Serial killer Rex Heuermann pleads guilty to murdering seven women, including a Philadelphian
Valerie Mack, who lived in Philadelphia, went missing in 2000. Her remains were found years later. Heuermann pleaded guilty to her murder Wednesday.
Long Island, N.Y., architect Rex Heuermann, who led a secret life as a serial killer, pleaded guilty to the murder of seven women and admitted to an eighth in a string of slayings known as the “Gilgo Beach killings.”
One of those women was Valerie Mack, a Philadelphian who went missing in 2000 and whose remains were found on Long Island that same year. She was identified in 2020.
Heuermann’s guilty pleas Wednesday bring finality to a case that perplexed investigators for years, tracing back to Heuermann’s first slaying in 1993. Heuermann, 62, faces life in prison and is expected to be sentenced in June.
The architect and father of two strangled the women, many of them sex workers, over a 17-year span and buried their remains in remote locations, including along an isolated beach highway across the bay from where he lived in Massapequa Park, N.Y., only 25 minutes from where the women’s remains were found, authorities said.
Two days before Heuermann’s guilty plea, Mack’s son, Benjamin Torres, filed a lawsuit against Heuermann; his ex-wife, Asa Ellerup; and his daughter in Suffolk County Supreme Court. Heuermann’s stepson was not named in the lawsuit because of a lack of evidence, said Torres’ lawyer, John Ray.
Ray said that Torres, who was 6 years old at the time of Mack’s death, and his family were denied the right to properly bury Mack, a New York common law called the “right of sepulcher.”
The suit also seeks damages in relation to Heuermann’s ex-wife and daughter receiving payment for their participation in a Peacock/NBC Universal documentary on the case. The family reportedly received $1 million, according to NewsNation.
Despite authorities’ claims that Heuermann’s then-wife, daughter, and stepson (from Ellerup’s first marriage) were out of state when each of the slayings occurred, Ray said it is “impossible, factually, to believe that they had no knowledge of what was going on in that house.”
Who is Valerie Mack?
Mack, 24, had been working as an escort in Philadelphia and was last seen by her family in 2000 in New Jersey. She also went by the name Melissa Taylor. It is not known where Mack and Heuermann came into contact.
Months after Mack went missing, her partial remains were discovered in Manorville, N.Y. The rest of her body would not be found until 2011, when police discovered more remains along Ocean Parkway on Long Island, near where remains of other victims in the Gilgo Beach killings were found.
Police would not discover Mack’s identity until May 2020, when genetic genealogy testing revealed the body was hers. Before that announcement, she was known as “Jane Doe No. 6″ or “Manorville Jane Doe.”
“For two decades, Valerie Mack’s family and friends were left searching for answers,” Suffolk County Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart said following Mack’s identification. “And while this is not the outcome they wanted, we hope this brings some sense of peace and closure.”
Who is Rex Heuermann?
Heuermann was a resident of Massapequa Park, an area across Oyster Bay from Gilgo Beach, where police found skeletal remains along a nearby highway in 2010 and 2011. A father of two, Heuermann worked as a licensed architect with a small firm in Manhattan that completed store build-outs and other renovations for major retailers, offices, and apartments.
After bodies began to surface along the South Shore area of Long Island in 2010, names including the Long Island Serial Killer, the Gilgo Beach Killer, the Manorville Butcher, and the Craigslist Ripper were attributed to the perpetrator. In 2020, a Netflix film, Lost Girls — based on the 2013 book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery — dramatized the killings.
In addition to Mack, Heuermann also pleaded guilty to the killing of Amber Lynn Costello, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Sandra Costilla, and Jessica Taylor.
Police identified an eighth woman, Karen Vergata, whose remains were found on both Fire Island, more than 20 miles west, in 1996, and near Gilgo Beach in 2011. Heuermann has not been charged in Vergata’s killing.
This article contains information from the Associated Press.
