Melissa Barthelemy: How Heuermann Allegedly Taunted a Teen After Gilgo Kill
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.2 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The calls came from Madison Square Garden. From Times Square. From packed Midtown locations where surveillance cameras are useless. A man, using Melissa Barthelemy's phone, calling her 15-year-old sister Amanda. Five calls over five weeks. Each under three minutes — as if the caller knew exactly how long law enforcement needs to trace a signal. Vulgar. Mocking. Controlled. In the final call, he told Amanda her sister was dead and he was going to watch her rot.
Episode 5 of "The Seven." Melissa was 24, from Buffalo, a cosmetology school graduate who moved to the Bronx to chase a salon career. She'd started escort work through Craigslist because the city was expensive and the dream job was slow to arrive. On July 12, 2009, she told a friend she was meeting a man. Prosecutors allege the burner phone that man used traveled from Massapequa Park to Midtown Manhattan — Rex Heuermann's exact commute route. Melissa's own phone then traveled the reverse.
Her remains were the first found in December 2010, discovered by a cadaver dog during a training exercise along Ocean Parkway. Prosecutors also allege Heuermann searched online for images of the victims' families after their deaths. The phone evidence, the DNA, and what the calls to Amanda reveal about the alleged psychology behind these killings — all covered here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske. |
| 0:03.2 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:06.5 | A 15-year-old girl's phone rings. |
| 0:10.7 | The number on the screen is her sisters. |
| 0:13.9 | But the voice on the other end isn't Melissa. |
| 0:18.1 | It's a man. |
| 0:19.8 | He doesn't identify himself. |
| 0:21.7 | He tells Amanda things about Melissa's work, about the kind of person she is. |
| 0:28.1 | The language is vulgar, mocking, designed to wound. |
| 0:32.2 | The call lasts less than three minutes. |
| 0:34.2 | It comes from a crowded public location in Manhattan near Madison Square Garden, |
| 0:39.7 | where surveillance cameras are useless in a sea of anonymous faces. Over the next five weeks, |
| 0:46.0 | the calls keep coming from Times Square, from Midtown, always under three minutes, always targeting |
| 0:51.9 | Amanda, never Melissa's mother, who the caller hung up on |
| 0:56.0 | when she tried to answer. Each call is more explicit than the last, and the final one, |
| 1:00.9 | the man tells Amanda that her sister is dead, that he killed her, and that he's going to watch |
| 1:06.9 | her rot. Amanda Thunderberg was 15 years old. |
| 1:14.4 | She was the only member of Melissa's family who knew her sister was working as an escort. |
| 1:19.7 | And someone, someone who had access to Melissa's phone after her disappearance, |
| 1:26.5 | chose this teenager as the target of a sustained psychological campaign. |
| 1:33.5 | Not the police, not the mother, not a friend, a child, the youngest, most vulnerable person in the family. |
| 1:41.3 | That choice tells you something about whoever made those calls. It tells you this |
... |
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