Valley Stream's top crime stories of 2010

These are summaries of some of the top crime stories in Valley Stream in 2010, as chosen by Herald staff.

Tracey guilty in stepmother’s murder

It took a jury only a few hours to find William Tracey guilty of murdering his 42-year-old stepmother in their Gibson home last year. The jury announced its verdict on June 16, less than two weeks after Tracey’s trial began.

Tracey was arrested in April 2009 in Fire Island, after a three-week police investigation. His stepmother, Denise Tracey, went missing in late March and was found dead in a dumpster behind stores on Dubois Avenue a few days later. Police said that two had a fight in their Dartmouth Street home when Tracey bludgeoned his stepmother to death, tied up her body and dumped it.

At his sentencing on Sept. 26, the 27-year-old Tracey was given 25 years to life in prison by Judge Meryl Berkowitz. Tracey continued to maintain his innocence and said the police investigation was flawed. He said that several other possible suspects were not considered, and also noted that he was the only one from his family who went out looking for Denise when she went missing.

Helen Simon, mother of Denise Tracey, said she believed Tracey was the killer after sitting through the trial, and said she cannot forgive him. Denise’s sister, Lisa, said she will fight to keep Tracey in jail each time he comes up for parole.

Tracey’s attorney, Joseph Lo Piccolo, said he plans to appeal the guilty verdict and that the evidence against his client was circumstantial.

Mother of 3 gunned down outside of home

On a quiet night in North Valley Stream on Feb. 22, shots rang out, leaving a 37-year-old mother of three dead. Police responded to 1276 Barry Drive South shortly after 11 p.m., when other occupants of the home discovered Jeanmarie Beaudouin laying on the front lawn with multiple gunshot wounds. When police arrived, Beaudouin was in critical condition. She was transported to nearby Franklin Hospital, where she died a short time later.

Nassau County Police Lt. Kevin Smith said that Beaudodin came home around 11 p.m. and was walking up her driveway when shots were fired, hitting her several times. Smith said it was unclear where Beaudouin, who was unemployed, was coming from at the time. No suspects or motives have been found to this point.

Beaudodin lived in a basement apartment with her husband and three children, ages 10, 6 and 3. School district officials confirmed that the two older children attended Howell Road School.

New trial for Heidgen?

Four years after his 2006 murder conviction for driving drunk and killing two people, Martin Heidgen and his attorney, Jill Harrington, have filed an appeal. They cited a mishandling of blood evidence by police as the basis of the appeal, and questioned the validity of the “depraved indifference” murder charge.

Heidgen, of Valley Stream, was sentenced to 18 years to life in February 2007, 19 months after he slammed his Chevrolet pickup truck into a limousine taking members of the Flynn and Tangney families back to Long Beach after a wedding. Heidgen had driven for more than two miles on the wrong side of the Meadowbrook Parkway with a blood alcohol level of .28. Seven-year-old Katie Flynn, of Long Beach, and the limousine’s driver, Stanley Rabinowitz, 59, of Farmingdale, were killed and several other passengers, including Katie’s sister, parents and grandparents were severely injured.

The appeal, listed with the state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, makes five points that Harrington believes will result in a reversed conviction including the charge that prosecutors failed to prove that Heidgen’s crimes manifested a “depraved indifference to human life” and that he was denied the right to a fair trial because of blood evidence tampering and jury misconduct.

District Attorney Kathleen Rice filed a response to the appeal in October to support Heidgen‘s 2006 conviction.