Victims Families’ Attorney to Newsmax: Got Taunting Calls

An attorney representing two women whose bodies were found on Gilgo Beach, N.Y., told Newsmax on Tuesday that since January, he and members of his family were getting anonymous, taunting phone calls that he now believes may have been coming from a suspect who has been arrested in connection with the cold case.

“Not knowing the suspect, we, of course, didn’t know that there was a possibility it could have been him,” the attorney, John Ray, told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.” He added that he’s still not certain that the calls came from the suspect, Long Island architect Rex Heuermann, who has been charged in the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello while remaining a potential suspect in the deaths of eight other women whose bodies were found near the beach in 2010-2011.

According to court documents, Heuermann allegedly called Barthelemy’s family members at least five times within two months after she vanished.

Ray, who represents the families of two other victims Shannan Gilbert and Jessica Taylor, told Newsmax that he and his family started getting “very well-crafted, very intelligent” calls in January.

“[They were] extremely eerie and threatening, taunting, and very deliberately planned,” said Ray. “They started at one o’clock in the morning.”

He said the first call was made as a threat to his daughter, and a call in March “appeared to be to taunt us and to make us believe that we were being surveilled,” said Ray.

Ray said in the calls, “There were statements made” and then “there was eerie music, and then, you know, crazy sounds, and then the man would do this weird, eerie, bizarre-like scream and then he would play a tape of one of the reporters reporting on the Gilgo case back in 2011 or 2012.”

He said the calls came to his phone and to those of his daughter and her mother.

“He called our daughter’s phone and the exact same message with the exact same sequence was in it and then he would say something,” said Ray. “And he indicated, for example, that my daughter was on flying out to another state. She was getting trained by [the] Olympic people, and it was the first time away from home, and she was dressed all in blue. He mentioned that she was dressed all in blue.”

He added that in March, he came home at 9 p.m. one night from work and sat down to eat in the kitchen, and the same caller called, with the same patterns and then said ‘You’re having dinner.'”

“Our house is in a dark place up on a hill, and there’s a lot of windows… then he said ‘I hope you’re enjoying your pizza,'” Ray continued. “We didn’t have pizza, but within three seconds of him saying that the doorbell rang in the darkness, and there was a pizza deliveryman out front with three pizzas.”

Ray said he tried to record the calls but got only a portion of one.

And now, after hearing at the arraignment that other families had gotten calls, Ray said he believes Heuermann was also calling his family.

Meanwhile, Ray said his clients’ families are “elated” that a suspect has been caught in the Gilgo Beach deaths, but it’s still “bittersweet” that nobody has been charged in their relatives’ deaths.

“But you know, we have high praise for the task force,” Ray said.

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