What Do The Calls To Melissa Barthelemy's Teenage Sister Reveal About Rex Heuermann?

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Maureen Brainard-Barnes told her friend she needed to make $3,000 that weekend. She was facing eviction. If she lost her apartment, she could lose custody of her children. So on July 9th of 2007, the 25-year-old mother of two took the Amtrak from New London, Connecticut to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan to do what she'd done before. Work is an escort for a few days. Earn enough money to hold things together and take the train home. Her friend Sarah Carnes was with her. They checked into the Super 8 Motel on West 46th Street in Midtown and started seeing clients. On Monday night, Sarah decided to call it quits and head back to Connecticut. Maureen said she wanted to stay until Wednesday. She had a client lined up for that night and out-call, meaning she'd be going to meet him somewhere outside the motel. At 11:43 p.m., Maureen called a friend in Connecticut. That's the last confirmed contact anyone had with her.
She never made it back to Norwich. She never made it back to her children. People who love Maureen describe her in ways that have nothing to do with how she died. They talk about her songwriting, her art, her romantic streak. Her sister, Melissa Cann, calls her a dreamer. Friends remember someone creative and warm, someone who saw beauty in the world even when her own circumstances were squeezing her from every direction.
Maureen was a mother first. That's the detail that matters more than anything else in understanding why she was in Manhattan that July weekend. She had children at home. She was fighting to keep them and the financial pressures bearing down on her. The eviction threat, the custody risk drove her to a decision that millions of people in impossible situations make every day. She chose the option that was available. She went to work. Maureen was petite, four feet eleven, one hundred and five pounds. She advertised under names Juliana and Marie on Craigslist and Backpage. Her routine was consistent. She traveled to Manhattan for a few days, booked a room at one of the regular hotels, the Super Eight, the Red Roof Inn on West 32nd, the Carter Hotel on West 43rd, the Manhattan Hotel on Eighth Avenue and worked from there. Sometimes she traveled with another woman who worked out of a separate room at the same location. They sometimes brought a male friend along for safety. Someone they'd refer to as their cousin. It was a system, not a glamorous one, not a safe one, but a system designed to manage the risks as best they could.
On the weekend she disappeared, Maureen traveled with Sarah, but Sarah left on Monday. Maureen stayed behind and on the night of July 9th, she told her friend about an outcall. She was going to meet someone outside the motel and she didn't come back. Maureen wasn't reported missing until July 14th, five days later. And the report wasn't filed in New York where she had actually disappeared. It was filed by a friend with the Norwich Police Department in Connecticut because that's where Maureen lived. The NYPD eventually took over the case but by then whatever trail existed had gone cold. In the universe of missing persons, Maureen's disappearance was quiet. No public outcry, no media campaign, no pressure on investigators to move faster. She was an S worker who had gone to his city and hadn't come home. And in 2007, that kind of disappearance didn't generate the attention it should have. But here's what was happening with Maureen's phone. Three days after she vanished, her cell phone was used in Suffolk County along the Long Island Expressway to place two outgoing calls. Her phone and someone else's hands, picking off cell towers and a highway that leads to and from Gilgo Beach. The calls weren't to anyone of Maureen's known contacts. They were outbound calls from a phone that should have been in the possession of a woman who was already dead or dying. When investigators began building the Gilgo Beach case years later, the cell phone forensics became a cornerstone of the prosecution. Prosecutors allege that Heuermann, Rex Heuermann, used prepaid burner phones to contact his victims. A different burner for each woman, discarded after each killing. But prosecutors also allege he did something else. He accessed the victims' phones after their disappearances. In Maureen's case, according to court filings, Heuermann allegedly checked her voicemail after she was gone. After whatever was done to her was done. He allegedly reached into her digital life to listen to her messages.