The Long Island man accused of killing seven women in the Gilgo Beach serial killings is expected to appear in court on Wednesday, where he may change his plea to guilty ahead of his trial.
The man, Rex Heuermann, 62, has previously pleaded not guilty to murdering seven women. Wednesday is set to be a routine pretrial hearing before his highly anticipated trial that is scheduled to start in September.
But last month, Newsday and other outlets reported that he was considering changing his plea to guilty. Mr. Heuermann’s lawyer and the prosecutor declined to comment ahead of the hearing. Raymond A. Tierney, the Suffolk County district attorney, has long maintained he would not consider any kind of plea deal.
It’s unclear whether the judge, Justice Timothy P. Mazzei, will approve any change — but if he does, it would cause a shock wave in a case that has captured the public’s attention and drawn fascination and outrage.
Edwin Mack, whose daughter Valerie Mack is one of the seven women Mr. Heuermann is accused of killing, said in an interview that Suffolk County authorities recently called him and said Mr. Heuermann was going to plead guilty, but that “nothing is in ink yet” until the hearing on Wednesday, which they told him to attend.
The police arrested Mr. Heuermann in July 2023, nearly three decades after the first body was found in the 1990s in Southampton. Eventually, 11 bodies were uncovered along a beach parkway on the South Shore of Long Island, in the Gilgo Beach area. Mr. Heuermann was charged with killing six of those people.
Four victims — Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Lynn Costello — were discovered in the Gilgo Beach area in December 2010 and became known as the Gilgo Four. Their bodies were found wrapped in burlap and their feet or ankles bound.
That set off more than a decade of investigation, which was wracked by miscommunication, dysfunction, the discovery of more bodies and, at some points, corruption. Nearly immediately, police knew they were dealing with a serial killer. The crimes horrified the public and devastated the families of the victims.
Through painstaking work, investigators began to do DNA tests on evidence found with the bodies, and, with the help of cellphone data, they started narrowing in on a profile of a suspect. In 2022, the police finally homed in on Mr. Heuermann, based on data, DNA and records that linked him to the crimes.
Mr. Heuermann appeared to live a double life. He worked in Manhattan as an architectural consultant, where he had a reputation for meticulousness that impressed some and irritated others. But on Long Island, where he was born and raised, he lived with his wife and two adult children in a dilapidated house with an unkempt yard. Some neighbors in Massapequa Park considered him unpleasant, at times even menacing.
Facing multiple counts of first-degree murder, Mr. Heuermann is likely to be sentenced to life without parole if convicted of the highest charges. Even a guilty plea would most likely leave Mr. Heuermann in prison for life.
A guilty plea would also head off a long-anticipated trial that promised to be a major spectacle: The modest courtroom in Riverhead on Long Island, where he is set to be tried shortly after Labor Day, was outfitted with wall-mounted cameras to stream to overflow rooms.
And it would deprive Mr. Tierney, the district attorney, of the climax to a case that lifted him into the national spotlight. Mr. Tierney has long spoken assuredly about the prospect of a conviction and promised a trial that would reveal even more lurid details in a case already brimming with them. He has also repeatedly dismissed any possibility of his team offering Mr. Heuermann a plea deal for a shorter sentence if convicted.
Mr. Heuermann’s lawyer, Michael J. Brown, seems to have exhausted a number of attempts to get the judge to toss prosecutors’ strongest claims, including cutting-edge DNA evidence that linked his client to the case. Broad search warrants found key pieces of evidence, including an arsenal of guns in Mr. Heuermann’s home.
Mr. Brown, a longtime top defense attorney in Suffolk County, has spent nearly three years since Mr. Heuermann’s arrest finding ways to parry the constant barrage of devastating charges and claims against his client. These included an obsession with sadistic online porn and the creation of a homemade manual on how to hunt, kill and dispose of his victims.
Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories.
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