A young Long Island woman shared her story of a recent disturbing encounter with suspected Gilgo Beach serial murderer Rex Heuermann with the New York Post on Friday.
The woman, identified only as 25-year-old Ally, said she met the man arrested in connection to the killings on July 3 in Brady Park, which is just minutes away from Heuermann's home on 1st Avenue in Massapequa Park.
She described how the 59-year-old architect repeatedly approached her in the park, which creeped her out.
“I was going for a bike ride over in Brady Park and he came up behind me and he asked me what time it was,” Ally told the Post.
“He was trying to compliment me. Asking me if I came here often. Asking me my name,” she said.
“He had very dirty clothes on. He popped right out of the woods. Everywhere I went in the woods he would pop out somewhere,” she continued.
According to Ally's account, the first time Heuermann approached her he got so close she "felt like breathing behind me."
She was so upset by the ordeal that she called her sister to pick her up, Ally told the Post.
Ally said she filed a police report about the incident.
Two weeks later, Heuermann was arrested and charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of second-degree murder in connection to the Gilgo Beach murders.
The county prosecutor leading the investigation into the decade-old murders of mostly women along Ocean Parkway in Gilgo Beach, N.Y., said new advances in DNA technology in part helped break the case.
Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney told Fox News on Friday that suspect Rex Heuermann's arrest came after five "hairs of significance" from four victims were able to be further studied thanks to mitochondrial DNA technology.
The bodies found at Gilgo Beach, several miles east of the better-known Jones Beach, had been exposed to weather for so long that the DNA was too degraded to be properly analyzed using standard nuclear DNA technology.
"When people think of DNA, it's nuclear DNA that's the traditional DNA analysis that is done. But as the science advanced and although the hairs were [too] degraded for nuclear DNA, we were able to use them for mitochondrial DNA," Tierney said.
"So we were able to use that technology, but we still had to develop a suspect. And that's where the phone evidence and the evidence with regard to the car and some of [Heuermann's] other activities came in."
Fox News' Charles Creitz contributed to this report.
New York architect Rex Heuermann faces three counts of murder in the first degree and three counts of murder in the 2nd degree following his arrest in connection to the Gilgo Beach murders, according to court documents.
The counts are in related to the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello, three of the victims found in Gilgo Beach in December 2010.
Heuermann was arraigned in court in Yaphank, New York, on Friday afternoon. He was taken into custody last night in Manhattan, according to Suffolk County Police, and investigators searched a home in Massapequa Park in Long Island, about a 25-minute drive from where New York authorities discovered 11 sets of human remains strewn along a suburban beach highway in 2010 and 2011.
"I've lived with the Gilgo Beach investigation for my entire tenure as county executive, and I can tell you that during that time, the focus for me, members of our team have been on bringing justice for these victims and closure to these families who have suffered," Suffolk County Executive Steven Bellone earlier told reporters gathered outside the home Friday in Massapequa Park.
"Today's developments take us a major step forward in doing exactly that," he said, adding, "I want the public to know the message to the public is that we have never stopped working on this case."
Fox News' Maria Paronich contributed to this report.
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