Prosecutors now turn their attention to prosecuting those cases and investigating other bodies found nearby.

Brainard-Barnes, 25, who was once employed as a dealer at the Foxwoods Resort Casino, left her hometown of Norwich, Connecticut, on July 9, 2007, and headed to Manhattan for sex work, with plans to return the following day, according to friends who became concerned when she uncharacteristically stopped using her phone.

She never came back.

“I was only seven years old when my mom was murdered,” Nicolette Brainard-Barnes, 24, said at the Tuesday news conference. “I remember she read to me every night. Now I can no longer remember the sound of her voice.”

Heuermann was arrested on July 14 and charged with killing Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, three women who authorities say also were sex workers. Heuermann’s lawyer said he has denied committing the crimes. He previously pleaded not guilty to killing Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello.

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Brainard-Barnes was the first of the four women to disappear. Their remains were found along the same 400-metre stretch of parkway in the Gilgo Beach area of Jones Beach Island in 2010. Additional searching turned up the remains of six more adults and a toddler who was the child of one of the victims.

Investigators also found electronic evidence that Heuermann had accessed Costello’s prostitution advertisement September 1, 2010, according to court documents.

Police concluded that an 11th person found dead in a tidal marsh on the same barrier island accidentally drowned.

Investigators have said Heuermann, who lived in Massapequa Park across the bay from where the bodies were found, was probably not responsible for all the deaths. Some of the victims disappeared in the mid-1990s.

Investigators zeroed in on Heuermann when a new task force ran an old tip about a Chevy Avalanche ute through a vehicle records database. A hit came back identifying one of those make and models belonging to Heuermann, who lived in a neighbourhood police had been focusing on because of cellphone location data and call records, authorities said.

With the tip breathing new life into the investigation, authorities charted the calls and travels of multiple cellphones, picked apart email aliases, delved into search histories and collected discarded bottles – and even a pizza crust – for advanced DNA testing, according to court papers. Detectives said Heuermann’s DNA on the pizza crust matched a hair found on a restraint used in the killings.

Last summer, Heuermann’s ex-wife, stepson and daughter agreed to give DNA samples to prosecutors, according to court documents. Investigators compared them against DNA collected from bottles sipped by Heuermann and tossed into trashcans near his home.

Police said other evidence linked Heuermann to the victims, including burner cellphones used to arrange meetings with the slain women.

After the arrest, investigators spent nearly two weeks combing through Heuermann’s home, including digging up the yard, dismantling a porch and a greenhouse and removing many contents of the house for testing.

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Investigators found hundreds of electronic devices during their lengthy search of Heuermann’s home, according to court documents.

Prosecutors say the devices contained a collection of bondage and torture pornography.

AP