Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann admitted Wednesday that he strangled and dismembered eight sex workers and dumped their bodies along desolate stretches of Long island, ending a heartbreaking saga that has haunted the New York metro area for three decades.
The Manhattan architect and Massapequa Park schlub’s chilling guilty plea includes the slayings of seven women he had been charged with killing since 1993 — and an eighth victim newly linked to him.
The victims’ relatives gasped in Suffolk County court as the notorious killer repeatedly answered, “strangulation,” when asked how he murdered each of the women.
Heuermann also confessed that he dismembered the women and tied them up in burlap.
“He will serve three consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole,” prosecutors said.
Heuermann, 62, murdered Amber Lynn Costello, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who were famously known as the “Gilgo Four” — as well as Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor and Sandra Costilla, the first victim killed in 1993.
The married father of two also copped to killing Vergata.
Heuermann, who was arrested in 2023, will be sentenced on June 17.
“You know, the regular guy who goes to work, has kids in the local school and in a good neighborhood, but he’s killing people on the side,” a neighbor told NBC News about Heuermann in 2023.
Clever police work and cutting-edge DNA evidence helped take down the ogre-like, alleged serial killer, whose arrest has spawned real-crime documentaries and led to unprecedented media attention.
Suffolk investigators even scraped DNA from a used pizza box Heuermann tossed into a Big Apple trash can to help crack the cold case.
Since his arrest, sickening details have emerged.
Prosecutors said he killed all of the women in the basement of his home, which appears to be in squalid conditions compared to other houses in the pristine Nassau neighborhood.
Since his arrest, sickening details have emerged.
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His family — including his longtime wife — has claimed they had no idea what Heuermann was allegedly doing in his spare time.
He also kept a Tinder account and buzzed prostitutes on burner phones more than 500 times, prosecutors revealed in March. Heuermann made “significant searches for pornography related to bindings, torture, rape, snuff videos, crying, bruised and impaled women and/or girls,” according to prosecutors.
Heuermann had long maintained his innocence as his defense team tried to contest DNA evidence and point to other potential suspects.