This entry was written while the case was untried and has been updated. Heuermann pleaded guilty on April 8, 2026 and was sentenced on June 17, 2026. What follows is no longer a set of allegations.
Between 2010 and 2011 the remains of ten people were found in scrub along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach on the south shore of Long Island. The first four, found within days of each other in December 2010 and known afterwards as the Gilgo Four, were Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, young women who had advertised as escorts on Craigslist and Backpage and who had disappeared between 2007 and 2010. The search had begun because of a fifth woman, Shannan Gilbert, who had run from a client's house in Oak Beach in May 2010 calling 911 and was found in a marsh a year later; her death was ruled an accident, which her family has always disputed.
The investigation went nowhere for a decade and was badly damaged by the Suffolk County police chief of the period, James Burke, who was later imprisoned for beating a suspect and obstructing a federal inquiry and who had kept the FBI out of the case. A new task force was formed in 2022.
Rex Heuermann, an architect with a Manhattan practice who lived at Massapequa Park a few miles from where the bodies were found, was arrested on July 13, 2023. The prosecution case as set out in court filings rests on a burner phone pattern, a green pickup truck matching a witness description, hairs recovered from the remains and compared using whole-genome sequencing, and a document found on a hard drive which prosecutors describe as a planning file. Charges were added through 2024 covering Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valerie Mack, bringing the total to seven.
On April 8, 2026 he pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder and admitted killing an eighth woman, Karen Vergata, whose remains had been found on Fire Island in 1996 and who was identified in 2023. In exchange the prosecution dropped three duplicated counts and asked for consecutive terms; he was sentenced on June 17, 2026 to multiple terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and agreed to cooperate with the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. Two pre-trial rulings had gone against him and made the plea likely: in September 2025 the court admitted whole genome sequencing evidence connecting him to six of the seven victims, over the defence's argument that the technique was not yet accepted, and later that month refused to sever the counts into separate trials. A trial had been set for shortly after Labor Day 2026. The killings ran from 1993 to 2010 and eleven sets of remains were found in the original searches, so the recovery of the rest of that ground is not concluded by his conviction.