DNA From Discarded Pizza Crust Used To Identify Long Island Serial Killer

The Suffolk County Police arrested Rex Heuermann on Thursday as the suspected Long Island Serial Killer, who eluded authorities for over a decade.

And Heuermann might have gotten away with it if it weren't for a meddling piece of pizza.

The bail application reveals police identified the suspect from DNA he left on a pizza crust he threw out in a Manhattan trash can.

The DNA on the crust matched a male hair recovered from victim Megan Waterman’s body used to create a DNA profile in July of 2020.

Photo via RH CONSULTANTS AND ASSOCIATES webpage.

For context, it can take years to match a suspect to their DNA. If there is not a direct match in the database, and there often isn't, investigators try to match the DNA to the closest akin and then use a process of elimination.

Investigators used the long, tedious process to arrest Joseph James DeAngelo, The Golden State Killer, in 2018.

DeAngelo was not in the database at the time. But DNA left on a victim partially matched a distant relative of his, which police used to shrink the pool of suspects from millions of people down to a single family, ultimately ruling out all but Joseph DeAngelo.

Police have yet to confirm if the same process explains the three-year gap between the discovery of hair and Heuermann's arrest.

What is known, however, is that a surveillance team began to observe Heuermann leading to the pizza crust.

"On Jan. 26, a surveillance team recovered a pizza box he threw into a garbage can on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. The box was sent to the Suffolk County Crime Laboratory for analysis where the leftover pizza crust was swabbed," reports NBC News.

On June 12, 2023, the lab was able to determine the “mitochondrial DNA profile(s) are the same.”  

And then there's the Chevy Avalanche.

The bail application states that a witness in the disappearance of 27-year-old Amber Lynn Costello identified “a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche as the vehicle believed to have been driven by her killer."

Later, a renewed joint investigation “led to the discovery of a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche” registered to Heuermann in March 2022.

Police used the finding to secure a search warrant for Heuermann's cell phone recording, learning the records corresponded with cell site locations for burner phones used to arrange meetings with three of the Gilgo Beach victims.

"They were also allegedly linked to taunting calls made to a relative of slain victim Melissa Barthelemy and voicemails to victim Maureen Brainard-Barnes' phone, " adds NBC.

Travel and cell phone billing records also uncovered that Heuermann’s wife was out of state when three of the victims disappeared.

For over a decade, the search for the Long Island Serial Killer had been one of the most tracked unsolved investigations. Interest spiked during the pandemic when Netflix depicted the case in the 2020 film Lost Girls.

Ultimately, sleuths never included Rex Heuermann, who now faces three counts of first-degree murder, on their lengthy lists of possible suspects.

Heuermann was an average 59-year-old man married with children. He owns an architecture firm in New York City with high-profile clients. His neighbors describe him as "friendly."

Heuermann was a man of two lives.

Good detective work. So much so, the White House ought to call upon the Suffolk County Police to investigate the culprit behind CocaineGate.