DNA COLD CASE

Manhattan Architect, Suspect In Gilgo

Beach Serial Murders, Is In Custody

A decade-old high-profile case of serial murders on Long Island was solved late last week, as Suffolk County police charged Rex Heuermann, 59, a New York architect, with the deaths of three women and the disappearance of a fourth. The three deceased women were among 11 whose remains were found along a stretch of highway near Gilgo Beach, on Long Island. The case began in 2010 when investigators started searching for Shannan Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker who had vanished from her home in New Jersey. Her body eventually was discovered by police on Oak Beach in December 2011, after those of the 11 deceased women had been found by investigators. Authorities worked on the case for more than a decade, and in May 2022 they released 9-1-1 audio from a call Gilbert made from inside the home of a client, Joseph Brewer, in Oak Beach shortly before she disappeared. “There is somebody after me,” she told the dispatcher multiple times, but didn’t specify where on Long Island she was. A crucial break in the case came in January when investigators took a swab from leftover pizza crust Heuermann discarded in the trash outside his Manhattan office. DNA evidence linked him to a hair found on the burlap sack where Waterman’s remains were found. Heuermann apparently maintained a secret residence in a town near Gilgo Beach; he was arrested Thursday evening at his Manhattan office and arraigned Friday. He has pled not guilty to all charges.

The 50 Best Mystery Novels Ever

Written, Listed In Ranked Order

Selecting the 50 best mystery novels of all time is an impossible and thankless task, and I tip my hat to Esquire magazine’s Gabino Iglesias for attempting just that. “A mystery can be almost anything if you have a crime, a question, and someone trying to find answers,” he writes. “It can be called by many names because the lines between crime fiction sub-genres are so tenuous, and because mysteries mix well with everything else. Add to that its long history—Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841 and considered the first modern detective story—and it becomes a conundrum.” In order to create this list, Iglesias analyzed such things as the lingering impact of each novel on the genre, the way it influenced new writers, and whether it introduced a character that readers have loved for decades. “Mysteries are wildly entertaining and play with our need to know that which we ignore,” he says. “That’s what makes them so popular; we always want to crack the case, to find the answers, to get justice, to know the truth. Because of that, there are many books to celebrate, but we could only choose 50." So here, in a list that merely scratches the surface of what the genre has to offer, are the best 50 mysteries Iglesias says were ever written, presented in ranked order.

More Than 40 Years Later, De Palma’s

Blow Out Holds Up As A Solid Thriller

When Brian De Palma’s neo-noir conspiracy thriller Blow Out arrived in theaters in the summer of 1981, the initial reaction was relatively dismal across the board. Although the film did receive some rave reviews from such critics as Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, many reviewers dismissed it as a rip-off of Michelangelo Antonioni’s groundbreaking Blow-Up (1966). [Note: I saw it opening weekend, and thought it was a solid, fast-paced thriller.] As film critic Peter Sobczynski notes, “While the film quickly disappeared from theaters, it did not vanish from the memories of those who did see it. In the years since its release, a reappraisal of Blow Out would begin to take hold, thanks in no small part to Quentin Tarantino, who would not only name it as one of his all-time favorite movies but cite John Travolta’s performance in it as one of the key reasons behind his decision to cast the actor in Pulp Fiction. In a nutshell, the movie follows Jack Terry (Travolta), a movie sound effects technician who, while recording sounds for a low-budget slasher film, unintentionally captures audio evidence of an assassination involving a presidential hopeful. Nancy Allen stars as Sally Bedina, a young woman involved in the crime. [The supporting cast includes John Lithgow and Dennis Franz.] The film's tagline in advertisements was, “Murder has a sound all of its own,” and it’s available to rent on several streaming services.

The Most Haunted Movies—And

Sets—In The History Of Hollywood

For almost as long as Hollywood has existed, there have been stories about cursed movie productions. From the freaky weather that threatened to derail The Omen (1976), to the fires that ravaged the sets of The Exorcist (1973, left), to the tragic deaths of some the Poltergeist (1982) cast, stories of “haunted” films have become legendary. Sometimes, those stories are even more famous than the films themselves. As author John Winning wrote in Crime Reads last week, “It’s a fantastically Hollywood phenomenon. Tinseltown is, after all, a place where stories come to life, and there’s something tantalizing about the idea that the filmmaking process can summon a kind of magical energy that spills into the real world, reshaping it in its own image — like when Freddy Krueger crosses over into “reality” in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994). To find any kind of origin to the madness, you have to go back to July 1924, when Universal Pictures began constructing Stage 28 on its lot in Los Angeles. The 21,000 square-foot stage was built to house the enormous sets for The Phantom of the Opera (1925) where, during filming, an electrician fell from the catwalks above and died. Workers routinely reported sightings of a ghost on the sound stage over the years before its demolition in 2014, although it’s telling that most claimed they saw the ghost of Lon Chaney, star of Phantom, rather than the unfortunate electrician who died. But wait, there’s more….

The 25 Best Thriller Movies Ever Made,

Ranked, And Some Obvious Omissions

More than a drama but less than a horror film, thrillers rely on suspense and tension as their main emotional conduit. As Movie Web’s Matthew Mahler recently wrote, “Some action films can be thrillers, but most thrillers aren't action films; same with film noir. Sometimes a film is classified as horror, when it's probably more of a thriller, and vice versa…Genre classifications can be myopic, but for anyone looking for one of the most thrilling films of all time, movies that entertain by building suspense and drawing viewers to the edge of their seats, then these are the 25 greatest of all time.” Noting that it’s an evolving process, “there are some obvious films that should be included here as we update it, including Memento, Thief, Wait Until Dark, And Then There Were None, Branded to Kill, Body Heat, Man Bites Dog, Knife in the Water, Heat, and many, many more.” For now, Mahler says, these are the 25 best thrillers of all time.

Coming September 12:

INDIGO ROAD

“Indigo Road is a beautifully wrought, hard-biting story with elements of classic noir presented through a prism of modern sensibilities. A fantastic read.” –S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of Razorblade Tears 

While still slinging drinks fulltime at The Sandbar in Folly Beach, Jack Connor works a side gig as a licensed bounty hunter. One afternoon, as he's transporting his latest bail skip named Willis Ronson back to jail, his SUV is ambushed by a team of gunmen, killing Ronson instantly and seriously injuring his court-appointed attorney, Alisha Dupree. Connor can’t help but poke around the edges of the deadly incident and quickly learns that Ronson was a man of many secrets, including a mysterious woman from his past who has caused him to be sucked into a domestic terrorist fringe group.