The Gilgo Beach Killer: How Rex Heuermann Hid Eight Murders in Plain Sight

In the summer of 2009, a fifteen-year-old girl named Amanda answered her phone and saw her missing sister’s name on the screen. Melissa Barthelemy, 24, had vanished from the Bronx a week earlier. Amanda was desperate to hear her sister’s voice. Instead, a man spoke — flat, monotone, with a Long Island accent. He knew Amanda’s name. He knew what she looked like. Over the next several weeks, he called seven more times, always from Melissa’s phone, always from crowded areas in Manhattan where he could not be traced. He told Amanda her sister was a prostitute. He told her he had killed her. In the final call, on August 26, 2009, he said he was watching her sister rot.

Those calls were not directed at police or journalists. They were directed at a teenager, and their sole purpose was to make her suffer. Suffolk County law enforcement would later conclude the caller’s behavior was indicative of a sadist.

Sixteen years after those phone calls, on the morning of April 8, 2026, the man who made them stood in a dark suit in a Suffolk County courtroom in Riverhead, New York, hands shackled behind his back. Rex Heuermann, 62, a Long Island architect with a Manhattan office, a suburban home, and a double life spanning nearly two decades, pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder and acknowledged the killing of an eighth victim, Karen Vergata. The hearing lasted approximately thirty minutes.

The Victims

Between 1993 and 2010, Heuermann targeted women — many of whom were sex workers — strangling them and disposing of their bodies along remote stretches of Ocean Parkway, Gilgo Beach, Manorville, and Southampton on Long Island. He admitted to meeting all eight, strangling them, and leaving their remains where they were eventually found.

The first four — known collectively as the “Gilgo Four” — were discovered in December 2010 during a search for a different missing person, Shannan Gilbert, whose disappearance had brought police to the area. Their remains were found within a half-mile stretch of brush along Ocean Parkway. The discovery reopened old wounds and launched one of the most complex investigations in New York State history.

The Investigation

For years, the case went cold. Leads stalled. The investigation fragmented across multiple jurisdictions. Then, in 2022, a new dedicated task force was formed, and investigators took a methodical second pass at the evidence. What followed was a case built piece by piece.

DNA recovered from a discarded pizza crust was matched to a hair found on burlap wrapping around one of the victims’ remains. Burner phone records connected Heuermann to the locations and timelines of the disappearances. A witness had previously seen a green Chevrolet Avalanche near the scene of one woman’s disappearance — a vehicle connected to Heuermann. When investigators searched his home in Massapequa Park, they found extensive files documenting the case, multiple burner phones, and materials linked to the victims. Most chilling among the discoveries: documents on his computer that functioned as operational checklists for the killings — notes on limiting noise, cleaning the bodies, and destroying evidence.

On July 13, 2023, Heuermann was arrested outside his Manhattan architecture office. He had continued operating his firm, RH Consultants, throughout the years his case went cold and into the period during which investigators quietly closed in. He was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder. He maintained his innocence at every court appearance, stone-faced, pleading not guilty to every charge.

The Guilty Plea

Nearly three years after his arrest, five months before a trial that had been set for late 2026, Heuermann reversed course entirely. On April 8, 2026, he pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder, covering seven victims. As part of the plea deal, he also formally admitted to killing Karen Vergata — an eighth victim for whom he had not been formally charged — and agreed to cooperate with the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit.

In exchange for the plea, Heuermann is expected to receive multiple consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. His defense attorney offered a public explanation that the plea was intended to spare the victims’ families and Heuermann’s own family the ordeal of a lengthy trial. Sentencing is scheduled for June 17, 2026. He has waived his right to appeal.

The Family

For nearly three years, Heuermann’s family had publicly supported him. His ex-wife, Asa Ellerup, who had been married to him for 27 years, maintained that the man she knew was not capable of the crimes he was accused of. His daughter, Victoria, attended court hearings alongside the family’s attorney.

That support eroded slowly, then decisively. In the Peacock documentary The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, released in June 2025, Victoria Heuermann was visibly conflicted. She acknowledged there were times during her childhood when she did not know where her father was — including family vacations he skipped that coincided with murders he is now known to have committed. A week before the documentary aired, she told producers she believed her father was most likely the Gilgo Beach killer.

Ellerup filed for divorce. The family home in Massapequa Park was put up for sale. The family relocated to South Carolina. Heuermann’s longtime best friend and fellow architect, David Jimenez, visited him in jail and later described his reaction in the documentary: “I said, ‘Did you do it?’ And then he teared up a little bit and started crying. And that’s when I get the feeling he did it.”

The Sentence and What Comes Next

Heuermann is currently being held in secure, segregated housing at Riverhead Correctional Facility in Suffolk County. Under the terms of his plea agreement, he is expected to receive three consecutive life sentences without parole, followed by four additional sentences of 25 years to life. He will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Formal sentencing is set for June 17, 2026, at which point the plea will be entered into the court record and the families of the eight victims will have the opportunity to make statements.

What the Plea Does — and Does Not — Provide

A guilty plea offers the victims’ families a verdict. It spares them a trial. But it withholds something a trial would have provided: a full, public accounting of what happened to each woman — what was done to them, how it was done, and why. The thirty-minute hearing in Riverhead required Heuermann to acknowledge the bare minimum: yes, he met them; yes, he strangled them; yes, he left their bodies where they were found.

No cross-examination. No crime scene photographs displayed before a jury. No expert testimony. No explanation of the seventeen-year timeline. No answer to the questions that have haunted the families of Sandra Costilla, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, and Karen Vergata since their loved ones first went missing.

Rex Heuermann will spend the rest of his life in a cell. Whether justice, in any fuller sense, has been served is a question that the victims’ families alone are positioned to answer — and one that a thirty-minute hearing cannot fully close.

• 1993 – 2010

  Heuermann commits the murders of eight women across Long Island, disposing of their bodies along remote stretches of Ocean Parkway and surrounding areas.

• December 2010

  The remains of the “Gilgo Four” — Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, and Maureen Brainard-Barnes — are discovered along Ocean Parkway during an unrelated search.

• 2011

  Additional victims — Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla, and Karen Vergata — are located in the same general area.

• 2022

  A new dedicated task force is created to reinvestigate the cold case, applying fresh resources and modern forensic techniques.

• July 2023

  Rex Heuermann is arrested outside his Manhattan office. DNA from a discarded pizza crust, burner phone records, and other evidence has built an overwhelming case against him.

• June 2025

  Peacock releases The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets. Victoria Heuermann states publicly that she believes her father is most likely guilty.

• April 8, 2026

  Heuermann pleads guilty to seven murders and admits to an eighth. The hearing lasts thirty minutes.

• June 17, 2026

  Sentencing is scheduled. Heuermann is expected to receive multiple consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.