Between 1993 and 2010, a serial killer targeted young women, tragically taking the lives of eight victims by strangulation and abandoning their bodies in secluded parts of Long Island.
Disturbingly, these women had previously crossed paths with the man who would later end their lives, described by some as having an ‘ogre-like’ presence.
Recently, in the aftermath of the Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann’s admission to the murders, the Daily Mail has uncovered exclusive insights into how he was acquainted with his victims and the specific locations where he committed these heinous acts.
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney, who spearheaded the investigation that ultimately led to the capture of Heuermann and orchestrated the legal proceedings that ensured his life imprisonment, shared his insights this week in a comprehensive interview about the case that has haunted Long Island for decades.
For the first time, Tierney divulged spine-chilling details on how Heuermann selected his victims, the precision of his murderous schemes, and the harrowing final moments experienced by the young women.
Heuermann killed seven of his eight victims inside the basement of his Massapequa Park home – a ranch-style house where he spent his own childhood and then chose to raise his own family, Tierney confirmed to the Daily Mail.
The only exception was his first victim Sandra Costilla, a 28-year-old woman originally from Trinidad and Tobago and living in New York, who was murdered in November 1993.
Tierney exclusively revealed to the Daily Mail that Heuermann strangled Costilla inside his car, a Ram Charger which investigators have since tracked down and recovered from Pennsylvania.
Rex Heuermann appears to smirk as he pleads guilty to murdering seven women and admits to killing an eighth in a court hearing this month
The victims clockwise from top left: Sandra Costilla, Karen Vergata, Melissa Barthelemy, Valerie Mack, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Jessica Taylor
The serial killer, who was 30 at the time, inflicted several sharp force injuries to her face, torso, breasts, thigh and vaginal area post-mortem and then dumped her body in a wooded area of North Sea, Southampton.
Hunters later stumbled across her body, lying on her back with her arms outstretched, her shirt pulled up over her torso and head and with her legs spread apart.
As his first known victim, Costilla was something of an ‘outlier’ to the string of murders that followed.
After that, Heuermann embarked on his pattern of luring women to his home, where he held them for some length of time and tortured them before strangling them.
Karen Vergata, 34, Valerie Mack, 24, Jessica Taylor, 20, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Costello, 27 were all murdered in the basement while his family was out of town on vacation. Vergata, Mack and Taylor, who were murdered between 1996 and 2003, were also dismembered inside the home.
Heuermann is believed to have met each of the women at least once before he lured them to his home and murdered them, Tierney told the Daily Mail.
In those earlier meetings, Heuermann likely gained their trust, luring the women into a false sense of security so that they would agree to his request of a home visit once – unbeknown to them – he had picked them as his next victim.
‘It’s hard for us to know with certainty, especially through the use of burner phones. But we don’t believe that that’s the first time he met them in all of the cases,’ Tierney said.
Suffolk County DA Ray Tierney sat down with the Daily Mail for a wide-ranging interview about the case
A stretch of beach stands empty at Gilgo Beach on April 8 2026, near where murder victims were discovered decades ago
‘Because Sandra was earlier, she’s a bit of an outlier to be sure, but with regard to the others we believe he had met them before.’
Tierney explained that there typically would have to be some level of trust for the victims to agree to an out-call (visiting a client’s home) rather than an in-call (meeting at a location chosen by the sex worker) because it is less safe.
‘There’s this concept of in-calls and out-calls with the women and their work. There has to be a certain degree of trust and comfortability, because these women were working that tightrope. They didn’t have security,’ he said.
‘I don’t think that it would have been easy just to go straight to an out-call. An out-call typically is more lucrative, but it’s also fraught with peril. There would have been some sort of interaction, which would make them feel comfortable enough to do that.’
To some extent, Tierney said Heuermann must have gained the women’s trust – something that tracked with his ability to lead his violent double life all the while masquerading as a normal, non-threatening married father.
‘He was very good at portraying himself to be who he thinks you want him to be,’ he said.
‘That’s why I think not only his family, but also the people who knew him, worked with him and were friendly with him never thought that he would be capable of what he’s been convicted of. I think he liked living in that sort of space where he was not what he seemed to be.’
Only Heuermann knows why he selected each of the eight women as his victims.
But it is clear that a meticulous and precise level of planning went into each of the murders, Tierney said.
Rex Heuermann’s Massapequa Park home where he murdered seven of the eight victims
Rex Heuermann and his family before he was arrested and unmasked as the Gilgo Beach serial killer
He was a ‘prolific purveyor or consumer of escorts, the vast majority of which he didn’t murder,’ Tierney said.
‘He was patronizing a lot of individuals, and then, at a certain point, he would choose certain ones to murder.’
Burner phone evidence revealed a pattern for the last four murders – Brainard-Barnes, Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello, known as the Gilgo Four.
Heuermann would be in communication with several sex workers and then would select one as his desired victim and buy a burner phone to use solely to contact her. In each of the Gilgo Four murders, he bought and used a new phone.
‘It’s real cut and dried with regard to what we call the kill phones, the four burner phones that were used in the murders of the Gilgo Four,’ Tierney explained.
‘He had a phone that he used to correspond with a lot of workers. And then, all of a sudden, he would get a new burner phone and start corresponding with just one worker on one burner phone. And then, that woman would unfortunately lose her life and he then discontinued the use of that phone because he knew it would be traced back to him.’
In Megan Waterman’s case, Heuermann bought a burner phone on June 4 2010, used it to arrange to meet her on June 5 and then picked her up from the Holiday Inn in Hauppage on June 6. She was never seen alive again. Heuermann then stopped using that burner phone.
Based on his years-long investigation and face-to-face interactions with the serial killer, Tierney described Heuermann as ‘smart’, ‘meticulous,’ ‘manipulative’ and of ‘above average intelligence.’
Tierney said the pattern and burner phone use proved the serial killer’s ‘deliberateness’, ‘premeditation’ and how ‘meticulous’ he was with his crimes.
Rex Heuermann in selfies submitted as evidence in the case. He used burner phones to contact several of the victims
‘Then, if there was any doubt, the planning document really lays out just how meticulous he was.’
A 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 including sections titled ‘body prep’ detailing how to clean and dismember bodies and remove tattoos.
Though this document was created in 2000 and modified between 2001 and 2002, all eight of the murders were planned to some degree, Tierney said.
But Heuermann’s level of planning evolved over time.
‘Certainly after that document, all of those murders were planned, but we feel that there was a certain degree of planning with regard to all of the murders.
‘Then, as he progressed through the murders, the planning became more considerable and more elaborate.’
Though his method of murder stayed the same, aspects of Heuermann’s crimes evolved.
In the early days, Tierney said Heuermann would seek sex workers from well-known prostitution areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan. When the business changed to the likes of Craigslist in the 2000s, so did he.
Law enforcement on the scene of Rex Heuermann’s home following his arrest in July 2023
Map showing where the remains of victims were found along Ocean Parkway
His disposal of the victims’ bodies also changed over time.
After leaving Costilla’s body out in the woods, his next three victims – Vergata, Mack and Taylor – were all dismembered and their remains left in two separate locations. Vergata’s remains were found on Fire Island and Ocean Parkway; Mack and Taylor in Manorville and Ocean Parkway.
With the Gilgo Four, their bodies were wrapped in burlap, some bound with belts, and left along Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach, within a quarter-mile of each other.
That was a location Heuermann knew well through duck-hunting in Gilgo Beach and working in Jones Beach when he was younger.
‘He knew that area intimately and knew that at night, it’s very remote and dark, so you can see headlights from far away which gives you a certain amount of time to react before anyone sees you,’ Tierney said.
‘If you look at the areas where the bodies were left, it’s really overgrown. You can’t walk through that. It was advantageous to avoid detection. That told us this was not a happenstance – this was a person who knew this area and knew the best place to dispose of bodies.’
The earlier Manorville locations were also much more remote at the time than today. ‘The neighborhood wasn’t there. It was a remote area, all woods and there was a Girl Scout camp there and a hunting area.’
Tierney would not share all the details of what investigators uncovered of his crimes – including how long Heuermann held his victims inside his home and the torture he put them through – out of respect for the women and their families.
Heuermann’s wife Asa Ellerup is seen in the basement of their family home where her husband killed his victims
What he would share was that investigators believe Heuermann hung plastic sheeting from the ceiling of the basement to create some sort of ‘staging area’ during the murders.
During the initial search after his July 2023 arrest, Tierney said investigators noticed push pins in the wall and damage to the ceiling.
When the planning document was discovered – revealing not only his warped murder blueprint but also the mention of tape and not pins – a new search was carried out.
‘Using ultraviolet light, we were then able to see the adhesive marks on the paneling in the basement. And the adhesive made a little square, enclosed area. Our theory is that’s where he hung the plastic sheeting.’
It is not clear exactly what unfolded in this ‘staging area’ but the bail application previously documented how items in the planning document were associated with suspension bondage and dismemberment. Heuermann’s porn searches also revealed an interest in women being suspended, tortured, bound, mutilated and decapitated.
‘Unfortunately, it is a very comprehensive document, which really lays bare his intent to seek out these women to lure them back to Long Island, and to murder them, and then dispose of their bodies and do it in such a way as not to get caught’.
‘I think all of that evidence speaks for itself and out of deference to the families, we’ll let that evidence speak for itself.’
Despite the wealth of evidence the task force unearthed, Tierney revealed that investigators never found any trophies or mementoes Heuermann had held onto from his victims inside the home.
DA Tierney with the families of the victims on the day that Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty
Family members of some of the victims of the Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann attend a news conference after he finally confessed to his crimes
‘We worked really closely with the families to identify things like jewelry or clothing. We put a lot of effort in but we didn’t find anything that we could trace back to any of the victims,’ he said.
Even with the planning document, DNA evidence, damning cell phone data and now Heuermann’s own confessions, only he truly knows the full story of his haunting crimes.
‘The one thing everybody has to understand is that in each of these eight incidents, there’s two witnesses. And one witness is unfortunately no longer with us,’ Tierney said.
‘So then we have one witness and then we have forensic evidence and we have other evidence which we can use.
‘But with regard to the defendant, are we ever going to get the exact story? I don’t know.’
