New York architect Rex Heuermann at the Suffolk County Court Wednesday, pled guilty to the murders of eight women during a two decade killing spree

Heuermann, 62, admitted to ‘strangling’ escorts Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, Amber Costello, 27, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25

Other victims named are Jessica Taylor, 20, Sandra Costilla, 28, Valerie Mack, 24, and Karen Vergata, 34

He will be sentenced on June 17, for the killings which happened on Long Island in Suffolk County, between 1993 and 2010

Heuermann it is expected, will receive three life sentences without parole on three of the murder charges and up to four more life sentences for four of the murder charges

He waived all rights to appeal, but will not face additional charges on the eight murders

New York architect Rex Heuermann Wednesday, pled guilty to the murders of eight escorts between 193 1nd 2010. He faces three life sentences without parole on three of the murder charges and four more life sentences on four of the murder charges

Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann, 62, has admitted to murdering eight women, bringing some closure to the case that has terrorized Long Island for more than three decades.
Standing inside Suffolk County Court on Wednesday, the heavily built architect, a married father of two adult children, admitted to killing Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, Amber Costello, 27, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, Jessica Taylor, 20, Sandra Costilla, 28, Valerie Mack, 24, and Karen Vergata, 34, during a reign of terror between 1993 and 2010.
All victims were women who worked in the New York area as escorts. All practiced their trade through online ads in the metro area before disappearing.
Dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, responded with ‘guilty’ to seven murder charges and admitted his guilt of an eighth killing.
To the question on how he killed his victims, as each name was read in court, he answer was straight to the point: ‘Strangulation.’

Initially charged with first- and second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of three victims, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, Heuermann has been held in prison since he was arrested in July, 2023 

According to the terms of plea arrengement, Heuermann will serve three life sentences without parole on three of the murder charges and up to four more life sentences for four of the murder charges. 
Furthermore he has waived all rights to appeal, for which he will not face additional charges over the eight murders.
The sudden change in plea marks the first time that Heuermann has confessed to being the elusive serial killer. It is also the first time victims’ causes of death have been revealed.  
The longevity of his activity, the brutality of the killings and the long-term evasion and taunting of law enforcement marked him as one of the country’s most notorious serial killers.
He is scheduled to be in court on June 17 for his sentencing.

Heuermann was on trial for the murders of seven victims. [L-R], Top: Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Costello Bottom: Valerie Mack, [second left], Jessica Taylor and Sandra Costilla. However, Heuermann would go on also to pled guilty to killing Karen Vergata, [far left, bottom]

Over the years, the Long Island serial killer’s victims were found along Ocean Parkway in Suffolk County as mapped by county police

On the last day of trial Heuermann was initially charged with the murders of seven women also pled guilty to the murder of an eighth victim Karen Vergata, [photo]

Rex Heuermann Wednesday April 8, pled guilty to the murders of eight women in a reign of terror dating back to 1993. His victims had all been working as sex workers when they suddenly vanished.
Their remains, some mutilated and dismembered, were found dumped in remote areas of Long Island.
After evading detection for years, while living the life of a skilled professional, a suburban husband and father raising a family in Long Island’s Massapequa Park.
He ran an architecture firm in the heart of Midtown Manhattan until his arrest in July 2023.
Heuermann was initially charged with the murders of Barthelemy, Waterman, Costello and Brainard‑Barnes, who together were known as the ‘Gilgo Four.’
Investigations later linked him to the killings of Sandra Costilla, Valerie Mack and Jessica Taylor, raising the number of victims to seven women.
For the past three years, he has maintained his innocence, pleading not guilty, fighting those charges.

Until his admission Wednesday, Heuermann since his arrest three years ago, has maintained his innocence, pleading not guilty and fighting tooth and nail against the charges

In an unforeseen reversal, Heuermann has admitted not only to the seven murders he is charged with. The victim count increased to eight as he admitted to the murder of 34-year-old Karen Vergata.
Vergata made a haunting final call to her family on Feb. 14, 1996, before she disappeared, with her legs found two months later on Blue Point Beach on Fire Island and her skull discovered in April 2011, not far from the Gilgo Four along Ocean Parkway.
Known for a long time only as Jane Doe No. 7, it was almost two decades before Vergata was identified through DNA testing in 2023 and her family came to know her fate.
Fears that a serial killer was on the loose first emerged back in 2010 when the remains of the first of 11 bodies were discovered along the remote stretch of Ocean Parkway, close to Gilgo Beach in Suffolk County, New York.
The discovery was made during a search for 24-year-old Shannan Gilbert, who had made a 911 call and then disappeared following a visit to a client’s house in nearby Oak Park in May 2010.
That December, Barthelemy’s remains were the first to be found. Within days, Brainard-Barnes, Waterman and Costello were found close by.
By the spring of 2011, the remains of ten people had been found in the area. Ironically, the final discovery was the remains of Shannan Gilbert who investigators maintain died by accident.
Gilbert’s death has not been linked to the serial killer case.

Discarded pizza crust that was seized for DNA testing, which linked Rex Heuermann to the Gilgo Beach serial killings

In January 2023, with police surveilling him, police retrieved a pizza box that Heuermann had tossed into a garbage can in Manhattan, the source for the suspect’s DNA

Thirteen years would pass before investigators locked in on a suspect, as the case was notoriously hampered by the actions of disgraced, corrupt former Suffolk County Police Commissioner James Burke.
Heuermann was ultimately tied to the serial killings through a witness tip about his pickup truck as well as incriminating evidence linked to his digital footprint – his cellphone. 
The suspect in the serial killings used multiple burner phones to contact the victims. One constant however, was the location data which always placed the caller close to both Heuermann’s family home in Massapequa Park and his office in Midtown Manhattan.
Having marked a suspect, investigators needed DNA linked to the crimes. The crucial DNA evidence was obtained from a discarded pizza crust.
The result of the test proved Heuermann was the source of hair found on Megan Waterman’s body.

Rex Heuermann, [back], his wife and their children pose for family portrait taken before his arrest on suspicion of being a serial killer

Heuermann’s estranged wife Asa Ellerup and their daughter Victoria seen outside Suffolk County Court Wednesday morning, ahead of the hearing 

Asa Ellerup and Rex Heuermann share two adult children, but only one his biological child. A spokesperson for the family said their lives had been ‘destroyed’ by Heuermann’s actions

It later emerged that hairs belonging to his wife Asa Ellerup, daughter Victoria Heuermann and another individual close to him had been found on six of the seven women he’d been accused of killing.
Despite this DNA evidence, authorities do not believe any of those three individuals is connected to Heuermann’s extracurricular activities.
The office of the Suffolk County District Attorney has previously determined that suspect’s wife as well as the couple’s daughter Victoria Heuermann and his stepson Christopher Sheridan, were all out of town on vacation at the time of the murders.
Sheridan was Ellerup’s son from a prior relationship who Heuermann raised as his own.
According to investigators, Heuermann would stay home during family vacations. He committed his crimes during those windows. 
The suspect and his family lived in the same home where he lived as a child. Victims were held in the basement of the family home where they were tortured, murdered and, in some cases, dismembered.

Alleged serial killer Rex Heuermann has lived at this Long Island property since the 1980s with his wife, Asa Ellerup, and their two children. Investigators executed a search warrant against the home in July 2023, days after his arrest 

A disturbing ‘planning document’, found on a hard drive during a search of his home, revealed what prosecutors described as his blueprint for selecting, killing and disposing of victims. 
The document included sections titled ‘body prep’ detailing how to clean and dismember bodies and remove tattoos.
Other related evidence uncovered by investigators include his porn searches for ‘autopsy photos of female,’ ‘tied up fat girl porn,’ ‘skinny white teen crying porn’ and ‘stories of rape audio’, as well as his online obsession with the Gilgo Beach serial killer case.
Based on Heuermann’s sudden change in plea, his earliest known victim is now believed to be Sandra Costilla, a native of Trinidad and Tobago living in Queens when she vanished in 1993. 
Her body was found days later in a wooded area in North Sea, bearing sharp force injuries to her face and body. 
For years, her murder was not believed to be connected to the Gilgo Beach case. A different serial killer, John Bittrolf, was eyed as a suspect in the death of Costilla, until advanced DNA testing recently identified a hair on her body as belonging to Heuermann. 

On December 14, 2010, Suffolk County Police were seen conducting a search along Gilgo Beach where four bodies were found

The ongoing investigation into the disappearances apparently did not faze the serial killer, as bodies continued to pile. 
Three years later, in February 1996, Valerie Mack, who would become known as ‘Fire Island Jane Doe’, was last seen alive in Manhattan while working as an escort. 
Two months later in April 1996, her dismembered legs were found wrapped in plastic on Fire Island’s Blue Point Beach. In April 2011, her skull was found off Ocean Parkway, but it was a dozen years before Mack was finally identified through the investigation of her genetic genealogy. 
Mack, a mother-of-one, was then last seen alive in Philadelphia in 2000. Her dismembered remains were found in two separate locations, Manorville in 2000 and Ocean Parkway in 2011. 
Like Vergata, her family only learned she had been murdered years later when she was identified in 2020.

In the cascading discovery of remains in the area on Long Island, NY, police responded to the discovery of a body near Gilgo Beach in April 2011

In December 2011, police were back searching a marsh for the remains of Shannan Gilbert in Oak Beach, after the remains of several more victims were found in the area

Jessica Taylor’s partial remains were also found close to Mack in both Manorville and Ocean Parkway. 
The 20-year-old from Poughkeepsie had been last seen in July 2003 at the Port Authority in New York, a short walk from Heuermann’s office. 
Her tattoo had been disfigured, as though to prevent identification. That subterfuge mirrored the details in Heuermann’s ‘planning document’.
Investigators say these earlier killings predate what became known as the ‘Gilgo Four’ – the cluster of murders that first drew national attention. 
The first of those victims to disappear was 25-year-old Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who went to meet a client in July 2007 and never returned. 
Heuermann had bound her body with three leather belts, one of which contained his wife’s DNA. 
It was almost exactly two years later when 24-year-old Melissa Barthelemy vanished after going to meet a client. Heuermann’s family was away on vacation at the time.
As her loved ones searched for Brainard-Barnes, the person responsible for her disappearing used her phone to make chilling, taunting calls, mocking her family and bragging about the murder. 

Rex Heuermann seen in selfies from one of his Tinder profile photos, ‘continued to patronize prostitutes, using burner phones’, during the investigation. Detectives tracked the fictitious email account he used on dating profile and his burner phone number

Rex Heuermann’s home in Massapequa Park is approximately 5 miles, about a 27-30 minute drive, from Gilgo Beach where the remains of several of his victims were dumped

The following summer in June 2010, Waterman was last seen alive leaving a Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge to meet a client.
The last known victim was Costello, who left her home to meet a client in September 2010. 
Her roommate told police the client was ‘ogre-like’ and driving a distinctive green Chevy Avalanche – the vehicle Heuermann drove at the time.
Three months later, the serial killer’s graveyard was discovered. 
The victims’ families learned two weeks ago that the killer was changing his plea to guilty.
Mack’s son since filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Heuermann, Ellerup and Victoria, paving the way for further potential civil action against the serial killer.
Heuermann who since his arrest, has been held in isolation inside Suffolk County Jail, now faces life in prison when he is sentenced on June 17.