Heather Stines was arrested after a decapitated and dismembered body was found inside her refrigerator and freezer.
Police have charged a 44-year-old Brooklyn woman after the decapitated, dismembered body of a registered sex offender was found in in her taped up refrigerator, cops said Friday.
Heather Stines was charged with concealment of a human corpse on Thursday — four days after a tip led police to her Nostrand Ave. apartment near Farragut Road in East Flatbush, where the grisly discovery was made, cops said.
Investigators have identified the remains as Kawsheen Gelzer, a 40-year-old registered sex offender who was arrested for sexually abusing a 12-year-old boy in 2004, according to court documents.
Gelzer is a known drug dealer who went missing after visiting Stines and her husband, Nicholas McGee, law enforcement sources said. He may have died during an ongoing narcotics dispute with the couple.
Kawsheen Gelzer was a known drug dealer who went missing after visiting Stines and her husband, Nicholas McGee, law enforcement sources said. He may have died during an ongoing narcotics dispute with the couple. (CriminalJustice.NY.gov)
Officers responding to the scene Monday night found the body parts of a 6-foot tall, 200 pound man wrapped in black plastic bags in both Stines’ refrigerator and freezer, cops said.
Gelzer’s severed head was found in the refrigerator, according to court documents.
“The refrigerator was taped up,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at a Tuesday news briefing. “They were trying to hole up, I guess, the smell inside.”
Stines was the only person in the apartment when cops arrived. McGee is currently incarcerated in another state for an unrelated crime, cops said.
She didn’t make any statements about the body in her fridge, but did admit that she lived in the apartment, according to court documents.
Stines was ordered held on $50,000 cash bail during a brief arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court Thursday.
The apartment building on Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn where police discovered body parts in a third-floor apartment. (Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News)
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She was also given bail for three outstanding bench warrants for three shoplifting arrests she never returned to court for, according to court documents.
The shoplifting arrests, all in 2022, were for swiping COVID-19 tests and drinks months apart from the same Flatbush pharmacy, along with a “manscape electronic” device from a Target store.
As of Friday morning, Stines has not been charged in Gelzer’s death.
Gelzer lived in Prospect Heights, about 3 miles from where his remains were found. It was not immediately disclosed when he disappeared.
The city’s Chief Medical Examiner’s office hasn’t determined how he died.
The body, which may have been in the refrigerator for up to a year, needed to thaw before an autopsy could be performed, police sources said.
Gelzer was identified through a fingerprint match, Brooklyn prosecutors said.
He was convicted of sex abuse in the first degree in 2007 and served four years in prison until he was arrested in 2011, cops said. His parole ended a year later, but he needed to stay on the state’s sex offender registry.
As cops searched her home, Stines was overheard by a neighbor saying she was going to jail.
“She was saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to jail,’” neighbor Germaine Roberts told the Daily News Wednesday. “They wouldn’t let her in the apartment.”
A police officer secures the scene outside a third-floor Brooklyn apartment after body parts were discovered in a refrigerator. (Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News)
Roberts, 53, watched as investigators photographed the scene.
“From my kitchen, I can see into her kitchen and I could see them taking the photos with the forensic light,” she added. “I could see them when they put the markers.”
Over the years Stines struggled with drug abuse. When cops arrived, the apartment was filthy, a police source with knowledge of the case said.
Stines’ brother-in-law Timothy McGee said he didn’t believe she was responsible for the dismemberment.
The apartment building on Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn where cops discovered body parts. (Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News)
“She does not have it in her to do something like this. It’s a lot of commitment,” the brother-in-law said.
Stines is originally from Kentucky, cops said. She and her husband moved to New York City in 2014 and had spent several years in various shelters until finding their Brooklyn apartment, Timothy McGee said.
The couple’s neighbors were left rattled by the gruesome discovery.
“It’s crazy, you watch ‘Dateline’ and then this happens in this building,” a neighbor, who would only identify herself as Monica, 50, told The News Wednesday.
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