20/20 - Gilgo Beach Murders: A Serial Killer’s Secrets?

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

For over a decade, a suspect in the Gilgo Beach killings remained at large until authorities arrested family man Rex Heuermann, who they say lived a double life. Go inside the investigation of the man charged with murdering seven women. Originally Aired 01/16/25 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. This is Deborah Roberts, co-anchor of 2020. This week, we'll be bringing you a deep dive into the Gilgo Beach murders from Impact by Nightline. The number of alleged victims has grown. Prosecutors now have charged a Manhattan architect with the deaths of seven women. Here's an inside look at the alleged

double life of the accused killer. A Manhattan professional by day and a serial killer by night? Rick Sherman is a demon that walks among us. Was he leading a horrific double life? It's like two different people, like Jekyll and Hyde. Authorities now charging him with a seventh killing. The shocking evidence in court filings that law enforcement says are detailed plans to hunt and kill.

He's talking about preferences, ways to improve. He's saying things like, use a thicker rope so it doesn't break under pressure. Hit harder next time. The random 911 call that prompted intensive searches. Are you sorry? No, I'm sorry prompted intensive searches and meet the woman who believes she escaped the go-go killer. I remember everything about that night because he scared the crap out of me. Gilgo Beach, a spot that had once been synonymous with summer, surfing, and fun in the sun.

That is, until police started finding body after body. For more than a decade, those unsolved murders kept Long Island shore towns on edge. Could four murders on Long Island be the work of a serial killer? We want to bring to justice this animal that has obviously taken the lives of a number of people. I watched this rock on Long Island. Oh, it was horrible. There was a dark cloud over the entire island.

At least 11 bodies, most of them women, many of them dismembered. The remains strewn across a half-mile stretch of Gilgo Beach and in woods further east. Police say a serial killer was on the loose. The acts of depraved and heinous. He has been on the hunt for sex workers who he has brutalized. The sheer number of victims that were discovered shows the magnitude of the kind of offender

we may be dealing with. Rex, did you do it? Authorities say the man who committed most of these monstrous crimes is Rex Heuerman, an architect, husband, and father by day. And they say a killer by night. I probably could have cheated death a thousand times and father by day. And they say, a killer by night. I probably could have cheated death a thousand times and never knew it. But with him, I think I cheated death and I knew I did.

Rex Heuriman is a demon that walks among us. A predator that ruined families. How does he have a wife, daughter, son, living in a neighborhood of families? How did he have the time to run a business and do all that he did? Law enforcement suspected early on, Rex Heurman was living a very compartmentalized

double life. Heurman has been charged with the murders of seven women, most of them sex workers, who began disappearing in 1993. It is long overdue to provide justice for vulnerable women who are missing and murdered. He's pleaded not guilty to all the charges. He's a man who's never been arrested before. He's maintained his innocence from the inception of this case.

Today my office filed a superseding indictment charging the defendant, Yermin, with a seventh charge murder in the second degree. The most recent murder charge? Coming in December in the case of Valerie Mack, whose decapitated remains were found at Gilgo Beach. We want her family to know that they are not alone in their grief. Now law enforcement is exposing gruesome details of his alleged double life. Rex! How are you doing? Good to see you. How they say a 60 year, seemingly mild-mannered father of two from Massapequal Park, Long Island,

profiled in an online video about New York real estate. When a job that should have been routine suddenly becomes not routine, I get the phone call. Could have brutally murdered so many women. And then the disturbing evidence authorities say they obtained from his home. Heurman had a significant collection of violent bondage and torture pornography.

Prosecutors said, in addition to all this torture pornography, Heurman searched references to the Gilgo Beach serial killings. And he seemingly, according to prosecutors, would keep tabs on certain victims, their families, even collecting headlines from People magazine and the New York Post. A lot of what serial killers get off about is the planning.

I am smarter than all of them. I beat the authorities. They can't catch me. And look how successful I am at this. But for every piece of evidence comes the question, why did it take so long for police to make an arrest? And could there be more victims out there? If convicted, it's possible that Rex Heuerman could wind up being one of the most prolific serial killers of our time. I think that we are just starting to scratch on the surface

the tip of the iceberg. scratch on the surface, the tip of the iceberg. 13 years after the first bodies were uncovered at Gilgo Beach, authorities finally zeroed in on Rex Heuerman, playing close officers surrounding him on a busy street in Manhattan. When they did make an arrest, I was stunned because there had been no media attention on the case at all for 11 months, not even a news article. So I was worried that behind the scenes, they had lost steam. With the arrest, nonstop news coverage began, an orchestrated perp walk, to finally show his face.

I've seen Rex Heurman in court, and he is a kind of a hulking figure. He's tall, wide. He even makes some of the court officers look small. For days, authorities turned his home upside down, even digging up the backyard. Curious onlookers were there for every discovery. Police ended up seizing hundreds of electronic devices from his house. They discovered a single Word document that ended up becoming one of the most disturbing parts of the case.

This document, according to prosecutors, reads like a plan for how to go about killing victims, where to bury them, what to keep in mind for the next time, if something wasn't quite right, the kind of hardware that would be necessary for killing and dismemberment. He's talking about preferences, ways to improve. He's saying things like, hit harder next time. Just really devastating plans for the next person he intends to target. So as far as the planning document, he had pointed out that the ropes broke, and so he needed a thicker rope to bind these women to.

So it tells us that he's getting off on the planning, but also that he's learning from past mistakes, and he wants to make sure that he's correcting his errors so that he maybe one day will get to the perfect crime. There's also a section that investigators say appears to be a reference to potential targets. So TRG seems to indicate in this document a victim he's looking at. He even explicitly said small is good.

He went after smaller women. He went after smaller women for the purpose of making cleaning up easier. We know that he was targeting smaller bodies. We know that they're sex workers, women who were feminine and small and probably couldn't put up as much of a fight. According to investigators, this planning document was created the exact same year Valerie met. The latest victim police are tying to Heuerman was murdered. Authorities say she fit the profile of what he was hunting for.

Small, only five feet tall, and a sex worker, just 24 years old when she went missing. Valerie Mack struggled with drug use, and that led her to engage in survival sex work. Being a sex worker is a dangerous line of work, and the nature of this profession makes it very easy for people to prey upon these individuals. And when they go missing, very few people know

or even beg to ask the question, where'd they go? Valerie's decapitated remains were discovered about 40 miles from Gilgo Beach a few months after her disappearance in 2000. Parts of her body were bound with rope. More than a decade later, the rest of her body would be found during the search at Gilgo Beach. A decade later, the rest of her body would be found during the search at Gilgo Beach. This is the time of year when I know personally I've got to be smart about eating.

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In a story with so many twists and turns, the bodies at Gilgo Beach might never have been found, if not for the chilling case of Shannon Gilbert and the frantic 911 call she made in the spring of 2010. call she made in the spring of 2010. Please stop it, please. Please stop it, please. The 24-year-old was an escort working one evening in Oak Beach, Long Island, just east of Gilgoo. She was basically running away. Her last phone call was 23 minutes to 911.

23 minutes is a long 911 call. What do we know about what happened on that call? She seems to be panicked, and she seems to be in real fear of something as she's on this call. Stop! Stop! Stop!

It sounded frantic as she went to any house she could find, banging on doors, asking for help. And then, according to police she ends up taking off into this marshy area and she was never heard from again. The area is extremely difficult to search it's extremely heavily vegetated the terrain is difficult to navigate. Stuart Cameron ran the search for Shannon Gilbert back in 2010. One of his colleagues and his canine partner were tapped to help sniff out Shannon.

On December 11th of 2010, he located a set of human remains on the north side off the shore of Ocean Parkway. The assumption was that it was Shannon Gilbert. But it wasn't. The body, wrapped in burlap, was identified as Melissa Bartholomey, a 24-year-old sex worker. Days later, another shocking find.

We were quite surprised the second day when we found the second body. And then we conducted a more detailed search, and we found the third body, and then ultimately the fourth body. Pretty much dawned on all of us the realization that there was a serial killer working. A gruesome find about three miles away, near Gilgo Beach, a suspected serial killer cemetery, containing four skeletons dumped by the side of the road. But none of them were Shannon Gilbert. They were later identified as Amber Costello,

Maureen Brainer-Bards, and Megan Waterman, women in their 20s, bound in a similar fashion, and all apparently working as escorts before they disappeared. With Melissa, they became known as the Gilgo Four. They were human beings with aspirations and hope for a better future for themselves. They have families who love and miss them. with aspirations and hope for a better future for themselves. They have families who love and miss them. Megan really thought she was safe.

Megan thought nothing would happen to her, and she was only doing this temporarily. And then less than a month later, she was gone. How many times have you actually been out to Yogo Beach? I've probably been here like 15 or 20 times. I come out here kind of as often as I can. It just helps you get some greater perspective on what we're dealing with here. Alexis Linkletter is from Long Island and has lived and breathed this case for much

of her life. There's no doubt that the entire nation is completely enthralled and mystified by this case. She hosts her own podcast on the murders, Unraveled, for Investigation Discovery. This whole path here didn't used to be here. So trucks used to be able to essentially pull right up to this, which is probably what our suspect did in this case. If you're looking at all this brush and marsh right here, like if you're looking at double body. It's extremely remote at night. There's no streetlights.

So you would see someone coming from miles away in either direction. And before this bike path was here, you really could just back your vehicle up to it and do whatever you needed to do and have no one see you. By May of 2011, the search had yielded body parts belonging to six more of the victims. We found four sets of remains that were full human bodies, but now we found a set of partial remains. So someone had taken a human body and, you know, it's really heinous and hard to believe,

chopped up a human body and dumped part of the body in this area. -♪ Immediately following their discovery, a new police chief was put into power, and that police chief himself had many skeletons in his closet, and he was not interested in the FBI uncovering

those. So he did everything he could to essentially sabotage their efforts in solving this case. And the investigation really went nowhere for the better part of a decade. And this was terrifying for people who lived along the south shore of Long Island, that all these people were being killed near where they lived and nobody was being held accountable. But investigators managed to pinpoint the suspect's locations through his phone calls. Through the analysis of the cell phone data from that had been accumulated from this case, give us an area of Masapikwa.

This is the area where we believe the killer may reside. So that was a primary focus of the investigation. As if the deaths of their loved ones weren't horrific enough, friends and family members of the victims received taunting phone calls from the killer. Why would a person like to do this? It taunts psychologically, like to get into someone's mind

knowing I've killed your friend or your family member. There's an element again of control and the element of torture. He goes, do you know Marie? And Marie was her escort name. Sarah Carnes, a friend of Gilgo victim Maureen Brainerd Barnes, says she got one of those calls two weeks after Maureen went missing.

He's like, she's not missing. Well, I just saw her at a whorehouse in Queens. Oh, yeah? That doesn't sound right to me. And you know, and I'm like, can you call me back on block? Because I need to tell the cops and her family this so that they're not worried anymore. And he's like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, never call me back. Authorities say they eventually trace

some of the killer's calls to Midtown, Manhattan. Law enforcement know the suspect has burner phones that are making phone calls in two locations. An individual who may live in Long Island and take the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan by Midtown and also work in that area. Thousands make that commute daily and so now law enforcement has to figure out who's the one making this commute and are they the suspect they're looking for.

The case finally gets momentum in 2022 after Suffolk County announces the creation of a task force Bringing together local state and federal officials and breaking the case wide open They start taking a fresh look at old evidence from Amber Costello's disappearance Right before she went missing she had a client come to her home and essentially, along with her roommate, they engaged in a ruse with this client. And that ruse included taking the client's money and then the male roommate coming home pretending to be Amber's boyfriend. And the client ultimately drove off, angry.

Amber's roommate told investigators the truck driven by the client was a 2002 green Chevy Avalanche. A distinctive vehicle that just isn't sold very much in this part of the country. It's a Chevy Avalanche which is kind of this hulking sort of truck sort of SUV and not a lot of people have it. A female state police detective basically started with all the evidence from the beginning. What this detective did was looked up all the green 2002 Chevy Avalanches within a certain geographical area, and also cross-referenced a physical description

that that same roommate provided. He described the suspect as being extremely tall, resembling an ogre. And it didn't take this detective long to sort of zero in on somebody who seemed to match all of these things and who also had ties to the key locations of Massive People Park and Midtown Manhattan. of Massive People Park and Midtown Manhattan. the sports played on a field or I saw a course. River is the place. You put a smile on your face

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I remember everything about that night because he scared the crap out of me. And nobody's ever made me scared or uncomfortable like that. Like, when he got arrested, I was like, I knew it. Nikki Brass considers herself lucky. She says her date in 2015 with him left her terrified. I was on seeking arrangements, like, escort alligator, and I posted looking for a sugar daddy.

I'm not sure which one he contacted me on because it's been over 10 years, but he messaged me. She says they messaged back and forth for a sugar daddy. I'm not sure which one he contacted me on because it's been over 10 years, but he messaged me. She says they messaged back and forth for a few days and that some of the messages were concerning. So first of all, he wanted me to meet him directly at his house. He didn't want to meet public, which I don't do. I'm not coming directly to a stranger's house.

So to not want to meet in public was kind of like a big red flag for me. Even in the messages you had about him? Yeah, but I ignored it. He was someone that was like, I have a lot of money, I could take care of you. They decide to meet, she says, at a restaurant. But not before Nikki takes some precautions. I did get a picture of him.

I'm not going to say specifically who I sent it to because they asked me not to. But when he sent me his picture, I was at Chuck E. Cheese with that person, and I showed them the picture and said, this is who I'm going out with. They're an architect. They work in Manhattan. What was it like?

How did the date go? So when we sat down, it was basic small talk, like normal stuff you would talk about when you first sit down on a date. So this is what you do for a living, what do you want to do, what are your dreams, like basic stuff. That's when he asked if I like true crime. I was like, yes, like I was excited to talk about it because most people don't want to.

Even a true crime conversation, she says, didn't set off any red flags. Until… Once he said, have you heard of the Gilbert Beach Killer? And I said, yeah, he got like very, very excited. Like his body language changed. Until... He seemed way too weird. It didn't seem like somebody who was just nerding out. It was somebody who was like reliving what they did and enjoying reliving what they did. She says their date didn't end well. He was like, so you're gonna come back to my house, right?

And I was like trying to be polite. So I was like, it's late, you know, I really don't know the area. I don't wanna be driving at night. And he was like, oh no,, you know, I really don't know the area. I don't want to be driving at night. And he was like, Oh, no, no, no. Like you would leave your car here. Why would we take two cars? That makes no sense. You're getting out of here. At that point, I had already texted somebody to meet me at the door and he got angry. Like you could tell he was trying to hold it together and not seem angry, but he was like very angry.

Right after that night, and in the years leading to Heuermann's arrest, Nikki says she told people she had gone on a date with the Gilgo Beach killer. No one believed her. And those who worked with Heuermann say they suspected nothing. He had a big ego, that's for sure. A big head on his shoulders. Rex! Hello!

How are you doing? Good to see you. Rex Heuermann, I'm an architect. I'm an architectural consultant. I'm a troubleshooter. Born and raised on Long Island. Okay. Been working in Manhattan since 1987. We'd argue a lot about certain things, but he, um...

Yeah, I never saw anything that would make me feel that I couldn't be left alone with him. You were alone with him a lot. Well, yes, because if I ran the office and all the other two people who work in the office were in the field, so yeah, I would be in the office alone with him a lot. Muriel Enriquez met Rex Huberman back in 1992

and worked with him at his architectural consulting company. Their work relationship was ordinary, except for one unsettling incident when she was on vacation. So he would always make comments like, yeah, I can find you in the middle of the ocean. I said no you can't. How are you going to find me on a cruise ship?

She went on that cruise ship and one afternoon, Muriel says she got a surprise. I had been on the cruise for a day and there was a note under my door. But it was a note from Rex pretty much saying, I told you I could find you anywhere. And that note, I remember being so at first scared, like, could he be on the ship? That went through my mind for a minute. I realized he couldn't be on the ship, but how did he get that note to me? I still couldn't figure that out.

But when she came back to the office. I said, Rex, I mean, really, you don't have anything else better to do than to like send me a note on a cruise ship? He goes, and I told you I could find you anywhere. That was his response. What was yours? Mine was, well, how'd you do that?

He said, I had my ways. And then there was the seemingly innocent present from Heuroman, from his wife's trip to Iceland. Well, we always complain about being cold in the office. So he says, oh, you know, Iceland makes these beautiful wool sweaters. You know, would you like, each of you would like a sweater? I said, sure, you know, Iceland makes these beautiful wool sweaters. You know, would you like, each of you would like a sweater? I said, sure. You know, why not?

But police say the very same week his wife and kids were in Iceland, Heuerman was out hunting women. When you learn that that same week that his wife and his daughter were gone to Iceland was the same week that Maureen Rayner Barnes went missing. What goes through your head? That oh my goodness I can't believe that he actually had his wife bring back gifts for us while he was out murdering someone else. Like how do you how does somebody do that? That was just unbelievable to me. It's like two different people completely,

like Jekyll and Hyde or I don't know, the monster. By 2023, humans alleged double life started to unravel. Police had the suburban dad in their crosshairs. Coming to ABC in Hulu. Amanda Riley was a mother, wife speaker at her church. And then she got diagnosed with cancer. A beloved young Christian woman fighting a battle undeserved. We thought she was God's gift, but she was a liar.

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they began monitoring him. They did so for, I believe, 16 months. And they were pulling all sorts of records, phone records, IP address records. They were finding surveillance footage of him, buying new burner phones. Rex Heurman is allegedly using these burner phones to go on dating websites,

to solicit contact with sex workers on various websites. And according to them, they suspected that he may have been gearing up to kill again. Prosecutors were increasingly confident, but they needed more. They needed a direct DNA sample from Rex Heuerman, and they got it from Pizza Crust. Police devised an elaborate plan,

trailing him to work in Manhattan and retrieving a pizza crust he threw into a trash can. When they found that pizza crust, I said, that's so Rex that he would just eat the crust on a run and throw it in the trash. Right. That's the way he did. Never sitting down to like eat a meal. Undercover agents also followed his daughter Victoria onto the Long Island railroad.

They picked up an energy drink can that she tossed out. They also recovered his wife Asa's DNA from bottles in the human's garbage. Investigators say that DNA evidence turned out to be crucial. When police initially recovered the bodies, they were able to find hair samples, some of them female, there was a male, but the DNA technology was not sensitive enough to establish any kind of a potential suspect. Now when it come to those female hair,

they were able to track what's called the mitochondrial DNA of that hair and see that it was closely connected to or related to Rex Heuerman's wife and or daughter. Law enforcement is making connection between the male hair being Rex Heuerman and his wife or daughter's hair being there, that the only connection must be that Rex Heuerman at one point was at the location when these women were either killed or their bodies were buried. But police say Heuerman's wife and children are not suspects.

In fact, they were out of town around the time the murders occurred. What did investigators actually conclude by finding Rex's family members' hair on some of the victims? Law enforcement suspected early on that that may mean that these women were killed inside the Heuerman home. Initially, Hewerman was charged with three murders immediately following his arrest. Even with this arrest, we're not done. There's more work to do in this investigation

regarding the other victims. He has subsequently been charged with four more, including Jessica Taylor. When her life was stolen, a light went out. She is forever missed. Her head, arms, and hands, found less than a mile from where the original Gilgo Four have been discovered. The rest of her body was found years earlier, further inland.

Jessica Taylor's remains were found in the morning, but the night before, around 10 p.m., witnesses later recalled seeing what appeared to be a Chevy Avalanche backed in to a wooded area. And the presumption there is that whoever murdered Jessica Taylor was leaving her remains there. Investigators say DNA from a hair also linked Toorman to the unsolved 1993 murder of Sandra Castilla. It was a jaw-dropping moment because this is a victim who had never been associated with the Long Island serial killer case at all. The 28-year-old was found in Southampton, about 60 miles away from Gilgo Beach,

with numerous sharp force injuries all over her body, including her face, torso, and breasts. It introduced a brand new location and it also drastically expanded the timeline previously associated with this case, which means this expands this case greatly in terms of victims that could be connected to the suspect. Impact has reached out to Rex Heuerman's attorney, but has not heard back.

There are still three unidentified bodies found at Gilgo Beach, including the body of a male found dressed in women's clothes who police called Asian dough. There was another that police called Peaches because of a distinctive tattoo. There was a toddler that was identified as Peaches' toddler because of some jewelry they had in common and DNA testing. Another Gilgo Beach victim who's since been identified is Karen Vergata, a 34-year-old escort who went missing in 1996.

None of them have been tied to Heuerman yet. Prosecutors have no doubt. They say Rex Heuerman is their guy, is the serial killer. They've charged him now with seven murders, and I would expect that if they can build the evidence, they will charge him with more. Do you suspect that there's more bodies? I absolutely think, sadly, that there will be

many more victims associated with this case. This is Jempa Roberts. Our story was produced by Impact by Nightline and includes footage from Newsday TV. You can find Gilgo Beach Murders, A Serial Killer's Sec secrets, streaming on Hulu. Next week, we'll bring you a brand new season of wild crime. We'll follow along as special agents who work for our national parks hunt an elusive killer.

Thanks for listening.