Long Island, New York, 1993–2011 a Manhattan architect who came home to his family every night killed eight women across eighteen years, hid some of their remains in burlap on a barrier island and scattered others in the pine barrens thirty miles away. A pizza box caught him. And even after his guilty plea, the map of Long Island’s dead is still not complete.

The Woman Who Started It

Shannan Gilbert was twenty-three years old. She was a New Jersey-born escort who advertised her services on Craigslist and who, on the early morning of May 1, 2010, made a 911 call from inside a gated community called Oak Beach on Long Island’s South Shore. The call lasted twenty-one minutes. She was panicked. She said someone was trying to kill her. She ran from the house where she had been working, banging on doors in the neighbourhood, screaming that someone was after her, and disappeared into the darkness beyond the fences.

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She was the reason police came to Ocean Parkway.

She was not killed by the man who killed the others.

Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison confirmed years later that investigators believe Shannan Gilbert’s death was accidental that she ran into the marshland in a state of acute panic and drowned. Her remains were found in December 2011, eighteen months after she disappeared, about a third of a mile from the Oak Beach community. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as drowning.

The full audio of Shannan’s twenty-one-minute 911 call was released by the Suffolk County Police Department in 2021. What it contains the desperation, the fragmented pleas, the specific fear of a young woman who believed she was about to be killed is one of the most haunting documents in the Long Island case’s record. And the strangest dimension of her death is this: had she not disappeared, police would not have searched the area. Had police not searched the area, the remains along Ocean Parkway would not have been found on December 11, 2010, when an officer and his dog discovered human remains in the scrub brush during what was supposed to be a training exercise.

Shannan Gilbert did not die at Rex Heuermann’s hands. But the search for her produced the evidence of what he had done.

December 2010: Four in a Quarter Mile

On December 11, 2010, an officer conducting a training exercise with his dog found the first set of remains along Ocean Parkway on Jones Beach Island a barrier island separated from the Long Island mainland by the Great South Bay. The remains were initially thought to be Shannan Gilbert’s. They were not. They were identified as Melissa Barthelemy, twenty-four years old, who had last been seen at her Bronx apartment on July 12, 2009.

On December 13, two days later, police found three more sets of remains on the same quarter-mile stretch of Ocean Parkway: Megan Waterman, twenty-two, last seen June 6, 2010; Amber Lynn Costello, twenty-seven, last seen September 2, 2010; and Maureen Brainard-Barnes, twenty-five, last seen July 9, 2007.

Four women on A quarter-mile of scrub brush on a barrier island. Three years of disappearances the earliest going back to 2007 finally surfacing in the same location because a police dog had gone off-leash during a training exercise.

These four women became known as the Gilgo Four. They had all worked as escorts advertising on Craigslist and similar sites. All four sets of remains had been wrapped at the head, midsection, and legs in burlap a specific and unusual method of disposal that immediately told investigators they were looking at a single perpetrator who had developed a system.

In early 2011, further searches of the same area expanded the count. Additional partial remains were found a two-year-old girl’s remains, later identified as Tatiana Dykes; an Asian male; and the partial remains of two more women whose torsos would connect back to a very different location entirely.

Manorville: The Other Graveyard

Thirty miles east of Gilgo Beach, in the pine barrens of eastern Suffolk County, lies Manorville a hamlet of scattered homes and dense woodland, the kind of place where the trees close in quickly and the roads go quiet within a few hundred feet of any intersection.

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In November 2000, a woman’s decomposed torso was found in garbage bags in a wooded area off Halsey Manor Road in Manorville. She was missing her head and hands. She would be known for years only as Jane Doe No. 6. Her age was estimated between eighteen and thirty-five. Her identity was unknown.

In July 2003, another female body was found in the Manorville pine barrens also headless, also missing her hands, with a tattoo on her lower right back that appeared to have been partially mutilated, as if to discourage identification. Police eventually identified her as Jessica Taylor, twenty years old, a sex worker from New York. On her back, beneath the mutilation, they could make out the words: Remy’s girl.

In March and April of 2011, while searching the Ocean Parkway area for additional remains connected to the Gilgo Four, investigators found the heads and hands of both Jessica Taylor and Jane Doe No. 6 the missing pieces of the Manorville remains, deposited among the Gilgo Beach cluster decades after the torsos had been found thirty miles away.

The same killer had split these women. He had taken parts of them to the pine barrens and parts of them to the barrier island. He had dismembered them and distributed them across thirty miles of Long Island landscape, so that finding one part of a victim would not point directly to where the other parts lay. It was methodical. It was organised. It was the work of someone who had thought about how to make identification and connection as difficult as possible.

Also in November 2000, the partial remains of Valerie Mack a twenty-four-year-old escort from Philadelphia and a mother were found in Manorville. More of her remains were discovered in 2011 near Ocean Parkway.

The Other Killer: John Bittrolff

For years, the Manorville remains created an investigative puzzle. They were connected to the Gilgo Beach cluster by the subsequent discovery of the heads and hands, but they differed in method the Gilgo Four had been wrapped in burlap, these victims had been dismembered and distributed. Were they the work of the same killer? A copycat? Someone inspired by the same geography?

The name that kept surfacing in connection with the Manorville cases was John Bittrolff a carpenter who lived in Manorville, who had been convicted in 2017 of murdering two other women, Rita Tangredi and Colleen McNamee, in 1993 and 1994. Their bodies had been found in East Patchogue and North Shirley, beaten and strangled and left in wooded areas. They were identified through DNA enhancement techniques, matched through Bittrolff’s brother Timothy, who had submitted DNA after a contempt of court conviction in an unrelated matter.

Bittrolff lived three miles from where the Manorville remains were found. An assistant district attorney after Bittrolff’s sentencing in 2017 suggested that some of the Gilgo Beach area murders “may be attributed to the handiwork of Mr. Bittrolff.” He was convicted and sentenced to 50 years to life in prison.

But Bittrolff was not the Manorville connection.

In December 2023, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney addressed the long-running theory directly: “He has nothing to do with LISK,” Tierney said, using the acronym for Long Island Serial Killer. The DA’s office had examined the connection and ruled it out. The evidence linking Bittrolff to the Manorville or Gilgo Beach victims beyond geographic proximity and method similarity was not sufficient.

The Manorville remains of Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack belonged to Rex Heuermann.

The Man from Massapequa Park

Rex Heuermann was born in 1959. He grew up on Long Island, studied architecture, and built a career at RCC Architects in Midtown Manhattan, where he was the principal partner. He and his wife Asa Ellerup had two children. They lived in a beige house in Massapequa Park, a middle-class suburb roughly an hour east of Manhattan by Long Island Rail Road. He was known in the community as an architect. He commuted to the city. He had a family.

He also had, on his devices, a planning document. Discovered during the investigation that preceded his arrest, it outlined a strategy for future killings: how to dispose of a body, how to avoid apprehension, how not to leave DNA evidence, what supplies would be needed. He had written it down. He had kept it.

He had been killing since 1993.

Sandra Costilla, twenty-eight years old, was found murdered in North Sea, Long Island, in 1993 her death initially suspected to be the work of John Bittrolff, based on geographic proximity and the era of the killing. Advanced DNA work, conducted during the reinvestigation that preceded and followed Heuermann’s arrest, eventually pointed to Heuermann instead. Costilla had not previously been linked to the Gilgo Beach series. She was in 2024.

The full span of Heuermann’s confirmed killings runs from 1993 to 2010 seventeen years, across two decades, while he lived as a suburban architect, raised his children, attended community events, and was present enough in daily life that his neighbours described him after his arrest as someone they never suspected.

He used burner phones to contact his victims. He contacted Melissa Barthelemy’s family after her death calling her sister multiple times, asking “Do you think you’ll ever see her again?” and telling her “You won’t. I killed her.” He was taunting them. He did this while maintaining his ordinary life in Massapequa Park.

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The Pizza Box and the Hair

The reinvestigation that caught Heuermann began in earnest in February 2022, when Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison and District Attorney Ray Tierney formed a new task force dedicated solely to the Gilgo Beach case. The task force reviewed over 300 subpoenas and search warrants and used a level of investigative focus and resource that the original investigation which had stalled and been hampered by its own internal politics, including the eventual conviction of former DA Tom Spota on obstruction charges related to a separate case had not applied.

Investigators identified Heuermann as a person of interest through cell phone data analysis. The cell phone pings placed a phone used during the period of the murders in the vicinity of the crime scenes. Through patient technical work, they traced that phone to a pattern of movement that matched Heuermann’s known commuting and working habits.

To confirm, they needed his DNA. They watched him. On an evening in 2022, they observed him discard pizza crust outside his Manhattan office, in the ordinary way a person disposes of takeaway food. They retrieved the crust. They matched the DNA on the crust to the DNA from the burlap that had been wrapped around the Gilgo Four.

A single male hair had also been found tangled in the burlap. It matched Heuermann.

A pizza crust and a hair and eighteen years of murders came to a conclusion.

On July 13, 2023, Rex Heuermann was arrested at his home in Massapequa Park. He was charged with three counts each of first-degree and second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello. He was held without bail.

His attorney Michael Brown told reporters: “What has my client told me? He told me he didn’t do this.”

The Charges Accumulate

Over the following years, the charges expanded as DNA work and investigative analysis connected Heuermann to additional victims.

January 2024: Heuermann was charged with the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes.

June 2024: He was arraigned on charges for the murders of Jessica Taylor and Sandra Costilla Taylor whose remains had been split between Manorville and Gilgo Beach, and Costilla whose 1993 death had been attributed to a different killer for thirty years. DNA including a hair found on a drape under Taylor’s body tied Heuermann to both. He pleaded not guilty.

December 2024: He was charged with the murder of Valerie Mack Jane Doe No. 6, the woman whose Manorville remains had been unidentified from 2000 to 2011.

April 8, 2026: The Guilty Plea

On April 8, 2026, Rex Heuermann walked into a Suffolk County courtroom and stunned everyone present by reversing the position he had maintained through three years of proceedings.

He pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder.

He admitted to strangling Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla, and Valerie Mack. He confirmed that he had used burner phones to contact the women. He confirmed that he had dumped their bodies along Gilgo Beach, in Manorville, and in Southampton.

Questioned by District Attorney Tierney as to the manner of death, Heuermann calmly repeated the same word for each victim: “Strangulation.”

He was sixty-two years old, standing in the courtroom in a suit, answering questions about the murders of eight women with the same flat affect he had apparently maintained throughout eighteen years of committing them.

As part of the plea agreement, he also acknowledged without being formally charged that he had killed Karen Vergata, an eighth victim whose remains had been among those discovered in 2011 and who had not been formally included in the criminal charges. He admitted to meeting all eight women, strangling them, and disposing of their remains.

He agreed to cooperate with the FBI.

His sentencing was set for June 17, 2026. He is expected to receive three consecutive life sentences followed by four sentences of twenty-five years to life a formulation that will keep him in prison for the remainder of his natural life.

His attorney told the judge that Heuermann was not expected to face additional charges.

What Remains Unresolved

The plea of April 8, 2026, resolved the criminal cases of eight named victims across a thirty-three-year span. It did not resolve everything.

The two-year-old girl found among the Gilgo Beach remains later identified as Tatiana Dykes was addressed separately. In December 2025, Andrew Dykes, Tatiana’s biological father, was arrested in Florida and indicted for second-degree murder. DA Tierney confirmed this case was unconnected to Heuermann, though the investigation had benefited from the resources poured into the serial killer task force.

The Asian male whose remains were found among the Gilgo Beach cluster has not been publicly identified and no perpetrator has been named.

The question of whether Heuermann had additional victims beyond the eight he admitted to remains open. The planning document found on his devices which described a methodology for future killings suggests a level of organization and intentionality that investigators are still mapping against the full geography of Long Island’s unsolved cases from the relevant decades.

Heuermann’s wife Asa Ellerup filed for divorce upon his arrest in 2023. She has said she had no knowledge of her husband’s activities. The investigation into whether anyone else was involved or had any knowledge has not produced additional charges.

The Names

Sandra Costilla was twenty-eight years old. She died in 1993.

Valerie Mack was twenty-four years old. Parts of her were found in Manorville in 2000. The rest in 2011.

Jessica Taylor was twenty years old. She had a tattoo that read Remy’s girl. Parts of her were found in Manorville in 2003. The rest in 2011.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes was twenty-five years old. She disappeared in 2007.

Melissa Barthelemy was twenty-four years old. After she was dead, the man who killed her called her sister’s phone and told her she would never see her again.

Megan Waterman was twenty-two years old.

Amber Costello was twenty-seven years old.

Karen Vergata. Her age and circumstances are less fully documented in the public record. She has a name now.

Eight women. A pizza crust in a Manhattan garbage can. A hair in burlap on a barrier island. A plea on April 8, 2026, from a sixty-two-year-old architect who said “strangulation” eight times and sat back down.

Rex Heuermann is awaiting sentencing at Suffolk County Correctional Facility. His sentencing date was June 17, 2026. If you have any information about additional possible victims or about any aspect of the Gilgo Beach investigation: Suffolk County District Attorney’s tip line (631) 853-4801.