GILGO UPDATE: Rex Heuermann Pleads Guilty
4/9/20262 hr 13 min
The lead suspect in the Gilgo Beach Killings - 62 year old former architect Rex Heuermann - has now pleaded guilty.
So, with a trial off the table in the Long Island Serial Killer saga, join us for an update on what investigators found that finally nailed Heuermann - forcing him to confess.
Then stick around and revisit our two-part episode on this harrowing case that haunted Long Island for decades.
Plus, join us on next week’s Under the Duvet - over on Patreon - for a look at the impact this has all had on Heuermann’s own family.
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In 2010, Shannan Gilbert made a series of frantic 911 calls as she ran through the streets of Oak Beach, Long Island, screaming: “They’re trying to kill me”. Then she vanished.
A few months later a body was found - but it wasn’t her. And neither were the next 9 sets of human remains they found along Ocean Parkway.
Now, over a decade later, with the arrest of Rex Heuermann - the police believe they’ve found the elusive Long Island Serial Killer.
But the questions still stand; Why did it take so long to catch him - and was this the work of a lone serial killer, or multiple men using the same dumping ground?
We’ll look at Heuermann’s family life, his background - and delve into the 33-page bail document that offers us an in-depth look at how investigators finally caught this notorious, modern American serial killer.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSruti· Host0:00
This year I was bracing myself for a huge trial, that of Rex Heuermann, the Gilgo Beach serial killer, the case that we covered in depth last year in a two-parter. But honestly, I needn't have worried, because on Wednesday, the 8th of April, in a Suffolk County courthouse, he pleaded guilty to murdering seven women, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, and Sandra Costilla. And also, he pleaded guilty to intentionally causing the death of an eighth, Karen Vergata. In exchange for the guilty plea, Heuermann won't be charged with Karen's murder, but he will still spend the rest of his life behind bars. Heuermann's lawyer claimed that his client had decided to plead guilty to spare his victims' families the ordeal of a drawn-out trial. But given that this is the same man who phoned his victims' loved ones to taunt them after he had killed them, I find that quite hard to believe. This last-minute change of plea is probably much more likely to do with the documents that investigators found on Heuermann's computer. An architect by trade, it seems that Heuermann kept a chilling planning document to, in the words of the prosecutors, "methodically blueprint how to select, kill, and dump his victims." Police found a Word document on a hard drive in the basement of the house that Heuermann shared with his wife and children. In this document, spelled out in capital letters,