A Long Island architect who led a secret life as a serial killer on Wednesday pleaded guilty to murdering seven women and admitted he killed an eighth in a string of long-unsolved crimes known as the Gilgo Beach killings.
Rex Heuermann, 62, entered the pleas in a courtroom packed with reporters, police and victims’ relatives, some of whom wept as he detailed his murders. He is to be sentenced in June to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Heuermann’s guilty pleas — to three counts of first-degree murder and four of intentional murder — bring finality to a case that bedeviled investigators, tormented victims’ families and tantalized a true-crime obsessed public for years. Although he was not charged in her death, he also admitted that he killed Karen Vergata in 1996.
Photo: AFP
The women, many of whom were sex workers in their 20s, were killed over a 17-year span from 1993 to 2010.
Heuermann told a judge in Riverhead, New York, that he had strangled the women and dismembered some of them before discarding their bodies wrapped in burlap, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
The murders drew national attention after police found numerous sets of human remains in 2010 and 2011 along an isolated stretch of Gilgo Beach, a short drive from Heuermann’s home. The investigation, which failed to identify a suspect for years, inspired movies and documentaries.
Investigators tied Heuermann to the case in part by using DNA collected from a pizza crust that a surveillance team saw him throw away in Manhattan.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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