Years before the 2010 discovery of one set of human remains at Oak Beach in Suffolk County, 10 people fell victim to suspected homicide. Multiple females, one male, and a toddler were robbed of their lives between 1993 and 2010. November 1993 Sandra Costilla’s remains were found in North Sea by two hunters discovered 28-year-old Costilla’s body in a wooded area in North Sea, Southampton, on Nov. 21, 1993. She had been strangled to death and left partially clothed. Her remains were in the woods for several days prior to being discovered. Authorities identified Costilla by using her fingerprints, which had been entered into the system after she was arrested for jumping over a subway turnstile in 1992. July 2003 dismembered body of Jessica Taylor was found. The remains were Taylor’s body, decapitated and with both arms severed. A tattoo on the torso had been obliterated with a sharp object to prevent her identity. In 2010 Four women had been bound with tape or belts or wrapped in shrouds of camouflage-patterned burlap, the sort that hunters use for blinds. They had worked as escorts and had gone missing after going to meet a client. The bodies of the four victims – Maureen Brainard, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello – were found approximately 500 feet from each other. Investigators focused on cell phone use from the beginning of the investigation into the Long Island serial killer. The victims, referred to as the “Gilgo Four,” posted advertisements on Craigslist and used their own cell phones to connect with clients. 2009 The authorities stated that the killer used Melissa Barthelemy’s cell phone to make several taunting phone calls to her family in Buffalo, N.Y. during the summer of 2009. These calls reportedly originated from towers near New York’s Penn Station and other areas of Manhattan. 2010 A witness reported seeing a dark green Chevy Avalanche parked outside the home of Amber Lynn Costello in Babylon, N.Y., the day before she disappeared in September 2010. The witness informed the police that Costello had a meeting with a client on the same day. The witness described the client as a white male, approximately 6’4″ to 6’6″ in height, in his mid-40s, with dark bushy hair, and big oval-style 1970s eyeglasses. This information is from court documents related to the case. 2021, investigators, including the FBI, used advanced phone analytics to focus on an area of Massapequa Park, located about 17 miles from Gilgo Beach, where they believed the killer likely lived. There was a specific area where our potential suspect was making these phone calls to the victims. The next breakthrough in the case came when police revisited an old clue in March 2022. Investigators determined that Heuermann, who lived in Massapequa Park and matched the physical description, owned a Chevy Avalanche in 2010. Once they had established Heuermann as a suspect, they conducted surveillance on his daily life, issuing 300 subpoenas and search warrants to collect potential evidence. January 2023, an undercover team watched from security cameras as Heuermann allegedly tossed a pizza box into a trash can outside of his midtown Manhattan office. The team retrieved the box, which contained a partial piece of pizza crust that was later tested for DNA. It proved to be a “99.96%” match to hair found on one of the victims at Gilgo Beach.

Four of the victims – known as the “Gilgo Beach 4” – have been connected to Heuermann, who is believed to be “LISK,” December 2010, police found the bodies of four women, wrapped in burlap and hidden in thick underbrush along a remote beach highway that runs parallel to the ocean at Gilgo Beach, on the coast of Long Island, New York. Within a few months, they discovered six more bodies in the same area, including the skeleton of a toddler.

• Megan Waterman June 6, 2010;
• Amber Costello September 2, 2010;
• Melissa Barthelemy July 10, 2009;
• Megan Waterman June 6, 2010;
• Amber Costello September 2, 2010.

Because those four victims were all sex workers and their bodies had all been dumped in burlap sacks, investigators suspect the same killer was responsible. All were petite females approximately 22 to 27 years old, believed to be working as sex workers, all had missing clothing and personal possessions, all had been killed by homicide, all had contact shortly before their disappearances with a person using a “burner” cellphone (i.e., cellphones without an associated verified identity), and the cellphones of two of the four victims, Brainard-Barnes and Barthelemy, were used by the killer after their deaths. In addition, each of the four victims were found similarly positioned, bound in a similar fashion by either belts or tape, with three of the victims found wrapped in a burlap-type material. *Some reports in 2010 – 2011 stated all four victims were wrapped in burlap.

Discovery Timeline [timeline_awesome id=”3692″]