Paul Mauro, attorney & retired NYPD inspector, joined the Guy Benson Show to discuss the gruesome Gilgo Beach serial killings. Benson and Mauro discussed the killer, the gruesome details of the investigation, and how the killer was caught.
Listen to the full interview below:
Mauro had this to say:
“The problem is you own him now… In fact, I’m sure they were doing all kinds of tracking stuff, electronic or otherwise.”
Full Transcript:
Guy Benson: With us once again is Paul Mauro, attorney and retired NYPD inspector. Paul, thanks for joining us again.
Paul Mauro: Of course. Nice to be here.
Guy Benson: I want to talk about this serial killer, the accused serial killer in the Gilgo Beach killings. We know of at least three, quite possibly four or more women that this man allegedly victimized. And this dates back at least some of this terror dates back to 2010. It’s been years. Walk us through how it took so long to bring this guy to justice. What was the breakthrough?
Paul Mauro: So 2009, the case really initiated because one of the subsequent delays, Melissa Barthelemy, is marked as a missing. And actually she was missing from the Bronx. Her mother up in Buffalo was ringing the bell on it. Ultimately, that case goes cold. Even though, well, who ends up being the accused here is calling the family and taunting the family. And and he’s the key component guy. He’s calling them using her phone. This is now like 29, 2010. The phones didn’t lock the way. They do now. The full end to end encryption wasn’t in place. So he had her open phone and he was calling the family, taunting them that I have your daughter, etc.. Right. Real nice guy. So in poetic justice, however, that’s what ends up undoing him. There were two key components that put this together. My understanding and full disclosure, I know some people on the task force, I work directly with a couple of them. They are not on this case, I should be clear. But nonetheless, they’re out there now. The break appears to be the first break appears to be the phones. And what the methodology was is as follows They took as a starting point this time around as they reconstituted the task force and took a fresh look at it. The analysis was that he likely had his own phone on him when he made the calls using her phone to taunt the family. So what the and again, I’m putting this methodology together sort of, you know, by reading the tea leaves and by some things I’ve heard. But it’s also not honestly what I would have done. You take the phone calls from the cell towers of using her phone and you see what other phone was lives in all instances when he used her phone. And my understanding is that’s what did them. They were able to isolate the fact that this second number was live in the same cells.
Guy Benson: Of proximity.
Paul Mauro: As her phone.
Guy Benson: They’ll ping together each time with each victim. All right. So that’s one part of it. Very interesting. The other one that’s gotten a lot of attention, we’ve seen the image of the discarded pizza box and the crust that he didn’t finish. So I think a lot of people have watched enough CSI or Law and Order to draw the conclusion that he had his saliva on this pizza crust that didn’t finish. Once it’s discarded, it’s garbage. It’s no longer subject to warrants. That’s just something the police can go grab out of the trash. And they matched that saliva to hair found in at least one of these burlap sacks with the victim’s on the beach. Is that right?
Paul Mauro: That is right. So let’s call it three strikes for this guy. Let’s make the phones the first strike. The second strike is the fact that at some point the pimp told one of the sex workers who ultimately is discovered dead, Miss Costello, he gives up to the police. The circ*mstances are unclear. I think it was from jail because there’s been some talk of the intelligence developed in the prisons as being key here. Either way, the pimp says he’s a big guy because he got an eyeball on him at one point. He’s a he’s a very big guy. And he drives he’s got this unkempt hair and he drives this Avalanche, a new model Avalanche. So they had that stuff. When they get the phone information and they get a name off of that, they pull the DMV, they see he’s got the Avalanche. He’s 6′ 5”. The appearance matches. This has got to be our guy. Must have been a real eureka moment. So then they start doing all this stuff that you would do around the edges. They pull it off Google searches. They start to see him searching for Is anybody looking for the Gilgo killer? They see him searching for torture p*rn, all kinds of awful stuff. And they really think this is our guy. So now let me spare a word for the guys who didn’t manage to bring the case down back in the day, but did some very good work amidst this very desolate area out in Gilgo very windswept. It was the middle of the winter when they were processing that scene. They gleaned five human hairs off of two of the bodies. Sounds like two of the hairs were unusable. Two deteriorated, but. Of them, they put through mitochondrial analysis, which was not available back then. That’s a relatively recent thing.
Guy Benson: So that’s another reason why it took a while.
Paul Mauro: That’s right. And you only do that when you really feel like you’ve got somebody because it’s expensive. And two of the hairs come back to the wife, one of the hairs comes back to him. Nobody thinks the wife is in this. From my understanding, that’s just transferred DNA. But it’s another nail in his coffin because obviously, how did the wife’s DNA get there as well? The DNA match, as you said, the CSI effect. People want that these days. Juries want that. Let’s call that strike three. And they decided let’s move in and take them.
Guy Benson: You mentioned the vehicles, sort of this somewhat unusual vehicle. I think there was also some sort of footage of it somewhere. They have been carefully piecing together this case clearly for quite a while, even after they zeroed in on this man. And yet they waited a while to actually take him into custody. In some of the reading I’ve done about this, they want or the goal was to link him to as many of these deaths that they’re aware of as possible first. But they became concerned because, you know, they’re tracking the guy. They’re now surveilling him. They were worried he might kill again. He was trying to get back in touch with new sex workers and that kind of thing. At some point, obviously, from an investigative standpoint, you want to have a huge bow on top of this package and just show up with a bullet proof case on as many crimes as possible. But you have to weigh that against, you know, the public safety. Right. And the ongoing threat of someone this monstrous still on the loose, potentially seeking to quench that evil thirst again. Talk about the timing of bringing him in when they did and how they did it.
Paul Mauro: Yes, you’re right on the money. So that really is the question in these things. And I’ve been in this spot and it’s not a good spot. You got somebody that you already have probable cause to arrest. You’re holding that information, but you want to leave him out there because you want to see let’s let’s say, does he have confederates? Who else is he touching? What else is he doing? The problem is you own them now. So what does that mean? You got to surveil him. You got to cover him. 24/7. That is tremendously difficult. Much harder than it sounds. Every time he goes mobile, you got to have somebody with him and you can’t take a burn. As the saying goes, you can’t get made because if you do and he gets spooked, next thing you know, he’s on a plane to Brazil and you’ve got another problem. I was always surprised with Coburg and Idaho. They let him travel cross-country with his father at that point because it looked to me like they had most of that case. I was very surprised they let him get out of town because that’s the risk there. But ultimately, it didn’t happen, thank God. In this case, similar thing. They had a civil him. They had to watch him very closely, I suspect. In fact, I’m sure they were doing all kinds of tracking stuff, electronic and otherwise, to keep an eye on him. But at the end of the day, there’s that tension. What if he gets away and he kills again or leaves the country and we blew it. And so I’m sure they had a lot of sleepless nights where they were wondering, are we doing, you know, we waiting too long? Are we being too cute by half? And I think that they would like to have had at least a fourth piece. The fourth girl that was wrapped in the burlap that has the exact same M.O. as the other three. They don’t have that. They don’t have phones for her either. They decided to let that go. We got them on three very solid case. Let’s get him off the street so he’s safe. We’ll clean up the rest of this as we go and hopefully at some point they’ll get to the rest. But remember, unlike Idaho, we don’t have the leverage of the death penalty here. And so you can’t crowbar him into saying you want your life, we’ll put you away for life, but you got to give us everything.
Guy Benson: Yeah. So that was going to be my next question. I’ve spoken on this show a few times about how and why I’m against the death penalty, not in principle, but in practice and just people who have been wrongfully convicted. I just I can’t live with the possibility of someone who’s innocent being put to death by the state. That’s why I’m against it in practice. But I also hasten to say there are some people who deserve to die. And when there’s a certain threshold of guilt, a very, very high the the utmost threshold of guilt that’s proven for the most heinous and evil crimes. I’m totally fine and comfortable with morally the death penalty. This seems to me like it would be one of those cases where if they’ve got him absolutely dead to rights and there’s no doubt whatsoever about his guilt, if you are someone who is sexually tormented and tortured a group of women and then murdered them. And taunting families and all of that, this would be the poster child for someone worthy of the death penalty. You noted that they don’t have it here in New York. It was struck down by the state courts years ago. No one has been put to death in the state of New York in decades. Not only is that maybe, I think, a concern for victims families who would like to get that closure. It’s also the leverage point that you made. You can’t take something off the table strategically that’s already off the table because it’s been ruled unconstitutional or illegal in the state. So sometimes in other places you’d say, okay, you’re going to get the needle, you’re going to get the chair unless you tell us the full extent, unless you allocate, you tell us where the bodies are, who these people are, who you victimize, because a lot of families suffering every single day with all of this doubt, you can use that threat to take the death penalty, you know, away. It’s not going to happen in this case. If you tell us everything, if you don’t have that leverage, you wonder, this guy seems like an absolute psychopath. He might play these games and keep these these various tormenting tactics going on forever because he knows the cops will want something from him. Right. That’s that’s part of the challenge here. That bothers me.
Paul Mauro: That’s that’s that’s exactly right. And, you know, if you’re a student at all of these kinds of characters, ultimately when they end up in jail and, you know, he’s innocent until proven guilty, but he’s. Certainly in my estimation, it is a strong case. These guys, once they’re locked up, they have very little else other than their purchase on war enforcement and their purchase on the families to trade on. And what is that purchase? And that is, I know stuff you don’t and you want to know it. And they play all kinds of games. There’s a guy called Time Square Killer he killed back in the seventies. He’s been in jail forever. He’s claiming 60 bodies. 80 bodies. You know, he’s locked up for, I think, six. You know, he’s been claiming all these other bodies that they can’t prove. But ultimately, he did give them a couple that he had done that they didn’t know about. He’s been stringing that along for decades. He’ll give you a body for a candy bar, literally. And that’s the kind of stuff you deal with if you have the death penalty. And, you know, look at Idaho. I like the way they do it. There you have the the trial portion of the case. Once the person is found guilty, you have a whole nother mini trial, for lack of a better term, to determine by the same jury should he get the death penalty. It’s a second set of proof, so to speak, to ascertain is the crime. And that’s one of the ways you get to that is if the crime is particularly heinous, just as you said. So you’re right. You’ve taken an arrow out of the quiver. The only way you could get it here and I really don’t think it’s going to happen is if the feds asserted jurisdiction federally, we still have the death penalty. They’re very loath to use it. They haven’t used it in ages, but they probably could get jurisdiction one way or the other. Like he used Craigslist, for instance. He used an instrumentality, the Internet generally that can get you federal jurisdiction. So if the feds came in and said, okay, we’re going to take the case and we’re going for the death penalty, the only way I could see him confronting the death penalty here, but I really don’t think it’ll be a battle, the feds aren’t going to do it.
Guy Benson: Yeah, I tend to agree with you. So he seems like a sad*st. And so he would love to keep these families guessing and the authorities guessing because he’ll be if it is him. And as you said, it’s a very strong case. I agree he’s now largely powerless, but he’s going to cling to whatever power he’s still got. Got to figure out ways to use that against him. And you’re taking one of those key elements out of the equation very, very quickly. You made reference to this, Paul. It seems like he was an avid consumer of true crime, content about this case, almost like, you know, the arsonist who shows up to watch the place burn down and get some sort of joy out of that. Is that unusual for this type of character?
Paul Mauro: No. And, you know, it’s part of you know, there’s an old saying that serial killers killing is how they talk to the world. And, you know, part of that is making it, you know, a two way conversation while staying hidden. And so I am sure he enjoyed a very personal I’m sure he did want to get caught. Right. Because he was living this double suburban life, was talking about retirement and etc., although he apparently owed the IRS all kinds of money. So, you know, he he was now is accused of having faked car accidents. He has these pending lawsuits.
Guy Benson: So now he’s a sick puppy in every conceivable way. But you can tell I mean, it’s just make it sounds like he enjoyed the uncertainty and the mystery around it, knowing his role and tried to evade getting caught, but eventually he failed. Paul Mauro, our guest on The Guy Benson Show. Paul, thank you so much for your time.
