Netflix‘s new true-crime docuseries, Gone Girls: The Long Island, retells a series of chilling murders on New York City’s Long Island from 1993 to 2011. According to Yahoo News, between 2010 and 2011, remains belonging to 11 women, most of whom were sex workers, were found on Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach — four victims were found within proximity to each other and were discovered wrapped in burlap with belts or tape. It became clear to authorities and the community that there was a serial killer in the area.
After more than a decade, authorities arrested a suspect, 61-year-old Rex Heuermann, an architect from New York City living in Nassau County, who is accused of murdering seven women: Amber Costello, Melissa Barthelemy, and Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valerie Mack, Yahoo News reported.
Read on for what the three-part series uncovers about the murders, why it took authorities so long to find Heuermann, and where he is now.
Friends and family of the victims say authorities dismissed their concerns because the victims were sex workers
Yahoo News reported that the docuseries walks viewers through what happened to the victims and how Heuermann was eventually taken into custody. The docuseries interviews the victims’ families and friends, who shared that they felt like the police and the media ignored their concerns because the victims were sex workers. It helps tell their stories and uncovers how authorities were negligent in catching the killer.
“Police were saying, if you’re not a sex worker, you don’t have anything to worry about,” Long Island Press reporter Jaclyn Gallucci said in the show’s first episode. “You don’t want to think that somebody’s going around murdering women, and you want to say, ‘OK, they put themselves in that situation, this is the reason why this happened to them and this is the reason this could never happen to me.'”
Others said they even gave the police information about a man matching Heuermann’s description years before he was arrested.
In an interview on the show, Dave Schaller and Bear Brodsky, Costello’s roommates at the time she went missing in 2010, shared an encounter they allegedly had with Heuermann before she disappeared. They said Costello called them and said a client of hers was at the house and scaring her. Schaller and Brodsky said they went to the house and told the man to leave.
They said they knew Costello accepted a call from the man in September 2010 and went to see him (he allegedly offered her $1,500 for the meeting). Costello was never seen again.
Schaller and Brodsky went to the police after Costello vanished and described the man in detail and the first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche he was driving. In 2023, when they saw Heuermann’s face on TV after he was arrested, Schaller said it was the same man they had told the police about more than a decade earlier. Heuermann was driving a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche at the time of his arrest.
“[Police] had their answers for f**king years,” he said.
The cover-up that stopped authorities from finding Heuermann
Though the show did not include interviews with police at the time of the murders, the second episode explores controversies that may have been pivotal in derailing the case. According to the New York Law Journal, Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota resigned from office in 2017 amid an indictment that alleged he helped conceal an incident of police brutality that saw authorities threaten a victim. The indictment led to him being disbarred in 2020, News 12 reported, and sentenced to federal prison the following year, according to The Associated Press.
Yahoo News reported that Suffolk County Police Chief James Burke walked away from the position in 2015 and was arrested in 2023 for solicitation of a sex worker.
In an interview on the show, Gus Garcia-Roberts, an investigative reporter who covered the case for Newsweek, said that looking back, it was likely that Burke’s professional woes may have taken away his attention from investigating the Gilgo Beach murders.
The show’s final episode seems to affirm Garcia-Roberts’ theory, as Ray Tierney, who’s been the Suffolk County district attorney since January 2022, said that after a new team of investigators was brought onto the case, it only took them six weeks to set their sights on Heuermann as a suspect.
Director Liz Garbus agrees with Garcia-Roberts.
“I think Suffolk County under police chief Jimmy Burke and DA Tom Spota was run like a crime syndicate,” she told Tudum. “This is a cautionary tale about how to stop that kind of thing before these kinds of people get in positions of power.”
Where is Rex Heuermann now?
People magazine reported that Heuermann is being held without bail at the Riverhead Correctional Facility in Suffolk County awaiting trial.
“For the most part, it just seems like this is a new way of life for [Heuermann],” Suffolk County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon Jr., Ed.D., told People. “In the beginning he was a little bit more starry-eyed as to his surroundings. Life has transformed over the last several months. He receives visits, he makes phone calls and he doesn’t congregate with the rest of the population because of the crimes he’s accused of.”
As authorities continue to investigate the case and other unsolved incidents in the area spanning years, Heuermann’s fate remains unclear, Tudum reported. Garbus told the outlet that the case evolved as they finalized the docuseries’ editing.
“After we completed and turned in our cuts to Netflix, there was another victim added to [Heuermann’s] docket,” she said. “Will there be more between now and the time that we air? It’s possible. Will there be more between now and the time that we go to trial, if they go to trial? I’d bet yes.”
