Rex Heuermann, who was charged last summer and has been blamed for killing four women in the Gilgo Beach serial killings on Long Island, was indicted Thursday on killing charges in the ends of two more women.
Mr Heuermann, 60, who has claimed not blameworthy to all charges in association with the deaths of the six women, has stayed in jail for about a year awaiting trial. In the meantime, investigators shifted to the six other targets four women, a man and a toddler whose remains, like those of the first four women, were located along Ocean Parkway by Gilgo Beach.
On Thursday, Mr. Heuermann was tasked with destroying one of them: Jessica Taylor, whose partial remains were discovered near Gilgo Beach in 2011 and then connected to other partisan remains discovered eight years before in a remote wooded area in Manorville, a 45-minute drive east.
He was also assigned with killing Sandra Costilla, a 28-year-old New York female whose remains were found in 1993 in the Hamptons. Her long-unsolved murder had not yet been associated with the Gilgo Beach research.
Prosecutors also described a manual they said Mr. Heuermann held that summarised how to set, kill and dispose of targets. It included headings such as “Supplies” and “Problems,” about evading detection by switching car tyres, burning gloves, devastating photos of victims, concocting explanations and “packaging” bodies for transportation, according to court documents.
In the bench hearing, Mr. Heuermann stayed silent while standing next to his lawyer, Michael J. Brown, who told Justice Timothy P. Mazzei that he had just accepted the new points on the two murders.
“They have an army of researchers and prosecutors and professionals working on the issue,” he said, referring to the duty force completed by the Suffolk County district attorney, Ray Tierney.
“Speak about having a leader start,” Mr. Brown said. “They’re moving to pitch as much as they can at us, and we’ll schedule a defence as sufficiently as we can.
The Gilgo research dates back to late 2010 when investigators found the first of 10 targets left along a desolate stretch of Ocean Parkway heading east from Jones Beach.
DNA matches stayed so sparse for the six bodies during the first decade of the research that only one target, Ms Taylor, was identified. In recent years, Karen Vergata and Valerie Mack have been designated as victims, while the other three have stayed unidentified.
The authorities said Ms. Taylor rose in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., about 90 minutes north of New York City, and started performing in her late teens as an escort. She was 20 when she last visited the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan around the moment of her death in 2003.
According to the latest bail application on Thursday, a dog hiker discovered Ms Taylor’s dismembered body that year on a private road in Manorville just north of the Long Island Expressway in the Long Island Pine Barrens.
Prosecutors said Mr Heuermann disabled a tattoo on her right hip a red heart with an angel wing and the terms “Remy’s Angel” in an try to obscure her uniqueness. However medical examiners were able to salvage a picture of the tattoo that permitted lead to her designation.
Regarding DNA proof that prosecutors said linked Mr. Heuermann to Ms Taylor and Ms Costilla, Mr Brown said it amounted to “a single strand of fur” on one of the bodies, which “just doesn’t express proper.”
In a phone consultation, Mr Brown said his customer maintained his blamelessness. He has also examined the authorship of the manual attributed to Mr Heuermann and whether it may have been carried out of context.
According to court documents, the manual prosecutors said Mr Heuermann owned was a “planning paper” to “methodically blueprint” killings.
It details priorities for victims (“small is good”), how to set up a heavy-duty plain for injuring a body and how to make a suspension procedure for sexual bondage.
After the bench hearing, Ms Taylor’s mother, Elizabeth Baczkiel, explained her daughter as a humorous and hard-working individual who desired to become a mother.
“She loved helping kids and supporting taking care of them,” she said.
Mr Heuermann’s wife, Asa Ellerup, and their children have not been arrested in association with the two further murders and were out of state at the moment of Ms Taylor’s disappearance, prosecutors said. They have also not been arrested in relation to the Gilgo Four.
“We’re not moving to control— we can’t control,” he said. “We owe that to the sufferers.”