Ex-police commissioner on how his taskforce ‘broke the case’ and found the Gilgo Beach serial killer

Rodney Harrison formed taskforce that later identified Rex Heuermann as a suspect in the string of New York murders Rodney Harrison was not in the courtroom in Riverhead on New York’s Long Island last week when serial killer Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty to the murders of seven women and volunteered that he’d also murdered an eighth. But as the New York police department’s former chief of detectives, who was brought in to be police commissioner of Suffolk county – the area where Heuermann had dumped his victims – it was Harrison who pulled together a taskforce that came to crack the case. “I’m happy we’re able to put this behind us now,” Harrison said on Friday, just days after Heuermann admitted that he’d murdered the women, who were mostly sex workers, in a spree that lasted 17 years from 1993 to 2010. “Anytime there’s a criminal that’s gotten away with such heinous crimes for such a long time, and now they’re going to jail for a long period, is very rewarding in the law enforcement world.” When Harrison was named police commissioner in 2020, it was already a decade after police had found four sets of remains later identified as Melissa Barthelemy, Ma