Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann will face a single trial for all seven alleged killings, a judge in Long Island, New York, ruled on Tuesday.
Heuermann’s trial, which had originally been scheduled for August, was delayed after he was charged with two new alleged killings in the case – and after his defense lawyers’ decision to again challenge the admissibility of advanced nuclear DNA evidence.
In Tuesday’s ruling, state supreme court justice Timothy Mazzei told attorneys that the cases would not be split into multiple trials – and he ruled against a second defense challenge seeking to exclude molecular DNA evidence.
Mazzei set a 13 January 2026 deadline for additional pretrial motions in the case. Heuermann was initially charged in 2023 with the killings of Melissa Barthelemy, who was last seen alive in 2009, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, last seen alive in 2010.
He was subsequently charged in the killings of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Sandra Costilla, Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack.
The remains of Heuermann’s alleged victims were ultimately found on beaches and woodlands along Long Island’s south shore. He has pleaded not guilty.
Heuermann’s defense team argued in January that a “substantial disparity” exists between the evidence in the first indictment and the superseding indictments that allege killings spanning across nearly 17 years and different locations where the victims were found.
“A trial encompassing all 10 counts would unjustifiably create a strong risk that the jury will be unable to segregate the evidence by its separate and distinct relevance to each individual incident,” defense attorney Sabato Caponi argued.
But prosecutors arguing for Heuermann, 62, to be tried at once in connection with all the killings of which he is suspected pointed to his familiarity with the sites where he allegedly dumped six remains. They said there was an “overlapping aspect of the defendant’s modus operandi” because he once worked as a former seasonal employee at Jones Beach, a popular summer spot for Long Islanders and other New Yorkers.
Prosecutors maintained that Heuermann’s work at the beach in the early 1980s – including making sure beachgoers were off the property once the beach was closed – “made the defendant extremely familiar” with the area at night.
Heuermann was arrested in the long-dormant case in Manhattan in July 2023, 13 years after the remains of a woman whom he allegedly victimized were first discovered near Gilgo Beach in December 2010. Three more sets of remains were soon found, giving rise to the term “the Gilgo Four” as well as the suspicion that they were all victims of one killer.
Other sets of remains were also found later, including some that had been dismembered and were discovered nearly 50 miles away in the vicinity of Manorville, where Heuermann was a member of a shooting club.
He is awaiting trial in the custody of the Riverhead correctional facility in Suffolk county.
