Newsday reviews cold cases from the 1990s. Could the Gilgo Beach serial killer be tied to any of them?

The remains of a petite woman found in a dumpster in Sayville near the Long Island Rail Road train station in 1992. Bones belonging to a woman's partial torso scattered at an East Quogue beach in 1994. The naked, decomposing body of a woman discovered near the Deer Park train station in North Bay Shore. 

A Newsday review found half a dozen instances of unidentified remains like these found on Long Island in the early 1990s during a period when admitted Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex A. Heuermann began committing murders. Looking at these cases, and hundreds more, are a top priority for investigators trying to determine of any unsolved homicides are linked to the Long Island serial killer.

Prosecutors were examining these cases even before Heuermann pleaded guilty in April to strangling eight women on Long Island in the span of 33 years, while admitting to being what authorities called the Gilgo Beach serial killer.

In the aftermath of Heuermann's guilty plea, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney indicated that his office was looking at unsolved cases to see if any could be linked to Heuermann.

“Any case involving an unsolved homicide in Suffolk County, those cases remain open,” Tierney said. “We don’t presume he [Heuermann] did or didn’t do any more cases.”

Newsday reported early last year that Tierney’s staff and the Gilgo Beach Task Force had been looking at some 300 unresolved homicide cases whose victims were found in the county. Four Suffolk cases Newsday tracked are among those being investigated by Tierney, the district attorney confirmed. Two Nassau cases found in the Newsday review, in Lattingtown and Muttontown, are technically outside Tierney’s jurisdiction, the top prosecutor told Newsday.

Newsday's cold case review took months and focused on the time period from early 1994 through the spring of 1996, when, according to court records and law enforcement officials, Heuermann was either unmarried or going through a divorce from his first marriage. During his plea to the Gilgo murders, Heuermann acknowledged that he killed his victims in his Massapequa Park home when his second wife, Asa Ellerup, and their two children were away on vacation or out of the country.

Tierney said he and his staff looking at the unsolved cases with a methodical approach similar to the one used to make the Gilgo Beach case against Heuermann.

“With each case — as we did with these [Gilgo] women — we develop the evidence and see where it leads us. That is what we do,” Tierney told Newsday reporters during an in-house interview.

Heuermann, 62, a Manhattan architect living in Massapequa Park, pleaded guilty to seven murders in the Gilgo Beach case and admitted killing an eighth victim, Karen Vergata.

The case against him began in 2010 when investigators searched an area in Gilgo Beach looking for missing New Jersey resident Shannan Gilbert and stumbled upon four sets of remains of women that became known as the Gilgo Four. The discovery launched a serial killer investigation spanning almost 17 years, conducted by several law enforcement administrations and led to movies and documentaries. On April 8, Heuermann admitted killing Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack and Sandra Costilla.

Some seasoned investigators, like former Suffolk Police Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison, who once headed the Gilgo Beach investigation, have said they believe Heuermann is responsible for more killings. “One thousand percent,” Harrison told Newsday in an interview in the days after Heuermann was sentenced to serve multiple life terms for killing the women.

Bradley Adams, a retired forensic anthropologist with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City — who examined most of the remains of the Gilgo victims  — said the sheer number of cold cases going back decades offers possibilities.

“I think there are still unanswered questions, still bodies that haven’t been identified," Adams said. "It would not surprise me if there are other bodies linked to him.”

If Heuermann was to offer up information about other victims, prosecutors wouldn’t take what he said at face value but would have to investigate fully, said one law enforcement source familiar with the Gilgo investigation.

Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD detective sergeant who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania-Lehigh Valley, agreed that the closing out of the Heuermann case is an important development because it frees up Tierney’s cold case task force to tackle more unsolved cases.

“This is a huge boon; a trial would have lasted months,” Giacalone said.

Heuermann's attorney, Michael J. Brown, said that during proffer sessions with prosecutors, Heuermann candidly admitted the killings to which he plead guilty. Prosecutors did a very thorough investigation and, if there was evidence Heuermann was involved in any other murders, he would have been charged, Brown said.

Attorney Robert Macedonio, who represents Ellrup, is skeptical that there are other victims tied to Heuermann. Macedonio said there was no incentive for Heuermann to lie to prosecutors and the court about any additional victims because the sentence of life in prison without parole he received wouldn’t change.

“There is no benefit to him lying,” Macedonio said. “What does he gain?”

In his guilty plea, Heuermann said he strangled and murdered Costilla in November 1993. As a result, the Newsday review was pushed back to 1992 to include a dead woman found in Sayville who has been one focus of the cold case task force. Most of the known Gilgo victims were sex workers and were killed from 1996 to 2010, authorities have said. The women were relatively small in physical stature and ranged in age from 20 to 34.

The Suffolk cases that Newsday tracked and which Tierney is investigating  included those listed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), a federal database containing information about missing persons and unidentified bodies in all states. Cases are added to NamUs voluntarily by police and other law enforcement agencies. Newsday's search was broadened to include homicide victims in Nassau County, where Heuermann said he killed most of his victims.

NamUs cases linked to convicted Long Island killers Robert Shulman and John Bittrolff, were excluded, as were those involving the remains of toddlers, middle-aged and elderly people.

The earliest unidentified murder victim examined by Newsday is that of a petite white woman — about 93 pounds and 4 feet, 11 inches tall — found in a dumpster in Sayville near the railroad station on March 8, 1992. Known as “Sayville Jane Doe,” the woman appeared to be in good physical condition, officials said. An artist rendering of her face was publicly released by Tierney’s office last January as part of an effort to publicize her killing, along with other cold cases.

Another case goes back to Sept. 10, 1993, when a woman’s body was found off Wicks Road in Brentwood. The victim was found by the side of the road near a park-and-ride on the south side of the Long Island Expressway, near Exit 53. Police determined she had been beaten. A Newsday story at the time said the body was recovered after some young boys were playing among concrete highway dividers stored in a field.

In East Quogue on March 13, 1994, bones of a woman with a partial torso were found on a beach, according to a law enforcement source. Through DNA, the bones were related to others remains found at different locations in 1993, 1994 and 1997, the source said.

In Heuermann’s cases, two of his victims — Mack and Taylor — were dismembered, as was Vergata.

The fact that some of Heuermann’s victims were dismembered, while later victims were not, indicates that he was evolving from what experts call a “disorganized” mind to a more organized mind as a serial killer, Tierney said in an interview

On Sept. 9, 1995, in Dix Hills near the Deer Park train station, some 55 feet north of Long Island Avenue,  a badly decomposed naked woman's body was found. She was identified in NamUs as being either Black or Hispanic and about 5 feet, 2 inches tall, and has been referred to in law enforcement as “Dix Hills Jane Doe.” A sketch of her was also released by investigators in January 2025.

Some Nassau County cases are also listed in NamUs and involve women victims with characteristics that seem to fit the pattern of Heuermann’s victims in terms of their short stature and age. One set of remains was found on Nov. 10, 2001, in the Muttontown Preserve, when a troop from Scouting America hiking through a wooded area came across the woman’s skeleton. The remains were about 300 feet from the nature trail entrance on Muttontown Road and about 75 feet off the trail. Officials estimate the victim to have been anywhere from 4 foot, 9 inches to 5 foot, 4 inches and between 25 to 50 years old. According to the NamUs report, death could have occurred some three years earlier.

Nearly 12 years later, on Jan. 21, 2013, remains of a petite Asian woman were found in a plastic garbage bag along Long Island Sound shoreline in Lattingtown, according to NamUs. The bag and the remains, found off Sheep Lane, were mixed with roots of vegetation, indicating they had been there for some time. They also contained jewelry, including a necklace with a small pig insignia.

A Nassau police spokesman said detectives had no new information to disclose about either the Muttontown or Lattingtown victims.

Tierney said the first step in any investigation is to try and identify the person, using updated DNA techniques and genealogy.

 After that, he said, investigators backtrack through their lives, comparing crime scene and forensic evidence for ties to Heuermann or other possible persons of interest.

“Identifying these victims is goal number one,” Giacalone, the former detective, said. “Somebody knew them.”

Tierney wouldn't speculate on when his probe would yield results, saying, “We go to the crime [scene], develop the evidence and see where it leads. ... When I am ready to charge somebody, I will.”