Rex Heuermann

The backstory

The discoveries

In 2010, police searching for a missing woman, Shannan Gilbert, along Long Island’s South Shore found several sets of human remains, the Associated Press reported.⁶ According to the district attorney’s 2023 bail application, a police dog in a training exercise along Ocean Parkway at Gilgo Beach led officers on Dec. 11, 2010, to remains later identified as those of Melissa Barthelemy, and on Dec. 13 police found three more sets within a quarter mile: those of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello.⁴ An expanded search of the Gilgo Beach area in 2011 recovered more remains, the district attorney’s office has said.²

The task force and the truck

In early 2022, District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney formed the Gilgo Beach Homicide Task Force with the Suffolk County Police Department, the New York State Police, the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI to renew the investigation, his office says.³⁴ The task force developed a suspect in March 2022 and investigated him for the next 16 months.³

The lead came from the disappearance of Amber Costello. According to the bail application, a client who came to Costello’s home in West Babylon around Sept. 1–2, 2010, was sent away by a “ruse,” and witnesses described him as a large white man in his mid-40s with “dark bushy hair” and large glasses; one witness saw a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche in the driveway.⁴ On March 14, 2022, investigators found that an Avalanche of that kind had been registered to Heuermann at the time of the murders, the prosecution wrote.⁴ A grand jury authorized more than 300 subpoenas, search warrants and other legal process.⁴⁷

The phones

Prosecutors alleged that the victims were contacted through prepaid “burner” phones and that Heuermann’s own phone records placed him in the same general locations as those phones and the victims’ phones during key events; the bail application states that investigators “could find no instance” in which he was somewhere else.⁴ In the Waterman case, it says, a new burner phone activated June 5, 2010, contacted her phone at 1:31 a.m. on June 6, shortly before she was seen on video leaving the Holiday Inn in Hauppauge.⁴ In the Costello case, a burner phone that had been in contact with her sent a text at 1:18 a.m. on Sept. 2, 2010, and was in Massapequa Park within two minutes of it, according to the application.⁴

After Barthelemy disappeared in July 2009, calls were made from her phone to her family on five dates that summer, from locations in Midtown Manhattan near Heuermann’s office; in one call, a male caller admitted killing her, the prosecution wrote.⁴ Her phone was inactive while Heuermann was in Iceland from Aug. 10 to 18, 2009, according to the application.⁴ At sentencing, her sister recalled that Heuermann had called her after the killing.¹³¹⁴

The DNA

Hairs were recovered from the materials used to restrain several of the victims.⁴ In January 2023, a surveillance team recovered a pizza box Heuermann threw into a garbage can in Manhattan, and in June 2023 a laboratory reported that DNA from the leftover crust and a male hair found on the burlap around Waterman’s remains had matching mitochondrial profiles; the prosecution wrote that 99.96 percent of North Americans could be excluded as the source of the hair, and that Heuermann “cannot be excluded.”⁴ Other hairs were associated by the labs with his wife and, later, with his daughter; the prosecution argued that the materials or a vehicle may have come from the family home, and its records placed his wife out of state during three of the disappearances.⁴⁵ A lawyer for his former wife and daughter has said neither had knowledge of or involvement in the killings.⁶

Later testing used whole-genome sequencing on rootless hairs recovered from six of the seven charged victims, and the prosecution reported that the nuclear DNA results strongly favored a match to Heuermann for hairs from the Costilla and Taylor cases.⁵¹⁸ The defense moved to exclude those results because the technique had never been used in a New York court; on Sept. 3, 2025, Justice Timothy P. Mazzei ruled that the method was “generally accepted in the relevant scientific community” and allowed the evidence.¹⁸

The arrest and the added charges

Heuermann was arrested on the evening of July 13, 2023, in Manhattan, and indicted for the murders of Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello.⁴³¹⁴ A grand jury added the murder of Brainard-Barnes in January 2024, those of Jessica Taylor and Sandra Costilla in June 2024, and that of Valerie Mack in December 2024.³⁵

In the December 2024 bail application, prosecutors described a Microsoft Word file extracted from his laptop in March 2024 that a forensic examiner dated to 2001–2002, with an earlier version apparently created in 2000; they called it a planning document, with lists under headings such as “PROBLEMS” and “SUPPLIES,” and linked its contents to the Mack and Taylor cases.⁵ They also said that magazines and newspaper articles about the Costilla, Mack and Taylor cases were seized from his office and home, and argued that he kept them as mementos.⁵ According to the 2023 application, an online account the prosecution tied to him was used for more than 200 searches about the investigation, the victims and the task force between March 2022 and June 2023.⁴

The victims

The account of each killing below is the district attorney’s, as set out in announcing the plea, which Heuermann admitted in court.¹⁶

Sandra Costilla, 28, the mother of a son of about 5, met Heuermann on or about Nov. 19–20, 1993; he strangled her, and hunters found her remains near Fish Cove Road in North Sea, Southampton, on Nov. 20.¹

Valerie Mack, 24, who had a son, met him between September and November 2000; partial remains were found near Halsey Manor Road in Manorville on Nov. 19, 2000, and more along Ocean Parkway east of Gilgo Beach on April 4, 2011, and she was identified through genetic genealogy in 2020.¹

Jessica Taylor, 20, met him between July 21 and 26, 2003; remains were found just west of Halsey Manor Road in Manorville on July 26, 2003, and more along Ocean Parkway on March 29, 2011.¹

Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, the mother of two children, was contacted through an online advertisement; Heuermann arranged by burner phone to meet her and picked her up on July 9, 2007.¹ Her remains were found on the north side of Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach on Dec. 13, 2010.¹

Melissa Barthelemy, 24, was contacted through an online advertisement; Heuermann arranged by burner phone to meet her and picked her up on the evening of July 10, 2009.¹ Her remains were found on Dec. 11, 2010.¹

Megan Waterman, 22, the mother of a daughter, was picked up from a Holiday Inn in Hauppauge on June 6, 2010, after he arranged the meeting by burner phone; her remains were found on Dec. 13, 2010.¹

Amber Costello, 27, was picked up from her home in West Babylon on Sept. 2, 2010, after an earlier meeting the night before was disrupted; her remains were found on Dec. 13, 2010.¹

Six of the seven were found along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach; Costilla’s remains were found more than 60 miles away, in the Hamptons, the AP reported.⁷ Several of the bodies were bound with belts, tape or burlap, according to the district attorney’s office.¹

Karen Vergata (admitted, not charged). Vergata, 34, the mother of two sons, met Heuermann in April 1996; according to the district attorney’s office, he strangled her and dismembered her body, and he admitted the killing in court.¹⁶ Her legs were found on Blue Point Beach in Brookhaven on April 20, 1996, and her skull near Tobay Beach on April 12, 2011; she was known as “Fire Island Jane Doe” until genetic genealogy identified her in 2023.¹ He was never charged with her killing. It is not a conviction; the district attorney’s office says it “is covered by Heuermann’s plea to the murders of the seven charged victims.”¹

The plea

On April 8, 2026, in Riverhead, Heuermann pleaded guilty to three counts of murder in the first degree and four counts of murder in the second degree.¹⁷ Under questioning by Tierney, he admitted strangling all eight women, dismembering some, using burner phones to contact them and wrapping bodies in burlap, the AP reported.⁶ He confirmed that he believed changing his plea was in his best interest, Oxygen reported,¹⁰ and, as part of the agreement, he waived his right to appeal and agreed to cooperate fully with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, according to the AP.⁸⁶ Several other counts were dropped, the AP reported.⁸ The plea came before a trial that had been scheduled for September 2026.¹⁴

His lawyer, Michael J. Brown, said Heuermann had told him, “I want to plead guilty,” and that he wanted to spare the families a trial.⁶ Asked whether Heuermann was sorry, Brown said, “I would hope so.”⁷

The sentence

On June 17, 2026, Justice Mazzei sentenced Heuermann, then 62, to three consecutive terms of life without parole for the murders of Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello, and a consecutive term of 100 years to life for the murders of Brainard-Barnes, Taylor, Costilla and Mack.² Relatives of the victims addressed him before the sentence was imposed (see “The families” below).¹² Given a chance to speak, he said little; when the judge asked whether he was “a little bit sorry” for what he had done, he answered, “Yes I am,” and the judge ended the hearing with, “Get him out of here,” ABC News reported.¹³

Other remains near Gilgo Beach

Investigators have not attributed the other deaths connected to the Gilgo Beach search to Heuermann, and he was not charged with any of them.¹⁵

• Shannan Gilbert, whose 2010 disappearance led to the search, was found in a marsh near Oak Beach in December 2011; officials have not connected her death to Heuermann, CNN reported.¹⁵
• Tanya Jackson and her 2-year-old daughter, Tatiana Dykes, were identified through genetic genealogy in April 2025; a different man has been charged with Jackson’s murder and has pleaded not guilty, and he is presumed innocent.¹⁵ The district attorney in that case said Jackson “was not murdered by a serial killer.”¹⁵
• An unidentified person whose remains were found off Ocean Parkway in April 2011, about 300 feet from Waterman’s, died of blunt-force injuries before 2006, investigators said in 2024; Tierney has declined to say whether Heuermann is a suspect in that death.¹⁹¹⁵

Brown said at the plea that Heuermann maintains he has no other victims.⁸ The district attorney’s office said the plea does not cover other possible investigations.⁹

Personal backstory

Early life and work

Heuermann was raised in the Massapequa Park house where he was still living at the time of his arrest, a few miles across the bay from where the remains were found, CNN reported.²¹ He was 59 when he was arrested, according to news reports.²² He was an architect with his own business in Midtown Manhattan, according to the 2023 bail application.⁴ In a 2018 civil deposition he described his work as “general architecture,” including helping clients resolve problems with the city’s Department of Buildings, and said his main competitive activity was “competition rifle,” CNN reported.²¹ The sources reviewed do not document his schooling.

Family

In that 2018 deposition he said he lived with his wife of 22 years, a daughter and a stepson, CNN reported.²¹ His wife filed for an uncontested divorce in Suffolk County Supreme Court days after his arrest in July 2023.²² In March 2025 her lawyer said the divorce settlement papers had been finalized and submitted to the court for approval, the New York Post reported, and the AP described her as his former wife in April 2026.²³⁶ Her lawyer has said that neither she nor their daughter had knowledge of or involvement in the killings.⁶ His former wife said at the time of the plea, “My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.”⁶ His former wife and two adult children did not attend the sentencing, saying through their lawyers that they would stay away out of respect for the victims’ families.¹²

Mental health

No mental-health testimony or court findings about him appear in the sources reviewed. In his first weeks in the county jail in 2023 he was placed on suicide watch, which was later reduced to a less restrictive level, News 12 reported.²⁰

In custody

From his arrest until sentencing he was held at the Suffolk County Correctional Facility in Riverhead, where he spent about three years in a segregated cell, according to the sheriff.¹²¹³ After sentencing he went through intake at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County, and in August 2026 the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision confirmed his assignment to Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Dannemora.¹⁶¹⁷

The families

At the plea, the sister of Maureen Brainard-Barnes spoke of the “hope that one day we would stand here and say her name with justice beside it,” and the mother of Jessica Taylor said she was “glad that this is over as far as him pleading guilty,” the AP reported.⁷ The attorney Gloria Allred described several of the women as young mothers trying to earn extra money.⁷

At sentencing, a cousin of Jessica Taylor said, “A million years isn’t enough”; the sister of Melissa Barthelemy told him, “I hope you suffer”; and the mother of Valerie Mack said, “Justice has been done, but it can’t replace what has been taken,” according to the AP.¹² The daughter of Megan Waterman said, “In an instant, my world was shattered,” and the two children of Maureen Brainard-Barnes spoke about how her absence had shaped their lives.¹² The sister of Brainard-Barnes said the guilt she had carried “is for Rex and Rex alone.”¹² Families stood and applauded when the sentence was announced, FOX 5 NY reported.¹⁴ No statement from Karen Vergata’s family appears in the sources reviewed.