Rex Heuermann, the 62-year-old man accused of killing eight women in Long Island, New York, has finally confessed to his crimes. Heuermann made his confession as he appeared in Suffolk County Court on Wednesday, NBC News reported.
Rex Heuermann confessed to murdering eight women
Heuermann, who previously pleaded not guilty, has now admitted to murdering seven women and also confessed to killing an eighth person named Karen Vergata. However, Heuermann’s attorney, Michael Brown, said his client will not provide any further details about the murders.
Brown also said Heuermann made his confession five months before he was scheduled to go on trial, hoping to making the process easier for the families of the victims.
“He certainly wanted to save the families of the victims the ordeal of going to trial, coupled with saving his family from that,” Brown said, per NBC News.
Brown added that the confession also brings a sense of relief for his client: “When you have that type of — in your head, and on your body — I think by admitting it, it’s cathartic to some extent.”
Heuermann, who is scheduled to hear his sentencing on June 17, will likely face life in prison without parole and three consecutive life sentences, as well as four sentences of 25 years to life, per NBC News. As part of the plea deal, Heuermann will not be charged for Vergata’s murder.
The Gilgo Beach serial slayings was documented in Netflix’s ‘Gone Girls: The Long Island’
As Blavity reported, Netflix documented the story of the murders in its 2025 docuseries Gone Girls: The Long Island. Authorities opened an investigation of the murders after finding the remains of 11 women on Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach between 2010 and 2011. Four of the bodies were found near each other.
Yahoo! News reported that Heuermann was arrested a decade after the bodies were found. He was accused of killing Amber Costello, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valerie Mack.
The women’s loved ones said investigators neglected the case for a long time because most of the victims were identified as sex workers.
“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 Netflix documentary, according to Yahoo! News. “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.’”
Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney also spoke up for the women after Wednesday’s hearing.
“He thought that by killing them he could silence them forever and get away with murder,” he said, per NBC News. “But he was wrong.”