Gilgo Beach, Finally: Rex Heuermann Sentenced to Life Without Parole as 8 Families Face Him

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. For almost three years, Rex Heyerman said nothing through his arrest in July of twenty twenty three, through hearing after hearing, through the day. This passed April, when he stood up in court and pleaded guilty to murdering seven women and then admitted to an eighth he had never even been charged with. Through all of it, the man the world came to know as the Gilgo Beach serial killer kept his mouth shut. Yesterday in a courtroom in Riverhead, New York, he finally opened it. And I want you to hear what this man chose to say, after nearly three years and eight dead women, with the whole country listening here. It is, word for word quote.

0:51 I am responsible for all that was said in this room. The words I say will have no meaning. That's it. That's what he had. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. For once in his miserable life, Rex Hoyerman was right about something. The words he said had no meaning because by the time he stood up to say them, eight families had already walked into that courtroom and taken it away from him. He doesn't get the last word anymore. He hasn't for a while now. He just hadn't figured it out yet. Good morning, and welcome to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Thursday, June eighteenth, twenty twenty six, and today we are doing something we have been promising you on this show since last August. We are closing the book on Gilgo Beach. The man is going to die in a cell, and before he does, the people he tried to make invisible got to look him in the eye and tell him exactly who he is.

1:52 Let's start with the number, because the number is the whole point of yesterday, Suffolk County Judge Timothy Masey sentenced Rex Hoyerman to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, followed by four more consecutive terms of twenty five years to life. I want to be precise about that, because you may see it reported sloply elsewhere. There is no parole anywhere in this sentence, not on the front of it, not on the back of it. Rex Heyerman is sixty two years old and he will leave prison in a box. That is the entirety of his future, and he earned every day of it. The sentence covers the murders of seven women he was charged with, Melissa Barthelemy Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainerd Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Castilla, and Valerie Mack. And it folds in the eighth Karen Vergatta, a woman he admitted killing back in nineteen ninety six, a murder the state never even had him on paper for until he said the words himself.

2:53 Eight women killed by his own admission, by strangulation, some of them dismembered, all of them scat along the lonely stretches of Long Island shoreline that gave this case its name. Now the moment everyone was waiting for his defense. Attorney had been hinting for weeks that Hoyerman might finally speak at sentencing, and he did. For about ten seconds, he stood, He said he was responsible for what was said in the room. He said his words would have no meaning, and he sat back down. And then Judge Masey did something I want to give him credit for. He didn't let it slide. He looked at Hoyerman and he asked him directly, I assume you are a little bit sorry for the eight women. You strangled eight that we know of, And Hoyerman said yes, and the room came apart, family members shouting back at him, one woman calling out that he was no, he was not sorry. People crying, people furious, and matse Before he handed down the sentence, looked at this six foot four architect who had spent decades presenting himself as the harmless dad next door, and he said, you've been described as a big man, but you are a disgusting and small man. If you're a man at all, you're a coward. That's the judge from the bench. And when the sentence came down, the courtroom didn't go quiet the way courtrooms are supposed to. People cheered, people applauded.

4:19 Somebody yelled justice. As they let him out, you could hear the word ogre following him through the room. That's the sound eight families make when a thirty year weight finally ends he's sorry, he got caught. I want to talk about the two men who spoke for the system yesterday because they could not have framed this more differently, and the gap between them tells you something. First, the prosecution, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney has been carrying this case, and he was not in a forgiving mood. D When the question of Heyerman's remorse came up, all those statements that had trickled out since his arrest, through his therapists, through his family, through his ex wife, Tierney dismissed every bit of it. Nothing this defendant has said since July twenty twenty three is meaningful. He said, it's self serving.

5:19 And then he said the line that I think is the truest thing anyone said all day. I have no doubt this defendant is very sorry. He is very sorry he got caught there it is. That's the whole man in one sentence. And Tierney pointed to the one piece of evidence that I think should haunt anybody who still finds this guy fascinating, the planning document. Investigators found it in Heyerman's home, a written blueprint for murder. Sections on preparation, sections on supplies, sections on DNA, sections on disposing of a body. Tierney said it read like a shopping list for murder, and that it proved the victims meant absolutely nothing to him. They weren't people to Rex Hoyerman, they were line items. He made a checklist that's not a mistake.

6:09 That's a choice. You don't accidentally write yourself a to do list for killing women. You sit down and you plan it, and you do it again, and you keep the document. And then there's the other man. Hireman's defense attorney, Michael Brown. I'll give Brown this, he did something yesterday that I did not expect. Before the sentencing, he turned to the families in the gallery and he apologized to them. He said, I never met your mother, your daughter, your sister, but I've listened to what you've said about them, and they sounded remarkable. I'm truly sorry. That is not nothing coming from the man whose job was to defend the person who killed them. Credit where it's due. But then outside the courthouse, a reporter asked Brown whether he believes his client actually feels remorse, and Brown's answer was telling.

6:58 He said he doesn't know. He said he's seen what he called genuine emotion in Hoyerman at times, and that he believes there's a sincerity in his expression of remorse and his attempts to understand his crimes. And look, I'm gonna let you sit with that one rather than tell you what to think. Brown is doing. His job a defense attorney looking for the human being inside the monster. Is not a flaw in the system. It's the system working the way it's supposed to. But I'd ask you to hold his words sincerity, understanding his crimes right next to Tierney's words he's very sorry he got caught, and next to that planning document, and then you decide which version of Rex Hoyerman you believe. I know which one I believe. I believe the checklist the women spoke. Here's the thing about a sentencing like this, The sentence was never really in doubt. Hoyerman signed a plea deal in April.

7:56 Everybody in that room knew he was going to die in prison. So, yeah, yesterday was never about the number. Yesterday was about the one thing this man spent thirty years trying to take away from these women, their voices, and one by one the family stood up and gave it back to them. Melissa kNN is the sister of Maureen Brainerd Barnes, one of the original four women whose remained started this whole investigation back in twenty ten. Melissa stood up and she sobbed, and she talked about survivor's guilt, about decades of wondering whether she could have done something to protect her sister. And then she said the thing that I think a lot of people in that room needed to hear out loud. The guilt is not mine to carry, she said, and it never was. This burden belongs to Rex. She told him. When you took her life, you destroyed mine as I knew it. You are a coward who prayed on vulnerable, innocent women. And then this is the part that stops me, she told him. He is no longer the one in control of this story.

8:56 You tried to silence her, she said, and you failed. I became your worst nightmare. Your name will never rise above the women. Megan Waterman's aunt, Elizabeth Miserve, spoke for her. Megan was twenty two. She was working for a pimp the night she disappeared, leaving a hotel to meet a client, and Elizabeth said it plainly the way you should, because Megan was a young woman who was planning to build a life for her daughter. Her remains weren't found for seven months. Seven months her family agonized over when she was coming back to them, and Elizabeth looked at the man who took her, and she said, some people called him an ogre when they looked at him, but he is a cowardly opportunist. She also said something that I am not going to let go by, because she's right and somebody has to say it. She tore into the former Suffolk County officials whose corruption and incompetence let this case sit cold for thirteen years. Thirteen years between when those bodies were found and when an arrest was finally made.

9:58 Nobody was paying attention to her. Nobody was paying attention to any of them because of who they were and what they did to survive. And Elizabeth named the cost of that out loud, and she was furious about it, and she should be. And then there's Melissa Barthelemy's little sister. Her name is Amanda Fundenberg. And I need you to understand what this man did to her because it is one of the cruelest things in a case that is wall to wall cruelty. When Melissa disappeared, Amanda was fifteen years old, fifteen, and Hayerman took Melissa's cell phone and he called her teenage sister not once, and he taunted her. He told a fifteen year old child the things he had done to her sister, the kind of things I am not going to repeat on this show. For weeks, every time that phone rang, Amanda was afraid it was him again. Yesterday, seventeen years later, Amanda stood in front of him and she said, look at me when I'm talking.

10:56 I waited seventeen years and he wouldn't. He stared straight ahead the way he stared straight ahead through every single one of these statements, never once turning to face the families. And she said to him, you don't care. I was just fifteen. And the last voice I want to leave you with belongs to Violet Swager, who spoke for her cousin, Jessica Taylor. Violet went after the thing. This man was apparently proudest of that planning document, the meticulous blueprint, and she took it apart, line by line in open court. She read his own notes back to him. Supplies hair net. Well, she said, so much for that, because investigators found his hair on multiple victims DNA. You wrote it down twice, she said, and you still didn't get it. Remove identifying marks. Well, we know you didn't do that because she was identified by the tattoo. You couldn't remove you were sloppy. Violet told him, you made a whole planning document to kill my cousin, and you didn't even do that right. And then she said the words, I think this man fears more than the cell. You're boring, you're not prolific, you're nobody.

12:08 You chose small women because you are a weak, disgusting coward. There's no playbook clever enough to make a man like that interesting. He wanted to be a legend. He's a line item in somebody else's checklist now. And then Violet did the thing that broke my heart clean in half. She noted that yesterday, June seventeenth, would have been Jessica Taylor's forty third birthday, and she ended her statement to her cousin's killer with four words, Happy birthday, jess say their names. Rex Hoyerman chose these eight women because he believed nobody would look for them. He believed they were invisible. That belief is written into his own planning materials. He was wrong, and yesterday, a courtroom in Riverhead proved exactly how wrong. So let's do what this show always does.

12:55 Sandra Castilla, twenty eight years old, the earliest of them. Killed in nineteen ninety three. Valerie Mack twenty four years old, Jessica Taylor twenty years old. She would have turned forty three yesterday. Maureen Brainerd Barnes twenty five years old, one of the four who started the search for all of them, Melissa Barthelemy twenty four years old, the one whose teenage sister he called to taunt, Megan Waterman twenty two years old, a mother building a life for her daughter, Amber Costello twenty seven years old. And Karen Vergatta thirty four years old, the one he was never charged with, the one who waited the longest of all to have her killer say her name. Eight women not line items, not invisible, Sandra, Valerie, Jessica, Maureen, Melissa, Meghan, Amber, and Karen. Somebody has to say their names, and on this show, somebody always will. That's the show today. Rex Heyerman is going to die in a prison cell with no parole ever for eight women he treated like a to do list. The case that haunted Long Island for more than thirty years is closed, and the people he tried to silence got the last word, every one of them.

14:19 If this episode meant something to you, do me a favor and share it. Send it to one person who followed this case, who remembers when these bodies were found and wondered if anyone would ever be held accountable. Word of mouth is how this show reaches the people who need to hear these women's names. So tell a friend. And here's the question I keep turning over, the one I want from you. Hyerman's own lawyer says he sees sincerity in the man's remorse. The prosecutor says he's only sorry he got caught. After everything you heard today, the planning document, the taunting phone calls, ten seconds of carefully chosen words. Do you think a man like that is capable of real remorse at all? Or does it not even matter anymore? If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me where you land. I read them and I want to know what you think on this one.

15:10 I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been Daily Crime and justice. Do better. A note on sourcing and the record. Rex Heyerman pleaded guilty in April twenty twenty six to seven counts of murder and admitted an open court to an eighth killing for which he was never charged. His sentencing took place Wednesday, June seventeenth, twenty twenty six, in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead, New York, before Judge Timothy Mazy. Wire services, including the Associated Press, CBS and Newsday confirm the sentence as three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, followed by four consecutive terms of twenty five years to life. No portion of that sentence carries parole.

15:53 One outlet's live coverage described the back four terms as carrying parole. That is incorrect and we have use the wire corroborated structure. Some of the victim impact statements quoted in this episode are drawn from a single newsrooms live blog of the hearing. We have reproduced them as reported. The murder span nineteen ninety three to twenty ten, and the victims are Sandra Castilla, Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor, Moreen Brainerd Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, and Karen Viergatta