Suspected Gilgo Beach killer Rex Heuermann to plead guilty to 8th homicide, source says

Alleged Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex A. Heuermann — charged in the deaths of seven women during a 17-year killing spree — will also plead guilty to an eighth homicide when he returns to court Wednesday, a source familiar with the negotiations told Newsday.

Heuermann, 62, of Massapequa Park, is expected to admit to the 1996 killing of Karen Vergata, a Manhattan mother of two whose remains were found west of Gilgo Beach and on Fire Island more than a decade apart. The plea hearing is scheduled for 11 a.m. before State Supreme Court Justice Timothy Mazzei in Riverhead.

Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney and Heuermann defense attorney Michael J. Brown, of Central Islip, could not be immediately reached for comment Tuesday morning.

Tierney previously declined to comment on the negotiations.

"Nothing is done and so we wait," Tierney said during a public appearance the morning after news of the plea broke. "It’s not my decision and I’m not a party to that decision. There’s a presumption of innocence and a right to trial. And we respect those things and we're just going to have to wait and see."

The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office has scheduled a news conference for 2 p.m. Wednesday, following the court appearance.

Suffolk District Attorney Ray Tierney will address the media from the Suffolk County Police Academy in Brentwood after the former Manhattan architect’s scheduled appearance before State Supreme Court Justice Timothy Mazzei in Suffolk County Criminal Court in Riverhead, his office announced. The briefing was moved to the alternate site to accommodate an anticipated large presence of local and national media.

Tierney will be accompanied by Suffolk Sheriff Errol D. Toulon Jr., Suffolk County Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina, and representatives of the Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force from the New York State Police and Federal Bureau of Investigation and by family members of the homicide victims.

Family members of alleged victims of Heuermann, who has denied any involvement in seven charged killings dating back to 1992, were told by Suffolk Police to expect Heuermann to change his plea to guilty during the appearance, family members exclusively told Newsday two weeks ago.

The plea agreement, the added full details of which have not been publicly disclosed, marks a stunning turn in a case that has been covered in books, feature films and streaming documentaries in the more than 15 years since the skeletal remains of four women were found along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in December 2010.

Wednesday’s appearance had been scheduled for Mazzei to rule on the final defense motion and a trial was planned for September.

Vergata has long been connected to the Gilgo Beach killings because of the Ocean Parkway location where her partial remains were found in April 2011 but she was often referred to as Fire Island Jane Doe due to the discovery of additional remains there 15 years earlier.

The Gilgo Beach Homicide Task Force, whose investigation has already led to four indictments charging Heuermann in seven other killings, publicly identified Vergata in August 2022, less than a month after his arrest. Her identification was made using investigative DNA techniques that did not exist at the time of her death

Born on Nov. 4, 1961, Vergata was the second child of Dominic and Ann Vergata. The couple also had a son, Victor, four years older than his sister. The family lived in Glen Head.

Vergata had two sons of her own, Gary Doherty, 37, and Eric Doherty, 35, who were adopted two years before her death as Vergata struggled with addiction, the family previously told Newsday.

Vergata, a known sex worker, last had contact with her father on Valentine’s Day 1996. Her legs were discovered in a plastic garbage bag by two brothers taking a walk near the Davis Park community on April 20, 1996.

Vergata’s parents died a long time ago.

Heuermann first became a suspect in the case, which involves at least one additional uncharged killing, in March 2022 after a state police investigator with the Gilgo Beach Homicide Task Force learned while reviewing the case file that alleged victim Amber Lynn Costello was picked up by a man driving a green Chevrolet Avalanche. Police had already determined the likely killer lived in Massapequa Park and worked in New York City based on phone calls placed to the victims from those locations.

To build the case, the task force — which consists of members of the Suffolk police department, state Police, FBI, Suffolk County sheriff's office and the Suffolk District Attorney's Office — tracked burner phones, triangulated cell site data, used advanced DNA testing on strands of hair found on the victims' bodies, surveilled Heuermann and picked up his DNA from a leftover pizza crust in a box he discarded in Manhattan, court papers show.

Investigators also learned through his internet search history that Heuermann viewed torture pornography and maintained an active interest in the investigation, prosecutors revealed.

Heuermann was arrested while walking away from his Manhattan office on July 13, 2023, and arraigned on an initial indictment the following day even as the investigation into additional killings continued.

Police seized the opportunity to make the arrest then because investigators were concerned that Heuermann continued to use the services of sex workers and might attack again, prosecutors have alleged.

Heuermann was initially charged with first- and second-degree murder in the killings of Costello, Melissa Barthelemy and Megan Waterman. In January 2024, a special grand jury also indicted him on a second-degree murder charge in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, effectively answering the question of who prosecutors said killed the "Gilgo Four," the first set of remains found off Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in December 2010. The women, whose skeletal remains were all discovered without clothes and bound, were killed between 2007 and 2009, each at times when Heuermann stayed behind as his wife, Asa Ellerup, and children left for vacations, prosecutors have said.

Heuermann was indicted twice more in the more than two years he has spent in isolation at the Suffolk County Jail in Riverhead on three additional second-degree murder charges that widened both the geography and timeline of the alleged killings and exhibited a perceived shift in the way the accused killer carried out the crimes.

Alleged victims Valerie Mack, in 2000, and Jessica Taylor, in 2003, were both mutilated, their severed bodies dumped near each other off Ocean Parkway and 40 miles east in the vast woodlands of Manorville. Sandra Costilla was also discovered with sharp-forced wounds to her body even farther east, in the Southampton Town hamlet of North Sea, in 1993, about 60 miles from Gilgo Beach. Their bodies were all found within days of their disappearances, which prosecutors have also said occurred while Heuermann was alone in the Massapequa Park home he lived in shared with his family. The killings likely happened in the basement of the home, prosecutors have said.

All eight women were said to have engaged in sex work, officials have said.