Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann sentenced to life in prison for 8 killings that shocked Long Island

For more than 15 years, the mystery haunted Long Island.

It began with a missing woman fleeing through the darkness of Oak Beach. It grew when four bodies were discovered along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach. Then came more remains, more questions, more grieving families and years of frustration as one of the nation’s most notorious unsolved serial killer investigations drifted through false starts, missed opportunities and public distrust.

On Wednesday in a packed Riverhead courtroom, that long chapter finally reached its end.

Rex A. Heuermann, the Massapequa Park architect who admitted strangling eight women between 1993 and 2010, was sentenced to multiple terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole as relatives of his victims confronted him with the pain, anger and loss that had defined their lives for decades.

Heuermann sat beside his attorneys Wednesday with a vacant stare, his hands placed atop one another on the table in front of him. There was no mea culpa, or even a simple apology — just an acknowledgment that whatever he said wouldn’t be enough.

"There are no words I can say. I am responsible for what was said in this room today," said Heuermann, whose voice was low and hard to hear. "The words I would say have no meaning and I’m going to leave it there at this time."

Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney, who sat down for an interview with Newsday after the sentencing, said Wednesday was not about Heuermann but about the victims, and the lives they left behind.

"We shouldn't remember him," Tierney said of Heuermann. "We should remember the victims. ... For me personally, I hope everyone forgets him."

State Supreme Court Justice Timothy Mazzei delivered a lashing to Heuermann.

"I know that you’re sorry that you got caught, I assume that you’re sorry for what you’ve done to your wife and children," Mazzei said, speaking directly to Heuermann. "Are you a little bit sorry for what you did to these poor, innocent women, eight women that you strangled to death, at least eight that we know of? Are you at least a little bit sorry for that? Yes?"

Heuermann replied "yes."

Mazzei sighed and continued.

"You know what, you’ve been described as a very big man, but you’re a disgusting and despicable small man, if you’re a man at all. And you’re a coward!"

Heuermann, 62, who had an architectural consulting firm in midtown Manhattan before he was arrested on July 13, 2023, pleaded guilty to the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, Sandra Costilla and admitted the uncharged killing of Karen Vergata. All the women were sex workers who encountered Heuermann when he sought their services.

As part of a plea agreement with prosecutors, Mazzei sentenced Heuermann to three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the killings of Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello, for whom he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder because they were killed within two years of one another.

Heuermann was also sentenced to a consecutive sentence of 100 years to life imprisonment for second-degree murder in the killings of Brainard-Barnes, Costilla, Mack and Taylor.

The families of the victims, many of whom had stayed quiet for years, spoke in open court about the anguish they’ve lived with over the killings of their daughters, sisters and mothers.

At one point, Mazzei, a veteran jurist, wiped tears from his eyes.

Amanda Funderburg, the sister of Barthelemy, who as a 15-year-old had allegedly received taunting phone calls from Heuermann using Barthelemy’s cellphone telling her that he had raped her sister and he was letting her body "rot," forced Heuermann to engage her.

"You can look at me when I’m talking; it’s been 17 years since we last spoke," Funderburg told Heuermann, who was jolted to attention, shaking his head in agreement.

Brainard-Barnes’ daughter, Nicolette Brainard-Barnes, recalled her mother, who was killed when she was just 7 years old, as a poet and aspiring rapper, a "warm, bubbly and artistic person. ... a language arts girlie."

Her mother should be remembered, she said, as a "vibrant woman."

"My mother’s life had depth, warmth, humor and meaning," she said.

"Rex Heuermann stole decades from a woman who should still be here making memories with her family," she said. "Her death did not create a single moment of grief. It created a lifetime of pain."

Nicolette Brainard-Barnes concluded her remarks speaking directly to Heuermann: "You make me sick and I don’t forgive you!"

The district attorney thanked the families for sharing their pain.

"The effect this case has had on them is overwhelming," Tierney said. He said the suffering "will never end" for the eight families.

Tierney said Heuermann enjoyed a "twisted satisfaction" from his crimes, calling out statements Heuermann's family and therapist made in a controversial Peacock documentary about meetings they had with him in which he confessed to the crimes before he pleaded guilty.

"Who this defendant truly is, is seen in that planning document," Tierney said.

He said Heuermann planned out killings as if he were solving a math problem or writing a grocery list.

"No concern for the victims and the pain he inflicted upon them whatsoever," Tierney said.

Tierney also addressed the measures Heuermann took to commit the killings, sending his family out of town and using burner phones and fictitious email accounts to contact victims.

"Once someone was marked for death, he used four burner phones he used exclusively to [kill] the Gilgo Four," he said.

Tierney said Heuermann believed he couldn't be traced when he was searching for information about his victims' families. "He thought he was smart. He was wrong."

Long Island’s reckoning with what became known as the Gilgo Beach killings began in 2010, when Shannan Gilbert, a sex worker from Jersey City, New Jersey, went missing in the barrier island community of Oak Beach, after fleeing the house of a client.

While police searched for Gilbert that December, they found the first remains, dubbed the "Gilgo Four." Seven additional sets of remains were found in the area over the next year, including Gilbert's, those of an unidentified male whose killing has never been charged and those of a mother and child linked to a man arrested by Nassau County authorities just last year.

Authorities have ruled Gilbert's death accidental and said she is not a victim of Heuermann, but John Ray, a lawyer for Gilbert's estate, maintains she was a victim of foul play.

Heuermann's arrest shocked Long Island.

By day, he was an architect, commuting from his Nassau County home into Manhattan on the Long Island Rail Road. His adult daughter, Victoria Heuermann, worked in the midtown architectural consulting firm alongside her father.

It was when the family went on vacation, usually out of state or even out of the country, that Heuermann committed his crimes, prosecutors have said, luring the women for paid encounters via burner phones. He then went about torturing, killing and dismembering them in the basement of the home where he had grown up and then lived with his own family.

The killer had long eluded authorities in Suffolk, who in the early days of the investigation had squabbled over theories of the case and whether to allow the assistance of the FBI.

The federal law enforcement agency was kept out of the case for years, limiting the ability of investigators to use advanced DNA techniques, such as genetic geology, which experts say hurt the case.

Heuermann emerged as a suspect in March 2022 when Tifini Atai, a state police investigator assigned to the Gilgo Beach Homicide Task Force, discovered while reexamining the case file that Costello had been picked up by a man driving a green Chevrolet Avalanche on the night she disappeared. That same distinctive truck had been registered to Heuermann, according to a state database, and he lived and worked in the areas where phone calls had been placed to victims.

The multiagency task force created under the administrations of Tierney and Police Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison — drawn from the Suffolk County Police Department, New York State Police, FBI, Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office and Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office — deployed an array of forensic and surveillance tools.

Investigators traced burner phones, mapped movements through cell site data and conducted advanced DNA testing on hair recovered from the victims’ remains.

The evidence against Heuermann, initially circumstantial, began to mount. His internet search history revealed he viewed torture pornography.

About a year before his arrest, authorities began surveilling Heuermann and his family.

Undercover officers collected abandonment samples from both Heuermann and his daughter — his DNA from a discarded pizza crust he threw away in Manhattan and hers from a Monster Java energy drink she threw in the trash at an LIRR station, according to court filings.

Authorities later matched those DNA samples to a cheek swab, obtained from Heuermann by court order and a sample provided by Victoria Heuermann following his arrest.

Prosecutors have said that authorities acted to arrest Heuermann because they were concerned he was still soliciting sex workers and might attack again.

Searches of his home and storage lockers led investigators to clippings of news stories about the case, showing that he had followed developments in the investigation closely.

Heuermann maintained his innocence publicly, through his formal plea of not guilty and through statements from his attorney Michael J. Brown, who attacked the prosecution’s evidence.

Prosecutors had said in court papers that they linked Heuermann to the killings through DNA derived from hairs found with the remains of six of the seven charged victims.
Heuermann’s defense had tried to have the DNA evidence thrown out, arguing the new technology and statistical analysis used to extract DNA from a rootless hair was not a widely accepted method in the scientific community, and therefore did not meet the legal threshold for admission into New York courts.

But Mazzei ruled the DNA evidence admissible at trial in a September 2025 ruling, a blow to the defense’s case, Brown would later admit after Heuermann changed his not guilty plea.

Heuermann formally ended the long-standing mystery when he publicly confessed, while under oath, to killing eight women in a packed courtroom in Riverhead.

"Strangulation," Heuermann repeated eight times when asked by Tierney for the method he used to kill his victims when he pleaded guilty to the killings in April.

The body of Costilla, who had sharp-force injuries, was found in the Southampton hamlet of North Sea in 1993.

Vergata last had contact with her father on Valentine’s Day 1996. Her legs were discovered in a plastic garbage bag by two brothers taking a walk near the Davis Park community two months later. More remains belonging to Vergata, who was initially referred to as "Fire Island Jane Doe," were found in April 2011.

The Gilgo Four — Barthelemy, Brainard-Barnes, Costello and Waterman — the women whose remains were discovered in December 2010 along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach, had been bound, their skeletal remains found without clothing, and were believed to have been killed between 2007 and 2010.

Victims Mack in 2000 and Taylor in 2003, were found dismembered, their remains both left along Ocean Parkway and in the wooded expanse of Manorville, roughly 40 miles away.

In 2025, it emerged that Heuermann's family support had begun to fade. His daughter, in an interview with documentary filmmakers, said she had concluded that her father "most likely" committed the killings, based on publicly available evidence.

Victoria Heuermann, along with her mother, Asa Ellerup, was reportedly paid more than $1 million to tell their story in "The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets."

Elizabeth Meserve, the aunt of Waterman who said her niece’s murder "shattered our family," criticized the Peacock documentary that paid millions to Heuermann's family, calling it "despicable."

"This is the kind of world we're living in. A demon tortures and kills our loved ones and his family gets filthy rich off his crimes," Meserve said.

She also said the inaction of former Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota and Police Chief James Burke delayed the examination of key evidence "due to their corruption."

Heuermann confessed to Ellerup about the killings in August 2025, about eight months before he entered his guilty plea, she revealed in the Peacock documentary series. The two continue to regularly speak, though they divorced soon after his 2023 arrest.

Heuermann’s therapist, Alison Winter, of Sayville, said Heuermann told her he paid for sex with his victims before arranging a second meeting, beginning his four-day ritual while his family was away on vacation.

Heuermann said he spent the first day cleaning his basement and preparing to spend the following day with the women, the therapist said. He displayed a friendly demeanor with each woman until he was ready to kill, Winter said. After killing them by strangulation, he engaged in what he described as "playtime" with their dead bodies before dumping their remains, usually in the Gilgo Beach area.

Prosecutors have said some of his victims suffered postmortem wounds and have pointed to references to "playtime," "torture," "captivity" and "noise control" in a planning document that investigators discovered on a hard drive found in his basement. Prosecutors said the document amounted to a "manifesto," a Microsoft Word document created in 2000 that showed Heuermann’s "self-education and homework on the topic of carrying out serial, sexual murder," prosecutors said in court documents.

Winter also said in the documentary that Heuermann told his ex-wife that he killed all the victims in a "kill room" in the basement of their home with the exception of his first victim Sandra Costilla, whom he said he did not intend to kill but ultimately murdered her inside his vehicle, a Dodge Ramcharger.

In the days before Heuermann’s sentencing, Ellerup announced through her attorney that she would not attend the proceeding, because she didn’t want to distract from the victims.

Heuermann, who has spent over 1,000 days in the Suffolk County jail in Riverhead since his arrest, has continued to get weekly visits from his ex-wife and has exchanged letters with the so-called "Happy Face Killer," Keith Hunter Jesperson, who is serving a life sentence in Oregon for killing eight women, Suffolk Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr. recently told Newsday.

Sometime after he’s sentenced, Heuermann will be transferred to an upstate prison, where he’ll live out the rest of his days. Tierney said Suffolk wants him gone expeditiously.

On Wednesday, Mazzei raised his voice as he sentenced Heuermann to life in prison.

"Get him out of here," Mazzei said as the courtroom erupted in cheers.