Man pleads guilty over Gilgo Beach killings

A man accused of murdering and dismembering seven women and scattering their remains around an elite US coastal community has changed his plea to guilty.

Rex Heuermann, 62, pleaded guilty in Suffolk County court to kidnapping, torturing and killing seven women across Long Island between 1993 and 2010 and now faces a life sentence if the judge approves his plea.

The architect, who was first arrested in July 2023 outside his Manhattan office, had initially pleaded not guilty, raising the prospect of a lengthy trial for the families of his victims.

The remains of 11 murder victims - nine women, one man and a young girl - were found in 2010 and 2011 in the scrub along the parkway near Gilgo Beach, an Atlantic Ocean barrier beach on Long Island's south shore.

The Gilgo Beach case had stumped investigators for years, with the bodies of the victims, most of them female sex workers, found along the same isolated stretch of beach but no suspects identified.

But in 2022, investigators narrowed their focus onto Heuermann, after he was discovered to be the registered owner of a vehicle one of the victims had been spotted in.

Since then, the case against Heuermann - a married father-of-two at the time of the killings - has been based on DNA evidence from a discarded pizza box, and mobile phone data linking him to the victims.

Some of that evidence was found in his family home in Massapequa Park.

Heuermann also performed hundreds of internet searches about the investigation into the murders, asking questions such as: "Why hasn't the Long Island serial killer been caught?"