Gilgo beach killer gets sentence-Dodges EXECUTION-Architect Murdered 8 women for Fun- Full Details..

Mr. Humeman, is there anything you wish to say before I pronounce sentence? >> Yes. >> Stand up. >> There are no words I can say. I’m responsible for what was said in this room today. The words I would say have no meaning. And I’m going to leave it there. at this time. >> Speak up. >> Mr. Hume, as Mr.

 Tierney said, I know that you’re sorry that you got caught. I assume that you’re sorry for what you’ve done to your wife and children. Are you a little bit sorry for what you did to these poor innocent women? Eight women that you strangled to death. at least eight that we know of. Are you at least a little bit sorry for that? Yes. >> Yes, I am.

>> You know what? You’ve been described as a very big man, but you’re a disgusting and despicable small man, if you’re a man at all. And you’re a coward. As a result of your plead guilty to murder in the first degree and count one of indictment 73544 of 2024, it’s essentially court you serve the rest of your life without the possibility of parole.

Respect to count two, murder in the first degree, it’s essentially the court that you serve the rest of your life without the possibility of parole. With respect to count three, plead guilty to murder in the first degree. It’s a sentence the court to you serve your the rest of your life without the possibility of parole.

Those three sentences to run consecutive with each other. On the 17th of June 2026, a judge in Riverhead, New York, sentenced Rex Andrew Hurman to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and 100 years to life on top of them. It was the maximum available under New York law.

 He was 62 years old. He was 6’4. He was a licensed architect who had run his own consultancy out of an office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for 30 years. The man developers called when a building was in trouble and somebody had to know the city code better than the people enforcing it. He had lived his entire life in the same small ranch house on Long Island, the house he was born in, the house he bought from his mother, the house where he raised his daughter, 35 mi east of his office and 20 minutes from the beach. 10 weeks earlier on the 8th of

April, he had stood in that same courtroom and admitted killing eight women. >> Are you pleading guilty voluntarily and have your own free will? >> Yes. >> Sandra Castila in November 1993. Karen Vata in April 1996. Valerie Mack in the autumn of 2000. Jessica Taylor in July 2003. Marine Brainer Barnes in July 2007. Melissa Bartholomew in July 2009.

Megan Waterman in June 2010. Amber Costello in September 2010. Seven of them he had been charged with. The eighth he admitted to on his own in open court in a case that had never been brought against him. The district attorney took him through it one woman at a time. He answered every question. When the judge asked him how he had killed each of them, he gave one word, strangulation.

His daughter, sitting a few feet away in the gallery, began to cry. This is the complete story of Rex Hurman. Everything you need to know about Rex Andrew Hurman. If this is the kind of documentary you come to this channel for, subscribe right now and turn on your notifications. Rex Andrew Hurman was born on the 13th of September 1963 in Masipiqua Park, New York.

 Masipiqua Park sat in Nassau County, 35 mi east of Manhattan. It had been potato farmland once. After the war, the fields were sold off and small houses went up on small lots, street after street of them. 20,000 people. The lawns were kept short and everyone knew everyone else’s car. His parents were Theodore and Dolores Hurman.

 Their house was on First Avenue. It was a ranch house, low, small, with a front step and a big window and a driveway wide enough for one car. At the end of the driveway, there was a garage. Theodore Hireman was an engineer. He worked in aerospace and the parts he built went into satellites. A satellite gets sent into space and nobody ever touches it again.

 Everything has to be right before it leaves the ground. There is no fixing it later. A job like that does not let a man guess. You measure, you check, you find out before you cut. He brought that habit home and used it on wood. The garage was his workshop. He made furniture out there. cabinets, cases, pieces with joints cut to fit exactly.

 He had the tools and he knew how to use them. And when his older son was big enough to hold something without dropping it, he started teaching him. A second son came along. His name was Craig. What the boy learned in that garage was not really carpentry. It was a way of thinking. You work out how the pieces will fit before you make the first cut.

 Because a cut be taken back. You work out where the weight will press and you build for that and you hide the joins so the finished piece looks like it was carved out of one solid block of wood. A good cabinet does not show you how it was made. Dolores ran the house. She ran it closely. The neighbors thought she was controlling and they thought her older son stayed too close to her.

 The other children on the street called him a mama’s boy. They did not mean it kindly. He was big. He grew fast and he kept growing. Being big was supposed to settle things. It was supposed to stop the other boys picking on him. It did not. They picked on him anyway and he took it. He was everybody’s punching bag.

 A small boy who gets bullied has a reason he can point at. A big boy does not. He had the size and he got treated that way regardless. And there was no comfortable way to explain that to himself. In 1975, Theodore Herman died. He was 50 years old. Rex was 11. The man who set the standard in that house was gone.

 Dolores was the only adult left in it. The boy who had stood in the garage learning how to hide the joints still had the tools and still had the skill and there was nobody left to show them to. He went to Burner High School a few streets from his front door and he graduated in 1981. It was a big public school in a crowded part of Nassau County.

 He was 17 when he finished and close to his full height. 6’4, a big, heavy frame that made him the largest person in most rooms he walked into. What he came out of that school with was an interest in buildings. Not in how they looked, in how they worked, and more than that, in the rules that controlled them.

 Every building in New York sits inside a thick web of law. There are codes that say how wide a stairwell has to be, and how many people are allowed to stand in a room. There are zoning laws that say what can be built, how high it can go, and how far back from the street it has to sit. There are fire rules and occupancy limits and forms and inspections and permits.

 And behind all of it, a city department with the power to shut the job down completely. Most people find that world unbearable. It is dry. It is enormous. And it changes all the time, but somebody has to know it. Every builder and every landlord who wants to put up a wall or move a doorway has to get past those rules. And getting past them is a skill of its own.

 It is not really design. It is closer to arguing a case. You have to know the rule book better than the person enforcing it. That was the work he chose. He studied architecture and he started working in the field. In 1987, he began working in Manhattan. He was 23. And from then on, his working life was in the city, an hour west of the house on 1st Avenue.

 He did not move there. The city was where the money was. But at the end of the day, he went back east down the southern state or the Sunrise Highway or on the Long Island Railroad to the village he grew up in and the ranch house on the small lot. By the late 1980s, he was an intern architect at a construction company in Freeport, another town on the same stretch of the Southshore.

 That is the normal way into the profession. You work under licensed architects, you log the hours, you learn the trade properly, and eventually you sit the exams yourself. In 1990, he got married. Her name was Elizabeth Ryan. She was from New Jersey. And on the 29th of September 1990, they married at St.

 Peter’s Church in New Brunswick. He was 26. His brother Craig stood beside him as best man. The newspaper notice recorded the ordinary details, the church, the families, what the groom did for a living, an intern architect at a construction firm in Freeport. The marriage did not hold together for very long. Nobody knows why the marriage ended.

 Elizabeth Ryan has never spoken about it. There is no public record of it, no interview, no account from either of them. What is certain is that by the early 1990s, he was no longer married to her and he was back in Masipiqua Park in the house on 1st Avenue living with his mother. He was in his late 20s. He had a license to work towards a career in Manhattan and a marriage behind him that had lasted a matter of years and he was sleeping in the house he had been born in.

 That is the part worth sitting with. Men his age were buying places of their own in other towns near their own work. He had gone back to the room he grew up in. In the village where the boys on the street had called him a mama’s boy on a street where every neighbor remembered him as a child. He kept commuting.

 The office was in Manhattan and the house was 35 mi east and he made that journey constantly. It was the central fact of his working life. This back and forth between the city where he did business and the village where he slept. The work suited him. Every building in New York sits inside a web of law and every builder who wants to move a doorway has to get past it.

 He was becoming the man they called when it went wrong. It is not glamorous work. It is well- paid and it is necessary and the people who are good at it become known. He had money coming in. He had a car and a working knowledge of every road on Long Island, which roads had lights on them and which did not, which ones emptied out after dark, and how far east you had to drive before there was nothing on either side but pinewoods.

 In November 1993, he was 30 years old. That month, he met a woman in New York City and she got into his vehicle and he drove east. He strangled her in the vehicle and then he kept driving east. Her name was Sandra Costillia. She was 28 years old. She was born on the 25th of August 1965 in Sangre Grande, a town in the northeast of Trinidad and she came to the United States as a teenager.

 Not much about the years after that was written down. She married at some point. She ended up in New York. By the early 1990s, she had a son, a small boy about 5 years old. The town of Southampton is at the far end of Suffach County out out where Long Island narrows and splits and the villages get further apart.

 North Sea is a hamlet on the bay side of it, woods and water and scattered houses. There was a road there called Fish Cove Road and behind a property on that road there was a stretch of trees. It had been a holiday spot once, a place called the Fish Cove Inn with log cabins. That is where he left her.

 She lay in those woods for one or two days. On the 20th of November 1993, two hunters walking through the trees found her. She was on her back. Her arms were stretched above her head and her legs were apart. She was partly unclothed and the striped rugby shirt she had been wearing was pulled up over her head.

 She had sharp force injuries to her face and her body. She had been strangled. Police said there were signs she had been sexually assaulted. She had been arranged. That was obvious to everyone who looked at the scene. She had not been dropped or hidden or covered over. She had been put in a particular position and left in it. The Suffach County police had a murder and no name.

 There was no identification on her. They took her fingerprints and ran them and the machine came back with a match because 16 months earlier, a woman had been printed in New York City for jumping a turnstyle. That was the only arrest anybody had on her. A small brush with the law of the kind thousands of people in that city have every year.

 It was the thing that gave her back her name. Detectives started building a file and the file stayed thin. Her last known address was in Queens, but they did not think she had been living there. They called her a drifter, which is the word police use when they cannot draw a straight line through somebody’s movements.

 She had no arrests connected to sex work. What officers said was that she lived in a way similar to other women in that world and that there was talk secondhand and unproven that she had been working the streets. Her family was told there was a son who would grow up without her. Then the case stopped moving. There was no witness.

There was no suspect. There was no forensic result that could point at anybody because the science of 1993 could not do what later science would do. Hairs were recovered from her remains. In 1993, a technician could put a hair under a microscope and say whether it was consistent with another hair, but consistent is not a name.

 They went into evidence and they were stored. 70 mi west in the house on 1st Avenue, a 30-year-old Rex Herman went back to his ordinary life. 5 months later, he made two decisions that fixed the rest of it in place. The first was the business. In 1994, he started his own firm. He called it RH Consultants and Associates and ran it out of an office in Manhattan.

 The work was exactly what he had trained for. His firm did not design buildings. It fixed problems with buildings. When a developer had a project stuck at the Department of Buildings, when a plan broke the code, when a permit was refused, or an inspection failed, that was when somebody picked up a phone and called a man like him.

 He described the job himself. He said he was an architect, a consultant, and a troubleshooter. He said he had been born and raised on Long Island and had been working in Manhattan since 1987. Then he described what actually brought clients through his door. When a job that should have been routine suddenly stopped being routine, that was when he got the phone call. He was good at it.

People in that trade who dealt with him found a man with real command of the material, who knew the code thoroughly, and was not intimidated by the departments enforcing it. Not everybody liked him. Some found him difficult, but difficult is not a problem in that business. Difficult is sometimes what the client is paying for.

 The second decision was the house. On the 29th of April 1994, he bought it from his mother for $170,000. The ranch on 1st Avenue, the one he was born into, the one with the garage where his father built cabinets, became legally his. He was 30 years old. He had a new firm in Manhattan and every financial reason to live closer to it.

He bought the house he grew up in instead and he stayed in it. Two years later, the state of New York gave him his architecture license. It had taken 15 years from high school, done the slow way through the internships and the logged hours and the exams. He was now a licensed architect running his own firm, formally qualified to interpret the rules he had spent his adult life learning.

 And that same spring, he married again. Her name was Assa Erup. They married in April 1996. She had a son from an earlier relationship, a boy named Christopher, and Hurman became his stepfather. Later that year, she gave birth to a daughter. They named her Victoria. By the end of 1996, the picture was complete, and it would have looked completely ordinary to anybody driving down First Avenue.

 a married man in his early 30s, a wife, a stepson, a new baby, a house he owned and grew up in, a firm in Manhattan, and a commute he made every working day. In the same month he got married, he picked up a woman who lived in a rented room on West 45th Street. Her name Car Vata. Karen Vata was 34 years old.

 West 45th Street sits in Hell’s Kitchen, which in the middle of the 1990s was cheap and hard, full of single room buildings and people living close to the edge. She had two sons, Gary and Eric. She was not allowed to raise them. Child welfare took the boys and they were adopted by a foster mother and she had not seen them since 1992.

She was struggling with addiction. She had a father, Dominic, and an older brother, Victor, and she visited them often. Her father called her life troubled, which was true, and which is also the shortest possible way of describing a person. She had been arrested a number of times. Investigators believed she was working as an escort.

 On the 14th of February that year, she telephoned her father. It was his birthday. That was the last time anybody in her family heard her voice. Two months later, Rex Hurman strangled her. Then he dismembered her body and he spread the parts of her across more than one place. On the 20th of April 1996, two brothers were walking a shoreline looking for driftwood.

Robert Regona had come from Valley Stream. Andrew Rona had come from Danbury in Connecticut. They were on the beach for the ordinary reason people are on a beach, which is that it was April and the weather was turning. They found a pair of severed legs. The police came. The remains were collected and examined and cataloged.

 And the woman they came from got no name because there was nothing there to give one with. No face, no fingerprints, nothing that could be run through a machine and matched. She became a case number and a set of remains in a drawer, and the file called her an unidentified female. Then there was the second problem, and it was the one that mattered most.

 Nobody reported her missing. Not that month, not that year, not at all. There was no missing person’s complaint. Her father and her brother knew she had stopped calling and they got worried as the year went on and they started looking for her the way families do, asking, calling, going to the places she had been.

 But the formal report that turns a person into an open police file was never made. So there were two facts sitting in two separate places with no way for anybody to connect them. In one place, unidentified remains from a beach. In another, a family in New York who did not know where their daughter had gone. Her father did not give up.

 Lawyers got involved at various points. Suffach County police made contact with the family as early as 1997 about an unidentified woman’s death, but nothing came of it, and it was never clear whether that contact even concerned her. The years went by, and on First Avenue, none of it was visible at all. What was visible was a young family in a small house and a man in his 30s whose business was growing and four years in which nothing at all appeared to happen.

That is not because nothing happened. It is because what happened was ordinary and ordinary things do not make records. A man in his 30s with a young family and a small business does not turn up in newspapers. He turns up in filings with the department of buildings, in invoices, in his daughter’s school paperwork, and nowhere else.

 What can be reconstructed is the shape of the days. He commuted. He left the house in the morning and came back at night, 35 mi each way, an hour on the train or longer by road depending on traffic. The business grew because New York in the late 1990s was building and every project that ran into trouble was a possible client.

 Troubleshooters only get hired when something has already gone wrong. And in a boom, something is always going wrong somewhere. At home, there were children, a stepson moving through his teens, a daughter who was a toddler. Assa was there. The neighbor saw a big man come and go. That was mostly the extent of it. He was not sociable in any way anybody could describe.

 Some found him unsettling in a vague way they could not have explained. Others thought nothing of him at all. He was the very tall man in the small red house who worked in the city. The house was not well-kept from the outside. It looked tired. The lawn was not the pride of the street. It was a property clearly not being spent on.

 Owned by a man who was not short of money. He spent it elsewhere. There was a time share out near Las Vegas. There was land in South Carolina. There were vehicles and in the basement. Over the years, a collection of weapons built up, hundreds of them kept below ground. By the year 2000, he was 36 years old. His daughter was three.

 His firm was 6 years old and established. His mother was still nearby. From the outside, his life was completely settled. That autumn, he drove into New Jersey or somebody from New Jersey came to him. Nobody has ever established which for certainty till date. Either way, a 24year-old woman who was last seen by her family in a town called Port Republic got into his vehicle.

 Her name was Valerie Mack and she was born in New Jersey in the summer of 1976 under a different name. She was born a Fulton. She had four older brothers and sisters. Her mother’s marriage collapsed into a long and bitter legal fight that dragged on for years and all the children were taken into foster care. She moved between homes.

 Then at 9 years old, she was adopted by a family called Mac, Edwin and Joanne, who lived in a ranch-style house near the Pine Barons of New Jersey. She got a surname, a mother and father, and a sister named Angela. As a teenager, she was difficult. She fell in with a rough crowd, skipped school, started using. Her adoptive family did what families do, which is worry and argue and hope it would pass. At about 18, she had a son.

She had his name tattooed onto her ankle near the right foot. She could not raise him. She left the boy with his father and moved on. And by the middle of the 1990s, she was living in New Jersey and traveling constantly between there and Philadelphia. She had a job with a retail chain at one point.

 She also started working as an escort, and for that she used a second name. To clients and to police, she was Melissa Taylor. The arrest started in 1996. By 2000, she had three in Philadelphia. Prostitution, drugs, loitering. She was living with a boyfriend. She was small with brown hair and hazel eyes. Her family last saw her in the spring or summer of 2000 in Port Republic.

 She just did not come back one day. Her adoptive mother said there had been nothing unusual about it, nothing that stood out. She had a normal life. She did not come home. They tried to report her missing and the police would not take the report. She was an adult, they were told, and adults are allowed to leave. Rex Herman strangled her.

 Then he dismembered her and he split what was left of her between two places more than 30 mi apart. The first was Manville. Manville is in the middle of Suffach County out east in the pine barren, scrub pine and sandy soil and hardly any people. Hulsey Manor Road runs north through it, crossing under the Long Island Expressway.

 Off that road, there are woods nobody has any reason to enter. On the 19th of November 2000, at about 10:50 in the morning, three hunters were in those woods. Roughly a mile west of Hulsey Manor Road, a dog found something. It was a black plastic bag wrapped in duct tape. Inside it were more bags, and inside this was a body. She had been tied with rope.

 Her head was gone. Both hands were gone. One leg had been cut away. The medical examiner thought she had been dead somewhere between 2 and 8 weeks. There was no face. There were no fingerprints because there were no hands. There was nothing at that scene that could produce a name in the year 2000. She got a number instead.

 In the Suffach County files, she became Jane Doe number six. Somewhere in New Jersey, a family who had been turned away at a police station kept looking. Somewhere else, a small boy was growing up. And in Manorville, the case closed itself, the way cases do when there is no name and no witness and no science that can help and went into a filing cabinet.

 Meanwhile, in the basement on First Avenue, Rex Hoyerman sat down at a computer and opened a new document. He wrote it in Microsoft Word, mostly in capital letters, laid out as a series of lists. He created it around the turn of the millennium, and over the years that followed, he kept going back into it, adding things and changing things.

 The lists were about the practical business of killing people. There was a section on problems, the things that could go wrong, the things that could get a person caught, hair and fiber, DNA, fingerprints inside gloves. There was a section on supplies, cutting tools, acid, a burn can, cat litter, tarpolins.

 There were notes on places to dispose of a body, notes on scouting those places, notes on preparing a body to be moved. There were corrections in it, the kind a person writes after doing something and finding it did not work the way they expected. Use heavy rope for the neck. Light rope had snapped under the strain of being pulled tight.

Use push pins to hang drop cloths from the ceiling. There was a heading that read things to remember. Under it was a note about sound and how far it travels. There was a note about the value of sleep and about noise control and about how both of those things increased what the writer called playtime. There was a note about removing marks left by torture.

The file was never printed and never shown to anybody. It sat on a hard drive in a basement in a village on the southshore of Long Island, in a house with a big window and a small front lawn half a mile from a school. Above it, the house went on, a wife, two children, a television, meals, school runs, and in Manhattan, the firm was doing well, because these were the strongest years of his professional life.

 The city had come out of a long, quiet stretch and entered a construction boom. And construction booms make exactly the work he sold. Every new floor, every conversion, every change of use ran into the same wall of regulation, and the people who owned those projects needed somebody who could get them through it. His firm’s name turned up alongside substantial clients, retail chains, an airline, ordinary commercial buildings across Manhattan.

 At one point, he was engaged through a third party on work at a well-known office tower on Wall Street. None of it made him famous. All of it made him money. He worked out of an office on Fifth Avenue in the low 400s of the street numbering the middle of Midtown, a few blocks from the Empire State Building, surrounded by tens of thousands of people going about their working day. He was in his late 30s.

 His daughter was starting school and a few streets from where he sat, a 20-year-old woman from up the Hudson was living and working. Her name Jessica Taylor. Jessica Taylor came from Pakipi. She had a mother, Elizabeth, and two brothers. Her family described a girl who liked riding her bike, who loved children, who would sit on the couch and lean into her mother.

 Her cousin Jasmine described someone with a huge heart and a fierce streak. A person who did not take disrespect from anyone, who stood up for herself, the kind of relative a younger cousin looks up to. There was a story told about her in public, that she was estranged from her family. Her cousin says it is not true. She was loved and she stayed in contact.

 She had worked as an escort in Washington before New York. And by the summer of 2003, she was living in Manhattan and working near Midtown. In July, her mother’s birthday was coming up and she called to say she would be up to Pipsy in a few days for it. The call lasted about 7 minutes. Right after she hung up, she made another call.

 That one went to a telephone that was in Midtown Manhattan. Sometime between the 21st and the 26th of July, Rex Horman met her. He picked her up. He strangled her. Then he dismembered her and he took what was left of her to two places. The first was Manville, the same stretch of Pine Barons, the same road. He left her just west of Hollyy Manor Road near the Long Island Expressway overpass.

 Her arms, her hands, and her head had been cut off and were not there. There was a tattoo on her body. Before he left her, somebody took a sharp instrument to it and cut it apart. On the 25th of July in Pakipi, she did not arrive for her mother’s birthday. She did not answer her phone. Her family knew straight away that something was wrong and they reported her missing.

On the morning of the 26th of July 2003, a woman was walking her dog along Halsy Manor Road. That is how she was found. The Suffach County Police now had two dismembered women recovered from the same square mile of woods within 3 years and no name for either of them. But the tattoo had not been destroyed completely.

 Enough of it survived that a police artist could work out what it had originally been, and Suffach County released a drawing of the design publicly, hoping somebody would recognize it. 7 months later, a detective in Washington, DC saw it and knew it. He connected it to a missing person’s report from his own city. DNA samples were taken from her family in Pakypy and compared.

 And in February 2004, the identification was confirmed. Jane Doe had a name. Jessica Taylor, 20 years old. Her family could bury her partially. One other thing came out of that scene in 2003, and it went into an evidence store. Beneath her body, there had been a drape, and on that drape were human hairs.

 They came from the head of a man. In 2003, a laboratory could look at those hairs under a microscope and say what they were consistent with. The analysis indicated Caucasian or European characteristics. Beyond that, the technology of that year had nothing to offer. The hairs were judged unsuitable for further DNA testing. They were preserved and they were filed.

 and the man they came from went on with a life that was expanding in every visible direction. Over the next four years, he bought properties. In 2003 and 2005, he and his wife bought two timeshare condominiums in Las Vegas, a few miles west of the strip. The first was later sold. He also bought land in Chester County, South Carolina, four lots in a rural county south of Charlotte, hours from anywhere he lived or worked.

 None of that was remarkable in itself. Plenty of men in their 40s with a good small business buy property. What it meant in practice was that he had reasons to travel, places to go at the end of the travel, and vehicles to get there. One of those vehicles was a pickup truck. It was a first generation Chevrolet Avalanche, a large distinctive model with an unusual shape at the back where the cab meets the bed.

 It was registered to him. At home, the family was growing up. His daughter was in primary school. His stepson was moving into adulthood. His wife took holidays with the children, sometimes out of state. In Manhattan, the firm carried on, and in 2007, it ran into public trouble. He had been hired to work on the renovation of an apartment building in Harlem, seven stories of it.

 In September that year, fire officials declared the building unsafe and ordered the residents out. At least 26 families had to leave their homes. It was serious and it was reported at the time. It is the only occasion in three decades of practice that his firm surfaced publicly in a bad way. He carried on. The business survived it.

 By the summer of 2007, he was 43 years old and had been running his own company for 13 years. He knew every building department clerk worth knowing. He knew the code as well as the people enforcing it. He also knew how to arrange a meeting with a woman without leaving a record of himself. The internet had changed the sex trade completely since 1993.

Women who had once worked streets now advertised online on Craigslist, on the escort boards, on the various sites that had grown up around the trade. A client looking at those adverts could see a photograph, a description, and a phone number and make contact without going through anybody.

 And he could make that contact from a telephone bought with cash, used briefly, and thrown away. A prepaid phone, a burner. In July 2007, he opened an advert placed by Moren Brainard Barnes, who had come down from Connecticut for the day. Meen Brainard Barnes was born on the 14th of June 1982 in New London, Connecticut.

 Her mother was Marie. Her father William was not in the picture and she was raised in Groten by her mother and her stepfather Robert. She had a sister Melissa. She had a brother William who died in a motorcycle accident. She had a halfsister Biona. By her mid20s she was living in Norwich and she was a mother herself.

 Her daughter Nichollet was seven. Her son Dylan was younger. She had tattoos, Nichollet’s name in pink letters, liies across her chest, a rose on her right ankle. She worked as a seasonal telemarketer, and the money did not go far enough. She had a mortgage on a house and two children in it, and the arithmetic never quite closed.

 So, she had been doing something else on the side, and she had been careful about it. Her sister did not know. Her sister thought she was looking for work after being laid off. That was the version of Moren her family had. She had tried to stop. Towards the end of 2006, she made a real effort to get out of it and find another way to support her children.

 Then in July 2007, an eviction notice arrived. That is the whole of it. a woman with two young children, a mortgage she could not cover, a job that had gone, and a piece of paper telling her she was going to lose the house. She went back to the work she had been trying to leave because it was the fastest money available to her.

 On the 9th of July 2007, she told her family she was going to New York for the day and would be back the next. Rex Hurerman used a burner phone to make the arrangement. At 11:43 that night, she telephoned a friend in Connecticut. She said she had an out call and was going out to meet somebody. Then he picked her up and he strangled her.

 Afterwards, he bound her remains with three leather belts. One of the three he used to fasten her ankles together. He drove south and west and onto the barrier island, and he turned onto Ocean Parkway. Somewhere along the north side of that road in the low bramble between the parking fields near Gilgo Beach, he left her.

 She did not come back the next day. She did not answer her phone. Her family and her friends started calling. First her, then the police in Norwich and in New York City. On the 14th of July, a friend reported her missing to the Norwich Police Department. Detectives in Connecticut established that she had gone to New York City on the 9th and been expected home on the 10th.

 Her phone activity was traced. It had connected to a cell tower on Long Island. In 2008, on the strength of that, police helicopters and cadaavver dogs searched a marshy empty stretch of ground along the Southshore. They found nothing. Her mother and her sister put up missing person notices. Nichollet turned 8 and then nine.

 And on 1st Avenue, a 43-year-old architect went to work in Manhattan in the morning and came home in the evening. And two years went by. Then in July 2009, he opened another advert. This one had been placed by a 24year-old hairdresser who lived in a basement apartment in the Bronx. Her name was Melissa Bartholomew.

 She was born on the 14th of April 1985 and grew up in Erie County in the far west of New York State near Buffalo. She went to cosmetology school and qualified as a butician. That was the plan and she had done the work for it. She wanted to do hair. People who knew her described somebody ambitious and independent and warm and the person she was closest to in the world was her younger sister Amanda.

 In 2007, she moved to New York City to work as a hairdresser. She was 22. She took the apartment in the Bronx and kept five cats. The city was more expensive than the plan allowed for. Within about a year, she was also working as an escort, arranging meetings through online adverts. She lied to her mother about it. She said she was working as an exotic dancer, which was a smaller lie and easier to carry.

 Her mother, Lynn, believed it. The only person she told the truth to was Amanda, who was 15. The sisters were close enough that Amanda came down to the city twice to stay with her. On the first day of one of those visits, they went and had their nails done. Then they went to the zoo. Then they went to see the Statue of Liberty.

 He used a burner phone to arrange to meet her. She was last seen sitting on a curb outside her apartment. She had a date that night and she would not tell her on andoff boyfriend who it was with. He picked her up on the evening of the 10th of July 2009 and he strangled her. Then he wrapped what was left of her in tape and burlap sacking and drove out along Ocean Parkway and left her on the north side of the road in the Bramble near Gilgo Beach.

That same day, a call was made to her voicemail. It came from Masipiqua. Her family started looking for her almost immediately and they had trouble getting the New York City police to take it seriously. Then about a week after she vanished, Amanda’s phone rang. The caller ID showed her sister’s number. A man’s voice asked whether he was speaking to Melissa’s little sister.

Amanda said yes and asked who it was, and the man started saying things about her sister. He asked whether she knew what her sister did. He called her a [ __ ] The calls kept coming about one a week, always to Amanda. Always from that phone. If anyone else answered, he hung up. Each call lasted under 3 minutes.

They came in the middle of the day or in the evening. Lynn kept paying the phone bill all that year. She had to. The line was dead except when he chose to switch it on. And when he switched it on, it was because he wanted to talk to a 15-year-old girl in Buffalo. The police traced the calls.

 The signals came off cell towers in Midtown Manhattan, around Time Square, around Madison Square Garden, in an area with hundreds of thousands of people in it at any hour of the working day. There was nothing to be done with that. He told Amanda he was going to watch her sister’s body rot. The last call came on the 26th of August, 2009.

 He asked whether she thought she would ever see her sister again. He told her she would not because he had killed her. He said maybe one day he would come and show her. Then a television station in Buffalo ran a report revealing that the family had been receiving calls. The call stopped that month and never came again. 8 months later on the other side of Long Island, a young woman, Shannon Gilbert from Jersey City, locked herself in a bathroom at 4 in the morning and dialed 911.

 Shannon Gilbert was 24 years old and lived in Jersey City. She worked as an escort and she worked the way most women in that trade did by 2010. An advert online, a phone call, a price agreed. She did not travel alone. She had a driver, a man named Michael Pack, who took her to appointments and waited outside. On the night of the 30th of April 2010, a client named Joseph Brewer called her out to his house in Oak Beach, a private community of about 60 houses on the barrier island, reached by one road in and one road out.

 Pack drove her there and parked outside. Sometime in the early hours of the 1st of May, something frightened her badly. She locked herself in a bathroom and called 911. She stayed on the line about 20 minutes telling the operator that somebody was after her. She could not say where she was.

 She was in a house she had never been to before in a community she did not know and she could not give a street or a number. She asked whether they could trace the call. Then she came out of the bathroom and ran past the car her own driver was sitting in and out into the dark on foot. She knocked on a door a short distance away. It belonged to an older resident named Gus Kleti.

 He came out, found a young woman shouting for help on his step at 5:00 in the morning and told her he was calling the police. She ran again further into the community. Behind those houses, the land drops into marsh, half a mile of wet, tangled growth with standing water in it, too thick to walk through in a straight line thick enough that you cannot see somebody standing 20 ft away.

That is where she went. Officers came out that morning. She was already gone. And then very little happened. Nobody has ever established what set her off. Her client, Joseph Brewer, was questioned and cleared. So was Michael Pack, her driver. Neither was ever charged with anything. There was no large search of the marsh in those first days.

 There was no urgency of the kind there would have been for a different sort of missing woman. That is not a theory. It is what her mother, Mari Gilbert, said publicly for the rest of her life. The police heard the word escort and stopped treating it as an emergency. So Mari pushed, she phoned, she drove out there. She demanded to know what was being done and her daughters pushed alongside her.

 Months went by and Shannon Gilbert stayed missing. And the pressure from that family was the only thing keeping the case alive at all. 5 weeks after that 911 call on a different part of the same island, Rex Herman bought a prepaid phone, switched it on, and used it to call a hotel room in Hopage. A 22-year-old woman from Maine had checked in there 4 days earlier.

 Her name was Megan Waterman. She was born on the 18th of January, 1988 in Portland, Maine. Her mother, Lorraine, was 21. Her father was an ex-boyfriend rather than a partner. And for a while in her infancy, all of them lived in the same weekly rate motel outside Portland. Her mother, her father, her father’s new girlfriend and her older brother, Greg.

 Lorraine remembered Megan’s father as violent. He remembered it as going both ways. She was raised in Scar Bro by her mother and her grandparents. She dropped out of high school. She struggled with drink and with drugs. In 2006 at 18, she had a daughter. She named her Lily. And by every account, Lily reorganized her completely.

 She wanted to give the girl something steady. That was the thing she talked about. Money was the problem. There was not much work for a young woman with no diploma. And there was a man named 18 Cruz who told her there was a faster way. He said he loved her. He said he wanted to build a family with her and Lily.

 He said that if she kept doing this for a while, they could buy a house. She and her mother were estranged for a period over it and later they made it up. On the 1st of June 2010, she and Cruz took a bus from Portland to New York. She checked into the Holiday in Express in Hop Hodge in the middle of Suffach County. He stayed with family nearby.

She worked out of the hotel room placing adverts online. On Friday the 4th of June, she telephoned a friend called Nitsie with news. A team wanted to have a child with her and because of that he did not need her to do this work anymore. Nissi said afterwards that she had never in her life heard Megan so happy.

 When she traveled she called home three times a day to speak to Lily who was three. On Saturday the 5th she spoke to her mother and there was nothing unusual in it. At 9:50 that evening she called again and that was the last time her mother and her daughter heard her voice. Earlier that same day, the prepaid phone had been switched on and it called her at 1:31 on the morning of the 6th of June. It called her again.

 At about the same moment, the security camera in the hotel lobby recorded her leaving. She was wearing a yellow top. Rex Horman picked her up from the Holiday Inn and he strangled her. Then he bound her remains with tape and burlap, drove to Ocean Parkway, and left her on the north side of the road near Gilgo Beach.

 The burner phone that had called her that night traveled from Hodge to Masipiqua Park. In the hotel room, she had left her makeup, her clothing, and her cell phone. 2 days later, her family reported her missing. The reason they gave was simple, and it was the right one. She did not go 2 days without calling to check on her daughter.

 It was not something she would do. In November, her mother offered a reward for information leading to her safe return. By then, it had been 5 months, and by then, he had already made the 20-minute drive one more time for Amberllin Costello, a woman who lived barely 10 minutes from the Parkway in a small house on America Avenue in West Babylon.

 Amberllin Costello was born in Gaston County, North Carolina on the 10th of February, 1983 and grew up near Wilmington. Her childhood was hard. Her sister Kimberly described a family struggling with alcohol addiction and illness. Not the American dream, she said. Not anything like it. When Amber was six, a neighbor sexually molested her and their mother had a breakdown afterwards.

Amber was a promising student. Then she got involved with drugs as a teenager and by adulthood she was fighting an addiction to heroin. She had been in the sex trade on and off since she was 17. She had been married and divorced. She was tiny, around 5t tall and about 100 lb.

 By 2010, she had been living in Florida and working there. Her divorce was finalized in March. Her sister bought her a ticket and brought her north to New York, hoping the change would hold. There was a spell in rehab. There was a boyfriend. There was a return to the work. She ended up sharing 750 square ft on America Avenue with a man named Dave Scholler.

 Both of them were using drugs. They had a system. She arranged her dates through Scholler’s phone rather than her own, and he stayed in the house. Sometimes he waited in the next room in case a client turned violent. Sometimes he watched from the window when she was picked up outside. They had a second system, too, which was a robbery.

 A client would be invited to the house. Once he handed over the money, Scholler would come storming in, playing the part of the furious boyfriend, and the man would run out without getting anything, and the two of them would keep the cash. It worked more than once. It made them enemies. On an online message board used by men who bought sex on Long Island, there were angry posts that summer from customers who said they had been robbed at that house.

 One of them threatened to come round with baseball bats. On the night of the 1st of September, 2010, a man contacted Amber through a prepaid phone in response to her advert. She agreed to meet him. The phone started moving from the Masipa Park area east towards West Babylon. She and Scholler decided to run the robbery. The man at the door was enormous.

 Scholler said afterwards that he was like an ogre, well over 6 feet tall, wearing sunglasses. There was a dark pickup truck parked nearby with an unusual shape at the back end. Scholler was supposed to come in and play the angry boyfriend. He started to and then he stopped. He looked at how big the man was and he did not go through with it.

 The man backed off on his own. He said he was just a friend. He said to tell her he would give her a call. Then he left. A little while later, the same burner phone sent a message. It came from Masipiqua Park. It said that was not nice and asked whether he got credit next time. A few hours after that, the phone was in Midtown Manhattan.

 The following day, it was back in Babylon. On the evening of the 2nd of September, he started calling again. Scholler remembered three or four calls that night. The man offered $1,500, which was far more than she usually got, and she told Scholler she felt comfortable with him. She got ready. She put on a pink hoodie and jeans.

 She left her own phone behind in the house. On her way out, she told Scholler that if her sister rang, he should tell her she loved her. At about 20 11, she walked out and headed east on foot. At the corner, she looked up and down Hampton Road, then turned right towards where the truck was waiting around the corner.

 A moment later, Scholler saw a dark truck drive past the house. Rex Horman’s strangled her. He wrapped her in tape and burlap, drove out to Ocean Parkway, and left her in the bramble on the north side of the road near Gilgo Beach. The next morning, Amber had still not come home, so Shaler rang her sister, Kimberly Overreet. She told him not to worry yet. So he waited.

 Nobody ever reported Amber Costello missing. Not that week, not that month, not at all. 3 months later in December, a police officer and a dog walked out onto that same road looking for somebody else entirely. They were looking for Shannon Gilbert. The young woman who had run out of a client’s house in Oak Beach at 5 in the morning back on the 1st of May knocked on a neighbor’s door screaming for help and disappeared into the marsh behind those houses.

 7 months had gone by. Her mother had spent every one of them phoning, driving out there, and refusing to let the department put the file away. And this search was the result of that pressure. Oak Beach is on the same barrier island. The officer was working the scrub along Ocean Parkway, a few miles east of where she was last seen.

 At about a/4 to 3:00 in the afternoon, roughly 3 miles from the Robert Moses Bridge near Gilgo Beach, the dog indicated on something in the bramble. It was a human skeleton wrapped in burlap. It was not Shannon Gilbert. The search widened immediately because a body found while looking for a different body changes everything. Officers went into the scrub on both sides of the road, working the ground meter by meter.

 On the 13th of December, they found three more. All three were within 500 ft of the first. All of them were skeletal. They were bound and wrapped the same way, and they had been placed, not dropped, laid in the bramble along the north side of the parkway in a stretch under a quarter of a mile long. Four women.

 The identifications came over the following weeks, and one by one, the police put names to them. Melissa Bartholomew, 24, the hairdresser from Buffalo with five cats in a Bronx basement whose 15-year-old sister had been taking phone calls from a man using her phone, missing since July 2009. Megan Waterman, 22. the young mother from Scarboro, Maine, who called home three times a day to speak to her three-year-old daughter and who had told a friend that week that she had never been happier. Missing since June 2010.

Amber Costello, 27, the woman who walked out of a small house in West Babylon in a pink hoodie for $1,500, leaving a message with her roommate for her sister. missing since September 2010 and never reported by anybody. And Moren Brainard Barnes, 25, the mother of two from Norwich, Connecticut, who went back to the work she had been trying to leave because an eviction notice arrived.

 Missing since July 2007, the longest of all of them. Megan Waterman was identified on the day she would have turned 23. Moren Brainer Barnes still had the three belts around her. The four of them had been left within a quarter of a mile of each other over a period of more than three years on a road that runs past one of the busiest beaches in America.

 On the 14th of December, the Suffach County Police Commissioner, Richard Dormer, announced the discoveries publicly and said a serial killer might be responsible. In January, he and the Suffach County District Attorney Thomas Spot confirmed it. They were looking for one. They said the women had been killed elsewhere and their bodies brought to that road afterwards.

 They said the bodies had probably been there a long time. They said all four had arranged meetings through Craigslist and similar sites. The press called them the Gilgo four. On the 29th of March 2011, officers searching the Parkway found a skull, a pair of hands, and a forearm about 3/4 of a mile east of where the four women had been.

The remains were compared against unsolved cases, and they matched a body that had been in a Suffach County file since 2003. Jessica Taylor. That one match reshaped the whole investigation because it broke it out of the Parkway. Manorville is 45 mi east of Gilgo Beach. It meant this was not one dumping ground.

 There was a second one in a completely different part of the island, and parts of the same woman had been put in both. On the 4th of April, they found three more sets of remains along the Parkway. One was a woman with no head, no hands, and one foot missing. And when those remains were compared to older cases, they matched the taped black bag from Manorville.

 Jane do number six, still nameless after 11 years. The second was a female toddler between about 16 months and 2 years old. The third was the skeleton of a young man wearing women’s clothing. He had died of blunt force trauma and investigators estimated his death had happened years earlier. He was somewhere between 17 and 23. That brought the total to eight.

On the 11th of April, the search crossed the county line into Nassau and officers working near the Jones Beach water tower found two more. One was a set of female bones with jewelry. DNA later indicated she was the mother of the toddler found 7 days earlier and 8 mi east. She had a tattoo of a peach and part of her had already been found in a state park in 1997.

The other was a skull west of Tobay Beach. It was compared to an earlier case and in July that year, the Suffach County Crime Laboratory determined it belonged to the same person as a pair of severed legs recovered from a beach in April 1996. 10 sets of human remains along a 7mi stretch of public road found in four months. Four had names, six did not.

Then the theory of the case fell apart in public. On the 9th of May 2011, Thomas Spot announced there was no evidence all of these remains were the work of one killer. On the 29th of November, Richard Dormer announced the opposite, that he believed one serial killer was responsible for all 10, and that Shannon Gilbert’s disappearance was a separate matter that might not even be a murder.

 The two most senior figures in the investigation had publicly contradicted each other within 6 months. On the 13th of December 2011, more than 19 months after her 911 call, her remains were found in the marsh at Oak Beach, about a quarter of a mile from where her phone, her purse, her jeans, her shoes, and her lip gloss had been found the week before.

 The county medical examiner classified her cause of death as undetermined. Police suggested she had run into the marsh in the dark and drowned. Her mother did not accept it. And then for the better part of a decade, nothing happened at all. At least not of note. In February 2022, the Suffach County District Attorney’s Office, the Suffach County Police Department, the New York State Police, and the FBI formed a joint task force.

The county had been through five police commissioners, and three district attorneys since the first body was found. The men who had strangled the original investigation were in federal prison. The new district attorney was Raymond Tierney and the new police commissioner was Rodney Harrison and the task force went back to the boxes.

 6 weeks in, an investigator reading old case material found a witness statement taken in 2010. It was Dave Scholler’s account of the man who came to the door on America Avenue the night before Amber Castello disappeared. over six feet tall, sunglasses, a dark pickup that Scholler identified as a first generation Chevrolet Avalanche.

That statement had been in the file for 12 years. Investigators ran a database search for first generation Chevrolet avalanches registered on Long Island at the relevant time, cross-referenced against other criteria. One name came back, Rex A. Horman, Masipiqua Park. At the same time, they were working the telephones.

 The original investigators had always known burner phones had been used to contact four of the women before they disappeared. Those phones had been analyzed for their tower connections and the analysis showed calls made from within an area of a few city blocks in Masipiqua Park. He lived in Masipiqua Park.

 From that point, the investigation became a matter of accumulation. Over the following year, the task force issued more than 300 subpoenas and search warrants. They found the burner phones moved in the same pattern as his personal phone and his credit card records, that he was in the same general places at the same times. They found that the movement of Melissa Bartholomew’s phone when it was used to check her voicemail and to call her sister was consistent with him.

 The same was true of Morin Brainard Barnes’s phone after she disappeared. They found online accounts in false names and burner phones registered to nobody. They found a fake email account and a fake AOL account holding photographs he had taken of himself and sent out to solicit sex.

 They found American Express records showing repeated payments to a dating app linked to a burner. They found two more burner phones used heavily between 2021 and 2023 to contact sex workers. And they found the searches between March 2022 and in June 2023, which is to say exactly the period when the task force was reopened and working. He had used one account to run more than 200200 searches about serial killers and about the investigation itself.

 He was reading lists of active serial killers who had never been caught. He was reading about the Gilgo Beach Task Force. He was watching them look for him. What they still did not have was a piece of physical evidence connecting him directly to a body that had been sitting in an evidence store since December 2010. When Megan Waterman’s remains were first examined, a male hair had been recovered from the bottom of the burlap.

 In the years since, it had been analyzed as far as the available technology allowed. By 2023, the technology allowed more. What the task force needed was a sample of Rex Hyman’s DNA, and they needed it without telling him they wanted it. On the 26th of January, 2023, a surveillance team followed him in Manhattan.

 He was outside his office on Fifth Avenue. At some point, he threw a pizza box into a public rubbish bin on the street. The team took it. The box went to the Suffach County Crime Laboratory. On the 23rd of March, a swab was taken from the crusts left inside it. On the 28th of April, a detective drove the hair to the same laboratory and handed it over personally.

 On or about the 12th of June, 2023, the result came back. The hair and the pizza crust had the same mitochondrial profile, a profile that excluded 99.96% of the North American population. That was the point at which it stopped being an investigation and became an arrest. The task force moved quickly because there was a specific worry driving them.

This was a man they believed had killed repeatedly, who was still soliciting sex workers on burner phones as recently as that year, and who had spent the previous 15 months reading about the officers hunting him. On the evening of the 13th of July, 2023, he left his office in Midtown Manhattan. He was 59 years old.

 He had a wife of 27 years, two adult children, a firm he had run for nearly 30 years, and a house he had lived in his entire life. Officers took him into custody on the street outside he was carrying a burner phone. The next morning, cars and vans filled First Avenue in Masipeka Park, and neighbors came out onto their lawns to watch police officers walk up the path of the small red house.

 He was charged with three counts of firstdegree murder and three counts of seconddegree murder in the deaths of Melissa Bartholomew, Meghgan Waterman, and Amber Costello. Prosecutors named him as the prime suspect in the death of Marine Brainard Barnes. He pleaded not guilty. He was held without bail at the Riverhead Correctional Facility.

 His attorney was Michael J. Brown. Commissioner Rodney Harrison speaking to reporters called him a demon who had walked among us. Behind them on First Avenue, the search of the house had already begun and it went on for 12 days. Police tore up the garden with excavators. They went through every room.

 Asa Ellerup and her two adult children were moved out and spent nearly 2 weeks in a hotel while it went on. In the basement, they found a vault. It was thickwalled and big enough for a person to walk into, and inside it were weapons, at least 279 of them. They found 58 hard drives. Raymond Tierney told reporters at the end of it that they had taken an enormous amount of material, all of which would have to be cataloged and analyzed, and that it would be a long time before anybody knew what they had.

 He said no single piece of evidence had jumped out at him. He said the material did not point one way or the other on whether anybody had been killed in the house. A week after the arrest, Asa Ellerup filed for divorce. She had been married to him for 27 years. Prosecutors stated publicly that she and the children had been out of town when the killings took place and that she had never been linked to the crimes in any way.

Something else came out in those first weeks. Female hairs had been found on some of the victim’s remains. An analysis linked them to her. Hairs shed in a house and carried out of it on the clothes or the equipment of somebody who lived there. The investigation went national, too, because the property records did.

 Police in Las Vegas began reviewing their unsolved cases. Prosecutors in Atlantic County, New Jersey, went back to an unsolved case from 2006, in which four sex workers had been found in a drainage ditch behind a row of motel. In South Carolina, the Chester County Sheriff’s Office confirmed it had been asked by the task force to gather evidence, and the FBI searched property belonging to a relative.

 His Chevrolet Avalanche was recovered there. Tierney told reporters his office was looking at all of them. not necessarily in the context of any particular defendant and that they were not going to stop because they owed the victims that much. Then on the 4th of August 2023, 3 weeks after the arrest, he held a press conference to announce something separate.

 A woman known for 27 years only as Jane Doe number seven or the Fire Island Jane Doe had been identified. In August 2022, six months after the task force reformed, a DNA profile suitable for genealogical comparison had finally been developed from her remains. The FBI ran a genetic genealogy review and presumptively identified her in September.

 A swab from a relative confirmed it in October. Her name was Karen Vata. Tierney said the investigation into her death was continuing. He said it was important to note there were no charges at this time. He declined to discuss suspects. Dominic Vata, who had spent 19 years looking for his daughter and had gone to court in 2015 to have her declared dead, finally learned what had happened to her. He died later that year.

 5 months after that, the charges started expanding. On the 16th of January, 2024, Rex Hoyerman was charged with the murder of Morin Brainard Barnes. The charge rested on a single hair. It was found on the buckle of one of the three belts and it had been in evidence since December 2010. Melissa K stood outside the courtroom and said her sister had been silent 16 years ago and that the loss was a wound that never healed.

Nichollet said her mother’s death had changed the whole direction of her life. That there had been countless times she needed her and she was not there. that her mother had read to her every night and that she could no longer remember the sound of her voice. That spring, investigators went back into the ground.

 They searched the Manorville woods. They searched the North Sea area in Southampton. And in May 2024, they searched the house in Masipiqua Park a second time. They had a specific reason for going back, and it had come off one of the 58 hard drives. The word document had been recovered from unallocated space, which means it had been deleted and then rebuilt by forensic software.

 Analysis established it had been created in the year 2000 and edited over a period of years afterwards. Prosecutors called it the planning document. So, detectives went back into the basement on First Avenue with infrared equipment. Behind the paneling downstairs, they identified an area that had been cordoned off where an adhesive had been applied.

 In the dropped ceiling, they found push pins. On the 6th of June, 2024, he was charged with two more murders. The first was Jessica Taylor. The hairs from the drape beneath her body had been red, and they were linked to a woman who had been living with him at the time. The second was Sandra Castillia. That charge carried something else with it.

 For a decade, her murder had been attributed by the press and by law enforcement to another man, John Bitrol, a carpenter from Manorville, convicted in 2017 of murdering two women in the same year, 1993. All three women had been strangled. All three were small. All three had been posed in wooded areas. Each was missing a single shoe, and wood shavings had been found at all three scenes.

Bitroof’s DNA had been recovered from the other two bodies. It had never been found on Sandra Castillia. Hairs had been. On the 17th of December, 2024, he was charged with a seventh murder, Valerie Mack. Seven victims, 10 counts of murder, killings spanning from 1993 to 2010. And every one of those charges rested on hair, which meant the whole case now depended on whether a court would let anybody say what those hairs meant.

The hairs were rootless. A hair pulled out by the root carries a bundle of cells on the end and gives up DNA easily. A hair that is simply shed carries almost nothing. A trace of badly broken up material, far too damaged for the standard forensic method used since the 1980s. So the prosecution had gone to a laboratory in California called Astria forensics and a technique called whole genome sequencing.

 Instead of reading a few specific markers, it takes everything that survives in the sample, copies it, runs it through a machine, and reassembles the fragments across the whole genome. Astria’s founder, Dr. Richard Green, had also written the software that produced the result, a program that compares the hair against a known sample and works out how much more likely it is that the hair came from that person than from a stranger.

 This had never been allowed in a New York criminal court. So, Justice Timothy Maz held a Fry hearing, which is how New York decides whether a new scientific method is accepted as reliable by the scientists who work in that field. It ran 9 days between March and July 2025. The prosecution called a population geneticist from the University of Washington, a forensic scientist from the Center for Human Identification in Texas, and Green himself, a professor at Santa Cruz with 16 patents in DNA technology, who had won a national prize

for sequencing DNA out of Neanderthal bones. Green explained where the company came from. Homeowners doing renovations had found the skeleton of a small girl on their property. His lab was sent a lock of her hair. They traced a living great nephew, identified her, and worked out she had died in 1876. After that, the FBI started sending him cold cases.

 The defense called two witnesses from the same consulting firm, an engineer named Nathaniel Adams, and Dr. Dan Crane, the firm’s president, who was also Adams’s old professor, his current boss, and a member of his thesis committee. Adams argued the lab’s paperwork was inadequate. Crane argued the software asked the wrong question and overstated the answer.

 On the 3rd of September 2025, Maz ruled in 27 pages. He found the method accepted, citing the expert testimony, the published research, and a murder conviction in Idaho, where the same lab’s work had been admitted, and where these same two defense witnesses had testified against it and lost. He declined to accept Adams as an expert at all.

 Adams had finished his master’s coursework in 2017 and never submitted the thesis. He had published no research of his own, and Mazai pointed to a book chapter Crane himself had written, telling defense lawyers to attack any expert who lacked a master’s degree. Neither defense witness, he found, had produced anything to refute the evidence in front of him.

Estria had connected Rex Hurerman, his ex-wife, and his daughter, to nine hairs taken from six of the seven victims. The evidence was admissible. 3 weeks later, Maz ruled again. The defense had asked to break the case into as many as five separate trials, arguing the killings spanned 17 years with different methods and different disposal sites.

 He refused. All 10 counts would be tried together because the murders showed a pattern. A trial date was set for September 2026. It never happened. 5 months before it was due to start, the families were told to come to court. On the 26th of March, 2026, relatives were told there would be a hearing on the 8th of April and that he intended to change his plea.

 For nearly 3 years, he had insisted he was innocent. He had wept in court. His attorney had said from the first day that his client was not responsible. On the 8th of April 2026, he was brought into Suffach County Court in Riverhead in a dark suit, his hands shackled behind his back. Assa Erup was in the gallery. So was Victoria.

 He pleaded guilty to three counts of murder in the first degree and four counts of murder in the second degree. Then Raymond Tierney took him through it one woman at a time and he answered, “Sandra Castilla, November 1993. He met her. He picked her up. He strangled her. He took her to the woods off Fish Cove Road. Karen Vata, April 1996.

 He met her, picked her up, strangled her, dismembered her, and spread what was left of her across more than one location. Valerie Mack, autumn 2000. The same, Manorville and Ocean Parkway. Jessica Taylor, July 2003. The same. Manorville and Ocean Parkway. Moren Brainard Barnes, July 2007. He saw her advert.

 He used a burner phone. He picked her up on the night of the 9th. He strangled her. He secured her with three belts and he took her to Gilgo Beach. Melissa Bartholomew, July 2009. An advert. A burner phone, tape, and burlap. Gilgo Beach. Megan Waterman, June 2010. A burner phone. The holiday in in hopage tape and burlap, Gilgo Beach. Amber Costello, September 2010.

He said a ruse the night before had disrupted the encounter. He used a burner phone to arrange to meet her again. He picked her up from her house in West Babylon, strangled her, wrapped her in tape and burlap, and took her to Gilgo Beach. At one point, the judge asked him how he had killed each woman. He said, “Strangulation.

” Relatives in the courtroom were heard gasping. His daughter began to cry. He also admitted out loud and on the record to killing an eighth woman he had never been charged with. Karen Vata’s murder had never been brought under the agreement. It never would be. It was covered by his plea to the other seven.

 The terms were these: three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, followed by four consecutive terms of 25 years to life. He gave up his right to appeal. he would face no further prosecution over the eight. And he agreed to sit down with the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit so profilers could examine how he chose the women, how he planned, and how he went undetected.

 Afterwards, Michael Brown told reporters there had come a point in the defense when his client said he wanted to plead guilty and that admitting it brought him an enormous sense of relief. Tierney said the defendant had walked among them play acting as a normal suburban dad when all along he had been obsessively targeting innocent women for death.

 Sentencing was set for the 17th of June. And when that morning came, the families finally got to speak. The Arthur M. Cromardi court complex in Riverhead filled with families, police officers, and reporters. Outside, members of a sex workers rights group stood in line to get in. Somewhere between 10 and 15 people spoke.

 Edwin and Joanne Mack went first. Edwin told him he had done horrendous things to Valerie’s body, but that he had not touched the real Valerie. Joanne said what he had done to their family was beyond what words could express and that justice could not replace what he had taken. Nichollet described her mother as warm and bubbly and funny and artistic with the biggest heart of anyone she had known.

 She said seeing him smirk as he confessed proved he needed to be locked away for the safety of everyone else. Melissa K broke down as she read and told him he was a coward who prayed on vulnerable innocent women. Elizabeth Meserv spoke for Megan. She called him a cowardly opportunist who simply wanted to torture and kill.

She said it saddened her that the parents who raised Megan and the sister who gave her life had not lived to see this day. Jessica Taylor’s cousins spoke. It would have been her 43rd birthday that day. One of them told him she could not put into words the hatred she had for him. The other remembered her as fierce and kind and compassionate and beautiful and intelligent and told him he had chosen small women because he was nothing more than a weak and disgusting coward.

Amanda Thunderberg stood up. She told him he could look at her while she was talking and that it had been about 17 years since they last spoke. He did not look at any of them. He sat a few feet away and listened with almost no visible reaction, even when the families demanded his attention.

 Prosecutors read statements for two families who could not be there. Ruth Ramos, Sandra Castile’s sister, said they had feared this day would never come, that they had thought it was a lost case and that the people who worked it had proved otherwise. Amber Castello’s family said Amber’s quick thinking had lit the match.

 Tierney told the court that that eight young women had been needlessly and brutally murdered and that this defendant cared only about himself. Then Rex Hurman stood up. He spoke for less than a minute. He said there were no words. He said he was responsible for what had been said in that room. He said the words he would say had no meaning and that he would leave it there.

Justice Mazai asked him whether he was at least a little bit sorry. Then he told him he had been described as a very big man, but that he was a disgusting and despicable small man, if he was a man at all, and that he was a coward. He imposed three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for Melissa Bartholomew, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello.

 He added a consecutive term of 100 years to life for Moren Brainard Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Castile, and Valerie Mack. It was the maximum available under New York law. Then he told the court officers to get him out of there. Rex Herman left the courthouse in Riverhead to begin a sentence with no release date and no appeal.