Netflix’s new true crime docuseries, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, details the harrowing serial murders of young women in Long Island between 1993 and 2010. Their bodies were discovered along Gilgo Beach in 2010 and 2011.
Despite the victims’ families best efforts to draw attention to the case, it remained unsolved for decades — in part because of law enforcement and the media’s discriminatory attitude towards the victims, owing to their line of work selling sex. But in 2023, 30 years after the first victim was killed, there was a breakthrough: Manhattan architect Rex Heuermann was arrested and charged with the murders of seven of the 11 victims.
This new documentary, then — which landed on Netflix on Monday (31st March) — arrives in the thick of the case. So much so that Heuermann’s pre-trial hearing has been happening this week — and there’s a chance that vital DNA evidence could be thrown out before the proper trial even begins.
Who is the Long Island serial killer?
The Long Island serial killer is alleged to have murdered at least 11 people, in killings spanning three decades. The bodies of the victims were discovered after the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert, a 24-year-old escort who went missing from Long Island’s Oak Beach after fleeing from a client’s house in a panic, saying someone was “after her” and that “they” were trying to kill her.
When searching the nearby Gilgo Beach for Gilbert’s body, months after she was last seen, law enforcement discovered the four bodies of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello — all sex workers, and who later came to be known as ‘The Gilgo Four’ — in December 2010. Over the course of the next six months, six more bodies were discovered along Ocean Parkway (off which Gilgo Beach is situated), including three sex workers, Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor, and Karen Vergata, as well as three unidentified victims — one of whom was a toddler.
In July 2023, 59-year-old Heuermann was arrested and has since been charged with seven murders: the Gilgo Four, Taylor, Costilla, and Mack. Gilbert’s death had been ruled an accidental drowning in May 2012, with authorities believing she was in a drug-induced panic at the time. Her family maintain she was murdered.
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How did they catch the accused Long Island serial killer?
In 2020, the Netflix drama film Lost Girls — based on Robert Kolker’s 2013 book of the same name, and directed by Liz Garbus, who’s also at the helm of Gone Girls — and the podcast LISK: Long Island Serial Killer brought global attention to the case.
Whether this renewed interest influenced the authorities or not is unknown, but in January 2022, a new task force was assembled to try and solve the cold case. When reviewing evidence, authorities unearthed a tip-off about a car — a green Chevrolet Avalanche — that a witness saw one of Costello’s clients driving the night before her disappearance. The next day, Costello went to meet that same client but never returned home.
The authorities started to suspect Heuermann in March 2022, after it emerged that he had a car matching the Chevrolet’s description registered in his name at the time of Costello’s disappearance. He also matched the witness’ description of the driver: a large, white “ogre”-like male in his mid-40s, around six-foot-four to six-foot-six tall, with “dark busy hair” and “big oval style 1970’s-type eyeglasses”.
It emerged that Heuermann also had a stash of burner phones, which police traced to have been in the same locations as the victims at the times of their disappearances. His personal phone was traced to these locations, too.
In the years after the murders, Heuermann allegedly continued to use burner phones to meet sex workers, as well as to search for graphic images of young girls, children, and “sadistic, torture-related pornography”. He also reportedly researched the Long Island serial killer case and its victims, searching things like, ‘Why could law enforcement not trace the calls made by the Long Island serial killer?’ and ‘Why hasn’t the Long Island serial killer been caught?’.
Police rooted through Heuermann’s rubbish to collect his DNA, and he was then linked to the victims via a strand of male hair found on the burlap used to wrap Waterman’s body. It was found in 2010, but it was apparently unsuitable for DNA testing, but was stored and eventually tested in 2020. Hair belonging to Heuermann’s wife was also found on the bodies of three out of the Gilgo Four. It was discovered that she’d been out of town at the time of the murders, so it’s likely her hair was transferred via her husband’s clothes or other items taken from their shared home. She isn’t suspected of any crime.
But this DNA evidence could now be under threat.
What’s the latest with the case — and why might DNA evidence not be admissible?
Over the last week, prosecutors and Heuermann’s lawyers have been embroiled in a debate about whether a new type of DNA evidence can be used in the case. The evidence came from the hair fibres found on the victims, which were matched to Heuermann via something called nuclear DNA testing, which has never before been used in a New York court of law. As explained by CBS News, the new method means that “even an old low-quality rootless hair strand can now be matched to a suspect if thousands of small locations on the DNA match”.
The method is also known as whole genome sequencing, which forensic scientist Michael Marciano told the publication has been used for several decades. “Rather than look at 24 to 27 areas of the DNA, which is what we typically do in forensic cases, we look at thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of different variations in the DNA,” Marciano said of the process. “If you think about your DNA, a lot of people see it as a sequence of letters. We’re looking for differences in those letters. We share most of our DNA with each other. We’re looking for those differences, and those differences can provide information as to the identity of an individual.”
Although prosecutors and experts say the process is regularly used in forensics to exonerate people, identify remains, and also in healthcare to prevent disease, Heuermann’s lawyers claim that it’s “extremely faulty and defective”. It’s not yet clear what would happen if the DNA evidence was thrown out, but the hearing continues today (3rd April).
