Gilgo Beach: Eight Names

Transcript generated from the episode script.

0:05 What's up guys, welcome back to Crimetime Snacks. On April 8, 2026, in a packed courtroom in Riverhead, New York, a 62-year-old architect named Rex Hirman 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.

1:02 On May 4, 2010, an escort in her early 20s named Shannon Gilbert was at a client's home in Oak Beach, a gated community on the south shore of Long Island. At 45-1 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,

1:28 and then she ran off into the dark. Her remains were not found for 19 months. They were in a marsh about half a mile from where she was last seen. I will come back to Shannon 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,

1:53 turned up human remains in the bushes on an isolated strip of waterfront. An officer was working the area near her last known location with his police dog, and the dog found them. They were not Shannon Gilbert's. They belonged to a woman named Melissa Barthelamy. Police kept searching, and two days later, close by, they found three more. Maureen Brainerd 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.

2:23 They were lying about 500 feet from one another, and officials said all four died by homicidal violence. 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 4'11", Melissa was 4'10", and 95 pounds. All four had advertised on Craigslist as escorts. Maureen Brainerd Barnes was 25, from Norwich, Connecticut, and a mother of two. It worked as a seasonal telemarketer and turned to sex work when she could not find anything

2:54 else. 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.

3:18 Melissa Barthelmy was 24, from Erie County, New York, living in the Bronx. On July 12, 2009, she saw a client, put $900 in the bank, and tried to call an ex-boyfriend. A week later, her 15-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

3:47 to Massapequa. Keep those last two places in mind. 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 22, from Scarborough, Maine, with a three-year-old daughter she had left with family. She was staying at a motel in Howpodge, 15 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.

4:12 She was reported missing two days later when she did not check in on her little girl. 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 27. 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

4:38 husband, and worked as a waitress. In September 2010, she was living in West Babylon. A stranger called her several times and offered $2,500, 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 Abelanche. That detail sat in a file for more than 10 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, phone

5:08 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 12 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. Some of these turned out to be the missing halves of older cases.

5:38 In July 2003, the torso of a 20-year-old named Jessica Taylor had been found in Manorville, 45 miles east of Gilgo Beach, on a pile of scrap wood at the end of an access road. She had worked in Washington, DC 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. The remains found along the parkway in March 2011 were the rest of her.

6:03 In November 2000, in the same part of Manorville, a hunter's dog had found another woman's torso. She had no name for 20 years. In 2020, she was identified as Valerie Mack, 24, 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. She sometimes used the name Melissa Taylor. Though she and Jessica Taylor were not related, more of her remains were among

6:29 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 seven until 2023 when genetic genealogy gave her name back. She was Karen Vergata, 34, from Manhattan. She was last seen around Valentine's Day of 1996, and she was never reported missing either. 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.

6:59 Investigators believe the victim was between 17 and 23, was likely Han Chinese, and had been dead for five to 10 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 dough. Hold on to them too. Their story went somewhere nobody expected. So by the spring of 2011, police had 10 sets of remains and a

7:25 lot of theories. A profile in the New York Times said the killer was most likely a white man in his mid 20s to mid 40s who knew the South Shore very well and had access to burlap sex. 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. 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.

7:52 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 46 months in federal prison. 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.

8:20 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 best-selling book, a Netflix movie, and a string of documentaries. In January 2020, the police commissioner at the time, Geraldine Hart, tried something new. She released photos of a black leather belt found near Ocean Parkway during the original search and bossed with two letters that read either HM or WH, depending

8:46 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. That man's attorney rejected it.

9:11 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 Barthelomy. Long Island is a big place, but this case kept folding back on itself like that. Meanwhile, Shannon Gilbert's family was fighting their own fight.

9:36 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 Baton did an independent autopsy he found damaged 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

10:02 2022 to get her 911 call released. Shannon'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 10 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 13-year-old cold case. In February 2022, a multi-agency task force

10:31 was formed. Suffolk County police, the sheriff's office, the New York State police and the FBI, working with the district attorney Ray Tierney. The job was to go back to 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 Abilance had been registered to a man in Massa Piqua Park named Rex Hyerman. That was the same vehicle Amber Costello's roommate had described in 2010.

10:58 Once they had a name, the old phone evidence lined up behind it. Cell phone mapping had always pointed at two areas, Midtown Manhattan and Massa Piqua Park. Hyerman 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

11:24 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. 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

11:49 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 Hyerman residents. By the time the case was fully built, according to illegal filing, two separate forensic laboratories had concluded that hairs recovered from six of the seven victims were forensically tied to Hyerman to members of his immediate

12:12 family or to others he had lived with. Rex Andrew Hewerman was born on September 13, 1963, in Massapequa Park. His father, a World War II veteran, died when Rex was 12. People who knew him as a kid remembered him as extremely close to his mother. He graduated from Burner 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

12:42 from his mother for $170,000 and he never left it. Neighbors noticed that the house kept getting more rundown while the homes around it got nicer. He was married twice. The first marriage lasted from 1990 to 1994. His second wife was Asa Elarup. 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

13:11 in the basement of that house. There was another side to that regular guy. Prosecutors said he kept a tender 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. On July 13, 2023 police arrested Hewerman outside his midtown office. He was charged with the murders of Melissa Barthelamy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello and named as the suspect in Marines. At his arraignment, Michael Brown

13:38 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 Minerville and searched the woods there. Asa Ellerich 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

14:04 for the murder of Maureen Brainerd 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 Costello was 28 originally from Trinidad and Tobago living in New York City. She was killed on November 19 or 20, 1993. Hunters found her body days later in the woods in North Sea in the town

14:30 of Southampton about 60 miles northeast of Gilgo Beach. Hares found on her body matched Hyerman'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. He had been killing since at least the early 1990s and he had left victims in places well beyond Gilgo Beach.

14:58 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, Hewerman said he was innocent. His lawyers fought the DNA evidence and pointed to other possible suspects. So what made him fooled? According to his own attorney, Michael Brown, it was two rulings from Judge Timothy Mazay. The judge allowed all of the DNA evidence in

15:24 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, Hewerman stood up in court. Hewerman pleaded guilty to first degree murder in the deaths of Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Melissa Barthelamy, and Karen Vergata and to second degree murder in the deaths of Maureen Brainerd Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, and Sandra Costilla.

15:49 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 2007, Maureen in 2007. Then Megan and Amber within three months were charged with murdering each other in 2010. He killed every few years for 17 years

16:18 and went to work in Manhattan in between. Brown told reporters his client wanted to save the victim's family's 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 and civil suits brought by the victim's families. Brown also said Hewerman 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.

16:44 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. For the families that met 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 prosecutor's 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.

17:11 Prosecutors described it as three consecutive life sentences. He's being held at Greenhaven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York. Now the part I promised. Eight murders are solved. Not everything found along that parkway is. Shannon Gilbert, whose 911 call started all of this, is not among the eight. Hewerman 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.

17:39 The young person investigators call Asian Doe still has no name. Police put out a new forensic rendering in September 2024. Hewerman's lawyer says his client was not involved in that death either, so somebody else maybe. 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

18:08 from your life in the early 2000s, Suffolk County police still wanna hear it. 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.

18:38 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. 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.

19:06 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. 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 14 years, those two were counted as victims of the Long Island serial killer and the real story may have been something else entirely.

19:33 It also says something about 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. With Asian dough and with Shannon, nobody can yet say, here's 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 Vergada, and Tanya Jackson were never even reported missing.

19:59 Valerie Mack went 20 years without a name. Karen Vergada went 27. And in the end, it was one of them who helped solve it, not directly. But Amber Costilla'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. The family's vast 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.

20:24 After everything else in this case, that does not seem like much to ask. Sandra Costilla, Karen Vergada, Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor, Maureen Brainerd Barnes, Melissa Barthelamy, Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, the court filings in the district attorney's statements are public. Read the file, form your own conclusion. That's it for this one. Thanks for hanging out with me. This has been Crime Time Snacks, and I'll catch you next time.