Transcript of The After Show: New Updates on the Gilgo Beach Murders New

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Pigmentflecken reduzieren und vorbeugen durch innovative Wirkstoffe und höchsten UV-Schutz. OIBOS Anti-Age, dein neues Duo gegen Pigmentflecken und Hautalterung. OIBOS Individual Skincare. Hi everybody, welcome to 20/20: The After Show. So happy you're with us today. I'm Deborah Roberts, and you are joining us for for a pretty special story because we're gonna take a deep look, a special look at a major case that so many people have been talking about around the country. It's one of the most shocking crime stories I think that we've ever covered here on 20/20. And many of you have heard of it. It's called the Gilgo Beach Murders. Well, this was a series of killings of young women whose remains were discovered along Ocean Parkway on Long Island, New York. And at the center of those killings was Someone that people just never would've imagined, a 59-year-old architect by the name of Rex Heuermann. Well, I remember this case so well because I was assigned to it when he was arrested in New York City in July of 2023 for the murders of 3 women before he was later charged with the deaths of 4 other women. This past April, Heuermann shocked everybody.

He had steadfastly maintained his innocence And then he showed up in a courtroom in Suffolk County and changed his plea, and people are still talking about that and the reverberations and what that's going to mean possibly for law enforcement down the line. We're going to get into the details of what happened in that courtroom and also how police might be now working a little bit with Heuermann to try to solve other crimes. Yep, you heard that right. They will be putting their heads together with him to try to see if they can solve other murders. Here to help us uncover all of these details and to talk about it all is ABC News Chief Investigative Reporter Josh Margolin and 20/20 producer Christina Corbin. Hey guys. You both have been on this story for a very long time. I had heard about it over the years, and as I said, I jumped into it reporting just a few years ago when we heard about Heuermann. But Josh, this goes back decades, and New Yorkers definitely have been talking about the story of these missing women. When you worked for a newspaper, The Post, You worked on this story.

My first front page story at the New York Post was the day that they found the first bodies at Gilgo Beach in 2010.

That was your first story?

That was my first front page story at the Post. I had just started the week before. And so I have stayed with the Gilgo Beach story all these years through the investigation, through the years when we in the media thought that it had gone cold and nobody was looking at it and it was—

Yeah, it was just under the radar. And also too, there wasn't this real connection for a very long time.

Right, so what the story revealed build in those earliest months and then years was that Suffolk County and the highways that traverse Long Island and then go all the way out to Suffolk, which is the bigger of the two Long Island counties, but it's also farther away, is that you'd have these isolated areas along the highways, very, very dark. These aren't population centers right around the highways, and that it had become a dumping ground for victims of crimes. We originally thought that the victims would largely be like, you know, mob victims, right? But then we ended up, you know, we have these women who turns out that they were sex workers. So the belief was—

Mostly, not all of them, but mostly.

At Gilgo Beach. And the thought was that these were women who were victims of the johns.

I walked along that highway when I went out to cover the story, and I remember just being so struck by how desolate it was, as you said. And at night, nobody's out there, nobody can see you. Anything. And the brush and how dense it was. Christina, you don't go back quite as far with these cases, but what, 2010, you got involved in these cases. And as you always do, because you bring such a personal touch to everything you do with us when you're booking stories and meeting families, and you got a chance to talk to the families of these victims because many people saw them as these sort of faceless women who really, in a way, as coarse as it sounds, who almost don't matter. And you really helped to bring to life who these women were and the fact that they did have family members who cared and who worried about what had happened?

Yeah, I think there was this largely this perception that somehow their profession sealed their fate and they were different from the rest of the population, so we should not be afraid that there's a Jack the Ripper on the loose out on Long Island. But spending any time with their family, I mean, they were sisters, they were daughters, some of them were mothers, and I did form a pretty close bond with several of the family members over the years.

Shannon Gilbert was one of the names that surfaced early on.

Yeah, so Shannon Gilbert was a 23-year-old escort from Jersey City, New Jersey. She disappeared from Oak Beach May 1st, 2010, and it was actually the search for Shannon some 6 months later that led to this mass grave site of women at Gilgo Beach. Gilgo Beach is about 3 miles from Oak Beach, give or take. So it was actually Shannon's disappearance that led to the discovery of the Gilgo Four. Melissa Barth LaMay, Maureen Brady Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello.

You know their names all so well. Yes.

And while Shannon's disappearance led to this discovery, it's important to note that Rex Uriman has not been linked to her death, nor has he been charged in Shannon's death.

Yeah. What were the theories, Christina, early on? Because police didn't know really what they were dealing with. And as I said in the beginning, they didn't even know that they were all connected. What kind of led to the complications of the investigation? Because it took multiple investigators, some who had left the, you know, police forces, new folks came in and to have fresh eyes to look at it. What complicated it so?

So there was a lot of disagreement among law enforcement over who we were looking for. I remember a very well-respected, very intelligent detective with Suffolk County saying to me that the suspect is a crude street urchin. That is the description that he gave. And then I remember an FBI source saying, actually, we believe this is somebody who's a white middle-aged man, has a good job, drives a nice car.

Interesting.

And probably blends in very well with the rest of the population. So those were two very different profiles. And then there was disagreement over whether we were dealing with one killer or two killers, because the earlier victims were found dismembered. The later victims, the Gilgo Four, were not dismembered. So was— do we have two killers, or was this one killer who had evolved over time? And I think most in law enforcement believed that his early victims, he went to great lengths to dispose of them and dismember them, and then when they were not found, he realized, well, I don't have to do that with the later victims. So it was a debate among law enforcement whether we had two or whether we had one.

Yeah, and somebody who had an ego about it too, because they thought they could get away with it. Josh, as you said, this case, people thought just was just gonna linger and just be cold forever. And then in 2022, 'cause I remember talking to some of the investigators and they said, you know, a new, they never really gave up on this. They just never really got anywhere. Then a new task force comes on board in 2022. They start reexamining evidence, some old evidence that changed everything.

But all of this had been happening for months to years. And then they all decide, you know what, let's all go in.

Yeah.

Let's open those files. It's actually in some jurisdictions they call it a cold case review. And what they do is they say, "Let's put a task force together. Everybody's going to cooperate." And so what ends up happening is you have this new team that's there. They bring in the FBI, they bring in the New York State Police, they bring in the New York State DNA analysis capabilities, and they start looking at it. They take a number of steps and they wind up backing into the reality that Christina said, which is that this is a professional person. Who has some money, who has access to professional spaces, who can move around freely in the community. A street urchin on the island is not going to be able to move around like that.

Yeah. I thought that was so fascinating that they had a profile, Christina. And then at a certain point, there's that car. There was a car that they identified that they thought was a little bit unique and putting that together with this professional person, and it eventually leads them to Rex Heuermann. And people were just like stunned. This is a guy who was an upstanding architect. He was a family man. He was married. He had children. And police were even stunned when they recognized that this was probably the guy they were looking at, right?

That's right. And Rex Heuermann lived in a home in Massapequa, Long Island. Massapequa was long a focus here because some of the victims phones pinged from a tower in Massapequa, Long Island. But it was a real shock to people that actually we're dealing with a married father of two, an architect with an office in Midtown Manhattan. It was a real shock. That's, that's the profile of the person in the end.

They arrested Heuermann in, um, July of 2023, and I, I remember all of New York was, was abuzz about this. Well, I want to talk more about that because that was so fascinating. Um, But when Heuermann was arrested, he absolutely maintained his innocence. And then recently he changed his plea. When we come back, we're going to get into some of the details that happened in the courtroom, and you're going to hear some exclusive details on how the victims' families feel about this latest development in the story. So don't go anywhere. Kaffee in seiner besten Form. Mit Qubo wird jeder Kaffee auf Knopfdruck zum Genussmoment. Denn mit der neuen Qubo One Kapselmaschine von Chibo genießt du feinsten Spitzenkaffee aus besonderen Anbaugebieten. Vollmundige Aromen dank innovativer Press Brew Technologie und über 17 Sorten Kaffee für jeden Geschmack. Erlebe Premiumkaffee schon ab 29 €. Entdecke jetzt die Qubo Kapselmaschinen in deiner Chibo Filiale und auf chibo.de. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. 911, which emergency? We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer. For the next 2 decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible.

A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, Blood and Water. Listen on Apple Podcasts. On Spotify or your favorite podcast app, and ad-free on Amazon Music. Welcome back to 20/20: The After Show. I'm sitting here talking with ABC News chief investigative reporter Josh Margolin and 20/20 producer Christina Corbin about the latest in the Gilgo Beach murder case, the latest head-spinning turn that happened. We were talking about Rex Huermann, the architect, the family man who was arrested, who had maintained his innocence. Everybody was really waiting to hear the details. I mean, Police had revealed a little bit that this was a guy who, unbeknownst to his wife and family, would turn to sex workers at night when his wife was out of town. This was a guy who clearly had some kind of a motive, they felt, to get rid of these women and maybe just on a very dark side had committed these crimes. But we wanted to know the details about what had happened. And then all of a sudden, we hear that Rex Ehrman is going to turn up in court and he's going to change his plea. Josh, how shocked were you?

We were very surprised. So we, we started hearing over the last few weeks that this was something that was circulating around, but it was a surprise to us because by all accounts he seemed like he was going to fight this tooth and nail. They had made every motion under the sun. They were trying to keep every piece of evidence out. Now importantly, Rex's defense team lost every move.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. At the judge ruled against them at every turn. Every piece of evidence that had been developed by police and the DA's office was going to be entered into trial.

But they saw the handwriting on the wall, probably. Yeah, obviously.

But we, we, we couldn't even calculate why they would plead out because if they're gonna wind up going to prison for, for a bunch of murders, Why not roll the dice?

Exactly.

So it was very surprising to us. And I don't know that we even know to this day exactly what the behind-the-scenes rationale was.

Well, he pleaded guilty to murdering 7 women and even admitted to killing an 8th victim who we had not really talked a lot about, Karen Vergata. Did that surprise you, Christina?

It didn't surprise me because he was a suspect in her death. But I think, you know, his defense was trying to get the DNA evidence kicked out. And that failed. And I think the walls were closing in on Rex Heuermann. And you can't really argue with DNA because hair that was found on some of the remains was ultimately linked to him. And so that just— there was just no way getting around that.

There was so much evidence.

And to Josh's point, yeah, we really don't know exactly why he decided in the end to plead guilty. Some people have speculated that he wanted to spare his family, his wife, or ex-wife rather, and his children from hearing all of the gruesome details. About what he did to these women, the torture, the strangulation, and everything.

Does that make sense to you that maybe he would want to do that?

Yeah, possibly. I mean, possibly.

Because we hadn't heard from them and how they felt about all that. But his ex-wife and his daughter were in the courtroom. But Josh, he actually waived his right to any appeals of his conviction. And we cover so many stories where we keep doing updates about appeals that are being filed, but he waived his right to appeals. And then admitted to a murder that, you know, he hadn't even been charged with. How do you think that deal came about?

Well, a lot— we don't know exactly what happened in the room, I have to say that. But we do know that when somebody is going to agree to plead guilty, a lot of times the prosecutors will insist, if you are going to do that, we'll go along with it, but you must do X. So the final victim here, the Karen Vergato victim, they knew that they could not prosecute that case because they didn't have enough evidence, they suspected Rex, as, as Christina said, and so they wanted Rex to admit to it so that way they could actually be able to go back to the family and to the public to say that's a solved case. So we do have, have a lot of instances like that. Also notably in this case, different than in some of the other high-profile plea deals, there were, there were admissions that were entered in, and the prosecutors made a point of explaining the crimes in a way that in some jurisdictions they don't, and that sometimes winds up being controversial. In this case, there is no doubt. There's no doubt about how the investigation went. There's no doubt about what was going to happen at trial.

There's no doubt about what Rex did. He admitted to all of it.

That was really something else. What was that like in the courtroom?

Well, the courtroom was hushed when Rex came in, and there's—

he's a tall, imposing figure.

Very imposing. He's imposing in a room full of people, right? So you're talking about a packed courtroom. Also, the way the Suffolk County Courthouse lays out, you actually have the holding cell behind that closed door that everyone sees on TV. You have the holding cell right near that room. So he's a big guy and he's shackled.

Mm.

And so the chains clank. And so you have the courtroom is hushed. Family is there. Full of media. Global attention. And you hear him before you see him.

Mm.

So you have this big 6-foot-4 imposing figure shackled, walking through this blind hallway, so he is preceded by the sounds of his own chains. Yeah, coming in through.

Very— it was kind of haunting. What was his demeanor like?

You know, the, the papers focused on it. They, they said he was almost smirking. Now, it's also easy to take a snapshot of somebody in a weird facial expression at a moment, and it— you say it's a smirk, but it's just somebody's facial expression changing. He was calm. He was, he was not particularly remorseful. He was not particularly emotional. But I think it's important in those moments for us to know what we know covering crime the way that we do. We're talking about somebody who doesn't think like the rest of us, clearly.

I like the way you always try to find that middle road. You never really want to go completely judgmental, Josh, and that's why you're so good at what you do. Um, his wife Asa and his daughter Victoria were in the courtroom. What do we know about the two of them and how they might be dealing with all of this? Because you and I made efforts, we've been trying to talk to them for the very long— longest time. What do we know about them and what impact this has had, either of you?

I know they're very private people, and I know they asked for space following this announcement and said they would rather the focus be on the families.

Yeah, yeah.

We, we know very little. Rex had something of a man cave that police now believe was his kill space in the basement of the home. He kept guns, he kept weapons. But law enforcement very early on wanted the public to understand that officially law enforcement does not believe that they had any awareness of his crimes. Certainly they don't, they don't believe there was any involvement. They have been exonerated to the extent that they might have needed or wanted to be exonerated, that the crimes are believed to have been committed when the family was out of town, certainly not in the home. That's what we know.

You know, we've done too many stories where there are people who had double lives and folks really didn't know in their lives what was happening. But enough about his family, Christina, what about the victims' families? Because this was going to be a moment for them to be able to know more, to go to court and to hear what happened, as awful as it might be. And now suddenly— you know, a stop in everything. How are they dealing, at least the few that you've had a chance to speak with, how are they dealing with this plea arrangement?

I've been in touch with several of them, and the reactions vary, but for the most part, I would say they feel like a huge burden has been lifted, that they don't have to go through a trial and hear all of the graphic details. Of course, it is bittersweet because even though there's, you know, I never like to use the word closure, and I know victims' families hate that word. I'm sure they do, yeah. There is no such thing as closure to them. But at least he has confessed. And at least they are spared the trial. And, you know, I know at many points over the years, there were always these questions of, will this ever be solved? And maybe the killer is actually dead, or maybe this is some drifter who had come through to Long Island and he's long gone. So they know who did it.

They have a face on.

They have a face.

Evil.

But it is bittersweet at the same time.

Understandably. Well, his sentencing is going to come this summer, and he's facing obviously life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Several times over.

Yeah, I was going to say multiple life sentences. In other words, he's never getting out of prison, right? I mean, that's— is that what you're expecting is probably going to happen?

Oh yeah, it would be a shock on top of shocks to see him ever walk out of prison.

Yeah. Well, I want to talk to you guys more about what happens from here, because as we said, He might actually— Heuermann might be working with police now to help them out, cooperating with the FBI. When we come back, we're going to talk more about that and what we've learned about that agreement. So stay put. Don't go anywhere.

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Welcome back, everybody, to 20/20: The After Show. I am sitting with our ABC News Chief Investigative Reporter Josh Margolin and 20/20 Producer Christina Corbin. Let's talk about this idea that humor now has agreed to work with the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit to help them solve other crimes. Josh, you made it very clear it's not a cozy arrangement that they're working together, but he's agreed to cooperate.

Absolutely. And in fact, I mean, look, we've seen Silence of the Lambs, we've seen the show Mindhunters.

Which freaks me out, both of those.

Right. And Mindhunters with Jonathan Groff. It's, you know, the FBI has really been in the vanguard of trying to understand crime, the nature of crime, the nature of criminals. And the crime that has really baffled the experts for all of these years have been these serial killers, people who live among us, who travel among us, but have this terrible dark side, and they just kill, and the killing is the end in and of itself. And so it was really remarkable when we heard that the Gilgo plea deal had this component where Uriman was agreeing that he would cooperate with the experts at the FBI as they try to do like they did in Mindhunters, or in Silence of the Lambs, go in and question him to understand the nature of the criminal mind, what made him tick, what activated his brain to want to kill people in the way that he did it, and then to plot it out, and then to stop. As Christina said, we saw the evolution of his killing techniques. In the earliest days, it's believed, of the crimes he committed. Then we see a period of years where there may have been no crimes committed.

So what motivated him to stop? What motivated him to start?

I remember talking about that early on with some of the detectives, uh, which they may learn more about when they talk to him. Christina, what do we know about the focus of those interviews and what they might be able to elicit?

Yeah, I would say the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit studies the psychological fingerprints at a crime scene. And from that, they like to develop a profile of who they're looking at, their age, their profession, and they study things like, you know, their M.O., the psychology behind it. And so, they would like to work with Rex Uriman to sort of get inside the mind of a serial killer, what motivates them. I would say with these killings, they were actually getting closer and closer as time went on. We had one from 1993, 1996, then 2 in the early 2000s, then 2007, '09, and 2 in 2010 that were just like 3 months apart.

Yeah.

That would have been Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, June 2010 and September 2010. So they were actually becoming closer and closer. So I think that, you know, to Josh's point, the FBI really wants to get into the mind of someone who could do this. And in Rex's case, I mean, these women were, They were tortured, they were killed, they were disposed of like trash, and then he actually taunted—

yes—

the victims' families by using the cell phones belonging to the victims and calling family and leaving these weird creepy messages. Yes, well, he would call Melissa Barthelemy's sister in upstate New York, and he taunted her, and he actually did it from some of the busiest cell towers in the world, like Times Square and Penn Station. He kept the calls short, under 2 minutes.

Very clever.

And, and, and at the time, I remember there being speculation that perhaps we were dealing with someone in law enforcement or someone who was knowledgeable of law enforcement tactics. And so, I mean, that, that was truly sadistic to be calling the families and then also describing in great detail what he did to them, what he did to Melissa Bartholomay.

And, and you're so right, so clever about trying to, you know, make sure that he kept— he made sure that nobody could track him. Josh, when you think about it, and Christina alluded to this, you know, hiding in plain sight, the idea that Rex Heuermann was, and that's something that we have heard a lot from law enforcement about these serial killers. Sometimes they are right there in plain sight. Any other commonalities that, that over the years that you've sort of been able to piece together?

Well, what's interesting is over the years, the experts have found that a lot of their original beliefs of how serial killers operate are not true. That the studying of serial killers has revealed a lot to law enforcement. You know, the old days we had this caricature of the serial killer like the Ted Bundy era.

Lurking in an alley.

Or in a big old car traveling along the interstate somewhere in the South or in the West without a lot of people around, going after only hitchhikers or people without connections. We didn't picture them as a middle-class architect professional. Professional. Living out loud, being on YouTube, doing videos about how he works with New York City government to cut through red tape. So that's really the, the FBI behavioral analysis folks, they have really worked to make sure that they can learn why the stereotypes were wrong to help solve other cases. There are a lot of cold cases in this country. We look at them all the time.

Yeah, yeah, so a lot of their assumptions might absolutely be dispelled because of what they learned. So more to come probably in the Rex Heuermann story, that's for sure. Well, you two, thanks so much for coming by. As always, great talking with you. And so great to have you with us, too. Thank you for joining us today. And remember, you can watch our latest 2020 episodes on Friday nights on ABC. And you can stream episodes like this one anytime on Disney+ and Hulu. Have a good day, everybody. Mr. Sugar, we've run out of places to hide our money.

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