Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann has been sentenced to life in prison without parole in an emotional end to a decades-long murder case that haunted Long Island.
Families applauded and cheered in the courtroom after Judge Timothy Mazzei handed down the sentence Wednesday. The judge told Heuermann, “You are disgusting — a despicable man, if you are a man at all,” adding, “And you are a coward.”
Heuermann was allowed to speak at sentencing and told the court, "I am responsible for all that was said in this room. The words I would say have no meaning."
“Are you at least a little sorry?” Mazzei asked, and Heuermann nodded and appeared to mouth “yes.”
Heuermann’s ex-wife, Asa Ellerup, and their two grown children said through their lawyers that they would not attend sentencing out of respect for the victim’s families.
Earlier at the hearing, Heuermann, hands clasped and resting on the defense table in an eastern Long Island courtroom, looked straight ahead and lightly tapped his fingers as he was confronted by families of his victims.
“A million years isn’t enough," Jasmine Robinson, a cousin of victim Jessica Taylor, told Heuermann. "Nothing will ever make this right.”
“Justice has been done, but it can’t replace what has been taken,” said JoAnn Mack, the mother of victim Valerie Mack. “She had dreams, and you took them all away from her.”
Gilgo Beach serial killer’s secret life
The Long Island architect, 62, lived a secret life of violence for years before admitting in April that he killed eight women.
He pleaded guilty in court to murdering seven women: Barthelemy, Mack, Taylor, Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Sandra Costilla.
Heuermann also admitted to killing an eighth woman, Karen Vergata, though he was never charged in her death. He confessed to strangling his victims, many of them sex workers, and dismembering some of their bodies.
The sentencing concludes an extraordinary investigation that solved one of New York's most perplexing mysteries.
The case began as a series of seemingly unconnected disappearances of young women and later became the focus of true-crime documentaries, books and podcasts after police began finding the victims' skeletal remains in the sandy scrub along a coastal parkway.
How the Gilgo Beach serial killer was caught
The investigation began in 2010, when investigators started to discover remains along Ocean Parkway while looking into the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert, whose death was ultimately ruled an accidental drowning. Bodies continued to be discovered, but the case went cold.
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Detectives got a huge break in the case in 2022, when they linked Heuermann to a pickup truck that a witness reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared in 2010.
Eventually, investigators 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 victims’ remains.
Other evidence included cellphone and tracking data showing Heuermann arranged meetings with some victims shortly before their disappearances.
After Heuermann's arrest, prosecutors recovered what they described as a “blueprint” for the killings from his computer files.
Heuermann has spent the past three years alone in a segregated cell at the Suffolk County jail, where he has read crime novels and was occasionally visited by his lawyers or family.
He also struck up a brief correspondence with the infamous “Happy Face Killer,” according to Sheriff Errol Toulon.
As part of his guilty plea, Heuermann agreed to cooperate with the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit to help catch other serial killers.
With reporting by The Associated Press
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