Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann is expected to plead guilty over the deaths of seven women putting a potential end to a decades-long horror.
Family members of the victims were notified of the shock news, relatives told Newsday.
The 62-year-old architect is expected to change his plea during his next court appearance on April 8.
Details have not been disclosed of the expected plea agreement and that the plea deal could still fall through if Heuermann has second thoughts or if the prosecutor, or the judge could refuse to sign off, Newsday reported.
On Thursday after the news broke, Robert A Macedonio, the attorney that has been representing Heuermann’s estranged wife, Asa Ellerup told Daily Mail, ‘I have no comment on behalf of the family.’
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney and defense attorney Michael J. Brown have been contacted.
Heuermann had been charged with seven murders over a two-decade reign of horror running from 1993 to 2011.
Since his arrest, he has denied any involvement in the killings and had pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him.
In September, Heuermann was scheduled to go to trial. If convicted, he faces life without parole.
The case of the Gilgo Beach serial killer, had haunted the Long Island community ever since the first of multiple bodies were discovered along Ocean Parkway in December 2010.
Some of the victims had been bound, others had been dismembered and their remains discarded along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in Suffolk County, Long Island and other remote spots across the barrier island.
All the victims were working as sex workers when they vanished after going to meet a client.
For years the case went cold and no arrests were ever made – until July 2023.
Heuermann, who owned an architectural firm was leaving his midtown office heading to the Long Island Rail Road, he barely got down the block before he was surrounded by police and the FBI handcuffed and arrested.
At the time, he was initially charged with the murders of three women: Amber Costello, Melissa Barthelemy and Megan Waterman and then charged with four more victims: Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Sandra Costilla, Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack.
The burly Heuermann was first linked to the murders following a tip about a pickup truck.
According to a witness, Costello had disappeared after going to see a client who drove a green Chevy Avalanche in September 2010.
Following the launch of a new Gilgo taskforce, investigators learned that Heuermann drove that same type of vehicle at the time of the murders, prosecutors say.
He also matched the description of the client seen by the witness.
As well as the DNA evidence, investigators also found a chilling ‘planning document’ on a hard drive in the basement of his family home in Massapequa Park.
The document outlined his methodology and allegedly had a section detailed ‘PREP’ and noted that ‘small’ women were preferred.
Heuermann lived in Massapequa Park in the same home he grew up in with his ex-wife Asa Ellerup, 63, and their two adult children, Victoria, 29, and Christopher, 35.
He would commute to his midtown Manhattan architecture firm where some of the victims worked and were last seen alive.
Growing up on Long Island, and working at Jones Beach when he was in his 20s’ he was especially familiar with Ocean Parkway, where the victims’ bodies were dumped.
Fears that a serial killer or killers were at large on Long Island began back in May 2010, when Shannan Gilbert vanished in bizarre circumstances one night.
The 24-year-old, who was working as an escort, had gone to see a client in the Oak Beach Association community when she made a terrifying 911 call, saying that someone was trying to kill her.
During a search for Gilbert in December 2010, officers came across the body of Barthelemy in the marshes by Gilgo Beach.
Within days, three more bodies – Costello, Brainard-Barnes and Waterman – had been found.
The four victims, who became known as the Gilgo Four, had been dumped within a quarter mile of each other, some of them bound and wrapped in burlap.
Over the following months, the remains of seven other victims were found.
Gilbert’s body was found last. Investigators maintain that she was not a victim, but died by accidental drowning after she fled into the dense thicket that night.
Heuermann has not been charged in connection to the deaths of the other four victims found along Ocean Parkway: Karen Vergata, Tanya Jackson and her two-year-old daughter Tatiana Dykes, and an unidentified victim, known only as ‘Asian Doe.’
Jackson – a US Army veteran – and her infant daughter were finally identified in April 2025 having for years been known only as ‘Peaches’ and ‘Baby Doe.’
Costilla, meanwhile, had never been linked to the Gilgo Beach serial killer case until Heuermann was hit with charges for her murder in 2024.
Her murder expands the timeline that the accused serial killer is alleged to have been actively preying on victims.
In March, a motion filed by the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, found that Heuermann allegedly created a Tinder account and utilized false identities to incessantly reach out to prostitutes before he was taken into custody in 2023.
He used the aliases ‘Andrew Roberts’ and ‘Thomas Hawk,’
Searches on his phone allegedly included ‘Why hasn’t the long island serial killer been caught,’ ‘Map of all known serial killers’ and ‘Cops launch Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force.’
A police detective described in the filing that Heuermann’s online activity as ‘clear evidence’ that he derived pleasure from others’ physical pain.
One of the burner phones described in the legal filing was in Heuermann’s possession when he was arrested.
He allegedly contacted at least 56 sex workers and reached out to massage parlors more than 300 times between January 2021 and March 2022.
Another phone, used through February 2023, was allegedly used to contact at least 61 ‘prostitution–related’ numbers more than 220 times.
The phones were consistently kept near a phone registered in Heuermann’s real name, prosecutors claimed.
Heuermann also allegedly conducted thousands of pornography–related searches using a Gmail account. That same account was used for more than 100 searches related to the Gilgo Beach serial killings, the filing said.
He also looked up violent pornography and content ‘related to bindings, torture, rape, snuff videos, crying, bruised and impaled women and/or girls,’ prosecutors said.
Heuermann’s internet history also allegedly featured searches for images of victims’ family members ‘mourning the deceased.’
Prosecutors submitted the filing in response to a defense motion seeking to suppress certain evidence in the case.
