Rex Heuermann pleads guilty to murder charges and admits he killed 8 women in the Gilgo Beach case

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. (AP) — A Long Island architect who led a secret life as a serial killer pleaded guilty on Wednesday to murdering seven women and admitted he killed an eighth in a string of long-unsolved crimes known as the Gilgo Beach killings.

Rex Heuermann, 62, entered the pleas in a courtroom packed with reporters, police and victims’ relatives, some of whom wept as he detailed his murders. He will be sentenced in June to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Heuermann's guilty pleas — to three counts of first-degree murder and four of intentional murder — bring finality to a case that bedeviled investigators, tormented victims’ families and tantalized a true-crime obsessed public for years. Although he wasn't charged in her death, he also admitted that he killed Karen Vergata in 1996.

“This has been a long journey of hope — hope that one day we would stand here and say her name with justice beside it," Melissa Cann, the sister of victim Maureen Brainard-Barnes, said at a news conference hours after the hearing as she fought back tears. "Today, that long, painful journey brings us to this moment.”

In court, Heuermann admitted that he strangled all eight victims and dismembered some of them before dumping their bodies.

Wearing a black suit coat and white button-down shirt, Heuermann appeared matter-of-fact and unemotional as he answered questions from Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney and the judge. He never looked back at the packed courtroom gallery.

The women, many of them sex workers, were killed over a 17-year span.

Prosecutor credits the victims' families and investigators

“This defendant walked among us play-acting as a normal suburban dad when in reality, all along, he was obsessively targeting innocent women for death,” Tierney said at the post-hearing news conference.

He thanked the victims' relatives, including some standing alongside him, for helping bring their loved ones’ stories to life. And he praised members of the Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force, which cracked the case with the help of clues that included DNA lifted from a discarded pizza crust.

Gloria Allred, an attorney for some of the victims' families, described several of the women as young mothers who were just trying to earn extra money to support their children.

“Little did they know that the defendant, Rex Heuermann, did not care about their hopes and dreams, or that they had families and friends who loved them,” Allred said at the news conference.

Elizabeth Baczkiel, whose daughter Jessica Taylor was murdered by Heuermann, said: “I am glad that this is over as far as him pleading guilty. It took a big chunk of stress off of me and my family.”

Killer's ex-wife calls it a ‘difficult time’

Heuermann's ex-wife, Asa Ellerup, and their daughter attended the hearing and were mobbed by reporters as they entered and left the courthouse. Ellerup said her thoughts and prayers were with the victims' families and she asked for privacy for her own family during what she called a “very difficult time.”

Ellerup and her daughter, Victoria, had no knowledge of or involvement in the killings, said their lawyer, Robert Macedonio.

Heuermann's attorney, Michael Brown, said it was Heuermann's decision to plead guilty, in part because he wanted to spare victims' relatives and his family from the ordeal of a trial.

Asked by a reporter whether Heuermann was sorry, Brown responded, “I would hope so. ... I would expect at sentencing he would have something to say.”

As part of his guilty plea, Heuermann agreed to cooperate fully with the FBI's behavioral analysis unit as part of an academic and scientific exercise.

A shocking find

The discovery of numerous sets of human remains along Long Island's South Shore beginning in late 2010 set off a search for a potential serial killer that attracted global interest and spawned a Hollywood movie.

Remains of six victims — Melissa Barthelemy, Brainard-Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello, Valerie Mack, Taylor and Megan Waterman — were found in the scrub along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach. The remains of another, Sandra Costilla, were found more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) away in the Hamptons.

Police also identified the remains of Vergata, which were found on Fire Island, more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) west, in 1996, and near Gilgo Beach in 2011.

But despite the attention, including a documentary series and the 2020 Netflix film, “Lost Girls,” the investigation dragged on for more than a decade, punctuated by fleeting leads and dashed hopes.

A fresh look yields results

In 2022, six weeks after a new police commissioner formed the Gilgo Beach task force, detectives identified Heuermann as a suspect by using a vehicle registration database to connect him to a pickup truck that a witness reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared in 2010.

Heuermann lived for decades in Massapequa Park, about a 25-minute drive from where the women’s remains were found. Some of the victims were believed to have disappeared from that community and their cellphones were found to have pinged towers in the area, authorities said.

After the truck discovery, a grand jury authorized more than 300 subpoenas and search warrants, allowing the task force to dig in to Heuermann’s life.

Detectives collected billing records for burner phones he used to arrange meetings with the victims, retested DNA found with the bodies and scoured Heuermann’s internet search history, which showed that he had viewed violent torture pornography and exhibited an intense interest in the Gilgo Beach killings and the renewed investigation. Cellphone data showed Heuermann was in contact with some victims just before they disappeared, investigators said.

To obtain Heuermann’s DNA, a task force surveillance team tailed him in Manhattan, where he worked, and watched as he threw the remnants of his lunch — a box of partially eaten pizza crusts — into a sidewalk garbage can.

Investigators rushed in, grabbed the box, and sent it to the crime lab, which matched DNA from the crust to a male hair found on burlap used to restrain one of the victims. He was arrested in July 2023.