Gilgo Beach serial killings
The Gilgo Beach serial killings were part of a series of murders on Long Island, New York, spanning from 1993 to 2011. Many of the victims' remains were found over a period of months in late 2010 and 2011 during a police search of the area along Ocean Parkway, a road near the remote beach town of Gilgo in southern Suffolk County, New York.
In December 2010, the remains of four victims – Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello; designated "The Gilgo Four" – were found within a quarter of a mile of each other near Gilgo Beach. Six more sets of remains, believed to predate those four, were found in March and April 2011 in Suffolk and Nassau counties. Not all of the victims are believed by police to have been murdered by the same person.
The original search was prompted by the May 2010 disappearance of Shannan Gilbert in Oak Beach. Like most of the later identified victims, Gilbert engaged in sex work and advertised on Craigslist. Her remains were found approximately northeast of where the ten sets of remains had been found, but her cause of death is disputed.
Between July 2023 and December 2024, Rex Heuermann, a Manhattan-based architect and resident of Massapequa Park, Long Island, was charged with seven of the Gilgo Beach murders, including those of the Gilgo Four as well as the murders of Sandra Costilla, Valerie Mack, and Jessica Taylor.
Suspect
On July 13, 2023, Rex Andrew Heuermann, a resident of Nassau County, was arrested at age 59 in Midtown Manhattan and subsequently charged with three counts of first-degree murder, as well as three counts of the lesser charge of second-degree murder, related to the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello. He was also named as the prime suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, and was subsequently charged with her murder in January 2024.On June 6, 2024, Heuermann was arraigned and charged with the murders of Jessica Taylor and Sandra Costilla. Costilla's murder had not previously been linked to the Gilgo Beach serial killings. With this development, the timeline of the case reached back to the early 1990s, much further than previously thought by police. In December 2024, Heuermann was indicted for the 2000 murder of Valerie Mack. Heuermann has pleaded not guilty on all counts.
Heuermann has lived much of his life in Massapequa Park on the South Shore of Long Island. In an interview on YouTube, Heuermann stated that he had worked in Manhattan since 1987. Heuermann lived with his wife and their two children. Authorities began to seriously consider Heuermann as a suspect in March 2022 after discovering that a dark green first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche vehicle registered in his name had been linked to one of the killings by a witness.
According to investigators, Heuermann's cellphone records indicated that he had been in contact with three of the four victims, and an email account linked to him had been used to conduct online searches of the investigation's progress. Court records also indicated that he had searched the internet for "sadistic materials, child pornography, images of the victims and their relatives". Mitochondrial DNA testing indicated a potential match between a sample of Heuermann's DNA gleaned from a pizza crust he had discarded and mtDNA isolated from hair found on burlap in which one of the victims was wrapped. A potential match to Heuermann's wife was also found when comparing hair found on or near three of the victims to samples taken from bottles found in the trash outside the Heuermann residence. Investigators have stated that Heuermann's wife and children were out of the state each time the killings are believed to have occurred.
Victims
Sandra Costilla
Sandra Costilla was a 28-year-old woman from Trinidad and Tobago who was killed on November 19 or 20 in 1993. In December 2024, 31 years after her death, Rex Heuermann was charged with her murder. DNA from hairs found on her body matched Heuermann's, according to his indictment.Costilla was living in New York City at the time of her disappearance. Her body was found in November 1993 by hunters in a wooded area in North Sea, Long Island, approximately northeast of Gilgo Beach. Costilla is the earliest known victim in the set of murder charges against Heuermann, indicating that he allegedly began killing in the 1990s or earlier, and that he disposed of bodies in locations beyond the Gilgo Beach area.
The Gilgo Four: victims discovered in December 2010
Maureen Brainard-Barnes
Brainard-Barnes of Norwich, Connecticut, was 25 when she disappeared. She was last seen on July 9, 2007, saying that she planned "to spend the day in New York City." She was never seen again. Brainard-Barnes worked as a seasonal telemarketer and turned to sex work when unable to find other employment. A mother of two, she worked as a sex worker via Craigslist to pay the mortgage on her house. She had been out of the sex industry for seven months but returned to the work in order to pay her bills after receiving an eviction notice. Her body was found in December 2010. Brainard-Barnes was found restrained with three leather belts. DNA found on one of the belts matched the wife of suspect Rex Heuermann.Shortly after her disappearance, her friend Sara Karnes received a phone call from a man on a blocked number. The man claimed that he had just seen Brainard-Barnes and that she was alive and staying at a "whorehouse in Queens." He refused to identify himself and would not tell Karnes the location of the house. Karnes insisted that he call back on an identifiable number so that the police could act on the tip; he told Karnes he would call back and give her the address, but never called again. Karnes said that the man had no discernible regional accent.
At the time of her disappearance, Brainard-Barnes was working from a Super 8 motel in Manhattan. On the night of July 9, 2007, she called a friend in Connecticut and told her that she was planning to meet a client outside of the motel. Like many of the victims, Brainard-Barnes was very petite, at tall and.
Melissa Barthelemy
Barthelemy, 24, of Erie County, New York, went missing on July 12, 2009. She had been living in the Bronx in New York and working as a sex worker through Craigslist. Barthelemy was known to use the alias "Chloe". On the night she went missing, she met with a client, deposited $900 in her bank account, and attempted to call an old boyfriend, but did not get through. Beginning one week later, and lasting for five weeks, her 15-year-old sister received a series of "vulgar, mocking, and insulting" calls from a man, who may have been the killer, using Melissa Barthelemy's cell phone. The caller asked if the girl "was a whore like her sister."The calls became increasingly disturbing and eventually culminated in the caller telling Amanda that her sister was dead and that he was going to "watch her rot." Police traced some of the calls to Madison Square Garden, Midtown Manhattan, and Massapequa, but were unable to determine who was making them. Barthelemy's mother noted that there were "a lot of calls to Manorville" from her daughter's phone around the time of her disappearance. Barthelemy was tall and. Her remains were the first to be found in the search for Shannan Gilbert.
Megan Waterman
Waterman, 22, of Scarborough, Maine, went missing on June 6, 2010, after placing advertisements on Craigslist as an escort. The previous day, she had told her boyfriend that she was going out and would call him later. At the time of her disappearance, she was staying at a motel in Hauppauge, New York, northeast of Gilgo Beach. Waterman was reported missing by family members on June 8, 2010, after uncharacteristically failing to check in on her three-year-old daughter, whom she had left in their care. Her body was recovered in December 2010.Waterman was a victim of sex trafficking. Her boyfriend was arrested on sex trafficking charges on April 11, 2012; he is not thought to be connected to her disappearance or death.
Amber Lynn Costello
Costello, 27, of West Babylon, New York, a small town near Gilgo Beach, went missing on September 2, 2010, after going to meet with a stranger who had called her several times and offered $2,500 for her services. At the time of her disappearance, Costello's family believed that she was in a residential drug rehabilitation center. They did not immediately report her as missing when she stopped responding to messages and phone calls.Costello's roommate gave police a description of the unknown client and the first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche he was driving. More than a decade later, these facts prompted the investigation into Rex Heuermann as a possible suspect. Born in Charlotte and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, Costello was living in West Babylon with several other heroin addicts when she disappeared.
Prior to moving to West Babylon, Costello had been living with her second husband in Clearwater, Florida, and was working as a waitress. She had been a strong student but had become addicted to drugs as a teenager. She had been sexually assaulted by a neighbor when she was 6 years old. Costello was and weighed approximately.
Additional six victims discovered in March and April 2011
Four more sets of remains were discovered on March 29 and April 4, 2011. All of the remains were found in another area off the parkway near Oak Beach and Gilgo Beach, within and to the east of those found in December 2010. The newly discovered victims were Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, Tanya Jackson, and Jackson's daughter Tatiana Dykes. Suffolk Police subsequently expanded the search area up to the Nassau County border looking for more victims. Mack was not identified until 2020, and Jackson and her daughter were not identified until 2024.Two further sets of remains were discovered on April 11, 2011, after the search expanded into Nassau County. They were found about apart, approximately west of those found in December. One set of remains belonged to a male victim who may have been a crossdresser or a transgender woman. The police nicknamed this victim "Asian Doe" because of forensic evidence indicating Asian ethnicity. They said the victim had been dead for between five and ten years. The other remains were those of "Jane Doe No. 7," whose partial remains had been discovered on Fire Island in 1996. Jane Doe No. 7 was identified as Karen Vergata in 2023.