The Gilgo Beach Murders: The Case Against Rex Heuermann

Rex Heuermann set the terms of his own confession. Before he stood in a Suffolk County courtroom and pleaded guilty to murdering eight women, he arranged private jailhouse meetings with his ex-wife and his daughter. He chose the order. He chose the setting. He decided what they would hear and how they would hear it. Even in the act of admitting to being the Gilgo Beach serial killer, Rex was orche...

John Douglas looked at the full picture of Rex Heuermann — the four-day kill cycle, the stopwatch-timed body dumps, the kill room in his childhood bedroom, the planning document that referenced Douglas's own book — and delivered an assessment that should keep investigators working this case for years. He said Rex is a malignant narcissistic sadistic psychopathic serial killer.  He said he doesn't...

Rex Heuermann asked to confess to his daughter before he confessed to the world. That was one of his conditions for taking the plea — private meetings with Victoria and Asa before the public allocution. He wanted to control how his family heard the truth.  Even in confession, Rex was managing the narrative. Victoria walked into that jailhouse room and saw her father handcuffed to a chair. She said...

Rex Heuermann didn't just hide what he was from his ex-wife — he built the world she lived in. Every wall. Every doorway. Every belief she held about who he was and what their life meant. And then he filled that world with a version of himself that made the real Rex invisible.  The Peacock documentary revealed how total that control was. The family therapist described a dynamic where anything Rex...

Before Rex Heuermann stood in Suffolk County Court and pleaded guilty to the Gilgo Beach murders, he was given something almost unheard of — a private meeting with his ex-wife Asa Ellerup and their daughter Victoria to confess to them first. The final episode of the Peacock docuseries House of Secrets captures both women recounting that meeting. And what they describe goes to places the courtroom...

Rex Heuermann married Asa Ellerup in April 1996. According to the Suffolk County DA, he also strangled and dismembered Karen Vergata that same month. He admitted to it in open court during his guilty plea — an eighth killing he was never formally charged with. The confession was part of the deal: admit to Karen’s murder, never face prosecution for it. Seven indictments. One admission. Eight women...

Benjamin Torres was six years old when his mother disappeared. Valerie Mack vanished in 2000. Her dismembered remains were found in Manorville that same year — unidentified for twenty years. Rex Heuermann has now pleaded guilty to her murder. For Torres, the guilty plea wasn't the ending. It was permission to start. His wrongful death lawsuit names Heuermann, ex-wife Asa Ellerup, and their daughte...

One thousand days of maintaining his innocence. Tears on day one. Calm, controlled execution on day one thousand. Rex Heuermann didn't just plead guilty — he managed the terms. Every pre-trial ruling had gone against his defense. Whole genome sequencing was ruled admissible. All charges were consolidated. Trial was months away with no viable path to acquittal. So the man who spent decades planning...

For five weeks after Melissa Barthelemy disappeared, someone used her phone to call her 15-year-old sister Amanda. The calls came from crowded Manhattan sidewalks. They lasted under three minutes. They described what had been done to Melissa. And they were aimed exclusively at the teenager — never the mother. A burner phone Melissa had connected with the day she vanished traveled from Massapequa P...

He ate pizza on a Manhattan sidewalk and threw the crust in a public trash can. Investigators were watching. That discarded crust — legally recovered as an abandonment sample — carried DNA that matched a male hair found in the burlap wrapping around Megan Waterman's body on Ocean Parkway. Months of surveillance, one piece of garbage, and the entire Gilgo Beach case broke open. Megan was 22. A moth...

Rex Heuermann said it himself. In a packed courtroom, he admitted to strangling eight women over seventeen years. He confirmed the murders. He confirmed the dismemberment. He showed no emotion. And Asa Ellerup was sitting in the back of the room while he did it. For years, she said she did not believe it. She called him her savior. She dismissed the planning document. She described the hair eviden...

Rex Heuermann admitted to killing Valerie Mack in open court. He pleaded guilty to murdering seven women along the Gilgo Beach corridor and confessed to killing an eighth. For the families of the victims, the guilty plea brought a measure of closure that decades of investigation could not. But for Benjamin Torres — Valerie Mack’s son, who was six years old when she disappeared — the guilty plea be...

They packed the courtroom — the mothers, the sisters, the partners, the friends who spent years wondering and waiting and hoping that someone would be held accountable for the women they lost. Some had been waiting since the 2000s. Some since 2010, when the first four sets of remains were found wrapped in burlap along an isolated stretch of Ocean Parkway. And on April 8, in a hearing that lasted r...

Benjamin Torres never got to grow up with his mother. Valerie Mack disappeared when he was six years old. Her partial remains — dismembered, decapitated, hands severed — were found in Manorville that same year. Nobody knew who she was. For twenty years, she was listed as an unidentified woman. Torres spent his entire childhood, his adolescence, and most of his adult life without knowing what happe...

Sandra Costilla was 28 years old when her body was found in the woods of Southampton, Long Island, in 1993. For three decades, nobody connected her death to the Gilgo Beach case. Investigators looked at the wrong suspect for years. Meanwhile, according to prosecutors, the man whose DNA was allegedly on her body was living undisturbed — building a career, raising a family, and allegedly killing oth...

She called him her savior. He stood in a Suffolk County courtroom and admitted to murdering seven women. He admitted to killing an eighth. Rex Heuermann pled guilty. Life without parole. No trial. No testimony. Just an admission — and a family left to reckon with what was real and what was never what it appeared to be. Asa Ellerup maintained she would have known. Their daughter Victoria sat in tha...

Rex Heuermann pled guilty. After nearly three years of maintaining his innocence, the accused Gilgo Beach Killer admitted in court to murdering seven women and killing an eighth — Karen Vergata. Life without parole. No trial. For the families who waited over a decade for answers — some who waited more than two decades — a guilty plea provides certainty. It provides a sentence. But it also takes so...

Rex Heuermann got hustled on September 1, 2010 — and it may be the reason he's in prison. Amber Costello's roommate Dave Schaller ran a scam on a client at their West Babylon house. The client — described by Schaller as massive, an "ogre" — left, got into a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche, and sent a text: "That was not nice, so do I get credit for next time." The next night, the same burner...

The pizza crust changed everything. Investigators had Heuermann under surveillance for months before they collected the abandoned DNA sample that cracked the case. He discarded a pizza crust near his Manhattan office. The DNA on it matched a male hair found in the burlap wrapping around Megan Waterman's remains. That match gave prosecutors warrants for his house in Massapequa Park, where they seiz...

Asa Ellerup was in the courtroom. Last row. Watching the man she was married to for nearly thirty years admit to things she once said she would have known about if they were true. Rex Heuermann’s guilty plea is now the record. And Asa is navigating a world where the person she built her life around has admitted to being someone she says she never knew existed. Her daughter Victoria was there too....

He said it. After years of standing stone-faced in court, after denying everything, after forcing investigators and families through years of legal proceedings — Rex Heuermann stood in Suffolk County Court and pleaded guilty to killing seven women. He admitted to killing an eighth, Karen Vergata, whose case will not be separately charged under the plea deal. For the families of Melissa Barthelemy,...

The cellphone evidence in Melissa Barthelemy's case maps Rex Heuermann's alleged movements with precision. Prosecutors say the burner phone she'd connected with traveled from Massapequa Park to Midtown Manhattan on the day she disappeared — mirroring Heuermann's daily commute. Hours later, Melissa's own phone traveled the reverse route — from Manhattan back toward Long Island. And then, for five w...

Maureen Brainard-Barnes was the first of the Gilgo Four to disappear — July 2007. Three days later, her phone was used in Suffolk County along the Long Island Expressway. Prosecutors allege Rex Heuermann checked her voicemail after she was gone. Burner phone data from the phone that contacted Maureen traced back to "the box" — a tight cluster of cell towers surrounding Heuermann's Massapequa Park...

She built her life around him. He allegedly built something else entirely. Rex Heuermann is charged with the murders of seven women along Long Island's Gilgo Beach corridor — killings that reportedly spanned from 1993 to 2010. He is expected to enter a guilty plea, according to multiple reports. If accepted, he faces life without parole. But for the people who lived inside that house, the legal ou...

They were bracing for a trial. The mothers, the sisters, the children of the women Rex Heuermann is charged with killing — they were preparing to sit in that courtroom and hear every piece of evidence laid out publicly. To watch the prosecution present the DNA, the cellphone records, the alleged murder blueprint recovered from his computer. To see a jury decide. Now, reportedly, that's gone. Heuer...