After the suspect in the Gilgo Beach serial killings, Rex Heuermann, was indicted on two additional murder charges this month, a potentially incriminating document reportedly outlining his plan has come to light.
Written in capital letters, the manual is structured as a series of reminder lists under topics like PRE-PREP, which offers banal tips about the importance of checking weather reports and looking for surveillance cameras. However, the PREP section includes directions on how to set up a holding area and “stage” with equipment for apparent sexual torture. The BODY PREP list includes reminders on how to avoid leaving evidence.
According to prosecutors, Heuermann created the document to “methodically blueprint” the selection, killing and disposal of victims, a bail application filed with the indictment reads.
Heuermann, 60, and an architect, was arrested last summer and later charged with murdering the so-called Gilgo Four. Those victims were among 10 sets of human remains discovered along an empty stretch of Ocean Parkway east of Jones Beach in 2010 and 2011.
He has pleaded not guilty to all six murders and has remained in jail as he awaits trial.
Prosecutors say the document they found, which they argue the defendant created to avoid detection, may instead become damning evidence against him, in addition to the already disclosed DNA matches, phone records and internet activity that they say tie Heuermann to the killings.
In the document, Heuermann reportedly outlined his plans in “excruciating detail,” corresponding to the ways in which he carried out the six murders, said the Suffolk County district attorney, Raymond A. Tierney, adding that Heuermann’s “intent was specifically to locate these victims, to hunt them down, to bring them under his control and to kill them.”
“For him, it’s all about the planning and the details. As an architect, he is meticulous about the detail in his work and in his killing,” Scott Bonn, a criminologist and expert on serial killers, told the Times. “Just like he’d create a blueprint for a building, he had a blueprint for murder.”
This planning document, which prosecutors found on a computer hard drive during a search of his Heuermann’s home last summer, includes a reminder to “DISTROY COMPUTER FILES,” which the suspect had allegedly attempted to do before it was recovered by forensic experts in March.
At a news conference after this month’s indictments, Tiereny said the investigation will ensue as long as clues keep emerging.
