Rex Heuermann is sentenced to life in prison for New York’s Gilgo Beach serial killings

A New York man accused in a 17-year spree of unsolved killings has pled guilty to seven murder charges. ABC News’ Reena Roy reports.

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. -- After decades waiting for justice, relatives of women murdered by New York’s Gilgo Beach serial killer laid into him Wednesday before he was sentenced to life in prison. He told them: “I am responsible” for the crimes.

“The words I would say would have no meaning,” added Rex Heuermann, the Long Island architect who lived a secret life of violence for years before admitting he killed eight women.

The sentencing capped an extraordinary investigation that solved one of New York’s most perplexing mysteries. The seemingly unconnected and largely overlooked disappearances of young women became the focus of true-crime documentaries, books and podcasts after police began discovering the victims’ skeletal remains in the sandy scrub along a coastal parkway.

Heuermann, 62, will have no possibility of parole.

But “a million years isn’t enough,” Jasmine Robinson, a cousin of victim Jessica Taylor, said. “Nothing will ever make this right.”

“You fill me with so much repugnance, I can’t stand it,” Robinson said.

Judge calls Heuermann `despicable’

As a series of victims’ kin spoke, Heuermann sat with his hands on the defense table, looking straight ahead and lightly tapping his fingers. Then Amanda Funderburg, victim Melissa Barthelemy’s sister, urged Heuermann to look at her.

He glanced in her direction, but his eyes were slightly downcast.

“I hope you suffer,” said Funderburg, who recounted getting a taunting phone call from him days after Barthelemy disappeared, when Funderburg was 15 years old.

JoAnn Mack, the mother of victim Valerie Mack, told the killer that her daughter “had dreams, and you took them all away from her.”

“Justice has been done, but it can’t replace what has been taken,” Mack said.

Heuermann pleaded guilty in April to charges that he murdered seven women: Barthelemy, Mack, Taylor, Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, and Sandra Costilla.

Heuermann also admitted in court to killing an eighth victim, Karen Vergata, though he was never charged in her death. He said he strangled his victims, many of them sex workers, and dismembered some of their bodies.

“Are you at least a little sorry?” Judge Timothy Mazzei asked him Wednesday in a loud, indignant voice.

Heuermann nodded and appeared to mouth “yes.”

“You are disgusting -- a despicable man, if you are a man at all,” the judge said, his voice rising. “And you are a coward.”

As Heuermann was led away in handcuffs, spectators in the packed courtroom seemed to jeer.

Victims’ children recount a confounding loss

Most of the women disappeared between 2000 and 2010, and most of their remains were found on a parkway not far from Long Island’s Gilgo Beach, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Manhattan.

Costilla’s remains were found in 1993, more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) away in the Hamptons, while Vergata’s remains were found in 1996 on Fire Island, more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of Gilgo Beach.

Brainard-Barnes’ two children, who were 7 and 1 when she disappeared in 2007, underscored Wednesday how her absence shaped their lives and how she never got to know the adults they grew up to be. Her sister, Melissa Cann, said she lived with “survivor’s guilt” for decades, wondering whether she could have done something more to protect Brainard-Barnes.

“It was a weight I carried everywhere,” Cann said, sobbing deeply. But, she said, that guilt is “not mine to carry. It is for Rex and Rex alone.”

Liliana Waterman was 3 when her mother, Megan Waterman, vanished. The daughter said she didn’t fully understand what had happened until she was about 9.

“In an instant, my world was shattered,” she said. “Was she in pain? Was she scared?”

How the Gilgo Beach serial killer was caught

The case spilled into view in 2010, when investigators started to find remains along Ocean Parkway while looking into the disappearance of another sex worker, Shannan Gilbert, whose death was ultimately ruled an accidental drowning.

The case went cold until 2022, when detectives linked Heuermann to a pickup truck that a witness reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared in 2010.

Eventually, they matched DNA from a pizza crust Heuermann discarded in a Manhattan trash can to genetic material extracted from highly degraded hair fragments found on the women’s remains.

Investigators amassed other evidence, including cellphone and tracking data showing Heuermann arranged meetings with some victims shortly before their disappearances. After Heuermann’s 2023 arrest, prosecutors recovered what they described as a “blueprint” for the killings from his computer files.

Calling the man “a monster,” Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney declared that there was nothing Heuermann could say to mitigate his deeds.

As part of his guilty plea, Heuermann agreed to cooperate with the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit to help catch other serial killers.

Heuermann has spent the past three years alone in a segregated cell at the Suffolk County jail, reading crime novels, occasionally being visited by his lawyers or family, and striking up a brief correspondence with the infamous “Happy Face Killer,” according to Sheriff Errol Toulon.

Through their lawyers, Heuermann’s ex-wife and two grown children said they did not attend the sentencing out of respect for the victim’s families.

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By Philip Marcelo

Associated Press writer Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed.