Gilgo Beach: Eight Names

This transcript is the episode script as written and fact-checked, timed to the recording. Timestamps are approximate within a sentence.

0:05 What's up guys, welcome back to CrimeTimeSnacks. On April 8, 2026, in a packed courtroom in Riverhead, New York, a sixty-two-year-old architect named Rex Heuermann was asked, one victim at a time, how he killed them. He gave the same one-word answer each time. Strangulation. That morning he pleaded guilty to seven murders and admitted to an eighth. The families of the women he killed were sitting in that room. So was his own daughter, and she cried. The oldest of those murders went back to 1993.

0:32 The case most people know as the Gilgo Beach murders, or the Long Island Serial Killer, was over. For more than a decade, this was the case everybody said would never be solved. Today I want to go through how it started, who these women were, why it stalled for so long, and what finally broke it. And I want to be straight about what is still not answered, because a guilty plea closed eight cases, and there were more than eight sets of remains on that beach. Let's unpack it. It starts with a woman who, as far as anyone can prove, was not one of his victims.

1:01 On May 1, 2010, an escort in her early twenties named Shannan Gilbert was at a client's home in Oak Beach, a gated community on the South Shore of Long Island. At 4:51 in the morning she called 911. She told the dispatcher that someone was after her, that they were trying to kill her. She never said where she was. She ran to a neighbor's house and was let in. When she was asked to wait for police, she ran again. The last time anyone saw her, she was pounding on another front door, screaming for help, and then she ran off into the dark.

1:30 Her remains were not found for nineteen months. They were in a marsh about half a mile from where she was last seen. I will come back to Shannan at the end, because her death is still argued over. Her mother, Mari, started what one account called a tireless quest to make police search for her and take the case seriously. What matters here is what happened while they were looking. On December 11, 2010, a search along Ocean Parkway, the road that runs by Gilgo Beach, turned up human remains in the bushes on an isolated strip of waterfront.

1:56 An officer was working the area near her last known location with his police dog, and the dog found them. They were not Shannan Gilbert's. They belonged to a woman named Melissa Barthelemy. Police kept searching, and two days later, close by, they found three more. Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Megan Waterman. Amber Lynn Costello. Four women, found close together, wrapped in camouflaged burlap. They had last been seen between July 2007 and September 2010. They were lying about 500 feet from one another, and officials said all four died by homicidal violence.

2:27 They became known as the Gilgo Four. Police would come to call this one of the most consequential homicide investigations in Long Island's history. All four were small. Maureen was four foot eleven. Melissa was four foot ten and ninety-five pounds. All four had advertised on Craigslist as escorts. Maureen Brainard-Barnes was twenty-five, from Norwich, Connecticut, and a mother of two. She had worked as a seasonal telemarketer and turned to sex work when she could not find anything else.

2:54 She had been out of it for seven months. She went back after she got an eviction notice. On July 9, 2007, she called a friend from a motel in Manhattan and said she was going to meet a client outside. Nobody saw her again. Not long after, a friend of hers got a call from a man on a blocked number who claimed Maureen was alive in Queens. He would not give his name, he promised to call back, and he never did. Her friend remembered that he had no regional accent she could place. Melissa Barthelemy was twenty-four, from Erie County, New York, living in the Bronx.

3:22 On July 12, 2009, she saw a client, put 900 dollars in the bank, and tried to call an ex-boyfriend. A week later, her fifteen-year-old sister started getting calls from Melissa's phone. A man's voice, vulgar and mocking. It went on for five weeks. On August 26, 2009, he asked her, do you think you'll ever see her again? You won't. I killed her. Police traced some of those calls to Madison Square Garden, to Midtown Manhattan, and to Massapequa. Keep those last two places in mind.

3:49 Melissa's mother also noticed a lot of calls to Manorville from her daughter's phone around the time she vanished. That town is about to come up again. Megan Waterman was twenty-two, from Scarborough, Maine, with a three-year-old daughter she had left with family. She was staying at a motel in Hauppauge, fifteen miles from Gilgo Beach, and she went missing on June 6, 2010. The day before, she had told her boyfriend she was going out and would call him later. She was reported missing two days later when she did not check in on her little girl.

4:15 Megan was a victim of sex trafficking. Her boyfriend was later arrested on trafficking charges, though he is not believed to be connected to her death. Amber Lynn Costello was twenty-seven. She was born in Charlotte and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina. She had been a strong student. She had also been sexually assaulted by a neighbor at six years old, and she was addicted to drugs by her teens. Before Long Island she had lived in Clearwater, Florida, with her second husband, and worked as a waitress.

4:41 In September 2010 she was living in West Babylon. A stranger called her several times and offered 2,500 dollars, and on September 2 she went out to meet him. Her family thought she was in rehab, so they did not report her missing right away. But her roommate saw the client, and saw what he was driving. It was a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche. That detail sat in a file for more than ten years. I want you to notice something before we move on. By the end of 2010, the file on these four women already held two things.

5:07 Phone calls traced to Midtown Manhattan and to Massapequa. And a description of a very specific truck. Neither one was a secret to the people working the case. It would be twelve more years before anyone put them next to a name. Police kept searching into the spring, and it got worse. On March 29 and April 4, 2011, they found four more sets of remains, within two miles of the first four. On April 11, after the search was pushed across the line into Nassau County, they found two more.

5:34 Some of these turned out to be the missing halves of older cases. In July 2003, the torso of a twenty-year-old named Jessica Taylor had been found in Manorville, forty-five miles east of Gilgo Beach, on a pile of scrap wood at the end of an access road. She had worked in Washington, D.C. and in Manhattan, and she was last seen near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. She was identified through DNA later that year. Whoever left her there had cut away a tattoo on her body with a sharp instrument.

5:59 The remains found along the parkway in March 2011 were the rest of her. In November 2000, in the same part of Manorville, a hunter's dog had found another woman's torso. She had no name for twenty years. In 2020 she was identified as Valerie Mack, twenty-four, who had been living in Philadelphia. Valerie grew up in foster care. She had a young son. Nobody had ever reported her missing. Her family had last seen her in the spring or summer of 2000, around Port Republic, New Jersey.

6:23 She sometimes used the name Melissa Taylor, though she and Jessica Taylor were not related. More of her remains were among those found in April 2011. One set found in Nassau County matched a pair of legs that had washed up on Fire Island back in 1996. That woman was known only as Jane Doe Number 7 until 2023, when genetic genealogy gave her name back. She was Karen Vergata, thirty-four, from Manhattan. She was last seen around Valentine's Day of 1996, and she was never reported missing either.

6:51 There was also a young person of Asian descent, found on April 4, 2011, very close to the first four, who had died of blunt-force trauma. Investigators believe the victim was between seventeen and twenty-three, was likely Han Chinese, and had been dead for five to ten years. The victim was found in women's clothing and may have been a transgender woman. There is still no name. And there was a woman with a peach tattoo, and a toddler. They were not found together. For years they were called Peaches and Baby Doe.

7:17 Hold on to them, too. Their story went somewhere nobody expected. So by the spring of 2011, police had ten sets of remains and a lot of theories. A profile in the New York Times said the killer was most likely a white man in his mid-twenties to mid-forties who knew the South Shore very well and had access to burlap sacks. Investigators could not agree on whether they were looking for one killer or more than one. And then, for years, almost nothing. Part of the reason has a name.

7:43 James Burke was the chief of the Suffolk County Police Department, and he was reported to have blocked the FBI from joining the Gilgo Beach investigation for years. He resigned in October 2015. That December he was indicted on federal charges of civil rights violations and conspiracy, in a matter that had nothing to do with Gilgo. The very next day, December 10, 2015, the new police commissioner announced that the FBI was officially on the case. Burke was later sentenced to forty-six months in federal prison.

8:11 According to court records, Burke had been accused of beating a man in custody and then conspiring to obstruct the federal investigation into it, and he pleaded guilty. And he was not the whole problem. There was considerable friction between agencies over the years, and failures to cooperate, and the investigation paid for it. The case did not leave the public eye. It became a bestselling book, a Netflix movie, and a string of documentaries. In January 2020, the police commissioner at the time, Geraldine Hart, tried something new.

8:38 She released photos of a black leather belt found near Ocean Parkway during the original search, embossed with two letters that read either H M or W H, depending on which way you hold it. Police said they believed the killer had handled it and that it had not belonged to any of the victims. They launched a tip website along with it. Four months later came the identification of Valerie Mack. There were wrong turns as well. In 2017, a Suffolk County prosecutor said publicly that a local man, already convicted of murdering two other women in the 1990s, might be responsible for some of the Gilgo Beach killings.

9:09 That man's attorney rejected it. He was never charged with any of them. That man lived in Manorville, the same town where the torsos of Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack had been left, which is part of why the idea had legs. There was also a strange personal overlap. The adult daughter of one of the women he was convicted of killing had been the best friend of Melissa Barthelemy. Long Island is a big place, but this case kept folding back on itself like that. Meanwhile Shannan Gilbert's family was fighting their own fight.

9:37 In 2012, the county medical examiners said she had accidentally drowned in that marsh, even though the autopsy itself lists the cause of death as undetermined. Her mother, Mari, never accepted that. In 2014, the pathologist Michael Baden did an independent autopsy. He found damage to the hyoid bone, which can point to strangulation, and he noted she was found face up, which is not common in a drowning. The official cause stayed undetermined. It took a court order in 2020, and until May 2022, to get her 911 call released.

10:05 Shannan's mother did not live to see an arrest. But it is fair to say that without her, and without the noise she made, the search along Ocean Parkway might have ended a lot sooner than it did, and ten sets of remains might still be out there in the brush. What changed was 2022. Suffolk County's police commissioner, Rodney Harrison, a former NYPD chief, pushed to revive what was by then a thirteen-year-old cold case. In February 2022, a multiagency task force was formed: Suffolk County police, the sheriff's office, the New York State Police and the FBI, working with the district attorney, Ray Tierney.

10:37 The job was to go back through all of the evidence from the beginning. It did not take them long to get to the truck. In March 2022, investigators found that a dark green first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche had been registered to a man in Massapequa Park named Rex Heuermann. That was the same vehicle Amber Costello's roommate had described in 2010. Once they had a name, the old phone evidence lined up behind it. Cellphone mapping had always pointed at two areas, Midtown Manhattan and Massapequa Park.

11:06 Heuermann lived in one and worked in the other. His records showed contact with three of the four women found in December 2010. Prosecutors said he used burner phones to set up the meetings, and that over the years he had contacted sex workers on burner phones more than 500 times. An email account tied to him had been used to search for news about the investigation, and for images of the victims and their relatives. Then they needed his DNA without telling him. In January 2023, detectives watched him throw the remains of a pizza into a garbage can in Manhattan, and they pulled the crust out.

11:37 The DNA on it was compared to a hair that had been recovered from the burlap around Megan Waterman. It came back as a potential match. There were other hairs too, on or near three of the victims. Those pointed to his wife. Investigators were careful about what that meant. They said his wife and children were out of state every time one of these murders is believed to have happened. The potential match was made using hair samples taken from bottles recovered from the trash outside the Heuermann residence.

12:02 By the time the case was fully built, according to a legal filing, two separate forensic laboratories had concluded that hairs recovered from six of the seven victims were forensically tied to Heuermann, to members of his immediate family, or to others he had lived with. Rex Andrew Heuermann was born on September 13, 1963, in Massapequa Park. His father, a World War II veteran, died when Rex was twelve. People who knew him as a kid remembered him as extremely close to his mother.

12:28 He graduated from Berner High School in 1981. One of his classmates was the actor William Baldwin. He studied architecture at the New York Institute of Technology, and by 1987 he was working at a firm in Manhattan. In 1994 he bought his childhood home from his mother for 170,000 dollars, and he never left it. Neighbors noticed that the house kept getting more run-down while the homes around it got nicer. He was married twice. The first marriage lasted from 1990 to 1994. His second wife was Asa Ellerup.

12:57 They married in April 1996 and had two children. He stood six foot four. One neighbor described him to NBC News as the regular guy who goes to work and has kids in the local school. Prosecutors would later say that every one of these women was killed in the basement of that house. There was another side to that regular guy. Prosecutors said he kept a Tinder account. Court records say he searched online for sadistic material, for child pornography, and for pictures of the women he had killed and of their relatives.

13:25 On July 13, 2023, police arrested Heuermann outside his Midtown office. He was charged with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, and named as the suspect in Maureen's. At his arraignment, Michael Brown entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf, to three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of second-degree murder. The judge ordered him held without bail. Investigators then spent months going through what they had taken out of the family home, and they went back to Manorville and searched the woods there.

13:55 Asa Ellerup filed for divorce that year. The family has said they had no idea. Over the next year and a half the case kept getting bigger. In January 2024 he was indicted for the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes. She had been bound with three leather belts, and DNA on one of them matched his wife, the same kind of transfer from the household. On June 6, 2024, he was charged with killing Jessica Taylor, and with a murder nobody had connected to Gilgo Beach at all. Sandra Costilla was twenty-eight, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, living in New York City.

14:24 She was killed on November 19 or 20, 1993. Hunters found her body days later in the woods in North Sea, in the town of Southampton, about sixty miles northeast of Gilgo Beach. Hairs found on her body matched Heuermann's DNA. That pushed the timeline back to the early 1990s, much earlier than investigators had ever believed. On December 17, 2024, he was indicted for the murder of Valerie Mack. Sandra is the earliest known victim in the charges. Her case told investigators two things they had not known.

14:52 He had been killing since at least the early 1990s. And he had left victims in places well beyond Gilgo Beach. Investigators also found something on his computer. It was a document, full of typos, that read like a planning checklist for these crimes. I am not going to read from it. It is enough to say it existed, and that prosecutors had it. Through all of this Heuermann said he was innocent. His lawyers fought the DNA evidence and pointed to other possible suspects. So what made him fold?

15:17 According to his own attorney, Michael Brown, it was two rulings from Judge Timothy Mazzei. The judge allowed all of the DNA evidence in. And he refused to split the cases into separate trials, which meant one jury would hear about every one of these women together. The plea came months before the trial was supposed to start. On April 8, Heuermann stood up in court. Heuermann pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the deaths of Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Melissa Barthelemy and Karen Vergata, and to second-degree murder in the deaths of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack and Sandra Costilla.

15:48 Karen Vergata was the surprise. He had never been charged with her murder. He admitted it anyway. He also admitted that he had dismembered some of the women and wrapped others in burlap. The district attorney's office laid out the timeline that day, and the thing that stands out is the spacing. Sandra in November 1993. Karen in 1996. Valerie in 2000. Jessica in 2003. Maureen in 2007. Melissa in 2009. Then Megan and Amber within three months of each other in 2010. He killed every few years, for seventeen years, and went to work in Manhattan in between.

16:20 Brown told reporters his client wanted to save the victims' families the ordeal of a trial, and his own family too. There may be a more practical side to it. The plea could help shield his wife and daughter from liability in civil suits brought by the victims' families. Brown also said Heuermann had agreed to work with the FBI on other serial killer cases. Make of that what you will. There is one more thing about a plea that I think gets lost. It means there was no trial. The DNA work, the phone mapping, the document on the computer, none of it was ever tested in front of a jury, because the man it pointed at stood up and said it was all true.

16:52 For the families, that meant no weeks of testimony about what was done to their daughters and sisters and mothers. It also means that most of what the public knows about how he did this comes from prosecutors' filings and from his own short answers in that courtroom. On June 17, 2026, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors described it as three consecutive life sentences. He is being held at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York.

17:18 Now the part I promised. Eight murders are solved. Not everything found along that parkway is. Shannan Gilbert, whose 911 call started all of this, is not among the eight. Heuermann was never charged in her death, and his lawyer says he had nothing to do with it. Her official cause of death is still undetermined, and her mother died without ever getting a different answer. The young person investigators call Asian Doe still has no name. Police put out a new forensic rendering in September 2024.

17:46 Heuermann's lawyer says his client was not involved in that death either. So somebody else may be. Here is what is known. The victim stood somewhere between five foot three and five foot nine, was missing four teeth, and may have had a condition that affected the way they walked. Police released one sketch in 2011 and updated versions in September 2024. If any of that sounds like someone who went missing from your life in the early 2000s, Suffolk County police still want to hear it.

18:12 And the woman with the peach tattoo. In 2025 she was finally identified as Tanya Jackson, an Army veteran from Alabama who had been living in Brooklyn, and the little girl as her two-year-old daughter, Tatiana Dykes. They had been missing since 1997, and nobody had reported them. Tanya had served in the Army from July 1993 to February 1995. Her torso was found in a plastic container beside Hempstead Lake on June 28, 1997. The rest of her, and her daughter, were found near Jones Beach in April 2011, and it took until December 2016 for DNA to confirm those were the same woman, and that she was the child's mother.

18:49 In December 2025, Tatiana's father, Andrew Dykes, was arrested in Tampa, Florida, and charged with Tanya's murder. According to investigators, he was a former Army anatomy instructor and a former Florida state trooper, the two had met while stationed at Fort Sam Houston, and he was married to another woman at the time. He has not been charged in Tatiana's death, though investigators have said they believe he is responsible for both. He had been identified earlier, but was not at first treated as a suspect because he cooperated.

19:16 Police no longer believe their deaths had anything to do with the Gilgo Beach killings. He is charged, not convicted, and he is presumed innocent. But think about what that means. For fourteen years those two were counted as victims of the Long Island Serial Killer, and the real story may have been something else entirely. It also says something about a theory investigators held from early on, that there might be more than one killer using that stretch of coast. With Tanya and Tatiana, that has already turned out to be true once.

19:44 With Asian Doe, and with Shannan, nobody can yet say. Here is what stays with me about this case. For a long time, the public conversation about these women started and ended with what they did for money. Valerie Mack, Karen Vergata and Tanya Jackson were never even reported missing. Valerie Mack went twenty years without a name. Karen Vergata went twenty-seven. And in the end it was one of them who helped solve it. Not directly. But Amber Costello's roommate paid attention, and told police what that man was driving, and that description was still sitting in the file when someone finally went back and read it.

20:15 The families have asked Suffolk County to set aside a place for a permanent memorial. The ones they had put up themselves along Ocean Parkway were taken down. There is a petition for it. After everything else in this case, that does not seem like much to ask. Sandra Costilla. Karen Vergata. Valerie Mack. Jessica Taylor. Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Melissa Barthelemy. Megan Waterman. Amber Lynn Costello. The court filings and the district attorney's statements are public. Read the file.

20:41 Form your own conclusion. That's it for this one. Thanks for hanging out with me. This has been CrimeTimeSnacks, and I'll catch you next time.