Paul Mauro on Gilgo Beach: FBI Should’ve Stepped in Sooner

Paul Mauro, attorney & retired NYPD inspector, joined the Guy Benson Show to discuss the the new revelations about the Gilgo Beach Murders,

Listen to the full interview below:

Full Transcript:

Guy Benson: With us now is Paul Mauro, attorney and retired NYPD inspector. Paul, welcome back.

Paul Mauro: Nice to be here.

Guy Benson: Last time we had you here, we were talking about some of the truly stunning developments around the apparent capture of the so-called Gilgo Beach serial killer. Since that has died down in the news, have there been developments? What is the status of that investigation? Because, of course, there was keen interest. Well, you know, look at this guy. Looks like they got him. How many bodies? And then interest has sort of tapered off as the work continues, the police work continues. What can you tell us?

Paul Mauro: Yeah. So they’re into the non glamorous aspect of this thing now. Right. Which is what most police work is. They’re trudging through innumerable files, phone records now, etc., looking at cold cases. And it’s not just the task force at this point. It’s going to be other jurisdictions that human may have connectivity to, reportedly, he’s been washed out of the killings in Atlantic City, which had some similar sort of similarities.

Guy Benson: But apparently meaning it’s not.

Paul Mauro: It’s not him. Exactly. I’m sorry. Yes. So he’s been cleaned out of that one. All right. So Vegas is where he at timeshare. They’re still looking at that. And apparently South Carolina, they’re still looking at he’s in court tomorrow for his first court appearance, post-arrest. It’s a bail hearing. He’s not getting bail. So it’s likely not going to be very dramatic. He’s just going to be remanded, sent back to jail. The most significant thing I think that has developed is sort of backwards looking, if I could, because it’s begun to develop that a lot of what the cops had that they used now to break the case was available to them back in 2010. And I focus on the blast victims to go missing, which is a woman named M Berlin Castello. She was dug up as part of the Gilgo Four the core for people that he is believed to have killed. He’s charged. And three, they expect to get the fourth. He’s charged on Castello. She went missing only about three months before the whole guilt goal burial patch was discovered was quite recent and the last person to see her alive was her housemate. Some of the reporting characterizes him as her pimp, some as her housemate. So we have to be careful. But that said, that guy who’s on the record and has been interviewed states that he a saw Heuermann and that he saw Heuermann’s car, which is a unique car. And he gave the descriptions of both to the police. So he’s got that unique avalanche your man does and he’s 6’4” 240 to 50. That is a unique combination. Yeah. And he’s the last guy to have seen Castello. And it was a confrontational thing because they tried to rip your men off. They didn’t go along with it. But the other detectives back then, three months after three months later, you find this burial patch and she’s in there and he gives you that story. Well, you pull all the green avalanche owners because that was the car from the DMV file. You look for the ones that could be characterized as a quote unquote ogre, which is the term that the witness used. And you just do what’s called a photo array. You start showing that witness. Is this him? No. Okay. Next position? No. At some point he’s going to say, yeah, that’s the guy. And then she leaves. I don’t understand how that wasn’t done.

Guy Benson: Yeah, So that wouldn’t necessarily mean because I guess he this witness that you’re talking about saw the car and a unique ornament on one of the windows or part of the truck describe that so they got the the make and model the color of this car. They got a description of the man. And as it turned out, it was indeed, it appears the serial killer just identifying him wouldn’t have been enough to prove that he had killed anyone, but at least would have turned the cops on to this guy to start, you know, to start questioning him or looking into his background and maybe trying to do some other significant police work. You said you’re kind of baffled here on why they didn’t do it, because this was one of the questions I asked when the story initially broke. Why didn’t they nail this guy sooner? A big part of the answer was some of the science behind it wasn’t available yet. Okay, fine. But if there were significant leads that could have ended up right at this guy’s door that weren’t followed or followed up on or chased down to a full extent, I mean, you don’t want to always play Monday morning quarterback or anything like that. It’s it’s really hard work. But you were in those shoes for a long time in your career. Is there a plausible. Sort of anodyne explanation for why they wouldn’t have done that? Or is there something here that might cause a problem for the investigators?

Paul Mauro: I wish I had a better answer for that. One of the investigators at the time, they had what’s tantamount to a task force. At the time it wasn’t as multiagency, but they had a lot of people on this Gill Gill killer case writ large. And what’s very interesting to me is one of the other detectives in the case at the time back then gave an interview where he said, yeah, I don’t know why they didn’t circulate that information. They being the team that was on the Berlin case. So that tells me that even a detective who was involved at the time is befuddled by what I just described was not done. The other piece of this that I find interesting is that one of the reasons that people often point to the idea that the original case was a little bit dysfunctional was that they wouldn’t accept the FBI help and that there was this very contentious relationship between Suffolk PD and the FBI. Well, there’s a couple of things here that we’re forgetting. Number one, the girls were all working off of Craigslist, which is an Internet forum that gives you federal jurisdiction. Number of the girls came across state lines. That also gives you federal jurisdiction. If the FBI wanted the case so badly, why didn’t they just take it? They do it all the time. I’ve been on the other end of that. Okay? I’ve been in taskforces with them where I was embarrassed that we were kind of asserting jurisdiction over a local a local agency. So they’re not shy about that. And I don’t understand that. And adding to that is that the attorney gave an interview on Fox News on America’s Newsroom, where he said that one of the key breaks in the case was records that were gathered in 2012 by an FBI investigator on the case who went around and mapped. That’s his term, the Web site, the the Web’s own strata, the cell phone zones where human had been using one of the victim’s phones to call and taunt the family. That was 2012. Well, that tells me the FBI was in the case in 2012. Why didn’t they just take it and remember something else? DNA would have been fresh three months later. They had just dug her body up so you wouldn’t have to go to mitochondrial route if you thought he was your suspect, if you followed the lead that I just described, the description of the car and of the perp. You end up with human, you get a search warrant, you take a scrape from inside his cheek, you compare it to this DNA that’s on these other bodies. At least Costello’s would have been fresh. And there’s the guy. Never mind. Dumping is for his computer, his followers and everything else. Which is what you would have done once you had him as a suspect. So I wish I had a better answer. There’s a lot of questions retrospectively. I’m very glad they got them going forward and it’s more, you know, it’s always more healthy to look forward with these things. But I don’t have great answers for what went on back then.

Guy Benson: Now, for those of us not familiar with the timeline point by point, let’s say they had run down some of those leads and they had been more thorough on what was available in that 2010 to 2012 range. Were there additional murders attributed to him so far that happened subsequently, i.e. that we know of? Did they potentially allow him to keep killing by not solving this sooner, or is that not clear yet?

Paul Mauro: Million dollar question. You’re right over the target Guy, and the answer is not clear yet. If we limit his victims, which I would be loath to do, if we limit his victims to the burial grounds in Gilgo. And it doesn’t look like any of the bodies that were subsequently found occur after they could have gotten him. Because, as I said, Amber Lynn Costello was the last victim. He’ll go to go missing three months before they dug things up. So it’s not like you would have stopped any of those victims from meeting their fate. But we can’t limit that ground as the area that he was comfortable. We know that some of the bodies are only body parts and the other body parts in one instance, he’s found are found further east on Long Island in a place called Manor Hill. And in another instance, body parts are found in a lake in Hempstead Lake, which is west of Gilgo and in a related area.

Guy Benson: Go me jump in and ask this too, because my knowledge of this is limited to being a news consumer and also, you know, watching certain true crime shows and that sort of thing. You’re the actual professional here, but. Having seen a number of these shows and read books and listened to documentaries or podcasts or what have you, if he was a compulsion killer, who if these serial killers, you know, they they have a type they they enjoy this in some ways. They live for this in this extremely sick and evil way. Is it plausible to you that someone without having, you know, talk to him or there’s I’m sure a whole site mark up that they’ve done on the guy. But with this type of criminal, is it plausible? Does it make sense to you that someone like this would go on a killing streak of these types of women with this M.O. and then just stop for a decade plus, Can can people. Suppress that killer desire. Serial killers like that. Turn to the off switch.

Paul Mauro: So the surprising is or is. Yes, I’m not even going to equivocate. There are cases like that. BTK is one of them who actually took a break for a while. And in talking about it, shows that he got too busy with his family and for whatever reason, his family obligations asserted themselves over these impulses that he had. And so he went a long time without committing any of these crimes. And, you know, that’s one of the theories around. Sure. The other thing to remember.

Guy Benson: Is that right, he had a wife, he had kids, that kind of thing.

Paul Mauro: Precisely. In fact, in German reportedly has a special needs son. So, you know, you got that. The motivations of these guys are also are always very, very obscure, very conflicted, very complex, very complicated and hard to understand. But most importantly, they evolve. It’s one of the things I think, that, you know, we like Puckett’s, we like to be able to say, oh, his type is this He wants to kill nurses 20 to 30 years old. You know, the Bundy model, you know, somebody who fits into a very specific pigeonhole, but their tastes and predilections evolve. And that’s just the truth. And for whatever reason that happens. And so it’s dangerous to put them into a single bucket so as to what exactly went on him, did he stop? It is possible. Did he not stop? That’s also possible, too. So we have to bear in mind that there were no absolutes with a guy like that. And we have to go with the facts lead us. And it’s one of the reasons why it can be sometimes a bit skeptical of behavioral analysis because it doesn’t allow for all the variables that we see in human nature.

Guy Benson: Yeah, I feel like some of that behavioral analysis stuff might be helpful within certain parameters in some cases, But it’s not like this magic, you know, silver bullet that you’ll see in certain shows or it’s like, Oh, well, here’s the profile. And sometimes they get it wrong. It’s an infallible it’s not an infallible thing is the point. It’s it’s pseudo science that can be helpful, but it’s not perfect. And I had other things to ask you about, but this was fascinating. So I want to stick with this conversation. Paul Mauro you know a lot about this retired NYPD inspector, now an active attorney. Paul really enjoyed it. We’ll talk soon.

Paul Mauro: Thanks, Guy.