As Rex Heuermann pleads guilty, Massapequa Park neighbors, Gilgo residents seek return to normal life

Far from the Riverhead courtroom where on Wednesday Rex A. Heuermann pleaded guilty to murdering seven women and admitted killing an eighth woman, the Massapequa Park neighborhood where he lived — a onetime center of attention for police, media and the merely curious — was at last quiet.

The house where the serial killer lived with his family was still there, faded and unadorned save forlorn Christmas lights on the roof. “It’s a bit of a crazy day," one neighbor said to a reporter, but she was the exception. Most residents of this neighborhood who were outside declined to talk with the handful of reporters who visited. They wanted to walk their dogs and push their strollers in privacy, it seemed.

Five miles south at Gilgo Beach, the barrier beach thickets of bayberry and pine where Heuermann stashed the bodies of his victims were windy and desolate. This early in the season, the island communities were mostly empty, the traffic on Ocean Parkway still intermittent.

If this was the muffled coda, the crescendo came July 2023, when authorities arrested Heuermann. The arrest and subsequent developments of the case drew police searches and low-flying news helicopters in Massapequa Park that roused residents before dawn. Reporters gathered in packs. Streets were blocked and residents sometimes had to show ID to get to their own houses. Near Heuermann’s house, the village installed no parking, no stopping and no standing signs. True crime fans came to gawk and pose for photos. It went on for more than a year.

On Wednesday, out on Gilgo, Dorian Dale, Suffolk County’s former sustainability chief who has lived year-round on West Gilgo for decades, said he expected little reaction from most of his neighbors to Heuermann’s guilty plea.

“I don’t think this has been a topic of conversation for some time," he said in a phone interview. “Once Heuermann was apprehended, most people jumped to the conclusion that he was the fellow principally responsible."

At least one person with ties to the barrier beach communities did attend the hearing: Eileen Coletti, whose father, Gus Coletti, answered the door of his Oak Beach home for Shannan Gilbert the 2010 morning she disappeared. Heuermann did not plead guilty to killing Gilbert, but her frantic 911 call and the discovery of her corpse at Gilgo Beach led authorities to find the bodies of other women he admitted killing.

"I had to see it end," said Coletti, 64.

Back in Massapequa Park, Liz Engel, of Seaford, drove by for a look. "I've been following it since Day 1," she said. "It's just amazing to me that this person lived here all along and everything else fell by the wayside," Engel said. "We've wasted three years of taxpayer dollars and the court system when everyone thought he was guilty from the beginning. I'm just relieved he was found."

Rich Smith, 68, who lives about a mile away from the Heuermann house, said he walked by the home a few times a week.

"Every time I go walking past down here, nobody is around, and I don't think nobody really wants to talk about it," Smith said.

He said he was glad to see the case end. 

"I think it's going to be a happy day," Smith said. "I think he did the right thing, because if they go to court, it's going to be dragged on and on and on."

Of course, Heuermann’s guilty plea, in which he also acknowledged strangling an eighth woman, may end the case but not the story. Not long after Heuermann entered his plea, a reporter observed a true crime blogger film a video in front of the killer's old house.

The man said he was willing to buy the house for $650,000 cash, improving already rising property values in Massapequa Park.

Newsday's Janon Fisher contributed to this story.