After the disappearance of sex worker Shannan Gilbert in May 2010, police and the public had little idea the ensuing search would lead them to a slew of bodies and the eventual discovery of a serial murderer who’d gone undetected for almost three decades. New Netflix docuseries Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer explores the chilling case.
Shannan’s panicked 911 call – in which she claimed, “They’re trying to kill me,” before disappearing – would be the catalyst that started the investigation. Her case initially received little attention from the Suffolk County Police – a delay attributed to her being a sex worker and the stigma attached to that – but during a search some months later, police discovered four bodies near Gilgo Beach in December 2010.
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The remains of the women, dubbed the “Gilgo Four”, would be identified as Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello and Megan Waterman – escorts in their early- to mid-twenties who disappeared between 2007 and 2010.
That find sparked a broader search, uncovering six more sets of remains in 2011: three of them sex workers – Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor and Karen Vergata – who had gone missing between 1996 and 2003, and three unidentified bodies – an Asian male dressed in women’s clothing, a woman nicknamed “Peaches” due to a tattoo on her torso and her toddler daughter. Shannan’s body was also found later that year.
After the discoveries, however, the investigation stalled for years until a new task force was formed in February 2022. It only took them six weeks to piece together evidence that previous investigations had overlooked, particularly a 2010 tip-off from a witness who’d seen Amber with a client driving a green Chevrolet Avalanche the night before she vanished.
This clue led to Long Island architect and father-of-two Rex Heuermann, who owned a matching vehicle registered at the time of Amber’s disappearance. Police would then discover his burner phone activity, his chilling Google searches about the case and violent pornography, and a DNA match from a discarded pizza crust linking him to a hair on Megan’s body.
Heuermann was arrested in July 2023 and initially charged with three of the Gilgo Four murders, with the fourth charge to come the following January. Since then, he’s also been charged with murdering three more victims: Jessica, Valerie and Sandra Castillo, a 1993 case not previously linked to the Gilgo Beach murders. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The murder Heuermann, 61, hasn’t been charged with is the case that sparked it all: Shannan Gilbert. Police ruled her death an “accidental drowning”, although her family maintains she was murdered and marks on her neck found by a forensic pathologist are consistent with death by strangulation. “Shannan will be remembered for the girl who by her death exposed the truth and the killer,” Gilbert family attorney John Ray told People magazine in 2024.
(Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer is streaming on Netflix now)
