Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Gilgo Beach Serial Killer Rex Heuermann Admits to Killing 8 Women

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Gilgo Beach Serial Killer Rex Heuermann Admits to Killing 8 Women · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Picture a courtroom. It's a Riverhead, New York, April eighth,
0:05
twenty twenty six, right, and the Suffa County courtroom is
0:08
just packed to the absolute brim. I mean, you have
0:10
victims' families who have been waiting literally decades for this
0:14
exact moment.
0:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, decades of waiting exactly.
0:16
Speaker 1: You have law enforcement officials who spent their entire careers
0:19
chasing a ghost. You've got media from around the globe,
0:23
and even the defendant's ex wife is sitting right there
0:26
in the gallery.
0:27
Speaker 2: Wow.
0:28
Speaker 1: But despite the sheer mass of humanity in this room,
0:30
it is deathly silent. Standing before judge, Timothy Pimaze is
0:35
a sixty two year old man. He's wearing a dark suit,
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a crisp white shirt, and a blue pattern tie.
0:41
Speaker 2: He looks like a business van.
0:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, he looks exactly like what it used to be.
0:44
An architect. Just a guy who commuted on the Long
0:47
Island Railroad into midtown Manhattan every single morning, A guy
0:51
from the suburbs.
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Speaker 2: Completely unremarkable. I mean, a man basically designed to blend
0:55
into the background of a morning train commute. You know,
0:58
is reading the paper, holding a brief case.
1:00
Speaker 1: Right, But then District Attorney Raymond A. Tyranny stands up
1:04
and the silence breaks as he begins to read names,
1:07
eight names, eight women.
1:09
Speaker 2: It's chilling, and.
1:11
Speaker 1: For every single name, the sixty two year old former
1:13
architect is asked a simple, horrifying question, how did you
1:17
cause her death? And eight separate times, his answer is
1:20
just this cold, flat, one word response, this one word yeah. Strangulation. Strangulation, strangulation. Unbelievable.
1:28
So how does a seemingly ordinary suburban dad, you know,
1:32
a guy who measures square footage and files permits for
1:34
a living, commit decades of calculated, horrific murders today? Our
1:40
mission for this deep dive is to unpack the sprawling,
1:43
complex and just incredibly dark thirty year history of the
1:46
Gilgo Beach serial killer case.
1:48
Speaker 2: It's such a massive case, it really is.
1:50
Speaker 1: So Welcome to the deep dive. We're glad you're here
1:51
with us. We're going to examine how a monster hid
1:54
behind this mask of mundane normalcy and how the system
1:57
eventually caught up to him.
1:59
Speaker 2: That is the central paradox of this entire case. Really,
2:02
to understand the sheer brutality of the crimes he confessed to.
2:05
We first have to examine that perfectly constructed mask. We
2:08
have to look at how his day to day life
2:11
wasn't just a cover. It was an active training ground
2:15
for what he was doing in the dark.
2:16
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this, because I want to start right there.
2:19
At the time of his arrest back in July twenty
2:21
twenty three, Rex Heyerman was running a firm called RH
2:25
Consultants and Associates. His office was right near the Empire
2:28
State Building in Manhattan, and he was a licensed architect.
2:32
But from what I understand looking at the sources, he
2:34
wasn't exactly like designing sweeping skyscraper, no, none at all.
2:38
His specific job was essentially navigating New York City building codes.
2:44
Can you explain what that actually means in the context
2:46
of his personality?
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Speaker 2: Absolutely, And it is a crucial distinction. In New York
2:50
City real estate, there's this specialized role often called an
2:53
expedite or a code compliance architect. Okay, and New York
2:56
City has arguably the most dense, byzantine and contradictory set
3:01
of building codes and zoning laws on the planet. I
3:03
can only imagine, Oh, it's a labyrinth of red tape.
3:06
So Huerman's entire professional existence was based on understanding that
3:11
labyrinth better than anyone else. His clients hired him to
3:14
figure out exactly how to navigate these really rigid rules.
3:18
Speaker 1: Right, So he's looking for loopholes exactly.
3:20
Speaker 2: He had to look for structural workarounds, obsess over microscopic details,
3:25
and find ways to make his client's demands fit within
3:28
a rigid, unforgiving system.
3:30
Speaker 1: I have this analogy rolling around in my head about this.
3:33
In New York City real estate, knowing the building code
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loopholes is how you win, Right. You find the gray
3:39
areas on you find the blind spots that the city
3:42
inspectors aren't looking at, Like if you change a window,
3:44
the plumbing inspector doesn't care because information is siloed.
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Speaker 2: Right.
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Speaker 1: I just can't help but compare his knowledge of architectural
3:51
loopholes to his ability to find loopholes in law enforcements radar,
3:56
Like did his literal profession actively train him to be
3:59
a better press editor.
4:00
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is how perfectly your analogy aligns with
4:04
the psychological profile of an organized serial killer. Yeah, so
4:08
when criminologists and the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit look at
4:11
serial predators, they generally divide them into disorganized and organized typologies. Okay,
4:17
disorganized killers often act on impulse. Their crimes are crimes
4:23
of sudden passion or opportunity. Their crime scenes are chaotic,
4:27
They leave massive amounts of physical evidence behind.
4:30
Speaker 1: Because they're panicking or just not thinking.
4:31
Speaker 2: Ahead exactly, And they often struggle to maintain steady employment
4:35
or relationships because their internal world is just as chaotic
4:38
as their crimes.
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Speaker 1: So they are the ones who get caught relatively quickly
4:41
because they are leaving a trail of obvious mistakes precisely.
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Speaker 2: But organized killers are the opposite. They exhibit above average intelligence,
4:50
They hold down stable, often highly demanding jobs, are.
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Speaker 1: Running an architectural firm in Manhattan.
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Speaker 2: Right, and they maintain the facade of a completely normal
4:58
family life. Above all, they're driven by an extreme need
5:02
for control.
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Speaker 1: Wow.
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Speaker 2: Ohreman's profession required him to anticipate how systems work, and
5:07
more importantly, how systems fail.
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Speaker 1: That is terrifying.
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Speaker 2: It is he knew how to compartmentalize. He knew how
5:14
to keep a clean, fully compliant set of blueprints for
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the public eye, while the actual structure hidden behind the
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drywall was entirely different.
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Speaker 1: Oh man. That's exactly it.
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Speaker 2: He applied that exact same methodology to his double life.
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The Massapicko Park suburb, the commute, the wife and kids.
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That was the public blueprint right the front. But the
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burner phones, the hidden digital files, the dark web searches,
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that was the hidden reality.
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Speaker 1: And we really saw that public blueprint fracture over time
5:42
because the contrast in his behavior from his arrest to
5:46
his plea deal is just jarring.
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Speaker 2: It's a total one to eighty.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. When he was first arrested in July twenty twenty
5:51
three outside his Midtown office, the reports say he was tearful,
5:55
he looked shocked. He seemed like an overwhelmed suburban guy
5:59
whose world had just ended. But fast forward to April
6:02
twenty twenty six, and his demeanor in that Riverhead courtroom
6:05
is completely different. Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina actually described his
6:09
courtroom presence as serene, almost grandfatherly.
6:12
Speaker 2: Yes, But Catalina immediately follow that up by calling it.
6:15
Speaker 1: A lie, right exactly, He called it out immediately. He
6:18
said that serene demeanor was just a mask, exposing him
6:21
as a sadistic, soulless, murderous monster. But help me understand
6:26
that psychological shift, Like, how do you go from crying
6:29
on the sidewalk to calmly confessing to eight murders with
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a grandfatherly smile.
6:34
Speaker 2: Well, that grandfatherly calmness is a display of ultimate control.
6:38
When he was first arrested in Midtown, the loss of
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control was absolute and sudden.
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Speaker 1: It caught him off guard exactly.
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Speaker 2: The tears were likely not remorse for the victims. They
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were the shock of his meticulously built walls suddenly collapsing
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around him. It was self pity. But by the time
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of the plea deal nearly three years later, he had recalibrated.
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He was back in control of the narrative.
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Speaker 1: Ah, because he's the one making the choice to plead
7:01
bulky right.
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Speaker 2: He was the one deciding to end the legal battle.
7:04
He was the one calmly dispensing the word strangulation. He
7:08
wasn't crying anymore because he had fundamentally accepted the situation
7:11
and found a way to exert his dominance over the
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courtroom environment.
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Speaker 1: That level of calculation is just terrifying, And to fully
7:18
understand the depth of that calculation, we have to look
7:21
at the people he targeted. Horreman's meticulous nature allowed him
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to hide in plain sight, but it also directly informed
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how he selected and exploited his victims.
7:31
Speaker 2: Yes, geography and methodology.
7:33
Speaker 1: Right when I look at the geographic details and the sources,
7:37
I realize we need to set the scene for you
7:39
listening right now. If you aren't familiar with Long.
7:40
Speaker 2: Island, geogracy is destiny. In this case, It's absolutely essential
7:44
to understand the landscape.
7:45
Speaker 1: So Long Island is essentially a giant sand bar stretching
7:49
out from New York City into the Atlantic Ocean. You
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have the mainland, which is full of dense, crowded suburbs,
7:55
places like Massapequa Park where Horrorman lived, very typical suburbia. Yeah.
8:00
Then to the south you have these barrier islands. And
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running along those barrier islands is Ocean Parkway. It is
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a desolate, wind swept strip of road separated from the
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mainland by marshland in the Great South Bay. It's incredibly isolated.
8:16
It's covered in dense, tangled brush and brambles. It's very
8:19
unforgiving terrain, even though it's just miles from millions of people.
8:23
You can pull over on the side of that road
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at three am and feel like you're at the end
8:27
of the earth.
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Speaker 2: And that is exactly why he chose it. It was
8:30
his personal, carefully scouted graveyard. But what is critical to
8:34
note is that he didn't start there, or at least
8:37
his methodology for disposal evolved over time, just as his
8:41
methods for murder evolved.
8:42
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was looking at the timeline of the victims
8:45
and it is a massive, sprawling history. Let's walk through
8:49
the early era first, because it feels very different from
8:51
what came later.
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Speaker 2: It does.
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Speaker 1: The earliest confirmed victim is Sandra Costilla. She was twenty
8:56
eight years old, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, living in
8:59
New York City. She disappeared around November nineteen ninety.
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Speaker 2: Three, over thirty years ago.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and her body was found by hunters the very
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next day in a wooded area in north Sea, which
9:09
is out in the Hamptons. That's about sixty miles east
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of Gilgo Beach. And crucially, the source's note she suffered
9:15
sharp force injuries.
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Speaker 2: Right, the geography and the pathology there are completely distinct
9:21
from his later crimes. North Sea is heavily wooded, but
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it isn't the desolate marchland of the Barrier Islands right right,
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and sharforce trauma indicates a highly physical, potentially chaotic encounter.
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Speaker 1: Okay, let me jump forward a few years. We have
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Karen Viergatta, thirty four years old from Manhattan. She vanished
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around Valentine's Day in nineteen ninety six, and her case
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is horrifying from a forensic standpoint. Yes, her remains were
9:48
completely scattered. Her severed legs were found in a garbage
9:51
bag on Fire Island in April nineteen ninety six, but
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her skull and teeth weren't found until twenty eleven miles
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away at to Bay Beach.
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Speaker 2: Virgatta's case really highlights the grim reality of the geography
10:03
out there. When remains are deposited in those coastal environments,
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they're subjected to tidal shifts, storms and animal scavengers.
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Speaker 1: Just scatters everything.
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Speaker 2: Right. From a forensic anthropology perspective, this complicates the timeline exponentially.
10:15
It forces investigators to piece together a map that the
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ocean is actively trying to erase, and.
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Speaker 1: We see that dismemberment pattern continue. Right.
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Speaker 2: Valerie Mack, who was twenty four and a mother of
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a young son, vanished in two thousand while living in Philadelphia.
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Her partial remains were found in Manerville, which is mainland
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Long Island in the Pine barrens in two thousand and then.
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Speaker 1: More parts were found near Gilgo Beach eleven years later.
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Then you have Jessica Taylor, twenty years old, vanished in
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July two thousand and three. Her torso was found in
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Manerville a top scrap wood.
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Speaker 2: And the detail about her tattoo is significant.
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Speaker 1: Yes, the killer had actually gone to the length of
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mutilating a specific tattoo on her body to hinder identification.
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Her skull and hands were later found at Gilgo in
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twenty eleven.
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Speaker 2: Notice the extreme effort he's putting into obscuring the identities
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and severing the connections between the crimes during this nineteen
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ninety six to two thousand and three era.
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Speaker 1: He's working so hard at it.
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Speaker 2: He's moving body parts across different jurisdictions, Fire Island, Manorville, Gilgo,
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He's mutilating identifying Marx. He is deeply paranoid about the
11:18
remains leading back to him.
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Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because there is a very disturbing discrepancy.
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I noticed, how was that so Santra Costilla in nineteen
11:25
ninety three suffered sharp force injuries. The victims from nineteen
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ninety six to two thousand and three were dismembered. But
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in that Riverhead courtroom, when he was asked how he
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killed the women, he repeated the word strangulation eight times
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if he was using sharp force injuries early on and
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then going through the massive effort of dismemberment. But his
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final answer was strangulation across the board. What does that
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tell us? Does a serial killer's methodology naturally evolve? Or
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is Castilla a horrific example of a predator's learning curve.
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Speaker 2: That is a vital observation, and it goes right to
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the heart of how an organized killer's psychology develops over.
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Speaker 1: Decades, So they do change their methods.
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Speaker 2: Yes, methodology evolves. The early crimes of a serial predator
12:08
are often less refined. I use that word purely in
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the clinical forensic sense, right of course. In nineteen ninety three,
12:14
with Castilla, sharp force injuries suggest a messier encounter. It
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leaves more biological evidence, it requires a different, more unpredictable
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type of physical engagement.
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Speaker 1: It's riskier.
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Speaker 2: Exactly by the time he gets to his later victims,
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he has transitioned exclusively to strangulation. Strangulation is an incredibly intimate,
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hands on and control oriented method of murder. It's quieter,
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it leaves a very different, often smaller, forensic footprint, and.
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Speaker 1: What about the shift away from dismemberment.
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Speaker 2: Dismemberment is incredibly labor intensive. It requires a secure location,
12:47
time specific tools, and it generates a massive amount of
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physical evidence blood, tissue, tool marks, stuff the killer then
12:55
has to clean up.
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Speaker 1: That makes sense. It's too much work, too much risk.
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Speaker 2: It is risky. As he aged and as he became
13:00
more confident in his disposal site along Ocean Parkway, he
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streamlined his process, which.
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Speaker 1: Brings us to the era of what became known globally
13:08
as the GILG four. These women went missing between twenty
13:12
seven and twenty ten. Maureen Brainerd Barnes, twenty five years old.
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She was a mother of two who had received an
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eviction notice and was just trying to support her family.
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Speaker 2: So tragic.
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Speaker 1: Melissa Bartholemy twenty four years old, who vanished in July
13:25
two thousand and nine. Megan Waterman, twenty two, a victim
13:28
of sex trafficking with a young daughter, vanished in June
13:30
twenty ten, and Amber Lynn Costello twenty seven, who vanished
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in September twenty ten. She was struggling with severe heroin
13:37
addiction and had survived childhood sexual assault. She left her
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home after a client offered her twenty five hundred dollars.
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And with these four, the methodology completely changed. They weren't dismembered.
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They were found intact, bound with leather belts and wrapped
13:50
in burlap.
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Speaker 2: Exactly. He had optimized his ability to kill and dispose
13:54
of bodies with minimal risk to himself. Burlap is a
13:58
common landscaping material an architect or suburban homeowner would have easy,
14:03
unquestioned access to.
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Speaker 1: Right, you wouldn't look twice at a guy buying burlap exactly.
14:08
Speaker 2: Plus, it breathes, which affects decomposition differently than plastic, and
14:11
it blends perfectly into the brush. He was no longer
14:14
scattering parts across the island. He was depositing them in
14:17
a centralized, remote location. He had heavily scouted and trusted.
14:21
Speaker 1: When you look at the connecting tissue between all eight
14:24
of these victims, a very stark, very tragic picture emerges.
14:28
We know six of the eight women were working as escorts. Yes,
14:31
in the late two thousands with the Gilgo four. They
14:34
were utilizing platforms like Craigslist and Backpage, and physically many
14:38
of them were very petite. The sources note we're talking
14:41
about women who were around four feet ten inches or
14:43
four feet eleven inches tall, weighing around ninety five to
14:46
one hundred and five pounds.
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Speaker 2: He selected victims he knew he could physically dominate, that
14:52
physical vulnerability was a prerequisite for his control. But more importantly,
14:57
he selected victims who were socially in economic vulnerable.
15:01
Speaker 1: Right.
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Speaker 2: This is where we have to discuss the systemic issues
15:04
that allowed him to operate for so long. Victim's advocate
15:08
Gloria Alred, who represented several of the families, stated it perfectly.
15:12
She said they had no meaningful alternatives, right.
15:16
Speaker 1: I mean, Maureene Brandard Barnes was literally facing a viction.
15:19
Amberlin Costello was trapped in the cycle of heroin addiction.
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Speaker 2: They were forced into vulnerable positions by economic desperation, and
15:27
the killer understood the grim sociology of early internet sex work.
15:32
Speaker 1: He knew nobody would look for them right away.
15:34
Speaker 2: Yes, he knew that the systemic bias and societal indifference
15:37
towards sex workers meant that their disappearances wouldn't trigger the massive, immediate,
15:42
multi jurisdictional outcry that a missing college student from a
15:45
wealthy suburb would. He relied on institutional apathy as a shield.
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Speaker 1: That apathy is just infuriating, But what is even more
15:53
terrifying is the psychological torture he inflicted on the families
15:56
who were crying out for help.
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Speaker 2: The phone call.
15:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't just the murders. I want to highlight
16:01
Melissa Bartholemew's case for a second, because this detail stopped
16:04
me in my tracks. She goes missing in two thousand
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and nine, and for five weeks after she vanishes, her
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fifteen year old sister is receiving phone calls, cruel, vulgar
16:14
phone calls from Melissa's own phone. The caller is mocking
16:17
the family, and eventually he tells his fifteen year old
16:20
girl that your sister is dead. And these calls were
16:23
traced to midtown Manhattan in areas near Hureman's home.
16:26
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture of his pathology,
16:30
that detail is a profound indicator of his sadism. The
16:34
murder itself wasn't enough to satisfy his need for dominance.
16:37
He needed to extend his control and his power over
16:40
the victim's family.
16:41
Speaker 1: It's just evil it is.
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Speaker 2: To repeatedly dial a teenager's number and verbally torture her
16:46
requires a level of compartmentalized cruelty that is difficult for
16:49
a normal human mind to even fathom and consider the arrogance.
16:53
He felt entirely safe doing it right from midtax He
16:55
thought he was untouchable, standing in the middle of midtown Manhattan,
16:58
surrounded by millions of making these calls from a disposable
17:02
burner phone.
17:03
Speaker 1: And the tragic reality is that for a very long
17:05
time he was right. He was untouchable. The systematic silencing
17:09
of these women went largely unchecked. The families were screaming
17:12
for help, going to the media, trying to get local
17:15
police to care. But the gears of justice were basically
17:18
rusted shit.
17:19
Speaker 2: They really were.
17:20
Speaker 1: It wasn't until a completely separate, desperate plea for help
17:25
accidentally blew the case wide open. I want to shift
17:28
gears and talk about the catalyst for this entire discovery.
17:33
The search for Shenan Gilbert.
17:35
Speaker 2: Shanan Gilbert is the tragic fulcrum on which this entire
17:38
multi decade investigation rests. Without her, the secrets of Ocean
17:42
Parkway might have stayed buried forever.
17:45
Speaker 1: Let's set the timeline. It's December twenty ten. Shenan Gilbert,
17:48
a twenty three year old escort, had vanished back in
17:51
May of that year. She had made a frantic twenty
17:53
three minute nine to one to one call from a
17:55
client's home in Oak Beach, which is a small, isolated
17:58
gated community right near Gars Beach. So the police are
18:02
finally out there in the freezing brush along Ocean Parkway
18:06
doing a training exercise with a canine unit looking for Shanan,
18:10
and they don't find her right away. Instead, the dog
18:13
picks up a cent and they stumble upon the remains
18:16
of the Gilgo four. It's astounding, all wrapped in burlap,
18:19
all dumped just a short distance from one another, and
18:22
as they searching the brush into twenty eleven, they find
18:26
more remains, ten or eleven sets in total, including the
18:29
scattered remains from his earlier dismemberment era.
18:33
Speaker 2: The profound tragic irony is that Shnan Gilbert's disappearance forced
18:38
law enforcement to physically scour a landscape that Horrorman believed
18:42
was his perfect, permanent secret.
18:44
Speaker 1: Otherwise they never would have looked there exactly.
18:46
Speaker 2: The albums would have continued to degrade the evidence. The
18:49
brush is so thick there you could walk ten feet
18:51
away from a set of remains and never see them.
18:53
Speaker 1: Wow.
18:53
Speaker 2: I should note Gilbert's death was later ruled in accidental
18:56
drowning by Suffolk County authorities. They theorize she ran into
18:59
the marsh and state of panic and succumb to.
19:01
Speaker 1: The elements, but the family disputes that right heavily.
19:05
Speaker 2: Her family and independent medical examiners strongly dispute that finding
19:09
to this day. But regardless of how she died, her
19:12
presence in that specific geographic location was the catalyst that
19:16
exposed a serial killer's graveyard.
19:18
Speaker 1: So they find the bodies, the news explodes, National media
19:22
descends on Long Island. Suddenly everyone is talking about the
19:25
Long Island serial Killer or LISK. They have early theories.
19:30
They suspect a single killer targeting esports using burner phones,
19:33
probably commuting between Long Island and Manhattan based on early
19:36
cell tower data. They have the outline of the ghost.
19:39
They do, but then nothing. The case just stalls for years.
19:44
I'm looking at the sources, and they point to Suffolk
19:47
County police dysfunction, corruption scandals, and constant leadership changes. How
19:51
does a case with national attention and eleven sets of
19:53
remains just stop?
19:55
Speaker 2: It is a testbook example of how institutional failures compound
19:58
a human tragedy. When you look at the mechanics of
20:01
law enforcement, jurisdiction is everything. You have local Suffolk County police,
20:05
you have New York State Police because Ocean Parkway is
20:08
a state road, and you have the FBI offering behavioral
20:12
analysis and technical support. When interagency rivalries flare up, when
20:17
local police refuse to share files or communicate effectively with
20:20
state or federal authorities, information gets siloed.
20:24
Speaker 1: Oh, it goes back to that building code analogy. If
20:27
the plumbing inspector doesn't talk to the electrical inspector, a
20:30
fire hazard goes unnoticed.
20:31
Speaker 2: Exactly. Add to that the backdrop of severe corruption scandals
20:36
rocking Suffolk County law enforcement during the twenty tens without
20:40
getting bogged down in the legal nuances of other individuals.
20:43
The department's leadership at the time was actively pushing away
20:46
federal oversight.
20:48
Speaker 1: Why would they push away help on a serial killer case.
20:51
Speaker 2: When a department is insular and defensive, a complex, resource
20:54
heavy investigation simply cannot thrive. But we also have to
20:58
confront the underlying bias that dated resource allocation.
21:01
Speaker 1: You mean the bias against the victims because of their profession.
21:04
Speaker 2: Yes, in the critical early days when these women first
21:08
went missing, before they are found together in Burlap, the
21:11
urgency just wasn't there from the top down. It's so
21:14
sad when a marginalized woman, particularly one struggling with addiction
21:17
or engaged in sex work, goes missing. Too often, the
21:21
institutional assumption is that she simply moved on, or she's transient,
21:25
or she's running from a warrant. The lack of immediate,
21:28
aggressive follow through in the early two thousands gave Hoyerman
21:32
the runway he needed to keep killing.
21:34
Speaker 1: It's infuriating to think about the families are essentially being told,
21:38
we found your daughters, your sisters, but we can't find
21:41
who did this, and we aren't going to accept help
21:43
from the FBI to do it exactly. It was really
21:46
the persistent advocacy of the families and the pressure from
21:49
the media that kept this alive. I think about projects
21:52
like the Netflix documentary Lost girls, or the countless investigative
21:56
journalists who refused to let the public look away that.
21:58
Speaker 2: Public pressure was essential. When the institutional mechanics fail, public
22:03
accountability is the only lever left to pull. The families
22:07
of Maureen, Melissa, Meghan and Amberlyn, along with the other victims,
22:11
essentially had to become their own advocates.
22:14
Speaker 1: They were fighting the system and the killer.
22:16
Speaker 2: Yes, they formed coalitions, They spoke to the press. They
22:19
forced the system to eventually reform, bring in new leadership,
22:23
and look at the evidence with fresh eyes.
22:24
Speaker 1: And it took over a decade for that to happen.
22:27
A complete overhaul of the investigation team was required to
22:30
finally pick up the digital and biological breadcrumbs that Hoyerman
22:34
thought he had so cleverly hidden. That brings us to
22:37
twenty twenty two and the formation of a new multi
22:40
agency task force. This is where the puzzle finally gets unlocked, and.
22:45
Speaker 2: This phase of the investigation is a masterclass in the
22:48
marriage of traditional old school detective work and cutting edge
22:51
modern technology. The new task force decided to wipe the
22:54
slate clean and go back to the very beginning.
22:57
Speaker 1: They start looking at the witness statements again, and they
22:59
find a witness to description from Amber Lynn Costella's disappearance
23:02
September twenty ten, her roommate had actually interacted with the killer.
23:07
He described the client who came to the house and
23:09
crucially described his vehicle a first generation Chevrolet Avalanche.
23:14
Speaker 2: That is a massive detail.
23:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, that specific detail was just sitting in the file
23:18
for years. It's not a Honda Civic. An Avalanche is
23:21
a very specific, somewhat bulky, unique looking truck. So they
23:26
have the car. Then they start looking at burner phone
23:29
records from twenty ten.
23:30
Speaker 2: Right, And here's where we need to explain the mechanics
23:33
of cell side analysis. Even with a disposable burner phone,
23:37
every time that phone connects to a network to make
23:39
a call or send a text, it pings the nearest
23:42
cell tower. Okay, law enforcement can subpoena those records and
23:45
see exactly which tower and which specific sector of that
23:48
tower the phone connected to. When the task force mapped
23:52
out the pings from the killer's burner phones, the ones
23:54
used to contact the victims and taunt the families, they
23:57
realized the phones are consistently pinging into very specific, overlapping
24:02
geographic ven.
24:03
Speaker 1: Diagrams Midtown Manhattan near the Empire State Building and Massapekwell
24:07
Park on Long Island.
24:09
Speaker 2: Right there, the geographic profile narrows dramatically. You cross reference
24:14
a highly specific vehicle, a first generation Chevy Avalanche registered
24:18
in Massapekwell Park, with a daily commuting pattern established by
24:22
cell tower data that goes directly from that suburb to
24:25
Midtown Manhattan.
24:26
Speaker 1: So the suspect pool just plummets, it shrinks from those
24:35
burner phones and those Internet searches. As an invisible leash.
24:38
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good way to put it, right.
24:40
Speaker 1: Kuerman clearly thought that because he wasn't using his personal
24:43
registered cell phone, he was a ghost. He bought into
24:46
the nineteen nineties idea of a burner being completely untraceable.
24:50
But in the modern digital age, those tower pings literally
24:53
draw a line on a map.
24:54
Speaker 2: They absolutely do.
24:55
Speaker 1: They tied his desk at his Midtown architectural firm directly
24:59
to the shallow graves at Gilgo Beach. It just proves that,
25:02
no matter how meticulous you are with the physical evidence,
25:04
in the modern era, you can never truly wash your
25:07
hands of a crime. Your data will betray you.
25:09
Speaker 2: That invisible leash is a perfect way to conceptualize it.
25:13
He didn't account for the spatial and temporal analysis of
25:16
secular data. If Phone A the burner is consistently in
25:20
the exact same geographic radius as Phone BES be his
25:24
personal registered phone, day in and day out, moving on
25:27
the same train schedule, the firewall dissolves. The data proves
25:31
they are in the same.
25:32
Speaker 1: Pocket, and once they have him in their sights, the
25:34
biological evidence just buries him. I want to make sure
25:37
I understand this part correctly, because it's fascinating. They found
25:40
hairs on the victims. Specifically, they found hairs consistent with
25:44
his wife Asa elup on the leather belts used to
25:48
bind Maureene Brainerd Barnes. Now the investigators confirm through travel
25:53
records that his wife and kids were out of town
25:55
during the murders. He was deliberately using their absence as
25:58
his window of opportunity to bring these women to his
26:00
home and commit the crimes. But somehow his wife's hair
26:04
ends up on the victim.
26:05
Speaker 2: This is the fundamental rule of forensic science low cards
26:08
exchange principle. It states that every contact leaves a trace.
26:12
Speaker 1: Every contact leaves a trace.
26:14
Speaker 2: Right whenever two objects come into contact, there is a
26:17
transfer of material. He could control the burner phones, he
26:20
could wrap the bodies in burlap, he could commute across jurisdictions.
26:24
But he lived in a house with his wife. Yeah,
26:26
her hair was on the couch, on his clothes, on
26:29
the floor when he brought the victims into that environment.
26:33
Where when he used materials from his home, like tape
26:36
or belts, that microscopic evidence transferred. He couldn't control a
26:40
stray hair adhering to a leather belt.
26:42
Speaker 1: But wait, I need to stop you there. How does
26:45
a single hair from two thousand and seven turn into
26:47
a definitive match in twenty twenty two? Most people think
26:51
DNA is just a direct fingerprint you run through a
26:53
police database. But his wife wasn't in a criminal database,
26:56
So how did they connect it?
26:58
Speaker 2: That is where the magic of modern getic genealogy comes in.
27:01
This is entirely different from the traditional codis police database,
27:05
which requires an exact match to a known offender.
27:07
Speaker 1: Okay, so how does it work.
27:09
Speaker 2: With genetic genealogy. Scientists take that single hair and extract
27:13
the DNA. They sequence it to find specific genetic markers
27:17
called SNPs. Then they upload that profile to public genealogy websites.
27:23
The kind of database is every day people use to
27:25
trace their ancestry or find distant cousins.
27:28
Speaker 1: Oh, like the ones you get in the mail.
27:30
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, they aren't looking for Rex or his wife.
27:32
They are looking for a third or fourth cousin.
27:35
Speaker 1: Wow.
27:35
Speaker 2: Once they find a distant relative, specialized genealogists build a
27:39
family tree backward to a common ancestor and then trace
27:43
the branches forward through time, looking through census records and
27:46
marriage certificates until they find a single household that matches
27:50
the geographic and demographic profile. Yeah, it led them right
27:53
to Maspicico Park.
27:54
Speaker 1: Wow. So they match the DNA from the victims to
27:57
the specific genetic profile of his household, the circle is
28:00
completely closed completely, And when they finally raid his house
28:03
and his electronic devices in July twenty twenty three, the
28:07
digital footprint they uncover is chilling. The sources mention a
28:11
specific computer file. They found a file from the year
28:13
two thousand, over two decades before his arrest. He had
28:16
a document outlining plans for luring, imprisoning, and murdering women.
28:21
Plus they found endless searches for sadistic porn, torture, and
28:25
literal how to guides on body disposal.
28:28
Speaker 2: That file from the year two thousand is the blueprint,
28:31
is the architectural schematic of a serial killer. It proves
28:34
the immense premeditation. It proves that the architect persona wasn't
28:38
just his day job. He was architecting his crimes with
28:41
the same obsessive attention.
28:42
Speaker 1: To detail he was drafting plans.
28:44
Speaker 2: He was drafting the plans for human destruction long before
28:46
he executed some of them, and those searches for disposal
28:49
methods indicate a constant, obsessive refinement of his methodology. He
28:53
wasn't just committing crimes, he was studying his own dark
28:55
craft to ensure he never got caught.
28:57
Speaker 1: So they arrest him. He's tearful outside of office. He
29:00
denies everything initially, and then we enter this incredible one
29:04
thousand day period between his arrest in July twenty twenty
29:07
three and is guilty plea in April twenty twenty six.
29:10
Speaker 2: It was a long wait.
29:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, the prosecutors just keep squeezing the vice. They start
29:14
with three murder charges in twenty twenty three. Then as
29:18
they test more evidence, they link him to Maureen Brainerd
29:21
Barnes and it becomes four charges. Then in twenty twenty
29:24
four they indict him for Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack.
29:27
The walls are systematically closing in on him.
29:30
Speaker 2: It is an avalanche of evidence. And for a man
29:32
who defined his entire existence by his ability to maintain
29:36
absolute control over his environment, the mounting indictments represented a total,
29:41
terrifying loss of power.
29:42
Speaker 1: He couldn't outsmart the DNA.
29:43
Speaker 2: No, the procedural battles his defense team fought over those
29:47
one thousand days, challenging warrants, demanding discovery. We're just holding
29:51
back the tide. Eventually, the empirical way of the DNA,
29:54
the cell site data, and the digital forensics left no
29:57
meutivral space in the courtroom.
29:59
Speaker 1: Faced with all of that instrumuntable evidence, this meticulous planner
30:02
makes one final, controlling decision. He pleads guilty to all
30:05
of it. And this brings us to the most complex,
30:08
emotionally fraught part of the story, the why, the concept
30:12
of imperfect justice, and the business that is still tragically
30:14
unfinished on Long Island.
30:16
Speaker 2: The aftermath of a serial killer's conviction is rarely as
30:19
clean or as satisfying as we want.
30:21
Speaker 1: It to be, No, it's not. After the plea deal,
30:23
his defense attorney, Michael Brown came out and told reporters
30:26
that pleading guilty was entirely Hohurerman's decision. Brown claimed Rex
30:31
wanted to spare the victim's family's allurid trial and protect
30:34
his own family from the public spectacle. When our reporter
30:37
bluntly asked if Horrorman was actually sorry for what he did,
30:40
Brown just said, I hope so. Meanwhile, Da Tyrney announced
30:45
that as part of the deal, Horrorman agreed to sit
30:48
down for extensive interviews with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit.
30:52
Tierney called it an academic exercise to understand what created
30:56
him and what drove him.
30:57
Speaker 2: This raises an important question one that criminology, psychology, and
31:01
the justice system constantly gravel with. What is the true
31:04
value of these SBIBAU interviews On a macro institutional level,
31:09
Analyzing an organized killer who successfully operated undetected for thirty
31:14
years provides invaluable to data. The BAU religans on these
31:18
interviews to refine their profiling models, identify subtle future warning
31:22
signs and other predators, and understand exactly how killers exploit
31:26
systemic loopholes in law enforcement.
31:28
Speaker 1: So it's good for the FBI.
31:30
Speaker 2: It is academically crucial for stopping the next lisk, But.
31:33
Speaker 1: Does it actually help the families? Does it offer them
31:35
anything real?
31:36
Speaker 2: Exactly? On a micro emotional level, these interviews rarely offer
31:40
a satisfying why to the grieving families. Knowing that a
31:43
killer had a specific childhood trauma or analyzing the minutia
31:47
of his violent sexual fantasies does not bring a daughter back.
31:50
It doesn't heal the trauma and inflicted on a fifteen
31:52
year old sister who received those phone calls for five weeks.
31:55
It is an academic autopsy of a monster, but it's
31:58
not emotional closure.
31:59
Speaker 1: It's just I have to push back hard on his
32:01
stated motives here too. The defense attorney says Horriman wanted
32:05
to spare the family's allurid trial. Are we supposed to
32:09
believe that a man who meticulously stalked, tortured, and murdered
32:13
vulnerable women for thirty years is suddenly struck by empathy
32:17
for the people he destroyed.
32:18
Speaker 2: It's highly unlikely.
32:19
Speaker 1: Or is this just the ultimate narcissist maintaining control over
32:22
his narrative until the very end. By pleading guilty, he
32:26
avoids the discovery process. He avoids being publicly cross examined
32:30
and humiliated.
32:31
Speaker 2: That's a huge factor.
32:32
Speaker 1: He avoids having his every flaw, failure, and dark secret
32:36
laid bare before a jury of his peers for months
32:38
on end. He hats to walk into court in his
32:41
nice tailored suit, say the word strangulation eight times on
32:44
his own terms, and walk out.
32:45
Speaker 2: You're absolutely right to be skeptical, and frankly, the psychological
32:49
profile supports your skepticism. Serial predators of this specific, highly
32:53
organized typology do not suddenly develop deep altruistic empathy. Their
32:58
brains do not function that way. Guilty allows him to
33:01
bypass the profound humiliation of a trial where his absolute
33:05
powerlessness would be on public display every single day. It
33:09
is an act of self preservation, not an act of mercy.
33:12
By controlling the plea, he controls the final act of
33:15
the play he wrote. He dictates the terms of his surrender.
33:18
Speaker 1: Which leaves the families with a very bitter pill to swallow.
33:21
It's what the sources call imperfect closure. Yes, yes, the
33:25
plea means they get a definitive answer. They don't have
33:28
to wonder who the monster in the dark was anymore.
33:31
But they are denied the catharsis of a trial. They're
33:34
denied the experience of a jury looking at the evidence,
33:37
looking at him, and formally declaring him guilty of every
33:40
specific horrific detail.
33:41
Speaker 2: A heavy burden.
33:43
Speaker 1: Melissa kNN, the sister of Maureen Brainerd Barnes, described herself
33:46
as living in a space between heartbreak and hope for
33:49
nearly two decades. Another relative summarized it so poignantly in
33:53
the report, saying, we finally know who, but the pain
33:56
never ends.
33:57
Speaker 2: Imperfect closure is the harsh reality the criminal justice system.
34:01
The system is designed to administer punishment, it is not
34:05
designed to administer healing. And the trauma of the Gilgo
34:09
Beach case is compounded by the terrifying reality that the
34:13
geography of that shoreline still holds secrets that Horman has
34:17
not answered for.
34:18
Speaker 1: Da Tierney said it right at the news conference. It
34:21
was a chilling reminder to everyone celebrating the conviction. He said,
34:25
there are still bodies on that beach, There are still
34:27
bodies in Suffolk County, horrifying. We know from the case
34:31
files that there are still unsolved murders tied to the
34:33
immediate area, including the remains of an unidentified person known
34:37
as Asian Dough and tragically, the remains of a young.
34:40
Speaker 2: Child, which means the shadow of Gilgo Beach has not
34:43
fully lifted. Hoyerman admitted to eight murders spanning from nineteen
34:46
ninety three to twenty ten, but the math of the
34:49
eleven sets of remains found out there suggests two terrifying possibilities.
34:53
Okay whatever, Either his timeline is longer and more prolific
34:56
than he admits, or, perhaps even more disturbing, he was
34:59
not the only p editor using that desolate stretch of
35:01
Ocean Parkway as a dumping ground.
35:03
Speaker 1: Oh wow, another killer.
35:05
Speaker 2: It's possible. The Plea deal effectively closes rex Huerman's active
35:09
threat to society, but it does not close every file
35:11
on Long Island. The work of that task force is
35:14
far from over.
35:16
Speaker 1: As we look towards his sentencing on June seventeenth, twenty
35:18
twenty six, where he faces multiple life sentences without the
35:22
possibility of parole, we really have to grapple with the
35:25
permanent scar this case leaves on Long Island and our
35:28
broader society. Let's just recap the incredible heavy.
35:32
Speaker 2: Arc of this story, It's been a long road.
35:34
Speaker 1: It starts in nineteen ninety three with the murder of
35:36
Sandra Costilla. It moves through decades of systemic failure, ignored leads,
35:41
jurisdictional battles, and a profound societal indifference to vulnerable women.
35:45
It hinges on the tragic accidental disappearance of Shenan Gilbert
35:48
in twenty ten. It is finally broken open by a
35:51
twenty twenty two task force that married old school witness
35:54
statements with the absolute cutting edge science of genetic genealogy
35:58
and cell side analysis, and ends in a sterile Riverhead
36:01
courtroom with an architect in a blue tie repeating a
36:04
single word.
36:05
Speaker 2: But the true legacy of this case should not be
36:08
the depravity or the cunning of Rix Harrman. We give
36:11
him too much power, if that is the only takeaway.
36:13
The legacy belongs to the resilience of the families. Absolutely,
36:17
the sisters, the daughters, the mothers who refuse to let
36:20
their loved ones be forgotten in the brush along Ocean Parkway.
36:24
They endured the agonizing weight, they fought through the bureaucratic indifference,
36:28
and they forced the system to work.
36:30
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for you listening to
36:33
this right now, I want to leave you with a
36:35
thought to mull over as we end this deep dive.
36:37
Think about the mask. Nex Warreman wasn't a phantom hiding
36:40
in the woods. He wasn't a boogeyman in a horror
36:42
movie with claws and fangs.
36:44
Speaker 2: No, he was completely ordinary.
36:46
Speaker 1: He was a guy riding the morning commuter train into Manhattan,
36:49
drinking coffee. He was meticulously checking building codes. He was
36:53
waving to his neighbors in Mazapickwele Park. He bought groceries,
36:56
he paid taxes. If a monster capable of such unimaginable
37:00
cruelty can successfully hide behind the absolute mask of mundane
37:03
suburban normalcy for thirty years, how well do we really
37:06
know the people we brushed past every single day. Thank
37:09
you for joining us on this heavy, but truly vital exploration.