Gone Girls: A timeline of the Long Island serial killer case
If you’ve watched Netflix’s new docuseries Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, you’ll already know all about the horrific story of the serial murderer believed to have taken the lives of at least 11 people (mostly female sex workers) in Long Island between 1993 and 2010, and disposed of their bodies at various locations along a stretch of road called Ocean Parkway.
The murders continued over 30 years, before a suspect — 59-year-old architect Rex Heuermann — was finally arrested in 2023. The story is particularly tragic, as the killer potentially avoided apprehension for decades because of the contempt the police and media held for his sex worker victims.
For those looking for clarity on the case after watching the show, we’ve put together a timeline of everything that’s happened in the Long Island serial killer case so far.
A timeline of the Long Island serial killer case
November 1993: Sandra Costilla’s body is found
Sandra Costilla was a 28-year-old woman from Trinidad and Tobago, who was living in New York City when she disappeared in November 1993. When her body was found by hunters in a wooded area in North Sea, Long Island — around 60 miles from Gilgo Beach — authorities determined that she had been killed on either November 19 or 20.
February 1996: Karen Vergata goes missing
34-year-old Karen Vergata, a sex worker from Manhattan, was last seen around February 14, 1996, but was never reported as missing.
April 1996: A pair of severed legs are discovered on Fire Island
On April 20, 1996, a pair of severed legs were discovered in a garbage bag on Fire Island, around 16 miles from Gilgo Beach.
June 1997: The torso of a young woman, dubbed ‘Peaches’, is found
On June 28, 1997, a dismembered torso was discovered at Hempstead Lake Park — approximately 20 miles from Gilgo Beach — in Lakeview, New York. The torso belonged to a young African-American woman, and was found dumped next to a road in a green plastic container. Authorities were unable to identify the woman, but did report that she had a tattoo on her breast of a heart-shaped peach with a bite taken out and a drip falling from it. She was dubbed ‘Peaches’.
November 2000: The torso of a woman is found in Manorville, New York
The torso of a young woman was found wrapped in garbage bags and dumped in the woods in Manorville, New York on November 19, 2000 — around 45 miles from Gilgo Beach.
July 2003: Jessica Taylor’s dismembered torso is discovered in Manorville
On July 26, 2003, another torso of a young woman was discovered by a dog walker in Manorville. It was found on top of plastic sheeting on a pile of scrap wood at the end of a paved road. A tattoo on the torso had been partly mutilated (potentially done by the killer to try and prevent identification), but it depicted a wing. After Suffolk County police released photos of the tattoo, the woman was identified as 20-year-old Jessica Taylor, who had gone missing on July 21. The tattoo had originally been a winged heart with ‘Remy’s angel’ written inside; Remy was identified as “an acquaintance” of Taylor at the time, but has later been described as her pimp.
Her identity was confirmed via DNA analysis a few months later, after samples were obtained from Taylor’s estranged family. Taylor worked as a sex worker in Washington DC and Manhattan, and was last seen working around the Port Authority Bus Terminal in the latter city between July 18 and 22.
July 2007: Maureen Brainard-Barnes goes missing
On July 9, 2007, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, a 25-year-old mother from Norwich, Connecticut who was working as a sex worker, told a friend that she was going to an ‘out call’ (to visit a client) at a motel in Manhattan. When she didn’t return, the friend reported her as missing a week later. Brainard-Barnes was working as a telemarketer, but started selling sex via Craigslist when she couldn’t find alternative employment in order to pay the mortgage on her house. She’d been out of the sex industry for seven months when she went missing, but had to return to the job so she could pay her bills after she was threatened with eviction.
Shortly after she went missing, her friend Sara Karnes received a phone call from an unknown man, calling on a number she didn’t recognise. The man told her that he’d seen Brainard-Barnes working at a “whorehouse in Queens”, but refused to tell Karnes the location of the alleged brothel wouldn’t reveal his identity.
July 2009: Melissa Barthelemy goes missing
Melissa Barthelemy, a 24-year-old from Erie County, New York who was working as a sex worker via Craiglist, went missing on July 12, 2009. She had last been seen in the basement of her Bronx apartment, which she left to go and meet a client. She told her friend she’d be back in the morning. That night, she deposited $900 (approx £692) into her bank account and tried to call a former ex, but couldn't get through to him. On July 18, Barthelemy’s mother reported her as missing.
A week later, Barthelemy’s 15-year-old sister Amanda started receiving calls from Barthelemy’s phone. The calls, which lasted for five weeks, were from an unknown man, who mocked and insulted Barthelemy, referring to her as “a whore”. On August 26, he allegedly said, “Do you think you’ll ever see her again?”, referring to Barthelemy, before adding, “You won’t. I killed her”, and then hanging up. During other calls, he also reportedly described in explicit detail what he had done sexually to Barthelemy and told Amanda: “I’m watching your sister rot.”
Barthelemy’s mother, Lynn, said of the caller, presumed to be the murderer: “He was softly spoken and had a very controlled and comfortable manner of speech, which made his horrific messages all the more devastating... He began to toy with her... And for the first time, she heard the voice of the killer.”
May 2010: Shannan Gilbert makes a panicked call to police, then disappears
On May 1, 2010, Shannan Gilbert, a 23-year-old sex worker from Jersey City, had gone with her driver, Michael Pak, to visit a client, Joseph Brewer, at his home in Oak Beach, Long Island, seven miles from Gilgo Beach. In the early hours of the morning, Brewer came out to Pak’s car and told him Gilbert was acting “irrational” and wouldn’t leave the house. Gilbert herself then emerged and fled the house in a panic, before attempting to seek help from neighbours. At 4:51AM, she called the police and told them that someone was “after her” and that “they” were trying to kill her. Pak followed Gilbert, trying to get her into the car, but eventually she ran into the night — still in a state of panic — and Pak drove home without her.
The police arrived in Oak Beach after neighbours reported the disturbance, but by then Gilbert and Pak were gone, and so the police assumed that they’d left together. Neither Pak nor Brewer are alleged to have any involvement in Gilbert’s disappearance. When Gilbert didn’t return home, her boyfriend alerted her family, who then reported Gilbert missing and drove 140 miles to look for her themselves. Gilbert’s family put pressure on a reluctant police force to investigate her disappearance, who led an unsuccessful search a month later.
June 2010: Megan Waterman goes missing
22-year-old Megan Waterman, from South Portland, Maine, went missing on June 6, 2010. She was a mother of one and was working as an escort at the time, advertising her services on Craigslist. It was later alleged that she was actually a victim of sex trafficking by her boyfriend. She was last seen by her family on June 5, boarding a bus headed to New York.
According to Suffolk County police, Waterman left her hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island — 15 miles from Gilgo Beach — to meet a client at 1:30AM on June 6. After she didn’t return or check in on her three-year-old daughter, who she’d left in the care of relatives, Waterman’s family reported her missing on June 8.
September 2010: Amber Lynn Costello goes missing
On September 2, 2010, sex worker Amber Lynn Costello, a 27-year-old from West Babylon, New York — 10 miles from Gilgo Beach — went missing, after going to meet a client who offered her an unusually high fee to stay with him for 24 hours. Costello’s flatmates knew about her escort work, and had even kicked a client out of their house after Costello called on them for help. After she went missing, her flatmates told the police about this incident and gave them a description of the man, as well as the car he was driving.
As Costello’s family believed she was in a drug rehab centre at the time, they didn’t think it was strange that she’d stopped replying to messages, so she wasn’t immediately reported missing.
December 2010: The bodies of the ‘Gilgo Four’ are found on Gilgo Beach
On December 11, 2010, Suffolk County Police Department embarked on a new search for Shannan Gilbert. While searching the parkway by Gilgo Beach, a cadaver dog alerted officers to a scent, which they tracked to a skeleton wrapped in disintegrating burlap (heavy woven fabric). The body was later identified as Melissa Barthelemy. While searching the area, the police found three more bodies: Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello. The bodies were all approximately 150 metres from each other.
March 2011: More partial remains of Jessica Taylor are found
While still searching Ocean Parkway (off which Gilgo Beach is situated) for Shannan Gilbert, police discovered the rest of Taylor’s remains. Her torso had previously been found in Manorville in 2003.
April 2011: Three more sets of remains are found along Ocean Parkway
Police discovered three more sets of remains along Ocean Parkway on April 4, 2011. These included a head, right foot, and hands, which, in 2020, were identified as belonging to Valerie Mack, whose torso had previously been found in Manorville in 2000.
The body of an unidentified young Asian person, dubbed ‘Asian Doe’, was found at Gilgo Beach, close to where the Gilgo Four had been discovered. The victim was, according to police, biologically male but was wearing women’s clothing, indicating that they could have been a trans woman. They’ve never been identified, but they died from blunt-force trauma, and it was estimated that they’d been dead for between five and 10 years when their body was found. Police have speculated that the victim could have been a sex worker, who was killed after it emerged they weren’t a cisgender woman.
The skeleton of an unidentified female toddler — aged between one and four years old and dubbed ‘Baby Doe’ — was found less than 100 metres from Mack’s body. The child was wearing gold earrings and a gold necklace and her body was wrapped in a blanket. It was later determined that she was the daughter of ‘Peaches’, whose torso had been found in Hempstead Lake Park in 1997. The rest of her remains were found a week after ‘Baby Doe’ on April 11 in Jones Beach State Park, three miles from Gilgo Beach.
Also on April 11, a skull and several teeth were found at Tobay Beach, located in the middle of Jones Beach. DNA testing linked these to the severed legs found on Fire Island in 1996, all of which were later identified as belonging to sex worker Karen Vergata, who went missing in February 1996.
December 2011: Shannan Gilbert’s body is found
19 months after her disappearance, Shannan Gilbert’s body was found on December 13, 2011. Police first found a pair of jeans, shoes, and Gilbert’s pocketbook, which contained her ID, in a marsh by Oak beach, before discovering her body a week later a quarter-of-a-mile away. Her skeletal body was nearly intact and was found face down. There’s disagreement about how Gilbert died. The official ruling is ‘death by misadventure’, with the police claiming that Gilbert accidentally drowned in the marsh after getting lost while in a drug-induced panic. Her family maintains she was murdered, noting that her clothes were found far away from her body. A forensic pathologist later found marks on Gilbert’s body and damage to her hyoid bone (situated in the neck) consistent with death by strangulation.
July 2023: Rex Heuermann is arrested
30 years after the first potential murder by the Long Island serial killer, on July 13, 2023, 59-year-old architect Rex Heuermann was arrested outside his office in Manhattan and charged with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello. He was also named as the prime suspect in the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
Authorities had started to suspect Heuermann after it emerged that he had a car matching the description of the client who Costello’s roommates once had to kick out of their home. Heuermann also matched the description they gave of the man: 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”. Investigators also managed to place burner phones used by Heuermann to the same locations as the victims at the times of their disappearances. Heuermann’s hair was also reportedly found on one of the victim’s bodies, while his wife’s hair was found on three of the Gilgo Four’s bodies (likely having been transferred via Heuermann — his wife isn’t suspected of any crime).
In January 2024, Heuermann was charged with the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes. In June that year, he was indicted for the murders of Jessica Taylor and Sandra Costilla. And in December, he was charged with the murder of Valerie Mack. A date for the trial — or trials, TBC — is yet to be set.
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