News

Rex Heuermann Is Sentenced to Three Life Terms Plus 100 Years for the Gilgo Beach Murders

Two months after his guilty plea, the Massapequa Park architect was sentenced for killing eight women between 1993 and 2010 as their families confronted him in court.

Published

Illustration: empty prison exercise yard with basketball hoop seen from above

Before he was sentenced, Rex Heuermann sat in a Riverhead courtroom on June 17, 2026, and listened to the families of eight women tell him what he had taken. Then he was given the chance to speak. "There are no words I can say," he said. "The words I would say have no meaning, and I'm going to leave it there."

Justice Timothy P. Mazzei asked whether he was at least a little bit sorry for what he had done to "these poor, innocent women." Heuermann answered quietly that he was. "You're a disgusting and despicable small man, if you're a man at all," the judge told him. "And you're a coward." He then imposed the sentence Heuermann had agreed to in April: three consecutive terms of life without parole for the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, and a consecutive term of 100 years to life, four terms of 25 years to life, for the murders of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valerie Mack. "Get him out of here," Mazzei said. The families in the gallery applauded as the 62-year-old architect from Massapequa Park was handcuffed and led away.

On April 8 Heuermann had pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and four of second-degree murder, and in his allocution he also admitted killing Karen Vergata, whose death he was never charged with. Under the agreement, the district attorney's office said, that eighth murder is covered by his plea to the other seven. The agreement also requires him to be interviewed by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit.

Eight women

The district attorney's account, drawn from court documents and Heuermann's own admissions, begins with Sandra Costilla, 28, strangled in November 1993 and left near Fish Cove Road in North Sea, where hunters found her. She left a son of about five. Karen Vergata, 34, the mother of two sons, was killed in April 1996; her legs washed up on Blue Point Beach that month, and her skull was found on Ocean Parkway fifteen years later. Until genetic genealogy identified her in 2023, she was known as "Fire Island Jane Doe." Valerie Mack, 24, killed in the fall of 2000, had her son's name tattooed near her right ankle. Jessica Taylor was 20 when she was killed in July 2003.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25 and the mother of two, was killed in July 2007; Melissa Barthelemy, 24, in July 2009; Megan Waterman, 22, who left a daughter, in June 2010; and Amber Costello, 27, in September 2010. Heuermann found the last four through online advertisements and arranged to meet them using burner phones. All eight were strangled. Four of them were found in December 2010 along Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach. Sandra Costilla, Valerie Mack and Jessica Taylor had been found years before that, and the expanded searches of the parkway in the spring of 2011 turned up the rest of the remains of Mack, Taylor and Vergata. He was arrested on July 13, 2023.

The families

"You are a coward who preyed on vulnerable, innocent women," said Missy Cann, Brainard-Barnes's sister, through tears. Violet Swager, a cousin of Jessica Taylor, who would have turned 43 that day, told him, "I can't even put into words the eviscerating hatred I have for you." Amanda Funderburg, Barthelemy's sister, remembered how the killer had called her after her sister's death and taunted her. She turned to face him in court. "You can look at me while I'm talking," she said. "It has been about 17 years since we've spoken."

"Even though justice is done, it cannot replace what you have taken from us," said JoAnn Mack, Valerie Mack's mother. Megan Waterman's daughter, Liliana, said afterward that it was a day she had been thinking about her whole life. "The chance to finally speak up for her, it gives me comfort," she said.

Heuermann pleaded guilty to seven murders and admitted an eighth, Karen Vergata's, in open court; the sentence was imposed under the terms of his April plea agreement. The account of the eight killings is the Suffolk County District Attorney's, based on court documents and his allocution.

Sources

In the Archive