The Gilgo Beach Murders: The Case Against Rex Heuermann

Sandra Costilla was twenty-eight years old when her remains were found in the woods of Southampton, Long Island, in 1993. For thirty years, her case sat cold. Investigators pursued the wrong suspect. Nobody connected her death to the Gilgo Beach killings. And then DNA technology that didn't exist during her lifetime linked her to Rex Heuermann — and pushed the entire timeline of his alleged crimes back by fourteen years.

This look back puts Sandra first — her life before the case file, the decades her family spent without answers, and the forensic breakthrough that finally brought her name back into the investigation. Before Sandra's connection was established, the Gilgo Beach killings were understood to have begun around 2007. Her case changed the scope of everything investigators believed about how long Heuermann had been operating.

Heuermann eventually pleaded guilty to Sandra's murder along with six others, and admitted to an eighth killing as part of the agreement. He confirmed strangulation as the cause of death for each victim. The defense had tried to exclude the DNA evidence that connected him to Sandra — matched through advanced whole genome sequencing — and the judge ruled it admissible. He is expected to be sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus an additional hundred years. We revisit where the case stood at the time of our reporting. Sandra waited thirty years for someone to say her name in a courtroom connected to the person who took her life. This segment says it first.

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One word. When prosecutors asked Rex Heuermann in a Riverhead courtroom how he killed eight women over seventeen years, he answered with a single word: strangulation. No emotion. No elaboration. Victims' families packed the gallery, weeping, while the man who had maintained his innocence for nearly three years matter-of-factly confirmed what investigators had spent decades trying to prove. This look back sits with that moment and everything that led to it.

Heuermann pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder — three first-degree, four second-degree — and admitted to killing an eighth woman as part of the plea agreement. He said he used burner phones to lure each woman with the promise of money, strangled them in his Massapequa home, and left their remains along Ocean Parkway. His defense attorney told reporters the plea was driven by two pre-trial rulings: the admission of DNA evidence matched through whole genome sequencing — a first for a New York courtroom — and the denial of separate trials. Once both motions failed, the math changed.

Defense attorney and former felony prosecutor Eric Faddis breaks down what drove the plea, what the evidence looked like from both sides, and the question families are still carrying: a plea gives certainty, but does it give closure? Some waited decades for a trial that will now never come. The agreement requires Heuermann to cooperate with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit — which may eventually produce answers the courtroom didn't. He's expected to be sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus an additional hundred years. We revisit where the case stood at the time of our reporting.

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Melissa Barthelemy’s sister answered a phone call from the man who had just killed Melissa. He described what he did. That detail emerged during the sentencing of Rex Heuermann — three consecutive life terms, a hundred years, families chanting ogre as officers removed him from the courtroom.

The sentence is supposed to be the end. But inside the plea deal is a question the families can’t let go of. Heuermann confessed to killing Karen Vergata during a proffer session — a woman he was never charged with. He brought her up himself. He volunteered it for credit. The judge said “eight that we know of.”

The plea covers New York. Heuermann owned property in South Carolina and Nevada. Both are death penalty states. Women disappeared near those properties. If Heuermann’s cooperation was designed to close the case in the one state that can’t execute him while keeping the other jurisdictions quiet, the families who chanted ogre in that courtroom may not have gotten the full accounting they deserve.

A look back at the most compelling stories of the week.

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Rex Heuermann is sentenced. Life without parole. Eight murders. It’s over. So why would he agree to sit in a room with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and walk them through what he did?

Former FBI behavioral analyst Robin Dreeke says the answer is simple: information is the only currency Heuermann has left. He’ll use it to stay relevant, to feel important, to maintain some sense of control from inside a cell. He’ll dribble out details and try to manage the flow. The FBI has known this dynamic since Edmund Kemper told Robert Ressler in a California prison that he could rip his head off before the guards arrived. They’ve been navigating killer ego for fifty years.

The program started in the 1970s when Ressler and John Douglas interviewed thirty-six convicted killers to build the science of criminal profiling. It produced ViCAP, the national violent crime database. It produced the interview techniques that got Samuel Little to confess to ninety-three murders. It produced the six-month cooperation that led Gary Ridgway to the remains of four women nobody had been able to find.

Now the FBI wants Heuermann. Not for the eight he admitted to — that’s settled. They want to know if there are more. They want to study the first digital-era serial killer who used burner phones, fifty-eight hard drives, and a written planning document to operate for nearly two decades. And they want to check what he says against the document he thought he’d deleted.

Heuermann thinks the interview is his stage. The FBI has a different use for it.

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Rex Heuermann is serving life without parole for the Gilgo Beach murders. He confessed to eight killings. Seven happened in the Massapequa Park basement. He admitted it privately to Asa and Victoria before his courtroom plea. He told Victoria the victims were not real people to him.And Asa Ellerup is still talking to him. Still visiting. Still managing the relationship on his terms. The Peacock documentary captured phone calls where Rex directed the family from his cell, insulted Asa and Victoria’s ability to communicate, and still ran the room. And Asa’s response on camera — what she said about those calls and what she will not say to Rex — tells you who this version of Rex actually serves.She was adopted and never bonded with her family. She was assaulted as a teenager. Her first marriage collapsed. Then Rex showed up and built the only stable world she’d ever known. That world is still standing. She just remodeled it.

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Rex Heuermann sat across from Asa Ellerup and told her he killed eight women. Seven in their basement. He described the dismemberments. She filed for divorce to keep the house. Then she gutted the basement, put down new floors, hung a cross on the wall, arranged stuffed animals on the shelves, and moved in. She sleeps there. She has visited Rex in jail approximately twelve times since the confession. She told Peacock cameras she wants to understand his triggers.The audience has a simpler question: why? Why does someone keep going back to the man who confessed to serial murder? Why does the family reportedly collect seven figures from a documentary while a victim’s son — who was six years old when his mother was killed — files a lawsuit alleging they knew? Why does Victoria say she believes her father most likely did it while Asa maintains a relationship with him?Robin Dreeke, retired FBI Special Agent and former chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, addresses each question directly. He walks through what loyalty after confession actually looks like in behavioral terms, where the line between trauma and complicity gets tested, and what the DNA evidence found on all seven victims tells us about proximity. Listener-driven. Every question grounded in the documented record.

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Amanda Funderburg stood in a Suffolk County courtroom and addressed the man who killed her sister, Melissa Barthelemy. She told the court about a phone call. A call Heuermann made to her after the murder. What he said on that call is not something you forget.

Heuermann was sentenced to consecutive life terms. Judge Mazzei was visibly emotional. He asked Heuermann if he was sorry. Called him a disgusting, despicable small man and a coward. Ordered him removed from the courtroom as the families chanted ogre.

That sentencing closed one chapter. The cooperation agreement opens another. Heuermann will sit with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and describe everything — how he chose his victims, how he killed them, how he maintained a Manhattan career and a suburban family for seventeen years while the bodies accumulated near Gilgo Beach. His defense attorney says he is required to be truthful, accurate, and complete. Former FBI agents say the chances he stopped at eight are limited to none. Jennifer Coffindaffer, contributor to Hidden Killers, explains why Funderburg’s testimony matters to the BAU and what the cooperation sessions may reveal beyond the eight confirmed victims.

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He answered for eight murders. He did not answer for Karen Vergata’s — even though he confessed to it in the same courtroom. He did not answer for the civil conspiracy his ex-wife now faces. And he did not answer for the women who disappeared near his properties in states that can execute him.

Rex Heuermann’s sentencing gave the Gilgo Beach families a moment they earned. Three consecutive life sentences. A hundred years. A judge who said he was disgusting and ordered officers to remove him. It was the ending the case needed. It was not the ending the case got.

The plea deal contains an uncharged murder confession, an abandoned appeal, and an FBI interview labeled “academic.” Melissa Barthelemy’s sister put the phone call on the record — Heuermann calling from Melissa’s phone after killing her, describing what he had done. That testimony exists in the official transcript.

Asa Ellerup is facing a wrongful death lawsuit. She reportedly made over a million dollars from a documentary. She said on camera she did what she had to do to protect herself. She lives in the house. She sleeps in the basement.

And the map keeps expanding. Four lots in Chester, South Carolina. A timeshare in Las Vegas. Missing women near both. The judge chose his words: eight that we know of. South Carolina has the death penalty. Nevada has the death penalty. Heuermann’s New York plea deal provides no cover in either.

Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis covers the full scope: sentencing mechanics, civil conspiracy against Asa, and multi-state exposure. Everything the plea deal resolved — and everything it did not.

Eight murders. Three life sentences. And the case is still growing.

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According to reporting, Rex Heuermann sat in his cell at the Riverhead Correctional Facility six weeks after his arrest and wrote a letter. Not to a friend. Not to family. To Keith Hunter Jesperson — the Happy Face Killer — a man convicted of killing at least eight women during the 1990s.

And one of the things the Gilgo Beach killer reportedly wanted to know? Whether Jesperson had butter for his bread in prison.

The LISK — the man who admitted to strangling eight women and scattering their remains across Long Island — settling into jail life by asking another serial killer about food. According to those who’ve seen the letter, Heuermann’s tone was calm. Settled. He wrote that he’d been doing “a lot” of thinking. He reportedly called Jesperson’s letters “a help and a comfort.”

Jesperson had reportedly urged Heuermann to confess and take a plea. Heuermann ignored the advice for nearly three years — and then did exactly that when he pleaded guilty in April 2026 to seven murders and admitted killing an eighth.

I break down the full content of that letter, the psychology of why Jesperson reached out, why he then forwarded Heuermann’s response to a podcaster, and what forensic research tells us about why killers seek each other out. I also cover Heuermann’s jail reading list — crime novel after crime novel about serial killers — and what Sheriff Toulon said after watching him for over a thousand days without seeing a single change in the man’s expression.

The families’ attorney called them both what they are: losers and cowards who chose the most vulnerable people they could find.

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Missing women. In more than one state. Near property Rex Heuermann purchased during the same years he was killing on Long Island.

That is the piece of the Gilgo Beach case that did not end with the sentencing. Heuermann pleaded guilty to eight murders in Suffolk County. He received three consecutive life terms plus a hundred years. He waived his appeal. The New York case is legally finished. But the judge made a point of saying it out loud: eight that we know of.

Four lots in Chester, South Carolina. A woman who disappeared twenty miles away. A timeshare in Las Vegas. An escort who vanished two weeks after the purchase. Heuermann’s property footprint traces across states that carry sentencing options New York does not have.

South Carolina has the death penalty. Nevada has the death penalty. Heuermann’s plea deal provides no protection outside Suffolk County. If another jurisdiction develops probable cause, they prosecute independently — and they are not limited to life sentences.

Investigators have been working through a hundred and twenty terabytes of data recovered from his devices. A planning document Heuermann thought he had deleted was recovered and has been central to the New York case. Seven thousand pages of supporting material. If evidence of crimes in other states exists in that archive, the legal questions are about access, jurisdiction, and cooperation between agencies that do not always share well.

Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis assesses the realistic odds. What does it take to build a case from property records and timelines? Can the FBI interview produce usable leads for other states? And what reason does a man with no appeal and no possibility of release have to tell anyone the truth?

Seventeen years. Multiple states. The same pattern. Eight is a floor, not a ceiling.

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