YAPHANK, N.Y. (PIX11) — The Suffolk County Police Department confirmed to PIX11 News on Thursday it is investigating a possible link between Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect, Rex Heuermann, and four dead sex workers in Atlantic City, a crime that dates back to 2006.
A department spokesperson told PIX11 News reporter Eileen Lehpamer that detectives from the Gilgo Beach Task Force were taking a closer look at the Atlantic City case, along with the murders of sex workers in different regions of the country.
PIX11 News reporter Mary Murphy traveled to Atlantic City in 2016 to revisit the case during her coverage of the elusive Gilgo Beach killer.
Murphy visited the Golden Key motel, where four women were found fully clothed and face down in a muddy ditch in November 2006 — all of them barefoot.
Their bodies were positioned in a way that their heads were facing toward the casinos of the Atlantic City boardwalk in the distance.
In 2016, Mary Murphy asked then-Atlantic County prosecutor James McClain if he thought there might be a connection between Atlantic City’s mystery and the Gilgo Beach case. McClain said he wasn’t prepared to discuss that, but added that he’d been in touch with authorities from the Midwest and Canada during the course of his own investigation.
In 2020, during the pandemic, former Suffolk County Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart announced that a Jane Doe from the Gilgo case had been identified using genetic genealogy. It turned out Valerie Mack, a young mom, was last seen in Port Republic, New Jersey, before she disappeared in 2000. Port Republic is only 17 miles from Atlantic City.
Mack’s torso was eventually found in the woods of Manorville on Long Island 170 miles away, and she remained a Jane Doe for two decades. Her other body parts were later discovered along Ocean Parkway in 2011, when investigators were looking for more victims of the Gilgo Beach serial killer.
When Hart announced Mack’s name in 2020, PIX11 News asked her if she was in touch with Atlantic City authorities. The former police commissioner acknowledged there had been contact between Suffolk County and Atlantic City.
After Heuermann, a 59-year-old architect, was arrested last Thursday in connection with the Gilgo Four murders, the Suffolk County District Attorney revealed in court that Heuermann allegedly killed the women when his wife was out of town.
Now, it seems, investigators will check whether he killed other women in other cities.
