Why Rex Isn’t Ruled Out in 1982 Tina Foglia Murder

Tina Foglia, 1981

One of the enduring, cold case mysteries on Long Island concerns the 1982 dismemberment of 19 year old Tina Foglia. 

Tina was last seen near the exit of Hammerheads club in West Islip about 3 a.m. on February 1, 1982. 

Fans of rock music would flock to the venue on Sunrise Highway, which gave rise to bands like Twisted Sister. 

Hammerheads in 1980’s, before it closed.

On February 3, Tina’s body parts were discovered in three, plastic bags on the northbound shoulder of the Sagtikos Parkway, not far from a ramp leading off the Southern State Parkway.  

“They did say the way her arms and legs were cut, it was so precise that it was almost like a surgeon did it,” Tina’s older sister, Amy Foglia Gagliardi, recalled this week. “Somebody who knew how to cut bodies.”

Tina Foglia’s body parts were discovered on February 3, 1982.

Rex Heuermann was about to turn 19 years old in 1982, and the possibility that this was an early killing of his—42 years ago—is very much under consideration. Heuermann was an avid hunter.  He was charged in June 2024 with the 2003 dismemberment murder of Jessica Taylor, and he’s a suspect in the 2000 dismemberment of Valerie Mack. 

“The M.O. is very similar to Rex,” a law enforcement source told me. “Multiple agencies in Suffolk County are looking at that (Foglia’s) case.”

There’s evidence Tina had sexual relations the night of her murder, but that doesn’t necessarily prove who the killer is. “We have a lot of cold cases where women had sex and had genetic material in their bodies,” the source noted.

So investigators are looking at a theory that Tina Foglia might have had consensual or forced sex the night she visited Hammerheads, before hitching a ride home and meeting a killer.  This was long before surveillance cameras were in general use.  Her body was found in North Bayshore, which would be on the route home to her mother’s house on Lloyd Drive in Brentwood, Long Island. 

Map shows location of Hammerheads club in relation to Tina Foglia’s Brentwood, LI home.

Amy said she had begged Tina not to hitchhike, after the sisters had a bad experience in Queens, before their move to Brentwood. “The last time we hitchhiked together, we swore we’d never do it again,” Amy recalled, telling me about an incident when the sisters hitched a ride to the Queens Center Mall by way of the Long Island Expressway.

“We were stopped by the light.  Tina wanted to get out. He wouldn’t let us get out. He started touching her chest,” the older sister said of the male driver.  “I managed to open a window and the front door and got us out.”

Amy told me the last summer her younger sister was alive, in 1981, Tina had just come home after two years living in Fayetteville, North Carolina with a boyfriend.  The older sister said Tina had been following a fundamentalist religion down South, wearing long dresses instead of pants. But Amy said she got Tina back into a more free-spirited lifestyle.  The two sisters went to Hammerheads a lot with Amy’s friends and to another rock club, Oak Beach Inn. 

“We went to the beach, OBI, right on the beach,” Amy remembered. 

Tina Foglia had made friends with some men at the clubs. 

And for people following the Gilgo Beach case, it’s worth noting that Hammerheads and OBI were located on the south shore of Long Island.

Oak Beach Inn was at the east end of Ocean Parkway, which leads to Oak and Gilgo Beaches, significant spots in the Long Island Serial Killer investigation.  Rex Heuermann lived his whole life in Massapequa Park, close to the Great South Bay. 

In 2017, while revisiting the spot where Tina Foglia’s body parts were discovered in 1982, I noted the southbound Sagtikos Parkway leads to Robert Moses Causeway and Ocean Parkway west, the site where ten sets of remains were found between December 2010 and April 2011 in the Gilgo Beach search. 

I also noticed the proximity to the westbound Southern State Parkway. We now know that Heuermann could conceivably take the parkway to reach his home in Massapequa Park. 

Tina Foglia’s body parts were spotted on a rainy February morning by a Department of Transportation employee collecting trash. 

“The DOT worker suspected it was a body because of the shape of the bags,” Simon Ocampo, a senior investigator with the New York State Police, told me in 2017.  “And when he got closer, he saw hair.”

Ocampo had shown me an evidence photo of a foot print left in the mud, most likely by Tina Foglia’s killer.  A diamond ring given to Foglia by her father was missing, but police didn’t think robbery was a motive for the heinous crime. 

Foglia’s sister noted the murderer “put her arms in one bag, legs in another, and her torso in another.”

The presence of seminal fluids in Tina Foglia’s body may not prove who killed her. 

Tina Foglia had studied nursing, according to her sister, and was working as a home health aide. 

Amy said on the last night of Tina’s life, Tina had reached out to Amy’s friends to secure transportation to Hammerheads. The older sister was away at school.

“She had called Jackie and Dawn for rides,” Amy recalled, “but they weren’t available.”

Tina Foglia found a way to get to Hammerheads but never made it home to Lloyd Drive in Brentwood. 

The gruesome way she died always brings her sister Amy back to the Long Island Serial Killer investigation.

“It’s just too coincidental,” Amy Foglia Gagliardi said this week. “She probably could have been one of the early victims.”

And recently, I learned another interesting piece of information about Tina Foglia’s case status. 

According to Tina’s sister, she is dealing with a different, New York State Police investigator, who’s now overseeing Tina Foglia’s case. 

The investigator’s name is the same as the female detective who made the connection between Rex Heuermann and a dark, first generation Chevy Avalanche in March 2022.