Ten Bodies Found

The Nassau County Police Academy sits at the heart of Massapequa Park, a compact village on Long Island's south shore where generations of officers have raised their families. Rex Heuermann raised his family there too, just 20 minutes from the stretch of Ocean Parkway where, over more than three decades, he left the bodies of at least eight women.

On April 8, 2026, in a packed Riverhead courtroom, Heuermann entered guilty pleas to three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder, and admitted to killing an eighth woman he had not previously been charged with. His crimes, prosecutors confirmed, date back to 1993.

The case formally began in December 2010, when a Suffolk County police officer and his K-9, Blue, discovered human remains during a training exercise along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach. Two days later, investigators found three more sets of remains along the same half-mile stretch: those of Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello, all escorts who had advertised on Craigslist and vanished between July 2007 and September 2010. Their bodies had been bound at the head, midsection, and legs in camouflaged burlap. Six additional sets of remains were found in 2011. In total, at least ten sets of human remains were recovered along Ocean Parkway and nearby areas of Suffolk and Nassau counties.

What followed over the next decade was not an aggressive investigation. When a new Suffolk County Police Commissioner reviewed the case in 2021, he found that a single detective had been assigned to it, and that the department had made no effort to coordinate with federal or state law enforcement. The man suspected of the killings had been living in a village whose identity is inseparable from policing, and the institutional infrastructure to find him simply had not been deployed.

That calculus changed in 2022 with the formation of a revamped Gilgo Beach Homicide Task Force. Within six weeks, detectives had identified Heuermann as a suspect. Cell phone mapping placed him in midtown Manhattan, where he maintained an architectural practice, and in Massapequa Park. A vehicle registration database connected him to a pickup truck witnessed when one victim disappeared in 2010. While Heuermann was under surveillance, investigators retrieved a discarded pizza box and matched DNA from the crust to genetic material found on victims. Police arrested him on July 13, 2023, outside his Manhattan office.

Heuermann had lived at 105 1st Avenue in Massapequa Park with his wife, Asa Ellerup, and their children. Neighbors described him as quiet and unthreatening. "We've been here for about 30 years, and the guy's been quiet, never bothered anyone," one told CBS News. Actor Billy Baldwin, who shared Heuermann's graduating class at Berner High School in 1981, wrote publicly: "Massapequa is in shock."

The shock was institutional as much as personal. Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney, speaking after the guilty plea at a press conference held at the Suffolk County Police Academy in Brentwood, said Heuermann had walked "among us, playacting as a normal suburban dad." Tierney also acknowledged the reckoning is not over: "This case closes, and another one opens. There are still bodies on that beach."

Heuermann's DNA will be entered into the FBI's national database to investigate potential links to other unsolved crimes. Sentencing is scheduled for June 17.