As Rex Heuermann, an architect charged with murdering several sex workers around Gilgo Beach on Long Island, awaits trial, a new docu-series about the case is coming out on Netflix on Mar. 31. The three-part series, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, directed by Liz Garbus, features friends and family members of the victims and law enforcement authorities who have been working on the case since Shannan Gilbert, a sex worker, first went missing in 2010.
Garbus had interviewed some of the victims’ loved ones for Lost Girls, a 2020 feature film inspired by the case starring Amy Ryan and Lola Kirke and based on journalist Robert Kolker’s book Lost Girls: The Unsolved American Mystery of the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer Murders. “We were hoping it would [put] more public pressure on getting justice for these families,” Garbus tells TIME. When Heuermann was arrested in 2023 and charged with murdering seven women, she got back in touch with some of the families and started work on a docu-series. Here’s how Gone Girls details the milestones that led to the 2023 arrest.
The story of how the suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer got arrested begins with a change in leadership. When Suffolk County got a new police commissioner, Rodney Harrison, in 2021, he created a Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force in 2022, consisting of federal, NY state, and local law enforcement officials. They worked on digitizing the evidence to make searching easier. Authorities were on the lookout for someone who could be over six-feet-four-inches tall and drove a Chevy Avalanche. They knew that the women who had gone missing had all received calls from a burner phone, and authorities figured out that the burner phone belonged to someone who commuted from Massapequa Park on Long Island to New York City.
The first meeting of the task force was Feb. 1, 2022, and about six weeks later, on March 14, 2022, the task force started tracking Heuermann, a husband and father of two who worked at an architecture firm in Manhattan. They saw that wherever Heuermann went, so did the burner phone. Authorities saw him pay to add minutes to a burner phone and found anonymous email accounts that he was using to contact escorts. To get his DNA sample, authorities retrieved a pizza box that he discarded and took his leftover pizza crust. The DNA sample matched what police had found from hairs retrieved from one crime scene.
In Gone Girls, one of Heuermann’s former employees recalled that he was very knowledgeable about Long Island beach areas. Police discovered he had hundreds of firearms in his basement and seized his computer to see his Internet searches. A lot of them were related to the Gilgo beach murder investigation, the victims, and pornography focused on abusing women. In a major break, police recovered a deleted document from a hard drive in the Heuermann house that detailed best practices for torturing victims, lists of equipment required, and how to get rid of evidence. Heuermann has pleaded not guilty to all seven murder charges.
The biggest mystery to this day is why these women were murdered. Garbus did not come away from the documentary with any conclusive idea of what would drive alleged murderer Heuermann to prey upon sex workers, but notes sex workers are a very “vulnerable” population. “He went on dates with people who were working as escorts, and they were suspicious of him, but those women wouldn't go to the cops because they didn't want to be arrested.” Amanda Funderburg, sister of another victim Melissa Barthelemy, called Heuermann a “monster.” When asked what she would want to say to Heuermann if she could say something to him, “He’s not as smart as he thought he was.”
Other loved ones of victims are cautiously optimistic about the outcome. “When someone is found guilty, that’s when it will be like…we found Megan’s killer,” says Elizabeth Meserve, aunt of Megan Waterman, one of the women that Heuermann is charged with killing. “But I think nobody wants to get too hopeful, to be disappointed.”
While Gone Girls does examine the local politics that bogged down the case, Garbus also cites a larger societal stigma against sex workers. “When you start to learn about these families who lost their loved ones, hopefully it makes you question that as you look at these stories in the future,” Garbus says. She hopes that the film will create more empathy for not only the missing sex workers, but also any victims of crimes who are on the margins in society in terms of race and class. As she puts it, “I think what documentary and filmmaking in general does is it allows you to walk in other people's shoes. It brings you as close to them as you might ever get in your life. The more that we walk in other people's shoes, the more we can have empathy for them and be connected in a society.”
Gone Girls, the highly anticipated Netflix docuseries on the Gilgo Beach serial killer case, debuts on March 31 amid a pivotal moment in the case — and it’s not the first time for the director. Netflix’ long-planned release date for the first of the three-part series happens to fall shortly after the first day of a lengthy hearing in suspect Rex Heuermann’s case to determine if advanced DNA evidence can be used in his trial. Even more coincidentally, filmmaker Liz Garbus made her feature narrative debut in 2020 with Lost Girls, a film based on author Robert Kolker’s true crime book about the case — the trailer for which was released on the same day that Suffolk County police announced the first new details in the case in years at the time, before an arrest was made.
Police wouldn’t comment on the timing. Garbus could not be reached for comment on the second coincidence in her second Gilgo film, which is one of several documentaries on the case in the works. But she explained her vision in published reports. “In the course of the documentary, we got to examine what was going on in the police department and uncover a corruption scandal that made it clear why so little was being done for these women,” she told Tudum, the Netflix fan site. The docuseries explores that theme in an interview with a former Press editor who covered one of the victims’ disappearances before the bodies were found in December 2010.
Jaclyn Gallucci, a former managing editor for the Press who is now an assistant managing editor for The New York Times, covered the missing person case of Megan Waterman and how her family felt police and the media downplayed her case because she was a sex worker. The story published five months after the victim went missing and two months before she was found dead was titled “Lost Girls: When Women Go Missing on Long Island, Some Matter. Prostitutes Don’t. Where is Megan Waterman and Why Does No One Seem to Care?” Gallucci alludes to her coverage in the trailer for Gone Girls in which she was quoted as saying: “There’s very little coverage when a sex worker falls off the grid.” Pondering the growing magnitude of the case in which Heuermann pleaded not guilty to seven murders — up from the three he was originally charged with — Gallucci closes the trailer with the burning question: “How many more victims could there be?”
The gripping conclusion of Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer reveals a significant breakthrough in a mystery that has haunted New York for over a decade. The docuseries delivers a detailed account of how law enforcement finally zeroed in on Rex Heuermann, a local architect, and charged him with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, and Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Heuermann’s arrest constitutes a long-deferred initial step in delivering justice to the families of the “Gilgo Four,” the first victims whose remains were found along a stretch of Ocean Parkway in Suffolk County in 2010.
Meticulously piecing together stray strands of evidence, the Suffolk County Police Department and District Attorney’s Office, working with the FBI and New York State Police, collaborated in an extensive investigation that led to Heuermann's arrest. Initially, Heuermann’s Chevrolet Avalanche was matched to eyewitness descriptions of a car seen near the crime scenes. This led authorities to his residence in Massapequa Park and his office in Midtown Manhattan — locations corresponding to key activity zones identified through the investigations into the missing and murdered women.
The critical breakthrough, however, came when Heuermann was observed adding minutes to a burner phone, which aligned with the movements of burner phones used during the crimes. Further, Heuermann’s DNA, recovered from a discarded pizza crust, matched a single hair found on one of the victims, whose bodies had been bound in burlap, solidifying suspicions that he was connected to the murders. While Heuermann’s arrest marks a crucial milestone in the investigation, it is not the end of the story.
The identification of an accused serial killer has raised new questions and opened potential new lines of inquiry, culminating in the charging of Heuermann for three additional murders. Authorities are now scrutinizing unsolved cases spanning back years, examining whether they may be connected. With new victims possibly still to be linked to the serial killer, and a public hungry for justice, recent developments underscore that, although significant progress has been achieved, the investigation is very much ongoing.
Gone Girls director Liz Garbus reflects on the inherent dilemma of delivering a series on a live case: “After we completed and turned in our cuts to Netflix, there was another victim added to [Heuermann’s] docket. Will there be more between now and the time that we air? It’s possible. Will there be more between now and the time that we go to trial, if they go to trial? I’d bet yes.” A key factor in the drawn-out nature of the investigation, Garbus argues, are the allegations of corruption that dogged Suffolk County authorities initially in charge of the investigation, and may have hindered progress in the case for years.
“I think Suffolk County under police chief Jimmy Burke and DA Tom Spota was run like a crime syndicate. This is a cautionary tale about how to stop that kind of thing before these kinds of people get in positions of power,” Garbus says. Gone Girls explores how Burke and Spota compromised the integrity of the Gilgo Beach murder investigation. Burke, with numerous internal affairs complaints against him and a history of leveraging his position to protect himself from scrutiny over illicit activities, curtailed collaboration with other law enforcement agencies, obstructing the FBI’s involvement and halting crucial investigative steps. Meanwhile, Spota, who was later convicted of obstruction of justice, consistently shielded Burke, further entangling law enforcement in a web of corruption that prioritized self-preservation over justice.
As the case continues to unfold, Gone Girls serves as a powerful reminder of the resilience and determination of the victims’ families. “I think audiences should believe in the power of their voices when they see injustice,” Garbus says. “These family members were never going to give up. They knew there was a need to shake the establishment to get attention for this case.” For those following the case, the docuseries offers a comprehensive look at the investigation’s progress and the challenges that remain. Keep an eye out for updates and new developments.
