Arrest in the Long Island Serial Killer Case - 'A DEMON WALKS AMONG US'

THE FIRST VICTIM VANISHED 16 YEARS AGO. SINCE THEN AT LEAST 10 BODIES HAVE BEEN FOUND AROUND GILGO BEACH. NOW AUTHORITIES HAVE CHARGED A MANHATTAN BUSINESSMAN WITH 3 OF THE MURDERS-SO FAR. INSIDE THE SHOCKING CASE

- K.C. BAKER

On a hot, humid late-summer night in 2010, Amber Costello, 27, called her roommate from the locked bathroom of their rented cottage in West Babylon, N.Y., on Long Island. She was terrified. Costello, a sex worker, had been dancing for a client when he’d threatened to rape her, she said. Her roommate raced home and burst through the door ready to take a swing at anyone inside, only to find a hulking man in the living room who barely flinched. “It was like fighting Frankenstein,” the roommate says. As the man drove away in a first-generation Chevy Avalanche, he uttered a chilling admonition: “You don’t know who you’re f---ing with.” Says Costello’s roommate, who has asked not to be identified by name: “He had the blankest look on his face.”

MYSTERY SOLVED? 

Police say Rex Heuermann (in Riverhead, N.Y., on July 14) killed three women found along Gilgo Beach more than a decade ago.

Shortly after, on Sept. 2, 2010, Costello left her home and was never seen again, yet her roommate never forgot the man or his haunting expression. And on July 14, 2023, when a picture of architect and twice-married father of two Rex Heuermann, 59, of nearby Massapequa Park, flashed across the news, “I said, That's the Frankenstein dude. That's him.'"