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Rex Heuermann Charged With the Murders of Jessica Taylor and Sandra Costilla

A new Suffolk County indictment added two second-degree murder counts, reaching back to 1993 and bringing to six the women the Gilgo Beach suspect was accused of killing.

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Rex Heuermann in a white shirt beside his lawyer in a Suffolk County courtroom

Rex Heuermann was arrested in July 2023 for killing three of the four women found wrapped in burlap along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach, and was charged with the fourth that January. On Thursday, June 6, 2024, a superseding indictment unsealed in Suffolk County charged him with two more murders and stretched the case back three decades: Jessica Taylor in 2003 and Sandra Costilla in 1993. He now stood accused of killing six women. Through his lawyer, Michael Brown, he pleaded not guilty to the new second-degree murder counts, and he was sent back to jail without bail.

Jessica Taylor was 20 when she vanished in July 2003 while working as an escort in midtown Manhattan. Her mother reported her missing after she failed to turn up for a planned get-together in Poughkeepsie. That same year, a woman walking her dog in the woods at Manorville found part of her body. Her head, hands and forearm were missing. They were found eight years later, in 2011, along Ocean Parkway just east of Gilgo Beach, less than a mile from where the remains of the first four women had been discovered months earlier. Prosecutors alleged in a bail application that the mutilation was meant to keep her from being identified by her face, fingerprints or tattoos.

Sandra Costilla's name had never before been publicly tied to the investigation. She was 28, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who had been living in New York, when two hunters found her body in late November 1993 in a wooded area of Southampton near North Sea. Her death had long been thought to be another man's work, but DNA testing excluded John Bittrolff, a local man since convicted of murder.

According to the bail application, a male hair recovered from Costilla's body and another from a surgical drape found beneath Taylor's torso were tested against Heuermann. In each case, the lab found that 99.96 percent of the North American population could be excluded as the source of the hair and that Heuermann could not be. Prosecutors also alleged that both women, like the other four, were killed while Heuermann's wife and children were out of state.

The new counts followed two searches in the spring of 2024, one of the woods near Manorville and another of Heuermann's Massapequa Park home. Prosecutors said that earlier that year they had recovered a hard drive from his basement and, after restoring data they alleged he had tried to delete, found a document they described as a methodical plan for the killings, with checklists of what to do before, during and after them. District Attorney Raymond Tierney said Heuermann "meticulously planned and executed six separate murders," and that it was possible some had been committed inside the Massapequa Park house where he lived with his family.

Asked whether Heuermann was also a suspect in the death of Valerie Mack, whose partial remains were found near Taylor's, Tierney said, "That's fair to say." He was not charged in her death that day. Brown said outside court that he could not comment fairly without seeing the evidence and speaking with his client. Taylor's family attended Tierney's news conference. "This year has been 21 years since she was taken from us, longer than the chance that she got to be alive," said her cousin, Jasmine Robinson. "I can't express what this day means after waiting and hoping for answers."

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