The long road from teary denial to a guilty plea in the Gilgo Beach serial killings

By Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN) — Back on July 14, 2023, Rex Heuermann was in tears.

Heuermann, a New York-based architect with no criminal record, had just spent the night in jail following his arrest in the notorious Gilgo Beach serial killings on Long Island. He was being accused of three murders, and prosecutors said he was the “prime suspect” in a fourth killing.

He pleaded not guilty, and his defense attorney Michael J. Brown relayed to the media how his client was doing.

“The only thing I can tell you that he did say, as he was in tears, was ‘I didn’t do this,’” Brown said.

Exactly 1,000 days after his arrest, Heuermann, 62, showed no signs of emotional distress as he addressed a Suffolk County courtroom packed with media, victims’ families and uniformed officials Wednesday.

He calmly and coolly pleaded guilty to seven murder charges and admitted he killed an eighth woman. He said he fatally strangled all eight women and discarded their remains on Long Island from 1993 to 2010. He said “good morning” to the prosecutor and answered with a simple “Yes” or “Yes, your honor” to questions about what he did to the women.

“Are you pleading guilty, voluntarily, of your own free will?” State Supreme Court Justice Timothy Mazzei asked.

“Yes,” Heuermann responded.

The path from that teary denial to Wednesday’s guilty plea was paved by the ongoing investigative efforts of police, four added murder charges from prosecutors, the judge’s “monumental” ruling on DNA evidence and the desires of the victims’ families.

Ultimately, though, it was up to Heuermann himself.

“There came a point in this defense where Rex said, ‘I want to plead guilty,’” Brown said outside court Wednesday.

A cold case to an arrest

The guilty plea effectively ends a case that began back in 2010, when investigators discovered the remains of four women who had been bound by a belt or tape, wrapped in burlap and discarded in a remote area of Gilgo Beach, along Ocean Parkway. The “Gilgo Four,” as they became known, had gone missing between 2007 to 2010 and were all young women who did sex work.

The horrific discovery spurred a wider search on Long Island over the following year – nearly a dozen bodies were found in all – and raised fears of a serial killer on the loose.

But the case went cold for over a decade, frustrating some victims’ families who felt investigators were not taking the case seriously because of the victims’ line of work.

Some officials don’t exactly disagree with that criticism of the early investigation.

“There might have been some things that we could have done better,” then-Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison said in 2023.

Speaking to the media Wednesday, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney derided past officials who he said would “go out to Gilgo Beach, and all you guys follow, and they’re walking along the beach, looking for clues, presumably – I don’t know what the heck they’re doing.”

Harrison and Tierney said they took a different tack. In February 2022, Harrison announced a multiagency task force, including state police and the FBI, to reexamine the killings.

The task force was intentionally quiet and did not do Gilgo Beach media events, Tierney said, because they wanted the suspect to put down their guard.

“We didn’t say, ‘Hey, it’s a slow day, let’s toss Gilgo in the media pool to sort of get some clicks,’” Tierney said. “We purposely wanted everyone, especially the individual who committed these crimes, to go to sleep.”

Just a month into the task force’s work, Heuermann was first mentioned as a possible suspect, according to Tierney.

Over the course of the following year, investigators looked at cell phone location data, eyewitness descriptions of the vehicle and suspect, financial records and computer searches to home in on Heuermann, a resident of Massapequa Park, some 15 miles from Gilgo. They got a sample of his DNA from leftover pizza crust he had thrown out and tied it to DNA from a male hair found with the victims, according to prosecutors.

Finally, on July 13, 2023, Heuermann was arrested and charged with the murders of three of the Gilgo Four: Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello. He was a “prime suspect” in the killing of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, the fourth of the Gilgo Four, prosecutors added.

From three murders to seven

The task force’s plan to operate quietly worked as intended, Tierney said.

“We wanted to simultaneously arrest him and execute a whole bunch of warrants, and if he was lulled to sleep, we would get additional evidence, and that’s precisely what happened,” he said Wednesday.

Indeed, Heuermann was charged with four more murders in 2024.

In January of that year, Heuermann was charged with murder in the death of Brainard-Barnes, according to an indictment.

Heuermann was indicted on two new murder charges in June 2024 in connection with the 2003 death of Jessica Taylor and the 1993 death of Sandra Costilla, and he was charged with the 2000 murder of Valerie Mack in December 2024. Like the Gilgo Four, the three women were sex workers.

At a June 2024 court hearing, prosecutors revealed they had discovered disturbing content on Heuermann’s devices. A “planning document” outlined a strategy for future killings, how to dispose of a body, avoid apprehension and not leave DNA evidence, along with what supplies may be needed to carry out serial murder, according to the bail application.

The task force also used the newer field of genetic genealogy to identify some of the unidentified bodies. In August 2023, investigators identified a victim previously known as “Fire Island Jane Doe” as Karen Vergata, a 34-year-old escort who had gone missing in 1996. Her remains were found on Long Island’s South Shore, in Fire Island and Gilgo Beach.

Meanwhile, two key court rulings in the pre-trial period helped the prosecution’s case.

In September 2025, Judge Mazzei ruled that evidence derived from cutting-edge DNA technology would be admissible at Heuermann’s trial. Prosecutors said the evidence, known as whole genome sequencing, connected Heuermann to the killings.

Brown, Heuermann’s attorney, had argued whole genome sequencing has not yet been widely accepted by the scientific community and therefore shouldn’t be permitted.

Later that month, Mazzei ruled the seven murder charges would be handled in one trial rather than separated into individual cases, as the defense had requested.

The septuple murder case had been scheduled to go to trial in September.

How the plea deal came together

The plea deal accepted by the court Wednesday was relatively straightforward.

Heuermann faced 10 murder charges for killing seven women; three of the killings were charged as both first-degree and second-degree murder.

He pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder and admitted to killing an eighth woman, Vergata. In exchange, prosecutors dismissed the three doubled-up murder charges and asked the judge to sentence him to multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole. Heuermann must also cooperate with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, Brown said.

Brown and Tierney declined to provide an exact timeline of how the guilty plea came together, but they offered some clues as to the motivations.

Brown said the judge’s two pre-trial rulings hurt the defense’s chance of success at trial. The ruling allowing in DNA evidence was “monumental,” he said, and combining seven murder allegations into one trial would have an overwhelming, cumulative effect on the jury.

At a certain point, Heuermann admitted responsibility and said he wanted to plead guilty, Brown said.

“He certainly wanted to save the families of the victims the ordeal of going to trial, and coupled with saving his family that ordeal,” Brown said.

Meanwhile, Tierney said vaguely the plea deal discussions came together “organically.” In a proffer setting with Heuermann, in which the defendant discloses information that prosecutors agree not to use against them, “there was a discussion with regard to Karen Vergata,” Tierney explained.

“Once that happened, we began to think that certainly a plea might occur, but you never know,” he said.

In some plea deals, prosecutors negotiate with a defendant to reduce the prison sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, but that did not occur here, Tierney said.

“There was no negotiation with regards to numbers, so it was basically like we’ll continue to work this case,” he said. “If it comes a time when this defendant – and it’s the defendant’s decision – when this defendant wants to plead guilty, we’ll go ahead and take it, but we’re not discussing, ‘We’ll give him this’ or ‘We’ll give him that.’”

“The reason why this case pled guilty was because it was the defendant’s decision to do so,” Tierney said.

The victims’ families had a voice in the deal, too.

At Wednesday’s news conference, Gloria Allred, an attorney representing several of the victims’ families, said the loved ones were asked last week if they wanted to accept Heuermann’s guilty plea or if they wanted to go to a trial. The family members then came forward to the microphone and said they agreed to accept the plea.

“I am glad that this is over as far as him pleading guilty. It took a big chunk of stress off of me and my family,” said Elizabeth Baczkiel, the mother of victim Jessica Taylor. “I accept the plea wholeheartedly.”

As for the defendant’s perspective? Heuermann will have the opportunity to explain himself further at his sentencing on June 17.

“I expect at sentencing he’ll have something to say,” Brown said.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.