Sheila FlynnSenior US reporter
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Massapequa, its residents proudly proclaim, is a “cop town.”
Perched on Long Island’s idyllic South Shore, it is just an hour’s journey via train from Manhattan.
The community is home to New York Police Department (NYPD) detectives, multi-generational cop families, officers from Nassau and Suffolk Counties and members of myriad other law enforcement agencies.
And when body parts started to be discovered in 2010 on Gilgo Beach – not far from where local teens lifeguard and families gather in summer – it became clear that a serial killer had been active on Long Island for years.
The rumour mill went into overdrive. Was he local? Was he still hunting? And was he, after operating for so long without getting caught, perhaps even wearing a badge?
The 2023 arrest of architect Rex Heuermann put to rest those theories – and his admission in court this week to the murders of eight women has brought even further “closure” to Long Island cops, they said.
“It’s a great relief,” said Craig Garland, a retired NYPD detective, Massapequa resident and Little League baseball organiser. “There were people out there trying to pin this on a cop and … it brings great closure to the law enforcement community at large [that] this wasn’t a cop that was a serial killer.”
Heuermann, a 62-year-old married father of two, was arrested in July 2023 in Manhattan after authorities obtained his DNA from a discarded piece of pizza outside his mid-town office.
His daily commute from Massapequa Park to the city took him right past the local cop bar, Johnny McGorey’s, a popular pub directly next to a rail station where officers drank and discussed the hunt for the murderer as Heuermann made his way to and from his unkempt house just blocks away.
When bodies started being discovered, members of the homicide unit “were our Friday night regular guys,” said McGorey’s owner Joanne Fountain, describing them as “shook” after the gruesome finds.
“They would come in, and we would be like, ‘What the hell is going on down at the beach, at Ocean Parkway?'”
“Then it was all day, every day, on the news.”
As her regulars socialised and theorised, however, they had no idea just how close the killer was. Neither did the multi-generational cop families, even as some officers began to question whether the killer was one of their own.
“He’s covering his tracks so well and, you know, is there a possibility it could be a cop?” Garland recalled people would speculate. “Listen, there’s always a possibility it could be anybody.”
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Scandal hits the police department
There are “probably more cops that live in Massapequa, Massapequa Park area than any other part of Long Island,” said Bob Livoti, president of the Association of Retired Police Officers. He called the area “the hub” of Long Island’s already cop-heavy population.
Fountain uses one of her own barback employees as an example of a familiar family pattern in Massapequa.
“His dad was a cop, his grandpa was a cop, and he just got hired onto NYPD, too,” she said.
Massapequa police families “eat, sleep and breathe it”, she added.
And that legacy extends across other first-responder jobs, too; Massapequa’s home to many firefighters, EMTs and officers from other agencies. It was particularly hard-hit on 9/11, with the surrounding Nassau County losing around 350 people, including many first responders.
But the case of Gilgo Beach plagued law enforcement in more ways than one.
“As an administrator and someone who was a cop, it was very frustrating that it took so long to discover… [who’s] responsible for these murders,” said John Azzata, Nassau County’s retired head of homicide.
The situation wasn’t helped when Suffolk County Police Chief Jimmy Burke, then in charge of the Gilgo Beach investigation, was arrested in 2013 on sensational charges involving sex toys, pornography, coercion of witnesses and a cover-up.
According to the US Attorney’s Office, Burke entered the home of Christopher Loeb, a man arrested for probation violations, to retrieve a bag of sex toys and pornography that Loeb had stolen from Burke’s department-issued SUV. Then he beat Loeb while in police custody and tried to get others to cover it up.
He pleaded guilty in 2016 to reduced charges and was sentenced to 46 months in prison.
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The debacle also led to related charges and five-year prison sentences for former Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas J Spota and Christopher McPartland, the DA Office’s former chief of investigations and, ironically, chief of the government corruption bureau.
These allegations of corruption – amongst the same Suffolk officials tasked with investigating the murders of sex workers – only added fuel to the conspiracy theories around law enforcement connections to the serial killer. So did the fact that Burke had ended cooperation with the FBI into the investigation, much to the ire of many Long Island cops.
“There was a lot of disgust,” said ARPO president Livoti. “When I was reading about it, I said, I can’t believe the stuff that this guy got away with. Unbelievable. There were so many red flags, and nobody did anything.”
But the scandal was perfect fodder for armchair sleuths and conspiracy theorists, and the Long Island serial killer myth and mysteries persisted, until Heuermann’s arrest on 13 July, 2023.
As cops breathed sighs of relief that he was an architect, those living in Massapequa “were astonished,” Livoti said. “Whoever thought this guy was living next door to anyone?”
“I think everybody was in shock,” said Garland, who realised Heuermann’s child had participated in one of the Little League programmes he helped organise. “For anybody that came in contact with this individual, it was a shock.”
‘There’s no closure for victims’
At Massapequa’s St Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, which has a high percentage of cop and first responder parishioners, Rev Gerard Gentleman noted how the community moved quickly from shock to generosity and empathy.
“People reached out, saying: What are we doing for [Heuermann’s] family? Can we do anything?” the pastor said. “And we did. We had some offerings to them and … one of our staff members did actually go and sit with his wife for a little while.
“Obviously, there was also concern: ‘My goodness, this was happening right here in our town. He was among us,'” Gentleman said, adding that he believes “there is great relief that this is going to be in the past” as well as “deep sadness”.
“People do look at Massapequa as a close-knit community, and this was very disruptive and shattering,” he said.
The parish has repeatedly seen firsthand the outpouring of support from the law enforcement community; when Massapequa resident and NYPD Det. Jonathan Diller was killed in the line of duty two years ago, thousands turned out for the St Rose of Lima funeral, for example – and lined the streets. (President Donald J. Trump also made headlines for attending the officer’s wake in Massapequa, which has become increasingly more Republican in recent years; Nassau County flipped to red in the 2024 presidential election for the first time in two decades.)
“It’s a community that responds to sadness, to tragedy, finds their strength in being with one another and that identity,” he said. “It’s a middle-class, working community – lots of cops and firemen – and that’s the, I think, ethos of the community.”
And that ethos will likely be relied upon heavily since Heuermann’s guilty pleas.
“It brings great closure to everybody that this individual is behind bars,” Garland said. “It’s the right guy, and it’s nothing that anybody has to be concerned with moving forward.”
Azzata, for his part, feels “happy that this individual was arrested and hopefully will plead guilty and put this whole thing to rest.”
While police may feel vindicated, however, and while Massapequa – and wider Long Island – might feel safer, Azzata pointed out that even a guilty plea will only do so much for the loved ones of the murdered women.
“People say they get closure; there’s no closure,” he said. “You may get justice, but victims’ families never get closure.”
