Gilgo Beach Serial Killings

The Gilgo Beach serial killings were a string of murders on Long Island, New York, that began in the early 1990s and continued through about 2010. The majority of the victims’ remains were discovered between December 2010 and April 2011. Initially, investigators were not certain that the same killer was responsible for all the murders. It wasn’t until more than a decade later that police connected Long Island architect Rex Heuermann to the deaths. He pleaded guilty to the murders of eight women in April 2026 and was sentenced to life in prison.

The killings were so named because the remains of eight victims were located in Suffolk County along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo State Park. At one point investigators linked Heuermann to three additional killings in the area but later determined that he was not responsible for at least two of those deaths.

The victims

On the morning of May 1, 2010, Shannan Gilbert, a 23-year-old sex worker, called 911 to report that she was leaving a client’s house on Long Island and believed that she was being chased by people trying to kill her. Her mother, Mari Gilbert, reported her missing but the police told her that her daughter would eventually turn up. Because Shannan Gilbert was a sex worker, her mother felt the authorities weren’t taking her disappearance seriously and pressured them to do so.

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The Suffolk County police searched the area where Gilbert was last seen for several months without success until an officer using a search dog found human remains near Gilgo Beach on December 11, 2010. The remains were later determined to be those of Melissa Barthelemy, a 24-year-old hairdresser and part-time sex worker.

On December 13, 2010, during another search of the area, police discovered the remains of three additional women: Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello. Similar to Barthelemy, all of the women were in their 20s and small in stature, and had been working as sex workers when they went missing. Their bodies, found within about a quarter mile of each other, were wrapped in burlap with their feet or ankles bound. Authorities referred to the women as the “Gilgo Four.” Barthelemy had disappeared in July 2009, Brainard-Barnes in July 2007, Waterman in June 2010, and Costello in September 2010.

In early 2011 six additional sets of remains were discovered, none of which was bound and wrapped like the Gilgo Four. These included the partial remains of four women, an Asian man, and a two-year-old girl. The partial remains of Jessica Taylor, a 20-year-old sex worker, were located on March 29 several miles east of the Gilgo Four. Other remains of Taylor’s had been previously discovered in July 2003 in Manorville, a community in eastern Long Island. Partial remains of 24-year-old Valerie Mack, who was also a sex worker, were located approximately a mile and a half east of Taylor’s on April 4. Like Taylor’s, Mack’s other remains were previously discovered in Manorville in November 2000. On April 11 the skull of 34-year-old Karen Vergata, whose partial remains were first discovered on Fire Island in 1996, was found off Ocean Parkway in Nassau County. Like many of the other victims, Vergata was a sex worker at the time of her disappearance.

The other remains included a woman who was later identified as the mother of the two-year-old; their cases were determined not to be linked to the Gilgo Beach serial killer. The body of the Asian man remains unidentified.

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The Gilbert family prodded the authorities to continue searching for Shannan Gilbert, and on December 13, 2011, her remains were found in the Oak Beach marshlands. The cause of her death was ruled “undetermined” by the medical examiner, and police have theorized that she drowned accidentally, making her death a tragic coincidence. However, her family believed she was murdered, and an independent autopsy conducted by a forensic pathologist hired by the Gilberts included findings consistent with strangulation.

Suspect identified

In February 2022 Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison and Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney formed a task force with the goal of identifying the person or people responsible for the Gilgo Beach serial killings. Within six weeks a suspect was identified. In reviewing the original case files, the task force saw that Costello’s roommate, Dave Schaller, had described one of her clients as an “ogre-like” man who drove a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche. Schaller had also told investigators that she had one particular client who phoned her incessantly.

The original investigators knew that burner phones had been used to make calls to Brainard-Barnes, Barthelemy, Costello, and Waterman before they disappeared. They were able to connect the calls to cell towers located within an area of just a few blocks in Massapequa Park, Long Island. With the narrowed location and the description of the “ogre-like” man and his Chevrolet Avalanche, the task force was able to identify architect Rex Heuermann as the primary suspect. The middle-class professional and then-married father had led an astonishing double life while carrying out a string of brutal killings.

Police began to follow Heuermann and eventually collected a pizza box he had thrown away in a trash can in Midtown Manhattan on January 26, 2023. On June 12 DNA recovered from a piece of the leftover pizza crust came back as a match to a male hair found on Waterman’s body. With the DNA match and Heuermann’s personal cell phone records linking him to the burner phones, police arrested him on July 13, 2023, and charged him with the murders of Barthelemy, Waterman, and Costello.

By December 2024 additional DNA matches led Heuermann to be charged in the murders of Brainard-Barnes, Taylor, Mack, and 28-year-old Sandra Costilla (who was not previously associated with the Gilgo Beach serial killings, as her remains were found in 1993 in North Sea, Long Island). He pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

During a hearing on April 8, 2026, Heuermann, 62, stunned the Long Island courtroom by reversing his position and admitting to the murders of eight women, including Karen Vergata, in whose death he had not been charged. Questioned by Tierney as to the manner of death for a number of his victims, Heuermann calmly repeated “strangulation” several times. He was sentenced to life in prison in June 2026

Other serial killer cases

Ed Gein: Serial Killer and Grave Robber

Ted Bundy: The Celebrity Serial Killer

John Wayne Gacy: The Neighborhood Clown

Jeffrey Dahmer: The Cannibal Killer