The Turn To Tara team is getting the fullest accounting to date of the role that incarcerated sex workers are playing in the Gilgo Beach murder investigation. 

Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr.  says the team has interviewed roughly 100 female inmates to date and that five claimed to have had interactions with Rex Heuermann. 

"We created and formulated this human trafficking unit called SATI, Sheriff's Anti-Trafficking Imitative, which I feel was groundbreaking because...there's no one to help show where their services are. There's no one to help connect them," says Toulon. "I do feel eventually we are going to hit pay dirt with a couple...Someone is going to give us a piece, and maybe just a small piece, to connect us to one of the other deaths to the current cases that he's currently under arrest for."

The investigations are part of the first-in-the-nation human trafficking unit that is aiding what prosecutors have called "the most consequential homicide investigation in Long Island history."

News 12 recently spoke with Nicole Brass, a former escort from Amityville who said she went on a date with Rex Heuermann at the Steam Room in Port Jefferson in the summer of 2015 after meeting him online. 

Brass says she got creeped out when the conversation turned to Gilgo Beach and claims she came "terrifyingly" close to becoming a victim. 

Brass says he asked her if she had heard of the Gilgo Beach killer and whether she thought Jersey City's Shannon Gilbert's death was connected. 

She says Heuermann then asked her how she thought they got rid of the bodies unnoticed.

"My gut was telling me I had to run. I've never in all the years that I had escorted for, I had never feared for my life. Ever. Not once. With him, I was terrified," she says. "It was almost like he was reliving it. He stood up straighter and like got a smirk on his face."

Brass says Heuermann pleaded with her to go home with him, but she turned him down.

"I think if I had left my car in that lot and went with him, I never would have came home," says Brass. 

Brass says she was on probation at the time and too scared to come forward to police, but

Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr. is hoping more women now will find the courage to come forward and speak out.

"They may have seen him. They may have went out on a date with him," he says.

MORE: Las Vegas PD to compare Rex Heuermann's DNA with DNA recovered in the case of murdered NJ mom

MORE: What's prison life like for Rex Heuermann? News 12 goes behind bars to get a glimpse

MORE: Exclusive: Cousin of slain teen from NJ breaks silence as Gilgo probe expands to Las Vegas

LIVE BLOG: Gilgo Beach Murders

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