Melissa Barthelemy's apartment

This is the house where Melissa Barthelemy was last seen.

It is located at 1149 Underhill Avenue in the Bronx.

Barthelemy was a sex worker who lived in a basement apartment at this address. On July 10, 2009, she left the residence and never returned. Roughly 15 months later, her remains were found among the bodies of three other women.

On the day of her disappearance, she called a coworker and said a client was willing to pay $1,000 for an overnight stay. This was an unusually large sum at the time.

Barthelemy was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in the Kensington neighborhood. In 2006, she moved to New York City after Johnny "Blaze" Terry offered her a job cutting hair. Around this time, she became a sex worker near Times Square.

By 2009, she advertised her services almost exclusively on websites such as Craigslist and frequently met with clients in bars and hotels on the West Side of Manhattan.

Disappearance

Phone records indicate the client offering the $1,000 used a burner phone to contact Barthelemy multiple times over the previous seven days. The individual initially used this device to establish contact with her on July 3, 2009. He called her again on July 6 and July 9 before making a final call on July 10.

Barthelemy was reportedly last seen sitting on the curb outside her apartment on Friday, July 10, 2009. That day, the client's burner phone traveled from Massapequa Park to Manhattan. Later that evening, Barthelemy's phone moved from the Bronx to Manhattan.

Both devices then traveled toward Massapequa, indicating she was likely picked up in a vehicle.

Cellular records showed that she was brought to a location near Massapequa, where her phone last connected to a tower around 1:43 a.m. on July 11, 2009.

Barthelemy had told a friend she would return the following morning, but she never did.

Phone calls

Following Barthelemy's disappearance, an unidentified individual accessed her voicemail three times from Freeport and Babylon between July 11 and July 12, 2009.

Her phone registered as active in Massapequa, Freeport, and Babylon during this two-day period. The device was then used to make a series of brief calls to her younger sister, Amanda Funderburg.

Funderburg was 15 years old when a man began calling her from her sister's phone. She and her family initially felt relieved when the first call came through because Barthelemy had been missing for a week. When Funderburg answered, a man spoke in a monotone voice and informed her that her sister was dead.

During the first call, he reportedly asked the teenager if she was in the same profession as her sister and called her a "half-breed." In the final call, he stated that he had killed Barthelemy and was going to "watch her rot." He added that he might "come and show her one day."

The calls were kept short, and the caller refused to speak to anyone but Funderburg. On one occasion, he immediately hung up when Lynn Barthelemy, the victim's mother, answered the phone.

The phone calls to Funderburg took place on the following dates:

* Friday, July 17, 2009, at 12:40 p.m.

* Thursday, July 23, 2009, at 6:42 p.m.

* Wednesday, August 5, 2009, between 6:50 p.m. and 7:11 p.m.

* Wednesday, August 19, 2009, at 7:23 p.m.

* Wednesday, August 26, 2009, between 11:29 a.m. and 11:34 a.m.

Investigators determined the device was being used in Midtown Manhattan, but the brief nature of the calls made them difficult to trace to an exact location. During these communications, the phone connected to cell towers at 4 Penn Plaza, 275 West 39th Street, 249 West 36th Street, and 408 West 34th Street.

Discovery of remains

Seventeen months later, Barthelemy's skeletal remains were discovered near Gilgo Beach, across the bay from Massapequa. She was the first of the group known as the Gilgo Four to be found.

On December 11, 2010, police K-9 handler John Mallia and his cadaver dog Blue were walking along Ocean Parkway when the dog indicated toward a specific section of the thicket.

At the time, Mallia was searching for a missing woman named Shannan Gilbert, who had disappeared from a gated community on the eastern side of the island six months earlier.

When he entered the bushes to investigate, he found a skeleton. The victim had tape around the head, torso, and legs. A decaying burlap material was stuck to the adhesive.

Mallia initially believed he had found Gilbert. However, Gilbert had a titanium plate in her jaw, and the discovered skeleton did not. Investigators later confirmed the remains belonged to Barthelemy.

The discovery triggered a wider search of the area, leading police to find the bodies of three other women: Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello. All four victims were sex workers who went missing between 2007 and 2010.

Investigation and arrest

The investigation yielded no arrests for more than a decade. Authorities released minimal information to the public during this time.

On July 14, 2023, it was announced that a 59-year-old Massapequa resident named Heuermann had been indicted for the murders of Barthelemy, Costello, and Waterman. Authorities also publicly named him the prime suspect in the death of Brainard-Barnes.

Heuermann pleaded not guilty to the charges and was remanded into custody without bail.

Evidence

While analyzing Heuermann's digital devices, investigators uncovered evidence that a file-shredding program had been used on one of his laptops on July 9, 2009, one day before Barthelemy disappeared. Investigators believe the software was used to erase his visits to the victim's Craigslist profile.

At the time, Heuermann's architecture firm was situated at 19 West 36th Street. This location placed his office in the same immediate vicinity as the specific Midtown Manhattan cell towers that transmitted the phone calls to Funderburg. Billing and cell site records indicate that Heuermann's personal phone, Barthelemy's phone, and the burner phone consistently overlapped at multiple locations in Manhattan.

Travel records showed that Heuermann's wife and two children left for Iceland two days prior to Barthelemy's disappearance. Heuermann did not join his family in Iceland until August 10, 2009, a month after Barthelemy went missing.

The phone calls to Funderburg stopped between August 5 and August 19. Heuermann left for Iceland on August 10 and returned on August 18, the day before the caller resumed contact.

In the documentary The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, Heuermann's wife, Asa Ellerup, recounted a phone call she had with him the night before he flew to Iceland. During the call, Heuermann mentioned he had remodeled their upstairs bathroom, redone the plumbing, and installed a sink and toilet in the basement.

The documentary displayed plumbing receipts dated July 12, 2009, showing the bathroom remodel occurred in the days following Barthelemy's disappearance.

On April 8, 2026, Heuermann pleaded guilty to the murder of Barthelemy, as well as the deaths of seven others. Two months later, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.