NEW YORK — In the winter of 2010, shortly after police discovered the remains of his roommate and three other women buried on a remote stretch of Long Island shoreline, Dave Schaller provided detectives with a description of the person he believed to be the killer.
More crucially, Schaller told them about his truck.
The man they were looking for was a towering, Frankenstein-like figure with an “empty gaze” who drove a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche, Schaller recalled telling investigators. The man’s size stuck out, as did his unusual pick-up truck, which he’d used to flee the house Schaller shared with Amber Costello.
On that night, Schaller said he came home to find the stranger threatening Costello, an occasional sex worker, who had locked herself in the bathroom. The two men came to blows, with the hulking intruder eventually leaving in the truck.
Prosecutors say Costello was last seen alive on Sept. 2, 2010, as she left her home to meet that same client. A witness saw a dark-colored truck drive by the house again shortly after she left.
“When they told me she was dead, he was the first person who jumped in my head,” Schaller told The Associated Press. “I’ve been picturing his face for 13 years.”
On July 14, police arrested Rex Heuermann on charges of killing Costello and two other women, Melissa Barthelemy and Megan Waterman. He is the prime suspect in the death of a fourth woman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Heuermann, an architect who worked in Manhattan, has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The arrest marked a stunning breakthrough in the hunt for a serial killer who had eluded investigators and whose crimes gripped Long Islanders since the bodies of four women — all of them sex workers — were found wrapped in burlap near Gilgo Beach.
Within months, the remains of six other bodies, including a toddler, were discovered elsewhere along the same beach highway. Heuermann has not been accused in any of those cases. Police have said the…
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