31-03-2025
'Gone Girls' series explores Long Island killings as suspect goes to court
March 31 (UPI) -- For more than three decades, a series of homicides and disappearances has plagued Long Island, N.Y., and now, with a suspect making court appearances, Netflix is releasing a docuseries on the mysterious case.
The series, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, premieres Monday on the streaming service. It is a follow-up to director Liz Garbus' 2020 film Lost Girls, which dramatized the effort of one of the missing women's mother to find justice for the alleged victims, all of whom worked in the sex industry.
Prosecutors are hoping to get that justice after charging Rex Heuermann, an architect from Massapequa Park, Long Island, with murder for the deaths of seven of the women. Police arrested him in 2023 after a witness reported seeing a vehicle that matched one he drove. They were able to match his DNA to a hair found on one of the victim's bodies.
The Gone Girls series comes just days after Heuermann's latest court hearing Friday. There, a New York judge heard from defense attorneys, who want to suppress DNA evidence in the case.
They said the company used to test the DNA in the case, Astrea Forensics, uses a scientific method never before accepted in a New York court. The California company uses whole genome sequencing, or nuclear DNA, to match DNA, News 12 in Long Island reported.
Heuermann's lawyers are also wanting to have his case split up into multiple trials instead of one for all six women he's accused of killing. He faces one count of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder in each of the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Costello and Megan Waterman. He's also been charged with one count of second-degree murder for the deaths of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Sandra Costilla, Valerie Mack and Jessica Taylor.
Costilla, 28, was the first woman tied to the alleged serial killings to be found dead in 1993 in North Sea, NY. Police said the Queens woman had been strangled and left in a wooded area.
Mack's partial remains were found in November 2000 in Manorville, N.Y., though she wasn't identified until 2020. Taylor's partial remains were also found in Manorville in July 2003 and identified later that year.
Four of the women Heuermann is accused of killing -- Barthelemy, Brainard-Barnes, Costello and Waterman -- are collectively known as the Gilgo Four. They were each found along the same stretch of remote dunes called Gilgo Beach in December 2010 wrapped in burlap and bound with belts or tape.
Brainard-Barnes went missing in July 2007, Barthelemy in July 2009, Waterman in June 2010 and Costello in September 2010. They were identified in January 2011, with police revealing that each had advertised themselves as prostitutes online.
In the years after Costilla's death, police found the bodies of two other women possibly related to the killing spree. Karen Vergata's remains were found on Fire Island in April 1996, and a woman known only as Jane Doe No. 3 was found in June 1997 in Hempstead Lake State Park. In 2011, officials found the remains of an unidentified child, Baby Doe, who was identified as the daughter of Jane Doe No. 3. No one has been charged for the three deaths.
Another woman who worked as a prostitute, Shannan Gilbert, also went missing in 2010 after calling police while fleeing from a client. Her remains were found in 2011 in a marsh in Oak Beach, N.Y., but medical examiners said she died of an accidental drowning.
Garbus' three-episode docuseries dives deeper into the mysterious rash of killings and disappearances that had plagued Long Island's sex industry for decades. The series focuses on how the friends and family members of the women refused to give up searching for their loved ones and sought justice for their deaths.
"These women knew that there was a need to shake [up] the establishment to get attention for this case," Garbus said in a press release. "Of course, they shouldn't have [had] to work so hard. The system should work to protect them and should've protected their family members. But at the end of the day, their voices really mattered."
Heuermann is next set to appear in court on Wednesday in a continuation of his hearing on DNA evidence.
