Case 354: The Gilgo Beach Serial Killings (Part 2/2)

[Part 2 of 2] *** Content warnings: Sexual assault, rape, femicide, child sexual abuse *** For more than a decade, the investigation into the Gilgo Beach serial killings was stalled by corruption and apathy. But in 2022, a new task force would identify a clue that Suffolk County police had held in their possession since the very beginning of the investigation. A clue that would lead directly to the worst serial killer Long Island had ever seen… --- Narration – Anonymous Host https://www.instagram.com/caseys.snaps/ Research & writing – Erin Munro Production & music – Mike Migas http://mikemigas.com/ Audio editing – Anthony Telfer Sign up for Casefile Premium: Apple Premium https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/casefile-true-crime/id998568017?ign-itscg=30200S&ign-itsct=casefile_podcastsSpotify Premium https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/9gSwcv7USsbPatreon https://www.patreon.com/casefileFor all credits and sources, please visit https://casefilepodcast.com/case-354-the-gilgo-beach-serial-killings-part-2-2 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  On the night of Thursday, December 13, 2012, 26-year-old Christopher Loeb left his mother's residence in Smithtown, Suffolk County, and made his way to the neighbouring hamlet of St James. Christopher was someone who was well-known to the county's police. He struggled with heroin addiction and was on probation for theft-related felony convictions. He'd begun committing thefts to support his substance use and continued to do so after his release. Christopher would drive around Long Island, then park somewhere and walk up to parked cars, jiggling their door handles in the hopes of finding them unlocked. Sometimes he found electronics, wallets, or spare change that he could pocket.

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  That was what he was doing that Thursday night. In the early hours of Friday morning, he attempted to open the door of a GMC Yukon. Upon gaining access to the vehicle, Christopher grabbed a canvas duffel bag he saw lying on the backseat. When he got back home, he took the bag down to the basement.

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  Inside were a number of items. There was a box of cigars, a humidor, toiletries including lubricants, some sex toys, and several pornographic DVDs. There was also a gun belt with two Glock 9mm magazines, handcuffs, and a whistle.

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  Later that same morning, Christopher's parole officer showed up unannounced at the Smithtown home where Christopher lived with his mother. He was promptly followed by several Suffolk County police officers. Seeing their vehicles from his upstairs bedroom window, Christopher bolted. He ran out the back door and made it about half a mile from his home to a wooded area. The police, in hot pursuit, chased Christopher down and roughly cuffed his hands behind his back before dragging him back to his house and placing him on the couch in the den. Other officers who'd remained at the property were undertaking a search. One of those present was Suffolk County's then-Chief of Police, James Burke.

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  The canvas bag that Christopher had stolen the night before was given to Burke before it had been processed according to normal evidentiary procedures. According to Christopher Loeb, after he was subsequently taken into custody, James Burke confronted him in an interrogation room that had no video cameras and demanded, “You wanna fucking steal from me?”

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  When the remains of 10 different people were recovered along Ocean Parkway in the spring of 2011, Suffolk County Police Department was facing a case of mammoth proportions. However, the victims' families were hopeful that it would be solved soon. The department was well-funded and resourced, with a homicide clearance rate of 74%, placing it well above the national average. But internal politics had been getting in the way of the investigation from the very start. It began with the then-police chief, Richard Dormer, arguing publicly with the district attorney, Thomas Spota, over whether one killer was behind the murders or more.

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  According to journalist Robert Colker, author of the book Lost Girls, this was partly due to Dormer being affiliated with a political rival of Spota's. As Dormer was scheduled to retire at the end of 2011, Spota was eager for the next police chief to be someone he could more easily sway. And he already had someone in mind. Thomas Spota first met James Burke more than 30 years earlier when Spota was prosecuting the April 1979 murder of a 13-year-old boy named Johnny Pius. Johnny had gone missing in Smithtown while riding his bicycle

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  and was found the following morning dead in the grounds of a local elementary school. Stones had been forced down his throat, asphyxiating him. He had been beaten and stomped on, and his face was marked with the imprint of a sneaker. The community was horrified by the brutal and senseless murder, and the pressure was on to find the killer.

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  Detectives were hopeful of obtaining a confession quickly. At that time, the Suffolk County Police Department's homicide unit was renowned for having a confession rate of 97%, three or four times that of most homicide units in the United States. As author Robert Colker explains, “This extremely high figure is so improbable that it indicates coercion was being used to force confessions, the result of an unchecked police force.” Because Suffolk County's police union was wealthy, it was able to donate large sums of money to political campaigns. This resulted in politicians being reluctant to challenge them,

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  in turn allowing the department to get away with more than it should. The sneaker imprint on Johnny's face convinced detectives that Johnny had most likely been murdered by another teenager. They began speaking to local youths, hoping somebody might know something and name those responsible. Four teenage boys were soon implicated in the murder, with one confessing in the back of a police car. His confession featured some inconsistent elements, however, and probably wouldn't be effective in a courtroom. Thomas Spota began seeking out other adolescents who might be able to act as witnesses, and landed on then-16-year-old James Burke,

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  a juvenile delinquent involved in low-level burglaries and drug dealing.

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  Burke willingly provided a story against the suspects, which some have deemed very convenient, and became a star witness in the case. All four teenagers were convicted, though many held doubts about their guilt. And from that time on, Thomas Spota became something of a mentor to James Burke.

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  Burke stopped dealing drugs and became a cop. In 1986, when he was 21, he joined the Suffolk County Police Department and began rising through the ranks, being promoted to sergeant at age 26. Burke had a natural intelligence and a strong knack for being a street cop, but his record was always spotty. He lost his department-issued firearm on more than one occasion. In 1993, when Burke was 28, he was accused of smoking crack cocaine and having sex with a sex worker in his patrol car. This led to an investigation by Internal Affairs, and Thomas Spota, who was by then working in a private practice, offered to represent Burke.

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  Burke's punishment for his transgressions was the loss of 15 vacation days.

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  Former officers from the department who spoke to journalist Michael Edison Hayden for Vice described Burke as a sex-obsessed narcissist. There were rumours that he would shake down drug dealers for their contraband and then pocket them for his personal use.

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  Throughout every scandal, Thomas Spota had his back.

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  In 2002, Thomas Spota became Suffolk County's district attorney and hired Burke to work in his office overseeing investigations. It seemed obvious to the rest of Spota's staff that Spota was grooming Burke to one day become the department's police chief, as soon as he could exert influence over the appointment. That opportunity arrived a decade later, in 2012, right as Suffolk County was facing its biggest crime in a generation: the Gilgo Beach serial killings.

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  It was a huge case that required expertise on subjects such as cellphone data analysis and serial killer profiling. But instead of welcoming assistance from other law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, who'd already started working the case, James Burke and Thomas Spota sent them away. Before leaving, FBI agents handed over all of the work they'd done on the phone evidence. It was well-known that the killer had used burner phones to contact his victims, aware that he could be less easily traced this way. But it was likely that he still had a regular cellphone that he carried with him at the same time.

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  FBI agents had been checking all of the towers that the killer's burner phones had been pinging off, and had plans to search cell tower data in Long Island for other phones that had been hitting the same towers at the same time. By doing so, they hoped to come up with a list of possible suspects. The Suffolk County Police Department didn't continue this work, with Burke reportedly deeming it “too invasive”.

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  They had other leads they could pursue. There was some physical evidence from the burial sites, including a distinctive leather belt embossed with two initials, and several hair strands that had been caught in duct tape or burlap that was used to bind the women. And at least two of the victims' loved ones had received taunting calls from the killer. But overall, the investigation into the serial killings didn't appear to be a priority. As Robert Kolker described in his book Lost Girls:

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  “In the years that Burke ran the police department, the Gilgo Room at Suffolk Police Headquarters became a place for part-time work, with little urgency dictated from above. Under Burke, the police were in what would later be characterised as a complete ethical freefall.” In Kolker's words, Burke turned the department into his own personal empire. He ordered officers to follow and watch his girlfriend, her ex-partners, and her son. He also punished colleagues he considered disloyal. Every night, drinks were served in his office. Burke's mentor and number-one ally, Thomas Spota, also prioritised investigating perceived

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  adversaries over the Gilgo investigation.

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  With the police department operating in such close concert with the district attorney's office, there was even less scrutiny from the outside than there had been before, until that suddenly changed about a year into James Burke's term.

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  When Christopher Loeb went out looking for cars to steal from on the night of Thursday, December 13, 2012, he had no idea that one SUV he stole a duffel bag from was the department-issued vehicle of Suffolk County's Chief of Police. It is unclear how police identified Christopher as the culprit, but by the following morning, they were at his mother's home, searching the property for the stolen items and placing Christopher under arrest. After Christopher Loeb was transferred to a nearby precinct for questioning, the police aggression towards him only increased. He was handcuffed and chained to the floor of an interrogation room without cameras for 10 hours.

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  Over that period, James Burke and some detectives repeatedly beat and kicked Christopher. One detective threatened to rape his mother, while Burke said he'd murder him with a hotshot, an overdose of heroin that would look like an accident. Understanding that Burke was the owner of the duffel bag that contained various sex toys and pornographic DVDs, Christopher called the police chief a “pervert”. In response, James Burke punched him in the face.

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  Several days after the beating, James Burke bragged that the incident had reminded him of his old days as a younger cop. He referred to the other officers who'd helped him as “his palace guard”.

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  But this was the beginning of the end for James Burke. The FBI had caught wind of the assault against Christopher Loeb almost immediately and opened an investigation into the matter alongside the US Attorney's Office. They found evidence that Burke had pressured detectives to lie about the assault and instructed them to agree to a false version of events. One of those detectives later lied under oath that Christopher Loeb had not been assaulted.

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  The case finally broke open when an informant admitted the truth. In December 2015, James Burke was arrested and charged with the assault of Christopher Loeb, as well as civil rights violations and conspiracy to obstruct a federal investigation.

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  Burke later pleaded guilty to reduced charges and was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison. Thomas Spota, whose staff had helped Burke in his attempted cover-up, was subsequently indicted for witness tampering, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. He too was convicted in a federal court and subsequently sentenced to five years. The entire fiasco had left Suffolk County in complete disarray, and still, there was more that would emerge about James Burke.

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  After another year dragged on with no developments in the Gilgo Beach serial killings case, John Ray, the attorney for Shannon Gilbert's mother, Marie, held a bombshell press conference on Thursday, December 15, 2016. Sitting beside him was a woman named Leanne. She was a sex worker based in Long Island who was alleging that James Burke had engaged her services several times between April and August in 2011, the months after the bodies had been discovered on Gilgo Beach, but before Shannon was found at the end of that year. A former confidential informant, Leanne said that she'd met James Burke at a party

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  in Oak Beach, the same gated community where Shannon Gilbert had gone missing. She claimed that when Burke had been unable to perform sexually, he became angry and aggressive, telling Leanne that she was not a “good whore”.

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  When a journalist asked whether Burke ever mentioned the Gilgo case to Leanne, she replied: “No, but he seemed to like to choke me.” Leanne added that she also had several other Suffolk County cops as clients, despite sex work being illegal in New York State, and she'd seen James Burke grab a woman by her hair and push her to the ground. Attorney John Ray pointed out that now a direct correlation had been made between Burke, violence against sex workers, and the Gilgo case, via his attendance at an Oak Beach party where sex workers were present.

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  Following this press conference, speculation by armchair detectives and others who'd been watching the Gilgo case went into overdrive. Some believed that James Burke was the serial killer himself, or knew who the killer was, and that was why he deliberately thwarted the investigation. He was covering up for himself or a friend.

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  Burke's attorneys called this theory preposterous, stating: “There is absolutely not one shred of evidence linking him to the Gilgo Beach case.” There was no evidence suggesting that James Burke was a killer, but his relationships with sex workers and habit of using illegal drugs had played a part in his lackluster leadership regarding the Gilgo investigation. Burke's corrupt behaviour was most likely why he hadn't wanted the FBI involved in the case, to prevent them from discovering what he'd been up to. It was also indicative of his attitude towards the Gilgo victims.

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  In the Netflix documentary series Gone Girls, former Suffolk County detective Rob Trotter said:

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  “So you have a serial murderer killing prostitutes on Long Island, and your police chief is a guy who patronises prostitutes? You know, all the cops amongst ourselves would say, ‘It's a joke, he doesn't care about that.’ He would call them misdemeanour murders, where they really weren't important. They're not a high priority. They're just prostitutes.”

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  After James Burke was indicted and left the Suffolk County Police Department in disgrace, an outsider was brought in to be the new chief. Tim Seeny was a senior prosecutor from the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan. He brought the FBI back into the investigation and they resumed their work on the burner phone data. Cell tower triangulation had allowed them to create rough maps of where the killer had likely been using his burner phones from in midtown Manhattan and Long Island. It had long been thought that the killer probably worked in the former and lived in the latter. Using specialized equipment, they were able to refine this data even further, localizing to more precise areas.

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  Ultimately, they came up with a radius that had the Nassau County suburb of Massapequa Park at its centre, as the burner and victim's phones had pinged a cell tower in that area. Massapequa Park also sat directly across the bay from Gilgo Beach, giving someone who lived there greater familiarity with the dump site. There were roughly 500 residents included in this tight geographic zone, and the area was home to less than 1,000 men. If the police could identify which of these men worked in New York City, they might have a shortlist of suspects. However, the Suffolk County Force had butted heads with Tim Seeny since his arrival, seeing

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  him as an outsider, and resisted many of his investigative efforts. He left the job of police chief in 2018 after being elected as district attorney.

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  Seeny was replaced as police chief by Geraldine Hart, the first woman to hold the position, and the former head of the FBI's Long Island Bureau. She had already worked on the investigation, but had been removed from it by James Burke when he decided to exclude all other agencies. Now, as police chief herself, Hart decided to utilize genetic genealogy to try to identify the unknown victims found along Ocean Parkway. Genetic genealogy was being touted as a powerful new investigative tool after it led to the identification of the Golden State Killer in California, covered in case 53 of Case File.

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  Geraldine Hart commissioned an outside lab to go over the DNA evidence in the Gilgo case, and in 2020, this led to the identification of Jane Doe #6.

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  She was one of two victims who'd had some remains discarded along Ocean Parkway and the rest of her body left in a wooded area of Manorville, about 45 miles east of Gilgo Beach. Jane Doe #6 was identified as Valerie Mack, a 24-year-old from Philadelphia who'd gone missing in late 2000. Like all of the other victims, Valerie had been petite, standing five feet tall and weighing 110 pounds. She had lived in a number of foster homes as a child before being adopted by the Mack family. Valerie Mack became a mother to a son when she was 17, and lived for a time with her child's father in New Jersey.

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  She got a tattoo of her son's name on her right ankle.

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  Between 1996, when she was 19, and 2000, Valerie was arrested several times in Philadelphia for sex work-related offences. She was also thought to sometimes work in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Now investigators believed she had somehow fallen victim to the Long Island Serial Killer.

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  In the hopes of generating a lead from someone close to the killer, Geraldine Hart went public with a piece of evidence that had been kept under wraps: a leather belt that had been used to bind Maureen Brainard Barnes. It was a distinctive belt due to the fact that one end had been embossed with the owner's initials, HM or WH, depending on the angle you looked at it. Chief Hart shared photos of the belt with the public in the hopes somebody would recognize it. Unfortunately, no leads resulted, and the case continued to stagnate.

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  The tide finally turned in 2021, when a new district attorney was elected in Suffolk County. Ray Tierney campaigned heavily on the platform that he wanted the Gilgo case solved, and met with some of the victims' family members. After he took office at the beginning of 2022, he was joined by yet another new police chief, a veteran investigator named Rodney Harrison, who'd spent years with the New York Police Department and was the first African-American to be appointed as Suffolk County's police chief.

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  On Harrison's very first day in the role, he visited the site at Gilgo Beach where the bodies had been found. He was stunned to learn that the case file for the Long Island Serial Killer case hadn't been digitized. This meant that all of the notes, interview transcripts, and witness statements relating to the crime were available in paper form only and couldn't be easily searched.

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  Chief Harrison arranged for everything to be sent to the FBI's headquarters in Quantico, Virginia for digitization. He and DA Tierney also wanted a special task force to be dedicated entirely to the investigation. Chief Harrison's experience in New York City had taught him that collaborating with other agencies could be the key to solving a case. The task force would comprise investigators from numerous agencies, from the state police and Nassau County, as well as Suffolk County Police and sheriff's departments and the FBI. It was announced on Tuesday, February 15, 2022. Within a month, they had a massive lead.

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  Shortly after the bodies of the Gilgo Four were identified in early 2011, investigators interviewed those who had been closest to them, including Dave Shaller, the housemaid and good friend of Amber Ling Costello. Amber had been the last of the four women to go missing, disappearing after an appointment with a client on Thursday, September 2, 2010, roughly three months before her body was found. At the time of her murder, Amber had been living in West Babylon, a town in Suffolk County, in Dave Shaller's residence. Detectives visited the house and interviewed Dave. He told them about the days leading up to Amber's disappearance, and how, just one day before she went missing,

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  the two of them had carried out a scam that they employed from time to time. A client that Amber had been communicating with showed up to collect her, and after he paid, Dave jumped out, pretending to be her angry spouse. This enabled Amber to take the client's money without having to have sex with him. Dave and Amber had done this a few times. Sex work clients were easy to scam, because they weren't likely to go to the authorities to report the crime.

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  One thing that struck Dave about the man he and Amber stole from that night was how big he was. The word Dave used to describe him was ogre. He was between 6'4 and 6'6, with a broad build looming over both of them. A white man in his mid-40s, he also had dark bushy hair and big 1970s-style overly glasses. Dave also told police that he'd seen the man's SUV parked in the driveway. It was a dark green, first-generation Chevy Avalanche. The following night, Dave had seen the car again.

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  Amber had made plans to see the same client after he texted her to say, “That was not nice, so do I credit for next time.” Amber agreed to meet the client down the street, possibly because he told her he didn't want to see her angry boyfriend again. Dave had escorted Amber as far as the letterbox, then turned to see the same dark-colored SUV drive past the house a minute later. Dave never saw Amber again.

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  The description of the client and his car were a decent lead, and detectives in 2011 set about searching for his vehicle registration via New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, or DMV, records. But they found nothing, and the lead went nowhere. Journalist Robert Colker reported that a source told him the Chevy Avalanche had likely been miscategorized by the DMV, as it was a kind of hybrid of a car and a truck. Despite having a description of an ogre-like person of interest and his vehicle, the Suffolk County detectives hadn't passed this tip on to higher-ups at the department or any outside agencies such as the FBI. For more than a decade,

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  Dave Shaller's information was buried in a file filled with hundreds of documents. Until Monday, March 14, 2022, when the new task force dedicated to the Gilgo Beach case discovered it in their new digital case file.

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  A member of the state police who was working with the task force searched for first-generation dark-green Chevrolet Avalanches in a private, subscription-based vehicle database that was more comprehensive than New York's DMV records. He got a hit immediately. At the time of the murders, a green Chevrolet Avalanche had been registered to a man living in Massapequa Park in Nassau County. Two of the victims' phones had pinged cell towers in this same suburban neighborhood after they'd gone missing, and the man's home was at the center of the geographic area where investigators had suspected the killer lived.

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  The owner of the Avalanche had purchased it from a Long Island dealership in 2002. A Google Map photograph of the man's house, taken in November of 2011, showed the Chevy parked on the street out the front. In 2012, more than a year into the Gilgo Beach investigation, the man had transferred the vehicle's ownership and registration to his brother, who lived several states away in South Carolina.

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  Looking into the man who had originally owned the Avalanche, investigators saw that he was a perfect match to the physical description Dave Shaller had given. He had the same tall, hulking build, was white with a dark mop of hair, wore large eyeglasses, and would have been in his mid-40s 12 years earlier when Amber went missing. Moreover, he resided in Long Island and worked in Midtown Manhattan, just as investigators had suspected based on the cellphone data. The man's name was Rex Hewerman.

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  Born on September 13, 1963, Rex Hewerman was born and raised in Massapequa Park, a leafy, middle-class neighborhood on Long Island's south shore. His father, Theodore, was an aerospace engineer who served in the United States Air Force during World War II. Hewerman was one of five children. He had three older sisters and a younger brother. He clashed with his father, who could be domineering and critical of his son. Hewerman desperately wanted to follow in his father's footsteps by joining the Air Force, but he had dyslexia, which presented an obstacle. Theodore was disappointed by this.

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  Hewerman's relationship with his mother, Dolores, wasn't much better. He felt as though she was emotionally unavailable and self-absorbed. He began to act out by doing things like shoplifting. In 1975, when Hewerman was 12 years old, his father died. His mother continued to raise her children in the same Massapequa Park home on First Avenue, a modest, wood-paneled, ranch-style house.

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  Rex Hewerman's school life was even worse than the struggles he'd faced at home. A loner and an outsider, who stood out due to his exceptional height and awkward demeanor, he was often picked on by other children. A group of them set upon him in the 6th grade, trying to beat him up, but were stopped by a teacher. In addition to facing physical attacks, Hewerman was on the receiving end of verbal insults, with one classmate telling The New York Times, “He got picked on a lot. He would take it and take it and walk away. I seen him pushed to his limit.”

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  As he grew older, Hewerman's physical stature became more imposing, but he remained quiet and insecure. When classmates did try to talk to him, he had difficulty holding a conversation. He avoided school sports and other extracurricular activities, but did join the drama club, where he worked as a stagehand. He didn't socialize, and amongst some of his peers, he developed a reputation for having a mean streak.

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  One thing at school that Hewerman did seem to like was architectural drawing class. After he graduated, he studied architecture at the New York Institute of Technology. He became an architect, and then an architectural consultant, and in 1994, he opened his own firm on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, calling it RH Consultants and Associates. His job was to oversee renovations to ensure they followed the proper building codes. That same year, Hewerman purchased his childhood home from his mother for $170,000, taking over the single-family residence on First Avenue. He caught the train every day

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  from Massapequa Park to his office near Penn Station. Two years later, in April 1996, he married Asa Elrip, who was one month his junior. Asa had been born in Iceland, but was put up for adoption along with her little brother. Her brother stayed in Iceland, while Asa was adopted by a family in Long Island and raised in the United States. She maintained a connection with Iceland, however, and has traveled there regularly with her family to visit relatives. It was a difficult upbringing. Asa struggled with having been adopted, feeling unloved, unwanted, and like a perpetual outsider. When she was 16 years old,

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  she was sexually assaulted by a boy in her neighborhood. Struggling in the aftermath of the assault, Asa attempted suicide. She later left high school and began working at a 7-Eleven. Her life would change when she met Rex Hewerman.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Their paths first crossed when they were both eighteen and Hjulmand was at college. Asa was attracted to Hjulmand's six-foot-four height and thought he was handsome. As she would later tell filmmakers for the documentary series House of Secrets, she fell madly in love with him. But then she met another man who became her first husband. The marriage deteriorated after Asa gave birth to a son named Christopher, who had developmental disabilities. Asa wanted to leave her husband, and when he made it clear he wasn't going to make that easy for her, she reached out to Hjulmand for support.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  The two became romantically involved, and in November of 1995, Asa and Christopher moved into the Massapequa Park residence with Hjulmand. A few months later, Asa became pregnant and the couple decided to get married. Their wedding was held in Sweden on April 13, 1996. Later that year, their daughter Victoria was born. To Asa, Hjulmand was a savior who rescued her and her son in their greatest hour of need. Marrying him was the beginning of the life she had always wanted.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  As the years passed, Asa still travelled back to Iceland on occasion, typically in the summer months. Her children went with her, but her husband didn't.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  Construction in New York was often at its busiest over the summer, so he needed to remain at home to work. He would also take advantage of the house being empty to make internal improvements here and there.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Rex Hjulmand enjoyed woodworking, which he'd learnt from his father, and put this skill to good use. Once, he crafted an intricate dollhouse as a gift for his daughter.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  But despite his career as an architect and his carpentry skills, he didn't maintain the exterior of the home at all. While other houses in the upscale neighbourhood were typically well-maintained, from the outside, the Hjulmand residence looked increasingly shabby and ramshackle as years passed. Paint faded and peeled from the exterior wood siding, and the shingles on the roof looked worn. The yard was overgrown with weeds, in contrast to the more manicured gardens of neighbouring properties. It became the sort of house parents told their children to avoid while trick-or-treating at Halloween. Sometimes, Hjulmand could be seen chopping wood in the front yard while scowling.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Once, he threatened to slash a neighbour's tyres because he didn't like the way they parked their truck.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  He wasn't someone who invited neighbourly conversations.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  When the task force responsible for the Gilgo Beach investigation identified Rex Hjulmand as a person of interest in March of 2022, they set about obtaining search warrants and subpoenas for cellphone records and other evidence to verify their suspicions. The fact that he'd owned the same distinctive vehicle as the individual who'd last been seen with Amber Ling Costello gave them strong grounds to go off, as did the location of his home and office.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  One thing that the task force quickly established via travel records was that Rex Hjulmand's wife had been out of the country on some significant dates. On Wednesday, July 8, 2009, Asa Elrip and her children flew to Iceland for a five-week vacation. Two days after they left, 24-year-old Melissa Bartholomew went missing after meeting up with a client. Asa's cellphone billing records also placed her out of state in June 2010, when Megan Waterman went missing, and in early September that same year, when Amber went missing. Asa had purchased season tickets for the Six Flags amusement park and taken her children

• 44:16Speaker 00

  to ride the roller coasters there. Hjulmand suffered from motion sickness, so hadn't accompanied his family. Knowing that Asa had been away when three of the victims were killed, giving Hjulmand the house to himself, bolstered the detective's suspicions. They also obtained cellphone and credit card billing records for Hjulmand, which gave them general information about his locations on the same date. Again and again, they saw that Rex Hjulmand's phone had been pinging off the same cell towers as the burner phones used in the crimes, at the same time.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  Not once was there an incident where the burner phones were found to be in a different area from Hjulmand's phone. His cell also corresponded to the locations of the phones belonging to Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Melissa Bartholomew, which the killer had used to check the victims' voicemail and make taunting calls to their loved ones.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  On July 10, 2009, the last day that Melissa Bartholomew was seen alive, both her phone and Hjulmand's phone were in Massapequa, then travelled together towards New York City. Later, they travelled back to Long Island again. A week later, Melissa's phone was used to call her 15-year-old sister Amanda.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  The caller had been in midtown Manhattan at the time, with Melissa's phone attaching to a cell tower located at 4 Penn Plaza, less than half a mile from Hjulmand's office. Hjulmand's phone placed him in the same location. In every subsequent call to Amanda from Melissa's phone, both that phone and Hjulmand's were always in the same place in New York City, at times when Hjulmand was in his office there.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  Amanda had received a total of seven calls from her sister's killer. One of the later ones was made on Thursday, August 5. After that, she'd heard nothing for two weeks. Travel records revealed that Rex Hjulmand had flown to Iceland on Tuesday, August 10, to join his family on their holiday. There was no activity on Melissa Bartholomew's phone while Hjulmand was overseas. He returned home on Wednesday, August 18. The very next day, activity for Melissa's phone resumed, and Amanda received another call.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Investigators also discovered that Rex Hjulmand held a number of fictitious identities, including Andrew Roberts, John Springfield, and Thomas Hawke. These names were linked to email accounts, a paid subscription to the online dating app Tinder, and multiple burner phones.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Hjulmand's verified phone had been used to log into these accounts on occasion.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  When investigators obtained the call records for the burner phones, they found that they had been used extensively and recently to set up appointments with sex workers. A search warrant for one account turned up selfies Rex Hjulmand had taken of himself, posing in front of a bathroom mirror, then sent to his prospective date.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  A search warrant for one particular email account revealed that Hjulmand had made thousands of online searches relating to sex workers, rape, the torture of women, violent sadistic pornography, and even child sexual abuse material.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Over a 16-month period, Hjulmand had also made more than 200 searches about active and known serial killers, the specific disappearances of the women known as the Gilgo Four, and the investigation into their murders. He looked up podcasts and documentaries that had covered the now notorious case, and Googled Melissa Bartholomew's sister, referring to Amanda, whom he tormented via phone calls years earlier. He read articles about the recently formed task force that was devoted to solving the Gilgo murders, and researched how cell site analysis was used to solve crimes.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  In addition to looking into Huerman's online and burner phone activities, investigators were eager to test his DNA.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Five hairs had been found on the remains of three of the Gilgo Four: Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amberling Costello. Three hairs, including one recovered from a belt used to bind Maureen, belonged to one unknown female. One hair belonged to another unknown female, and the fifth hair belonged to an unidentified male.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  On Thursday, July 21, 2022, an undercover Suffolk County detective went to Rex Huerman's home and rummaged through a recycling bin that had been put out for collection.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  They took 11 bottles from the bin, which were later swabbed and sent to a forensic laboratory for mitochondrial DNA profiling.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Almost one year later, on Tuesday, May 23, 2023, investigators followed Victoria Huerman home from work one day. She was employed as a receptionist at her father's office. Victoria boarded a train at Penn Station that was headed to Long Island and drank an energy drink throughout the journey. When she disembarked at Massapequa Park, she threw the empty can in a bin at the station. The investigators collected the can, which was also sent away for testing.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  It was found that three of the hairs found at the Gilgo crime scene were consistent with Asa Eldrop's mitochondrial DNA profile. Two were left on Megan Waterman's body, the third was on Maureen Brainard-Barnes. A fourth hair stuck to duct tape around Amberling Costello's head was consistent with Victoria's.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Investigators believed that the hairs had been inadvertently transferred by Huerman from the family home on to the women's remains.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  The lone male hair had been recovered from the bottom of the burlap that had been used to wrap Megan Waterman's body.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Shortly after launching the investigation into Rex Huerman, the task force had placed him under field and video surveillance, keeping tabs on all of his activities. One day, while following him throughout Manhattan, undercover detectives watched Huerman throw a used pizza box into a bin on Fifth Avenue, right outside his office building. They retrieved the box, which was then sent to a forensic laboratory for testing. A swab was taken from a piece of leftover pizza crust, then compared to the result from the hair found on Megan Waterman.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  On Monday, June 12, 2023, it was found that the two samples had the same mitochondrial DNA profiles at a rate that would exclude 99.96% of the North American population. By the time this result came through, the task force had been investigating and surveilling Rex Huerman for 16 months. He was now 59 years old, but was still actively pursuing sex workers via burner phones and fake online identities. He also visited massage parlors.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  In late May 2023, the task force captured footage of him purchasing more prepaid minutes for his burner devices. This was concerning. Although the last known murder had been committed more than a decade earlier, in 2010, there was always a chance that he might be biding his time before killing again. By July, the team was ready to make an arrest.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Just before 8:30 PM on Thursday, July 13, 2023, Rex Huerman exited his office building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and turned left. He wore a pair of beige trousers with a leather belt and a short-sleeved blue shirt, and was carrying a satchel over his left shoulder. As he walked towards East 35th Street, he didn't notice the undercover agents following him from behind, nor did he see the trio of law enforcement officers dressed in suits approaching him until they abruptly cornered him next to some rubbish bins and placed him under arrest. Surrounded from all sides, Huerman was trapped.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  His office would be subject to extensive searches over the ensuing days. Amongst the items discovered there was an issue of People magazine from 2016 with the front page headlines: "Bodies on the Beach Hunt for the Long Island Serial Killer." A little over two hours later, in Massapequa Park, Rex Huerman's family heard a loud banging on the front door of their house. "FBI, open up," called a loud voice. The late intrusion was a shock to Asa and her daughter Victoria, who were still waiting for Huerman to return home. Asa let the agents inside, and they asked her: "Do you know why we're here?"

• 53:56Speaker 00

  "My husband's guns," Asa asked. Huerman was a keen hunter and legally owned 92 handguns. A female investigator asked: "Have you heard about the murders on Gilgo Beach?" Asa said she had, but knew nothing about them. "Your husband..." "He knows all about it," the investigator said.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Asa and Victoria were informed that the agents had evidence their husband and father had murdered multiple women, and their home was now considered a crime scene.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  The two women were stunned and disbelieving. Victoria was asked whether her father had ever sexually abused her or shown any sexual interest in her. She said that he hadn't.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  Officers drove Huerman's family to a hotel and got them a room where they had to stay under police guard. Meanwhile, a search of their property got underway. It was a mammoth raid that would involve officers from Suffolk and Nassau Counties, the FBI, and the state police. In the days that followed, police in hazmat suits, gloves, and face masks combed through the house and its yard, while forensic canine officers were sent in to sniff for evidence. Construction equipment was used to dismantle parts of the property, tearing apart the deck and excavating the yard. Tents were set up outside, and there was a steady stream of officers removing belongings from the home.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  Tools such as saws were removed from the garage. Inside the basement, investigators found several rooms and closets. Behind a solid iron door with a combination lock, they discovered a walk-in vault that held a huge arsenal of firearms, far beyond the 92 handguns Huerman had permits for. He had started building the collection when he was 18 years old. A total of 279 firearms were removed from the property, including antique weapons, long guns, 15 unregistered assault rifles, and at least 26 unregistered handguns.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Investigators didn't believe Huerman had used the firearms against any of his victims, but the vault he had specially designed and built for their storage was another matter. It sat directly under the basement stairs and was soundproofed.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Huerman kept the vault locked at all times, and his family members were only allowed in there under his supervision. Investigators suspected that he had taken his victims back to his home and held them there for a time before murdering them and disposing of their remains.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  The vault appeared to be a likely place where he would have carried out these crimes, as it was soundproofed and secure.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  In another part of the basement was a room that had been Huerman's childhood bedroom, which still had a bed set up, but was very cluttered. It also had a set of stairs leading up to the yard outside. Adjoining the rear of that room was a small hidden compartment.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  It also appeared that while the exterior of the Huerman house had been left to slowly fall into disrepair, several renovations had been completed inside the home. Investigators learnt that while his family was away in Iceland in July of 2009, Rex Huerman had remodeled one of the bathrooms.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  This renovation also coincided with the murder of Melissa Bartholomew. Huerman had torn out everything from the old bathroom, then re-tiled it and installed all-new plumbing. There were receipts from his purchases dated July 12, 2009, two days after Melissa went missing.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Investigators suspected the renovation had been done to conceal evidence of her murder. They cut up parts of the vinyl bathtub and the floor tiles, looking for traces of blood. It has not been publicly confirmed whether any was found.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  A press conference was held the day after Rex Hulman's arrest to announce that a suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders had finally been apprehended. Hulman had only been charged with three of the murders at this stage, those of Melissa Bartholomew, Megan Waterman, and Amber Ling Costello. Investigators were seeking more evidence relating to the murder of Maureen Brainard Barnes and the other victims who had been killed during the 1990s and early 2000s. For that, they needed to work on the timelines when each crime was committed. It would ultimately emerge that Asa Elrup and her children had also been away during the period in July 2007 when Maureen Brainard Barnes had gone missing.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  In addition to searching Hulman's home and office, investigators had obtained warrants to search some storage units he leased. They'd recovered thousands of documents from those units, and amongst those records was a credit card statement that featured transactions made in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in July 2007. Asa had taken the kids there for a holiday from July 6 to July 20. Hulman had joined them for the second week of the vacation, arriving on July 13. Maureen had gone missing on July 9.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Investigators now had evidence that on each occasion that one of the Gilgo Four had been murdered, Rex Hulman had his home entirely to himself.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Maureen's last known location was Penn Station, which was just a few blocks away from Rex Hulman's office. She had been found with a leather belt that was used to bind her ankles, and the belt was embossed with the initials HM or WH. The initials WH would be a match for Hulman's grandfather, William, who died in 1964.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Tied in the buckle of the belt was a hair, which was 7.9 trillion times more likely to have come from Asa Elrup than from a random unrelated person.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  About six months after Rex Hulman's initial arrest, he was officially charged with the murder of Maureen Brainard Barnes on Tuesday, January 16, 2024. But investigators believed he was responsible for more murders than those of the Gilgo Four. There were still six other victims they suspected he was responsible for.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  During the raids of Hulman's home and office, more than 400 electronic devices had been seized, including phones, laptops, and hard drives. Stored on the devices were photos and videos of extreme pornography and violent content dating back to 1994. Hulman had saved images he'd found of decapitated bodies, women bound with rope, mutilated breasts, and child sexual abuse material. There was also evidence that he had viewed Amber Ling Costello's back page ad mere hours before his first encounter with her on September 1, 2010.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  But not all of Hulman's online and tech activities were accessible. He'd searched online for directions to wipe data from a computer and had purchased software that enabled him to shred digital files. There was evidence that he'd used this software on July 9, 2009, right before he met up with Melissa Bartholomew.

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  Investigators believed he'd used the software to remove any evidence that he'd viewed her online advertisement.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  Hulman's devices were handed over to forensic experts who might be able to recover some of the deleted information. During the analysis of a hard drive taken from Hulman's basement, investigators recovered a Microsoft Word document that had been deleted titled HK 2002-04.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  The original document was created in the year 2000 and had been named HK 2000-03.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  Investigators suspected that Hulman had renamed and updated the document over time to refer to impending years. As investigators read the file, they realized it referred to the planning and carrying out of murder. HK stood for the words hunt and kill.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  There were four columns on the first page, with the headings Problems, Supplies, DS, and TRG.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Beneath the word Problems was a long list that included DNA, tire marks, bloodstains, fingerprints, witness, hair and fibre, and other items that could result in a killer being identified.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  The list for Supplies mentioned things like rope, hairnets, police scanner, and medical gloves. Investigators believed the column titled DS referred to dump sites. TRG appeared to be a reference to targets. Featuring on that list were the words "small is good".

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Beneath this first page were more lists that related to planning and preparing for a murder, and what to do afterwards. Hulman mentioned doing reconnaissance, looking out for surveillance cameras, and checking the weather well in advance of a murder. Then, closer to the event, he would set up a stage and a holding area where a victim would be suspended from the ceiling or bound to a table.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  This setup was consistent with the sorts of extreme bondage pornography that had been found on his devices. The final column was how he would cover his tracks, by changing car tires, burning and disposing of items, and having a story set for where he'd been at the time. Further down the document, a section titled Body Prep described how to remove evidence from a victim and prevent their identification. Some of the items on this list included "remove ID marks, tattoos", and "remove head and hands". The year that this document had been written and some of the items featured on Hulman's

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  lists made investigators more certain than ever he was responsible for more of the victims.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

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• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Jessica Taylor was one of two victims whose partial remains were found near Gilgo Beach, while the rest of her body was left in a wooded area about forty-five miles away. Twenty-year-old Jessica had gone missing on Monday, July 21, 2003, and her body was found five days later in Manorville. Her breasts had been mutilated, and she was missing her head, hands, and forearms. Most of these body parts were found almost eight years later during the extensive search along Ocean Parkway.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  While some close to the investigation had believed a different killer was behind Jessica’s murder, others suspected that her murderer had also killed the Gilgo Four. He’d just changed his methodology. There were other examples of the killer honing his methods over time. For example, he’d initially not had a problem with victims bringing their cellphones on dates, but eventually began instructing them to leave their phones at home, probably because he realised that cell data allowed investigators to track a device’s general location. After the news reported that Melissa Bartholomew’s killer had taunted her younger sister with phone calls, he ceased to doing that as well.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  The planning document Rex Huhman had written up for the years 2002 to 2004 appeared to confirm the theory that he had changed his methodology over time. This was a man who planned meticulously and adapted along the way. Jessica Taylor had been identified in 2003 by a distinctive tattoo, which her killer had tried to remove by cutting it repeatedly. Luckily, medical examiners had been able to reconstruct the tattoo. Huhman’s office was also just a few blocks from where Jessica had been known to work, and, once again, his family had been out of state at the time of the murder,

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  vacationing with some friends in Vermont from July 20 until July 27. Huhman had stayed home to work.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  Further forensic analysis of Huhman’s devices revealed that on July 28, 2003, two days after Jessica was found, he’d accessed an article about the case headlined “Cops Seek Help in IDing Manorville Body”. The article revealed that about thirteen hours before Jessica’s body was found, a witness who’d been in the area had noticed a dark-coloured Chevrolet Avalanche backed up in the same wooded area, the same kind of vehicle that Huhman owned. He later deleted that online activity and searched for a new Chevrolet Avalanche in bright blue or white, despite his dark-green vehicle being just one year old at the time. Then he deleted that search as well.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  When Jessica Taylor’s body was first examined, investigators recovered a human hair from beneath the plastic sheet she was lying on. Although it was believed that the hair had come from a Caucasian man’s head, DNA testing capabilities weren’t advanced enough in 2003 to test it further. By 2024, however, significant advances in technology allowed forensic experts to develop a DNA profile from the hair. It overwhelmingly pointed to the source being Rex Huhman. The other victim recovered in both Manorville and Ocean Parkway was 24-year-old Valerie Mack, who had only recently been identified via genetic genealogy.

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  Valerie had been murdered between September and November of 2000, and a hunter’s dog had found her body wrapped in garbage bags near the same area where Jessica would be recovered almost three years later. Like Jessica, her breasts were mutilated, and she was missing her head, hands, as well as her right leg from the mid-calf down, where she’d had a tattoo of her son’s name. Investigators would find these dismembered remains more than a decade later along Ocean Parkway. It had long been thought that whoever killed Jessica Taylor had also killed Valerie Mack.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  Rex Huhman’s digital devices revealed that throughout 2020, he had accessed to GilgoNews.com, a website maintained by Suffolk County Police Department to provide updates about the case. Several times, he’d visited specific articles about the identification of Valerie Mack. Moreover, the planning document recovered from his hard drive was initially created in the year 2000, the year Valerie went missing. In a section where Huhman had listed possible dump sites for human remains, he’d mentioned the specific road where Valerie’s body was found. A female hair found in one of the garbage bags that Valerie had been wrapped in

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  came back as most likely belonging to Huhman’s daughter, Victoria, who would have been just three or four years old when Valerie was murdered.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  Investigators had enough to charge Rex Huhman with the murders of Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack. If they were his earliest victims, then Huhman had started murdering women in the early 2000s, when he was in his late 30s. But in 2024, he would suddenly be linked to a much earlier case that, until then, hadn’t been tied to the Gilgo murders at all.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  On Saturday, November 20, 1993, two hunters made their way through a wooded area of Southampton in southeastern Suffolk County along the Athlone-Hampton shoreline of Long Island. About 25 miles east of Manorville, along a hamlet called North Sea, they discovered the remains of a young woman. She was lying on her back with her arms stretched over her head and her legs apart. Her striped shirt had been pulled up over her torso, exposing her chest. Her lower half was naked. Multiple stab wounds and cuts were visible across her face, torso, breasts, left thigh, and genitalia.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  The victim was identified as 28-year-old Sandra Castilla. Originally a native of the Caribbean jewel island nation Trinidad and Tobago, she had been living in Queens, New York City, when she went missing. The previous year, in 1992, she’d been arrested for jumping a subway turnstile, so police had a record of her fingerprints. Like all of the victims in the Gilgo Beach case, Sandra had been doing sex work at the time of her murder.

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  Three foreign hairs were recovered from Sandra’s body, two from her shirt, and one from her right arm. In July 2014, almost a decade before Rex Huhman was identified as a suspect in the Gilgo case, another man named John Bitroff was convicted of killing two sex workers in Suffolk County in 1993 and 1994, respectively. Thinking he might be responsible for Sandra’s murder as well, investigators had the three hairs found on her body tested. Mitochondrial DNA profiles were extracted from the hairs, ruling out John Bitroff as a contributor. Two were actually from an unknown woman; the third was from an unknown man.

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  After the Gilgo Task Force identified Rex Huhman as a suspect, they requested further testing on the hairs. Sandra Castilla hadn’t been found in the same area as any other victim, but there were similarities in her victim profile. They found that the male hair left on Sandra had the same genetic profile as Rex Huhman. The female hairs were a match to a woman Huhman had lived with between 1991 and September 1993, years before he married his wife, Assa. At the time of Sandra’s murder in November 1993, Huhman was living alone in the childhood home where he’d grown up.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  He purchased it from his mother the following year. This meant that Rex Huhman had started killing at least seven years earlier than previously believed, shortly after his 30th birthday. The timing also placed Huhman’s offending within a notable period in Long Island’s history. Serial killers Joel Rifkin and Robert Shulman had also been targeting sex workers on Long Island in the early 1990s. Rifkin was arrested just five months before Sandra Castilla was murdered, while Shulman continued killing until 1995. It was an unusual concentration of serial killers with similar victim profiles in the same place and time.

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  By the end of 2024, Rex Huhman had been charged with murdering seven women. Investigators strongly suspected he was guilty of killing an eighth, Fire Island Jane Doe, whose skull and teeth were located near Gilgo Beach in 2011. Those remains had been linked to a pair of severed legs that had been found in April 1996 in a garbage bag on Fire Island. In 2023, Fire Island Jane Doe was identified via genetic genealogy as a 34-year-old Manhattan woman named Karen Vergada. Karen was believed to have been working as a sex worker when she went missing in mid-February 1996.

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  The last time anybody had heard from her was when she called her father on February 14 to wish him a happy birthday. No missing persons report was filed at the time.

• 1:17:10Speaker 00

  Almost exactly two months after she went missing, Rex Huhman married his wife, Assa Ellrup, in Sweden.

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  Law enforcement, the media and the public were overwhelmed by the extent of Rex Huerman's offending and wondered how many more murders he might have been behind. As well as looking at other unsolved Long Island cases, investigators considered whether Rex Huerman could be responsible for crimes in other states. In 2012, he'd given his Chevrolet Avalanche to his younger brother, who lived in Chester, South Carolina. Huerman also owned about eighteen acres of land nearby. Shortly after arresting Huerman, police seized the vehicle and searched it, looking for evidence of the crimes. Nothing of note was recovered, but Huerman's connections to South Carolina led to speculation

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  that he might have harmed women there as well. News reports compared unsolved cases in the area to Huerman's crimes. Back in Long Island, some women who'd met Huerman previously came forward to share their stories. A picture emerged of a man who seemed to delight in discussing the crimes he was now accused of. Shortly after Huerman's arrest, a woman named Nikki Brass posted on TikTok about an encounter she'd had with him in 2015. Nikki had been working as an escort on Long Island at that time, when she met Rex Huerman online. They met up for a date at a restaurant in Port Jefferson, almost an hour from Huerman's

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  home in Massapequa Park. Nikki was immediately struck by how enormous Huerman was. They chatted for a little bit, then Huerman asked Nikki, "Are you into true crime?" Nikki replied that she was, and followed serial killer cases closely. "Have you heard about the Gilgo Beach killings?" Huerman asked. He looked more excited and animated than he had before. He spoke of the Gilgo Four in particular, nicknaming them with numbers and calling them "Girl Number One" and "Girl Number Two" instead of using their names. Huerman speculated about how the killer disposed of the bodies without being seen, adding

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  that he "lived near Gilgo Beach, and it was very quiet and secluded." He invited Nikki back to his place, but she got a bad feeling and ended the date. She texted a friend to come and meet her, saying, "I think I'm on a date with the Gilgo Beach killer." Questions still remained about the victims along or nearby Ocean Parkway, whose murders Huerman hadn't been charged with. Answers would eventually arrive for some. It would take investigators the better part of two decades to identify the victims who'd been known as Peaches and Baby Doe, an African-American mother and daughter whose remains had

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  been strewn eight miles apart from one another. While Baby Doe had been left fully intact, initially investigators only recovered her mother's arms and legs, which had been placed in a plastic bag and left near Jones Beach State Park. In December 2016, DNA linked these remains to a torso found in Hempstead Lake Park, about twenty miles northwest of Gilgo Beach. That victim had been dubbed Peaches, after a tattoo on her left breast. Investigators had released a photo of the tattoo, hoping it would prompt someone who knew her to come forward, but no credible leads resulted.

• 1:21:00Speaker 00

  However, investigators eventually managed to identify both the mother and child via genetic genealogy. On Wednesday, April 23, 2025, it was announced that Peaches and Baby Doe were Tanya Jackson, a 26-year-old originally from Alabama, and her two-year-old daughter, Tatiana Dykes. Tanya had served in the US Army from 1993 to 1995, and while she was stationed in Texas, she met a medical sergeant named Andrew Dykes. He was married with two sons, but the two had an affair, leading to Tanya conceiving Tatiana.

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  Shortly after Tatiana was born, Dykes was transferred to a base in Brooklyn. Tanya relocated to be closer to him, wanting a relationship with the father of her child. At the time Tanya and Tatiana were murdered, they'd been living in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park. Their disappearance had gone largely unnoticed, as Tanya was estranged from her family back in Alabama. But police had questioned Andrew Dykes in 1997 after Tanya and Tatiana went missing, and he denied having a relationship with Tanya. Following Tanya and Tatiana's identification, investigators said they weren't sure whether

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  their case was linked to the Gilgo Beach serial killings. Then, almost eight months later, on December 5, 2025, DNA evidence found on Tanya's remains led to Andrew Dykes being arrested and charged with her murder. The now 66-year-old man wasn't charged with killing Tatiana due to a lack of evidence, but investigators believed he was responsible for both deaths. Dykes has pleaded not guilty, and as of the release of this episode, is still awaiting his trial. The identification of Tanya Jackson and Tatiana Dykes left only one Gilgo Beach victim

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  who was yet to be identified. Asian Doe was the name given to a victim who was biologically male but found wearing women's clothing, leading to speculation that they had been a trans woman. Unlike the majority of the other victims, who were white, Asian Doe's DNA indicated that they were most likely of Han Chinese descent. Investigators believed Asian Doe had been killed via blunt force trauma around the year 2006 or earlier. They were wearing pants, a bra, and a blue-ribbed, short-sleeved shirt. Aged between 17 and 23, Asian Doe was five foot six inches tall.

• 1:23:48Speaker 00

  Some believed that this victim's profile made them less likely to have been killed by Rex Huerman. But Huerman's digital footprint suggested otherwise. When trawling through Huerman's online searches, investigators found that he had looked for Asian escorts in Manhattan, as well as transgender sex workers. He had also Googled the words "Asian twink tied up porn." Twink is a slang term from the LGBTQ+ community, used to refer to a young, slim man with a boyish or androgynous appearance. This led to speculation that Asian Doe may have been one of Rex Huerman's victims after all.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  On Monday, September 16, 2024, the Suffolk County District Attorney and the Gilgo Beach Task Force released two new high-tech facial reconstructions of what Asian Doe may have looked like. One depicted a more masculine-presenting individual, while the other showed a feminine-presenting person. As of the release of this episode, Asian Doe has not been identified. The final remains awaiting resolution were those of Shannon Gilbert, the woman whose disappearance had triggered the entire investigation and led to the discovery of all the others. Ever since Shannon's body was found in the marsh in Oak Beach, investigators had concluded

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  that Shannon's death was a tragic accident and entirely unconnected to the Gilgo Beach serial killings. Their theory was that during her appointment with her client, Joseph Brewer, Shannon had possibly suffered a mental health episode, leading to her becoming scared and disoriented. Believing that people were pursuing her with ill intent, she fled and became lost in the dense marsh, where she died of exposure and/or drowning. But Shannon's family and other people connected to the case disagreed with this conclusion, pointing in part to her official autopsy, which listed her death as "undetermined."

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  In early 2016, Shannon's family commissioned a second examination by a private medical pathologist. He found that the condition of Shannon's hyoid bone, a small bone in the front of the neck, was consistent with strangulation. However, he too ruled Shannon's cause of death as "undetermined," finding that there was insufficient information to determine exactly how Shannon had died. Shannon's mother, Marie Gilbert, became her fiercest advocate, pushing police to take her disappearance seriously from the start, and continuing to speak up for her daughter after her death was said to be an accident.

• 1:26:38Speaker 00

  Robert Kolker, who wrote the acclaimed book Lost Girls about the Gilgo Beach case, described Marie as willing to challenge the authorities in ways that some of the other women's families were reluctant to. She spoke up for all of the women involved in the case, pointing out the unfair stigma around sex work, and insisting that the case be taken seriously. Marie never accepted that Shannon's death was accidental, and arranged for her daughter's second autopsy. Five months after the results of this examination were shared, Marie was stabbed to death by her daughter Sarah on Saturday, July 23, 2016.

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  Sarah suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and said voices had told her to kill her mother. She invited Marie over to her apartment, where she then killed her. Sarah was charged with second-degree murder and convicted the following year. She is currently serving her sentence of 25 years to life. Marie died before the arrest of Rex Huerman, preventing her from seeing some of the resolutions she had fought so hard for.

• 1:27:54Speaker 00

  Rex Hulman initially pleaded not guilty to all of the seven murders he had been charged with. Although the evidence investigators had shared with the public via charging documents had most people accepting his guilt before he had even been trialed, Hulman maintained the support of his nearest and dearest.

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  Asser El-Rup, his wife of 27 years, could not believe that her husband was guilty of the horrific crimes he was charged with. She saw him as her personal saviour and a devoted father, plus, he told her he didn't do it. Asser always took her husband's word for everything, never challenging or doubting him. He was an authority figure in their relationship, and she was loyal to him. Hulman had been the family's breadwinner, as well as his daughter Victoria's employer. With him gone, they faced financial struggles.

• 1:28:52Speaker 00

  Six days after his arrest, Asser filed for a divorce, which was uncontested by Hulman. But it is believed this was primarily done to protect the family's assets, including their home in Massapequa Park. Asser continued to maintain an emotional relationship with Hulman, and he called her regularly from jail.

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  Asser and Hulman's children appeared in a four-part documentary series titled “House of Secrets”, in which they allowed filmmakers into their home, the same place where Hulman had committed his crimes. In return, they were paid more than a million dollars by the production company G-Unit in conjunction with the streaming platform Peacock, a deal that angered many of the family members of the victims.

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  Over the course of several years, Asser and Victoria shared their thoughts with the documentary crew via exclusive interviews. Four months after Hulman's arrest, Asser stated on camera that she believed the killer had to be a man without children, not a family man like her husband. She couldn't comprehend a father being capable of murder.

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  At the same time, Hulman's defence lawyers and the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office prepared for the criminal trial. It was expected to be the biggest trial the county had ever seen. But in the spring of 2025, almost two years after Hulman was arrested, he began to discuss the possibility of a plea deal.

• 1:30:30Speaker 00

  From the prosecution's perspective, a plea deal would make the process easier for the victims' families, preventing them from having to hear certain things or having painful details published in the media. As far as Hulman's attorneys were concerned, the evidence against their client was overwhelming. They had tried to have the DNA evidence excluded, but a judge had ruled it was admissible. They had also wanted each murder to be trialed separately, but that request had also been denied. The cases would be far more damning when lumped together, revealing a broader pattern. Realising the writing was on the wall, Hulman agreed to plead guilty,

• 1:31:14Speaker 00

  possibly believing that doing so was the only way he could exert any control over his situation.

• 1:31:22Speaker 00

  He wouldn't be facing a reduced sentence by pleading guilty, but he would be dictating the narrative somewhat. As part of the agreement, Hulman would cooperate with the FBI's behavioural analysis unit, providing information that may help them when it came to investigating other serial killers. And he had another condition: he wanted to meet with his wife and daughter individually prior to publicly pleading guilty, so he could tell them the truth and answer any questions they had before the wider world heard what he'd done.

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  In August of 2025, Rex Hulman's wife and daughter visited him in two separate meetings at Suffolk County Correctional Facility where he was being held. Asser's meeting was the first.

• 1:32:10Speaker 00

  When she walked into the room where Hulman was waiting, she saw that he looked nervous. Asser sat down at a table across from her husband and said: “So, Mr. Hulman, I understand that you are confessing to me on these murders. Can you please tell me how many of these women did you kill?” He replied: “Eight.”

• 1:32:35Speaker 00

  Hulman had only been charged with killing seven women. The eighth was Karen Vergata, the woman previously known as Fire Island Jane Doe. Investigators had suspected Hulman was responsible for her murder, but hadn't had the same strong evidence for that case as they had for the others. Hulman told Asser that all of the murders had been planned in advance, with the exception of the first, Sandra Castilla. He claimed he had killed her while the two were in the Dodge Ram Charger he'd owned back in 1993. It had been a spontaneous act, committed before he'd become romantically involved with Asser. Sandra was stabbed to death.

• 1:33:19Speaker 00

  Karen Vergata was his next victim, killed in April 1996, just days before his and Asser's wedding. Hulman strangled her in his home's basement. He hadn't used the gun vault, as investigators suspected. He'd killed her in his childhood bedroom.

• 1:33:40Speaker 00

  Asser, who was then two months pregnant, had flown to Sweden for a three-week holiday with her son Christopher. Hulman had joined them two weeks in, and the couple was married in Sweden on April 13. The six victims that followed all shared the same pattern: they were killed while Asser and her children were away, tortured and strangled in Hulman's childhood bedroom in the basement. Three of the women had been dismembered there as well. He spent considerable time planning each crime, carrying it out, and meticulously cleaning up afterwards. Listening to her husband, Asser didn't feel like he expressed any remorse. He cried at times,

• 1:34:25Speaker 00

  but she felt as though his tears were for her, not his victims.

• 1:34:31Speaker 00

  Experts believe that Hulman deliberately chose a wife who was insecure and wouldn't challenge him. He had been briefly married before Asser and described his first wife as “crazy and uncontrollable”. In contrast, Asser idolised him, believing every word he said, and felt deep gratitude that he had chosen her.

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  Speaking to a psychotherapist who was hired by Asser El-Rup's lawyer, Hulman said he'd had dark thoughts about death, mutilation, and violent sexual fantasies as a teenager, but provided no explanation as to why these thoughts had started. He claimed he'd stopped killing after Amber Lynn Costello because he was no longer experiencing gratification from his crimes. The psychotherapist pushed back against this, pointing out that the discovery of the bodies on Gilgo Beach three months after Amber's murder shone a spotlight on the murders that hadn't existed before. She believed Hulman had only stopped out of fear of being caught.

• 1:35:38Speaker 00

  On Wednesday, April 6, 2026, 62-year-old Rex Hulman appeared in the Suffolk County Court and pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Melissa Bartholomew, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello, and the second-degree murder of Maureen Brainard Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, and Sandra Castilla. He also admitted to killing Karen Vergata, whose murder he hadn't been formally charged with.

• 1:36:06Speaker 00

  After admitting to his crimes, Hulman concluded: “There are no words I can say. The words I would say have no meaning.”

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  In response, the judge retorted: “I know that you're sorry you got caught. I assume that you're sorry for what you've done to your wife and children. Are you a little bit sorry for what you did to these poor, innocent women?”

• 1:36:32Speaker 00

  Then he continued: “You've been described as a very big man, but you're a disgusting and despicable small man, if you're a man at all, and you're a coward.”

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  Then he addressed the bailiffs, stating: “All right, get him out of here.”

• 1:36:51Speaker 00

  This prompted the families and loved ones of the victims who were present in the courtroom to burst out in cheers and applause. One person chanted “Oga, ogre”, a reference to Hulman's distinctive physical appearance that had been crucial to his suspect description and identification.

• 1:37:10Speaker 00

  Hulman has never admitted to killing Asian Doe, which hasn't prevented many from believing that he is responsible for that crime, as well as other cold cases. Asian Doe's murder remains an active homicide investigation. There are also dozens of unsolved murders involving women on Long Island, some of whom were sex workers.

• 1:37:33Speaker 00

  Rex Hulman was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He received three life sentences for the first-degree murder charges and four 25-year-to-life sentences for the second-degree murder convictions, all of which will run consecutively.

• 1:37:53Speaker 00

  On the day of Huerman's sentencing, the court was packed with family members and loved ones of the women murdered, who were there to represent all of the victims. The exception was Karen Vergata, who had only been in sporadic contact with her father when she was killed, and he had died in 2022, before his daughter's case was solved. The family members berated Huerman and mourned their lost loved ones. Jasmine Robinson, a cousin of Jessica Taylor, told Huerman: “You chose small women because you're nothing more than a weak, disgusting coward.” Valerie Mack's parents said that although justice had finally been done, the damage

• 1:38:36Speaker 00

  Huerman had inflicted on their family was irreparable. Amanda Funderberg, the younger sister of Melissa Bartholomew, who had received taunting phone calls from Huerman when she was just 15, spoke about the questions she'd lived with for a decade and a half. “I always wonder, if it would have happened if I would have been there, would she still be here? Would she have been spared because you wouldn't have met her, or because I would have known where she was going? But those questions don't matter, because you still took her from me, from all of us.” Noticing that Huerman was staring blankly at the table in front of him, Amanda addressed him directly.

• 1:39:20Speaker 00

  “You can look at me while I'm talking,” she said. “It's been about 17 years since we spoke, don't forget.” But Huerman kept gazing down at the table as Amanda shared details of the lifelong trauma she and her family had endured, how the calls he'd made to her caused unspeakable suffering. “I was 15, 15 years old. I know you don't care,” she added. “I was robbed of my youth, robbed of my young adulthood, and I still feel robbed to this day. There were so many years that I didn't want to be on this earth anymore. I would have never taken my own life, but it got to the point where I didn't care what

• 1:40:05Speaker 00

  happened to me. I simply didn't want to be here without her.” Missy Cane, the sister of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, cried as she recalled the day when she learnt her sister had been murdered. She described being plagued by survivor's guilt and endless what-ifs, wondering if somehow Maureen could have been saved. “It has taken me years to know the truth. My actions did not cause my sister's death. The guilt is not mine to carry,” she said. “This burden belongs to Rex, and Rex alone. I hope he's forced to sit with the reality and feel even a fraction of the weight, the

• 1:40:49Speaker 00

  trauma, and the pain I've carried for so long.” Missy spent time telling the court about Maureen, who she described as a rare soul, intelligent, and insightful. She had always been Missy's protector. A statement was read aloud on behalf of Amber Ling Costello's sister, Kim, in which she credited Amber with lighting the match that led to Huerman's eventual downfall. Amber had gotten the better of Huerman when she and her housemate, Dave, ripped him off the first time he visited. As Kim pointed out, this had likely ignited fits of rage in the egotistical narcissist

• 1:41:29Speaker 00

  Rex Huerman, prompting him to seek revenge against Amber the following night, despite having already been seen by Dave. This allowed a witness to pass along crucial details to police, which were key to identifying Huerman. A statement was also read on behalf of Sandra Castor's sister, Ruth, who had been waiting decades for justice for her sister. Ruth expressed her gratitude to law enforcement for solving her sister's case, and the other women's cases as well. She recalled Sandra as a beautiful, intelligent woman with endless potential, who cherished being a mother to her son.

• 1:42:10Speaker 00

  He had been the centre of her world, and losing her at a young age had caused irreparable damage to him. “My heart is with all the families,” Ruth wrote. “And it is my deepest hope that their loved ones will find peace and will honour their lives by living their best lives. And may the children left behind carry on a beautiful legacy of their mothers.” Liliana Waterman, the daughter of Megan Waterman, shared all of the things she had missed out on by having her mother taken from her. She had been three years old when her mother was murdered, and was now about 20. She'd never experienced what it was like to be comforted by Megan after a bad day,

• 1:42:55Speaker 00

  to hear her advice, or be guided by her unconditional love. After eventually learning the truth of what had happened to her mother, Liliana was tormented by knowing that Megan had only been doing escort work to provide a better life for her. Megan's mother had died in August of 2022, almost a year before Huerman's arrest. She never got to see the capture of her daughter's killer, or witness him being brought to justice. Megan's aunt, Elizabeth Meserve, spoke instead. Elizabeth said Megan had been repeatedly victimised, first by the man who trafficked her, and then by Rex Huerman, who had access to Megan because of what her pimp had done.

• 1:43:40Speaker 00

  “I'm certain my niece fought as hard as she possibly could to come back to her daughter, who she loved with every fibre of her being.” She described Megan as funny, strong, and devoted to her family and friends. Elizabeth also used her platform to talk about the ways the families had been revictimised by others after Huerman. First, by the corruption of former Suffolk County Police Chief James Burke and former District Attorney Thomas Spota. Under their watch, key evidence in the case had been ignored, and assistance was rejected, so that light couldn't be shone on their corruption.

• 1:44:22Speaker 00

  If they had done their jobs properly, the case might have been solved a decade earlier. In 2011, investigators already had the crucial information they needed to identify the Long Island serial killer. Elizabeth had also felt revictimised when she learnt that Huerman's family would be receiving more than $1 million for participating in a documentary series on the case. As she saw it, they were profiting from the crimes committed by their patriarch. Maureen's sister, Missy, agreed with Elizabeth, and the two women have formed the Gilgo Victims Committee, with the intention of revising New York's Son of Sam law.

• 1:45:03Speaker 00

  As it currently stands, criminals cannot profit from their crimes by speaking or writing about them, but a loophole allows their families to receive money for the same. Much has been made over the years about the fact that Huerman's victims went unseen by so many for so long. Law enforcement officers initially dismissed their disappearances, and when they were found, they reassured the general public that they had nothing to be afraid of. When journalist Robert Colker wrote his definitive book about the case, he titled it "Lost Girls", as a nod to the way society had failed them.

• 1:45:44Speaker 00

  In her statement, Elizabeth Meserve addressed this aspect of the case, and how Huerman had deliberately selected victims he saw as disposable. She pointed out that the legacy of the eight women he murdered would go well beyond what he ever could have anticipated, stating: “The prisoners' plan to erase Megan, Maureen, Melissa, Amber, Jessica, Valerie, Sandra, and Karen, backfired. Because of his vile and cowardly actions, our loved ones will be spoken of for years to come with love and reverence. Not only by their families and friends, but by millions of people around the world

• 1:46:28Speaker 00

  who now mourn their loss.”

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