"There are no words I can say," Rex Heuermann told the court in Riverhead on June 17, 2026. He was sixty-two, and he had just listened to the families of eight women tell him what he had taken from them. "I am responsible for what was said in this room today. The words I would say have no meaning, and I'm going to leave it there." Justice Timothy Mazzei sentenced him to three consecutive terms of life without parole and four consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life, and when it was over he told the deputies to get him out of there as the courtroom broke into applause.
The case had begun with a woman who was not among his victims. In May 2010 Shannan Gilbert ran from a client's house in Oak Beach on the south shore of Long Island, calling 911, and disappeared. Searching for her in December, police found the first of ten sets of human remains in the scrub along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach. The first four, found within days of each other and known afterward as the Gilgo Four, were Maureen Brainard-Barnes, twenty-five, Melissa Barthelemy, twenty-four, Megan Waterman, twenty-two, and Amber Lynn Costello, twenty-seven, young women who had advertised as escorts on Craigslist and Backpage and who had disappeared between 2007 and 2010. Gilbert was found in a marsh a year later. Her death was ruled an accident, which her family has always disputed, and Heuermann was never charged with it.
For a decade the investigation went nowhere. It was badly damaged by James Burke, the Suffolk County police chief of the period, who kept the FBI out of the case and was later imprisoned for beating a suspect and obstructing a federal inquiry. A new task force was formed in 2022.
Heuermann, born on September 13, 1963, was an architect with a practice in Manhattan, married with two children, and lived in Massapequa Park, a few miles from where the bodies were found. He was arrested on July 13, 2023, at first charged with three of the murders to which DNA had linked him. The prosecution's case, as set out in court filings, rested on a pattern of burner phones, a green pickup truck matching a witness's description, hairs recovered with the remains and compared through whole-genome sequencing, and a document on a hard drive that prosecutors described as a planning file. Through 2024 charges were added for Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, twenty, Sandra Costilla, twenty-eight, and Valerie Mack, twenty-four, bringing the total to seven. The Costilla case, from 1993, pushed the timeline back years earlier than investigators had believed. In September 2025 the court admitted the whole-genome sequencing evidence over the defense's objection that the technique was not generally accepted, and it refused to split the counts into separate trials. A trial had been set for after Labor Day 2026.
On April 8, 2026, he pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, for Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello, and four of second-degree murder, for Brainard-Barnes, Taylor, Costilla and Mack. In his allocution he also admitted killing Karen Vergata, thirty-four, whose remains had been found on Fire Island in 1996 and who was identified in 2023; he was never charged with her death, but the plea covered it, and he would face no other prosecution over the eight. All eight women had been working in the sex trade. He admitted that he strangled them, dismembered them and hid their bodies across Long Island. As part of the agreement he must be interviewed by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. His lawyer, Michael Brown, said the decision to plead was Heuermann's alone and brought him a huge sense of relief.
His former wife and their two grown children stayed away from the sentencing out of respect for the families. Jasmine Robinson, a cousin of Jessica Taylor, told him that a million years was not enough and that he had chosen small women because he was a weak, disgusting coward. Melissa Cann, Maureen Brainard-Barnes's sister, told him that without his knowing it she had become his worst nightmare. Amanda Funderburg, Melissa Barthelemy's sister, asked him to look at her while she spoke. District Attorney Raymond Tierney told the families that their voices had been heard.
Heuermann was transferred to state custody at Green Haven Correctional Facility. Investigators have said they believe he may be linked to further killings, and several of the other remains found along Ocean Parkway have never been attributed to anyone.