Grisly-fridge case charge
Frozen body parts in Brooklyn apt.; vic ID’d as sex offender
Police have charged a 44-year-old Brooklyn woman after the decapitated, dismembered body of a registered sex offender was found in her taped up refrigerator, cops said Friday.
Heather Stines was charged Thursday with concealment of a human corpse — 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 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.
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 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. Her husband is currently incarcerated in another state for an unrelated crime.
She did not make any statements about the body in her fridge, but did admit 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.
She was also given bail for three outstanding bench warrants for three shoplifting arrests for which she never returned to court, according to court documents.
The shoplifting arrests, all in 2022, were for swiping drinks and COVID-19 tests from the same Flatbush pharmacy, along with a “manscape electronic” device from a Target store.
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 Medical Examiner’s office has yet to determine 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.
He was convicted of sex abuse in the first degree in 2007 and served four years in prison His parole ended a year after that 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.”
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, a police source with knowledge of the case said.
When cops arrived, the apartment was filthy, the source said.
Stines’ brother-in-law Timothy McGee said he did not believe she was responsible for the dismemberment.
“She does not have it in her to do something like this. It’s a lot of commitment,” he 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, 50, who would only identify herself as Monica, told The News Wednesday.