Severed Head, Body Parts Discovered in Woman’s Freezer

Brooklyn police made a gristly discovery in an apartment unit in Flatbush on Monday morning while responding to a CrimeStoppers tip about a possible dead body. In a taped-off freezer, they found the severed head and body parts of a man later identified as a local drug dealer. The woman living in the apartment was taken into custody and later charged with concealment of a corpse.

Heather Stines, 45, was already wanted for outstanding petit larceny warrants when police showed up at her Nostrand Avenue apartment. According to neighbors, she had lived in the building for about six years and was originally from Kentucky. When cops first entered her apartment she tried to stop them from looking in the freezer, where the head and other body parts were being kept on ice.

She later identified the victim, Kawsheen Gelzer, 39, from a photo and pointed to a tattoo on the dismembered body as being his. However, the circumstances surrounding Gelzer’s death remain a mystery, as Stines told authorities that her husband, Nicholas McGee, 45, killed Gelzer during a dispute over drugs in September, and chopped up his body and stored it in plastic bags inside the freezer.

But McGee is currently locked up in Chesapeake, VA on an identity fraud case, and police say he has not been officially tied to the body.

During a press briefing about the case on Tuesday, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said that Stines had been arrested Wednesday afternoon after undergoing a psychiatric evaluation.

Adding another layer of complexity to the case, neighbors told the New York Post that it was apparently common knowledge among tenants that Gelzer had been killed in the apartment. “Everybody in the building knew it,” claimed one tenant, Dorothy Williams. “Everybody knew he went in there and never came back out. We all talked about it.” 

Williams and other tenants said that Stines would sometimes let Gelzer sleep in the apartment. But she wouldn’t let anyone who had recently visited in the past few months near her fridge.

“She would never let anyone in her kitchen, never,” Williams added. “She let me in her apartment but never the kitchen. She never let the super in her kitchen, only the bathroom.”