The grieving sister of one of four women linked to the Gilgo Beach serial killer said the gruesome murder of her loved one still haunts her dreams, blaming police for failing to catch the suspected killer for more than a year. decade.
Amanda Gove, in an interview with Patch Riverhead, criticized the Suffolk County Police Department’s decision to release only video evidence in the case of her half-sister Megan Waterman last year, 12 years after she disappeared.
“Are you kidding me? That should have been published that day or the day after or as soon as possible, not now,” he mocked the footage, which shows Waterman in a Hauppauge hotel just before he disappeared.
This and other errors, Gove added, probably ended up “sabotaging the case.”
Waterman, with whom Gove shared a father, although they had different mothers, was just 22 when she disappeared on June 6, 2010.
Her burlap-wrapped remains were found near the bodies of three other women on Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in December.
Last month, architect Rex Heuermann was arrested and charged with killing Waterman and two of the other “Gilgo Four,” Amber Lynn Costello, 27, and Melissa Barthelemy, 24.
He is the “prime suspect” in the death of the fourth woman, 25-year-old Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
Megan Waterman, 22, disappeared on June 6, 2010. Her body was found six months later.
Police released a video of Waterman at a Long Island hotel last year, 12 years after she disappeared, angering her sister. Suffolk County Police Department
“She wasn’t just [my] blood sister, she was my soul sister,” Gove told Patch about her relationship with Waterman.
In the nearly 13 years since Waterman’s body was found, six months after she went missing, Gove said she has experienced vivid dreams in which she feels her sister’s presence.
The grieving woman said she sometimes dreams of a house and garage she doesn’t recognize, and thinks it may be her sister trying to communicate with her.
In addition to the visions of the unknown house, Gove said, she sometimes feels as if she is by Waterman’s side in his harrowing final moments.
“I had a nightmare every night, a repeating nightmare where I would hear her say my name, ‘Amanda, Amanda.’ I didn’t want to go to bed,” she said.
Rex Heuermann was arrested and charged with killing Waterman and two other women last month. via REUTERS
The two shared a very close bond, Gove said, calling Waterman “my best friend.”
“We lived together for eight years. Since I was 14 years old I spent almost every day with that girl. We were inseparable. “We were pregnant together and had our children two weeks apart.”
Gove called the identification of Heuermann as his sister’s alleged killer “a curve ball.”
“I was surprised,” he said.
Investigators vandalized Heuermann’s Massapequa Park home in the days after his arrest looking for more evidence linking him to Gilgo’s victims or possible other crimes.
In the months after Waterman’s disappearance, Gove said, he came across a photograph of two hearts joined in the sand. The two sisters loved hearts.
Megan’s sister Amanda is comforted by friends at her sister’s funeral on January 30, 2011. Getty Images
“It sounds crazy, but I knew it was by the water, on the beach,” Gove said of the coastal mudflats where Waterman’s strangled body was eventually found.
She even searched the area herself, even though she lived miles away at the time.
“It was like nothing I had ever felt before. I felt helpless, I was miles away, ”she recalled.
“And that’s where they found her.”
Gove told Patch that she was frustrated with how her sister has been portrayed in the media to this day.
Like Gilgo’s other victims, Waterman was advertising as a sex worker when she died.
“She was much more than [a sex worker]. She was a sister. She was a mother. “Sex worker… that’s not what she was,” Gove insisted.
Investigators raided Heuermann’s South Shore home and garage after his arrest.Gregory P. Mango
Waterman, his sister added, would not have willingly left behind his daughter Liliana, then three years old, either.
His death devastated his family, Gove said.
“It was the worst thing I’ve ever been through, and I’m still going through it. I always told him: ‘I don’t know what I would do without you’. I still don’t know what to do without her, ”he explained.
Gove said Waterman’s brother, Greg, was also “destroyed” by the murder.
“Seeing my older brother cry was a shock to me. To see him cry, to see him so broken, he just crushed me,” Gove recalled of the funeral.
Bringing Waterman’s body home gave the family some closure, but Gove said every day remains “literally hell” as they wait for justice.
Meanwhile, Heuermann is detained in Riverhead, where Suffolk County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon Jr. said he meets with a clergyman once a week.
The father of two pleaded not guilty to the murder of Waterman, Barthelemy and Costello last month. No charges have yet been filed regarding Brainard-Barnes’ death.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn