NYC woman charged with hiding drug dealer’s dismembered corpse in freezer appears before judge
Heather Stines, the Brooklyn woman charged with stashing a dismembered head and other body parts in the freezer of her Flatbush apartment, made her first appearance before a judge Thursday night.
Stines, 45, is being held on $25,000 cash bail or $50,000 bond, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
It was not immediately known if she had retained an attorney.
She was taken into custody around 3 p.m. Wednesday after undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, police said.
Her arrest for concealment of a corpse came two days after cops’ grisly discovery of a chopped up body in bags being kept in her freezer.
Acting on a CrimeStoppers tip about a possible body being “stored” in the apartment, Brooklyn police entered the fourth-floor unit on Nostrand Avenue near Farragut Road around 6:15 Monday morning.
Once inside, investigators discovered several severed body parts being kept in plastic bags in a refrigerator, which sources said had been taped shut to prevent the odor of decaying flesh from escaping.
“We have a head. We have some limbs,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters Tuesday.
“As of right now, it seems like we have the whole body.”
Stines was taken into custody at the time on several unrelated petit larceny warrants, sources said.
It was not announced until Wednesday that she was a person of interest over the discovery of the body parts, later identified as the remains of Kawsheen Gelzer, 39, a local drug dealer who went missing last year, law enforcement sources told The Post.
The NYPD has since ruled the case as a homicide.
Stines later told officers that that her husband, Nicholas McGee, 45, who is incarcerated in Chesapeake, Virginia on an identity fraud case, killed Gelzer in September in a dispute over drugs.
She said her hubby, who has not officially been tied to the corpse, then chopped up the body and stored in plastic bags in the freezer.
The presence of a decomposing body in the apartment building where Stines lives was apparently an open secret, tenants told The Post.
“Everybody in the building knew about it,” tenant Dorothy Williams said Thursday.
“Everybody knew [Gelzer] went in there and never came back out, we all talked about it.”
Williams and other tenants said Stines had grown unusually protective of her fridge in recent months, never letting visitors anywhere near it.
“She would never let anyone in her kitchen, never,” Williams said.
“She let me in her apartment but never the kitchen. She never let the super in her kitchen, only the bathroom.”
By Thursday, a makeshift memorial for Gelzer had been set up in the apartment building lobby, featuring candles and photos.
