Gilgo Beach killings: A look at the Gilgo Beach victims and their mysterious disappearances

They were mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, friends and neighbors. 

Many experienced troubled childhoods and fell into drugs or prostitution at a young age.

Eight women in all whose lives, troubled but meaningful, each came to an abrupt and violent halt. 

Ranging in age from 20 to 34, they would all go missing without a trace — their bodies, or what remained of them, not discovered or identified for years later, often near Gilgo Beach.

The case of the so-called "Long Island Serial Killer" haunted the region for nearly two decades  until Rex A. Heuermann, 62, of Massapequa Park, who owned a Manhattan architectural consulting business, was arrested in July 2023.

Since then, Heuermann has been charged with the murder in the death of seven women. 

While Heuermann has publicly denied any involvement in the killings and was set for trial in September, Newsday reported last month that the family members of some of the victims have been told he plans to change his plea to guilty during a hearing on Wednesday. Newsday also reported that Heuermann plans to plead guilty to an eighth homicide that law enforcement officials have long linked to the murders.

Details of the expected plea agreement have not been disclosed and the deal could still fall through for a number of reasons.

But, with the potential end of the Gilgo case now in sight, here is a look at the victims, and their mysterious disappearances.

Melissa Barthelemy

A Buffalo native, Barthelemy worked as a hairdresser and was described by friends and family as independent, ambitious and close to her younger sister, Amanda. 

She left for New York City in 2007 to pursue a career in cosmetology, family members said.

Neighbors and law enforcement officials said Barthelemy rented a basement apartment in the Bronx for $700 a month, kept cats and advertised her services as an escort.

Barthelemy kept in touch with her parents and sister regularly, speaking to them several times a week, her uncle Jim Martina told Newsday in 2011. 

"She said she just loved New York," Martina said.

Family members said they had no idea the 24-year-old worked as an escort — she had been arrested on a charge of suspicion of prostitution  — until after her disappearance on July 12, 2009, when she told a friend she was going to meet a client.

On Dec. 11, 2010, a Suffolk County police officer and his cadaver dog, Blue, discovered Barthelemy's remains wrapped in burlap along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach.

Two days later, police returned to the area and found the remains of three other women — Amber Lynn Costello, Megan Waterman and Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Similar to Barthelemy, they were all petite, in their 20s and worked as escorts.

In the weeks following Barthelemy's disappearance, Amanda began receiving a series of calls from a then-unknown man who admitted to killing her. The man, now believed to be Heuermann, used Barthelemy’s phone to make the "taunting" calls, police said.

At a memorial service held in Buffalo after her body was discovered, Barthelemy's father, Mark Szpila, described his daughter as "wonderful. She was the light of my life."

A cousin, Ashley Martina, told mourners that Barthelemy "loved the fast life, drinking, partying, her friends. She loved her friends."

Barthelemy's grandfather Elmer Barthelemy recalled babysitting his granddaughter and giving her Oreos for breakfast.

"The best thing is to remember how great she was," he said.

Megan Waterman

Waterman was born in Scarborough, Maine, where she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Muriel Benner.

She dropped out of high school, worked in a sandwich shop and had frequent run-ins with the law as a teenager, family members have said.

Waterman turned to sex work as a means of supporting her daughter, Liliana, relatives said. 

She advertised on Craigslist and Backpage, using the names Lexxy and Sexy Lexi, authorities said.

The 22-year-old was last seen by her family on June 6, 2010, boarding a New York-bound Concord Trailways bus in Maine, traveling with Akeem Malik Cruz, whom she had been dating for 11 months, police said.

Family and police have described Cruz as her pimp. He was later convicted of the interstate transportation of Waterman for the purpose of prostitution.

Waterman was staying at the Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge and left the hotel at 1:30 a.m. to meet a client, authorities said.

After family members didn't hear from her — it was uncharacteristic of her not to check on Liliana — they reported her missing on June 8.

Her remains were found along Ocean Parkway along with the rest of the "Gilgo Four."

Seven months after the single mother disappeared, friends and family gathered to say their goodbyes at a service in Portland, Maine.

"I don't know how to let go of you, said her half-sister, Amanda Gove. "It's the hardest thing I've had to do."

During the service, family and friends described Waterman as a natural leader who craved adventure and would frequently stick up for those she loved even if it put her in danger.

"Megan was loved by a lot of people," her aunt Elizabeth Meserve said. "And this affected a lot of lives."

Greg Waterman, the victim's half brother, said he begged her to stop working as a prostitute, but that Megan brushed off her concerns and seemed confident Cruz would not allow her to get hurt.

"Akeem won't let anything happen to me," Benner recalled her saying.

Waterman's mother, Lorraine Ela, had said she wants the Gilgo victims to be "remembered as who they were, not what they did." 

 Amber Lynn Costello

Born in Charlotte and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, Costello had a hardscrabble young life.

She dropped out of high school, bounced from job to job and was married — and divorced — twice by the time she was 27, family members said.

And she developed a drug habit early in life, both of her ex-husbands told Newsday in 2011.

"She was a good girl, but she just had bad habits," said Michael Wilhelm, her first husband, who said their two-year marriage soured when he discovered her heroin addiction.

Costello's second husband told a similar story.

"Amber kept a lot of secrets," said Don Costello, of Clearwater, Florida, who said their two-year marriage ended in March 2009.

Shortly thereafter, Costello moved to West Babylon, where she rented an apartment with two roommates. Costello's sister, Kimberly Overstreet, lived in Lindenhurst. 

Before her disappearance, she had attended a 28-day drug rehab program at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson. She would relapse the following spring.

Costello was a sex worker who advertised on Craigslist and Backpage, using the names Carolina and Mia, authorities said.

Court records indicate that while working as a sex worker, Costello developed a ruse with her two male roommates: She would meet a client at her home. After the customer had paid, one of the men would enter and claim to be Costello’s boyfriend, forcing the client to flee before any sex occurred, records state.

It was a ruse, prosecutors said, that Costello used on Heuermann in early September of 2010. Heuermann told Costello he would call her later, police said.

Costello, then 27, was last seen leaving her home on foot on Sept. 2, 2010, to meet a client, believed to be Heuermann, who was picking her up at home, prosecutors said.

Friends said Costello typically avoided getting into clients' vehicles but was promised enough money to drop those precautions, even agreeing to leave behind her phone and purse.

Three months later, Costello's remains were found in the thick brush off Gilgo Beach near the remains of three other women. 

Maureen Brainard-Barnes

Brainard-Barnes grew up in Groton, Connecticut, and attended Fitch High School, where she earned straight A's, relatives said.

"She was very outgoing. She had so much energy," Sarah Marquis, a friend from her hometown, told Newsday in 2020.

Brainard-Barnes got pregnant at the age of 17, earned her GED and worked as a blackjack dealer at the nearby Foxwoods casino. She also held jobs at a ShopRite and at a gas station, family members said.

A single mother struggling to support two children, Dylan and Nicolette, she was introduced to prostitution through a modeling job in Manhattan, according to Melissa Cann, her sister, who added that her sister also worked in telemarketing.

Brainard-Barnes advertised her services on various websites as Juliana or Marie, according to investigators.

To members of her family, sex work was an unexpected path for the bookish young woman who published poetry on her MySpace profile and invented games for her children.

By July 2007, Brainard-Barnes had been laid off from her telemarketing job and faced eviction from her apartment, Cann said.

On July 6, 2007, Brainard-Barnes, 25, left her children with their fathers, took a train from New London, Connecticut, to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, got a hotel room near Times Square and posted an ad on Craigslist, Cann said.

She was last heard from on the evening of July 9, 2007, when she called a friend in Connecticut to say she was going to meet someone on an "out-call," meaning she was meeting a customer somewhere other than the hotel where she'd been staying.

The family suspected she was dead when she didn't show up for her brother's funeral, Marquis said.

"She would never go for long without being on the phone and contacting her friends and family," she said.

Jessica Taylor

Taylor grew up in Poughkeepsie, where she loved dancing, drawing, jumping rope and cuddling on the couch with her brothers while watching television, according to family members.

"I was lucky to share my childhood with her and I wish every day that we got the chance to create new memories," Taylor's cousin Jasmine Robinson said at a 2024 news conference following Heuermann’s arraignment on upgraded criminal charges. "When I think of her, I see her smile first, big and bright, lighting up her face, gleaming through her beautiful eyes."

Taylor's mother, Elizabeth Baczkiel, said her daughter worked hard at school, loved board games such as Monopoly and Candy Land, and enjoyed working with children, including as an aide at a summer camp.

"It is a tragedy she never had children," Baczkiel said at the news conference. "Jessica would have been a great mother. She loved kids and she loved working with them."

Taylor, 20, spoke to her mother on July 21, 2003, telling her she would visit her in Poughkeepsie later that week to celebrate her birthday.

When she did not show up and failed to answer calls, her mother called police. Taylor was last seen at the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan.

On July 26, 2003, Taylor's partial remains were discovered by a dog walker just west of Halsey Manor Road in Manorville. More of Taylor’s remains were discovered near Gilgo Beach in 2011, along with the remains of three other women, a man and a toddler.

Taylor was a sex worker who was in a relationship with a man believed to be her pimp and boyfriend, officials said, although family members believe she had run away from him shortly before her death.

Her remains were identified, in part, by a tattoo on her right hip that included the man’s name. The tattoo — a red heart with an angel wing and the words ''Remy's Angel'' — were "severely obliterated" with a sharp object by Heuermann to prevent the identification of her remains, court documents state.

Sandra Costilla

Costilla was a native of Trinidad and Tobago, where her father was a police officer, records show.

Relatively little is known about Costilla's early years and family members have not commented about her murder, which is believed to be the first committed by Heuermann.

Police have described Costilla as a "drifter" and said her last known address was on Gates Avenue in Ridgewood, Queens.

On Nov. 20, 1993, two people hunting in the woods in North Sea in the Town of Southampton discovered her partially clothed body. Authorities said Costilla, 28 at the time of her death, was strangled, stabbed and may have been raped.

She was identified, authorities said at the time, by fingerprints that were entered into the system after she was arrested for jumping a subway turnstile in 1992.

Costilla's death was not originally tied to the Gilgo Beach investigation and police initially thought her murder may have been committed by John Bittrolff.

The Manorville carpenter was convicted in 2017 in the strangling and bludgeoning deaths of Colleen McNamee and Rita Tangredi, whose body was found in a wooded area in East Patchogue in November 1993. The victims were known sex workers operating in Suffolk, authorities have said.

Law enforcement has never described Costilla, who occasionally used the last name Cutello, as a sex worker but called her lifestyle "substantially similar."

Her case went unsolved for years until investigators matched Costilla's DNA from hairs found on her body to DNA recovered from Heuermann, authorities said.

Valerie Mack

Similar to many of the other victims, Mack didn't have an easy childhood.

Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Mack was put up for adoption as an infant by her biological parents, police said.

Mack’s birth mother was Patricia Fulton, a woman who had substance abuse and alcohol problems and was diagnosed with AIDS, her relatives told Newsday.

Her first adoptive parents died by the time she was in middle school. She went into foster care and was eventually adopted again, officials said.

Mack gave birth to a son when she was a senior in high school, and shortly thereafter got addicted to drugs, police said.

Mack and the father of her son, who lived together in Port Republic, New Jersey, soon broke up and she moved to Philadelphia, where she was arrested three times on prostitution charges, police said.

Mack had been working as an escort in Philadelphia under the name Melissa Taylor when she vanished at the age of 24.

She had no apparent ties to Long Island and was not reported missing, police have said. 

Mack's family members told investigators they last saw her in the spring or summer of 2000 in the area of Port Republic.

Mack's remains were found near a Manorville sump discharge basin on Nov. 19, 2000, in a heavily wooded area about a half-mile west of Halsey Manor Road and north of the Long Island Expressway, police said.

But it wasn't until police found other parts of her body off Ocean Parkway, east of Cedar Beach, on April 4, 2011, that her killing was linked to the other Gilgo Beach victims.

She was positively identified through genetic genealogy, a DNA technology technique.

"Now the girls can rest in peace," Tricia Fulton Hazan, Mack's half-sister, said after Heuermann was arrested. 

On Monday, Mack's son, Benjamin Torres, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Heuermann, his ex-wife, Asa Ellerup and daughter, Victoria Heuermann.

Karen Vergata

Vergata was raised in Glen Head, the second child of Dominic and Ann Vergata, records show.

Friends and family described Vergata as a petite girl who suffered from scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine.

She attended North Shore High School, where she was known as Pumpkin, had an interest in art and fancied floppy hats and jewelry, according to classmates.

Jimmy Biedrzycki remembered dating Vergata around 1980 after meeting her at Sgt. Pepper's Pub off Glen Cove Road near Glen Head.

"She was quiet and sweet. She was really beautiful," Biedrzycki, who grew up in Roslyn, told Newsday in 2024. "She was a partier."

By 1981, Vergata wandered up and down the Eastern Seaboard, supported by money from her father, court records show.

Two years later, Vergata was arrested in New Orleans on drug charges. She would face additional arrests due to her drug use in Connecticut and New York City, court records show, including court-ordered drug treatment programs.

Vergata also worked as an escort, police said.

In 1986, court records show Vergata resurfaced in the Shore Haven apartments in Brooklyn, where she had been living with Guenther Hugo Lind, a married man. 

Lind was a longtime employee of Fred Trump, President Donald Trump's late father. Vergata once lived in one of the buildings Fred Trump owned in Brooklyn.

Vergata and Lind had two children, Gary Doherty, who was born premature with cerebral palsy, and Eric Doherty.

Her family last heard from her on Valentine’s Day in 1996, when she called her father on his birthday, according to court papers he filed in 2015 seeking to have her declared presumptively dead. At the time she was living in a rented room in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

Vergata's dismembered remains were found in 1996 on Fire Island, while her skull was discovered in 2011 near Jones Beach.

Vergata, 34 at the time of her death, was publicly identified through genetic genealogy.

In 2025, she was identified as a Gilgo Beach victim using scientific techniques not available at the time she went missing.

"It is just a relief we can finally have her back," Eric Doherty, who was barely past toddler age when his mother disappeared, he told Newsday.

While Heuermann has not been charged in Vergata's killing, he is expected to plead guilty to the homicide, Newsday reported this week.