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    Rex Heuermann, Gilgo Beach Serial Killing Suspect, Is Charged With 2 More Murders

    Rex Heuermann, who has been accused of killing four women, has been charged with the murders of two more.Rex Heuermann, who was arrested last summer and has been accused of murdering four women in the Gilgo Beach serial killings on Long Island, was indicted Thursday on murder charges in the deaths of two more women.Mr. Heuermann, 60, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges in connection with the first four women’s deaths, has remained in jail for nearly a year awaiting trial. In the meantime, investigators turned to the six other victims — four women, a man and a toddler — whose remains, like those of the first four women, were found along Ocean Parkway by Gilgo Beach.On Thursday, Mr. Heuermann was charged with killing one of them: Jessica Taylor, whose partial remains were found near Gilgo Beach in 2011 and then linked to other partial remains found eight years earlier in a remote wooded area in Manorville, a 45-minute drive east.He was also charged with killing Sandra Costilla, a 28-year-old New York woman whose remains were found in 1993 in the Hamptons. Her long unsolved murder had not previously been associated with the Gilgo Beach investigation.The new indictment followed a recent flurry of activity in the investigation: a nine-day canine search completed last month in Manorville and a wooded area in Southampton where Ms. Costilla’s body was found. Last month, investigators also conducted a six-day search of Mr. Heuermann’s home in Massapequa Park, which had been exhaustively searched for two weeks last summer after his arrest.The Gilgo investigation dates back to late 2010, when investigators discovered the first of 10 victims left along a desolate stretch of Ocean Parkway running east from Jones Beach.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Robert Pickton, Notorious Canadian Serial Killer, Dies at 74

    Convicted in the murder of six women (though he boasted of killing many more), he died of unspecified injuries after being assaulted in prison.Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, whose crimes called attention to police and societal disregard for the violent deaths of Indigenous women, died on Friday after a fellow inmate attacked him in prison in Quebec, where he was serving a life sentence. He was 74.His death, in a hospital, was announced by Correctional Service Canada, which said he had been assaulted on May 19 at Port-Cartier Institution and had died of unspecified injuries. The announcement did not give a motive for the attack.In 2007, Mr. Pickton was convicted in the murders of six women, though he boasted to an undercover police officer that he had killed 49 in all.The remains of his victims were found at a ramshackle pig farm he owned outside Vancouver, where authorities conducted what at the time was the largest crime-scene investigation in Canadian history. After 18 months, they found the remains of 33 women.The victims were mainly members of Indigenous groups, and most were sex workers and drug addicts whom Mr. Pickton encountered in the Downtown Eastside, an underbelly of the scenic, affluent Vancouver.Mr. Pickton was able to continue killing for so long, according to an investigation by the provincial government of British Columbia, because of police bias toward the race and marginalized status of his victims.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Book Review: ‘The Devil’s Best Trick,’ by Randall Sullivan

    “The Devil’s Best Trick,” Randall Sullivan’s in-depth occult investigation, is not for the easily frightened.THE DEVIL’S BEST TRICK: How the Face of Evil Disappeared, by Randall SullivanWhen I was 12 years old, my family went on vacation and, at my request, left me behind. My mother told me that I could sleep in her and my stepdad’s bedroom — normally strictly off limits to kids — and watch their TV. The first night they were away, I made a horrifying mistake: “The Exorcist” was debuting on Canadian television. It came on around sunset. I turned on the TV and climbed into my parents’ bed. You know what happened next.I wanted to go turn off the TV, but I didn’t dare for fear of what might be waiting in the darkness. I tried hiding under the covers but that only made it worse. I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I do know that every time I closed my eyes I could see the ravaged, green, grinning face of Linda Blair. As Randall Sullivan would say, the face of evil.The Devil’s greatest trick, as the saying goes (attributed sometimes to Baudelaire and other times to “The Usual Suspects”), was to convince the world he doesn’t exist. Sullivan, an investigative journalist, goes out looking for him in our modern world. And “The Devil’s Best Trick” is a master class in the difficult art of first-person, narrative nonfiction.At the start of his journey, Sullivan’s not sure if he believes in the Devil; by the end he is certain that Satan is real. Sullivan is never showy, and doesn’t insert himself into the story more than necessary, but we always feel he is there with us — which is often comforting and necessary, given his sinister subject.The prose has wonderful momentum even when he’s writing about arcane debates in the early Christian church. Each chapter is a turn, a surprise. The writing is never clichéd, nor is the thinking. Sullivan knows a great lede, and he’s just as good with cliffhangers.He tells us that he cut quite a bit of the murder and torture material, but parents should still skip Chapters 9 and 10. When he says, of the serial murderer Westley Allan Dodd, “I’m not going to describe the things Dodd did next; they’re too horrible,” we are grateful; what he has included is very difficult to read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More