Inside the decades-long hunt for a Long Island serial killer

How one woman's disappearance sparked a decade-long hunt for a Gilgo Beach serial killerBy Brianna Morris-Grant Link copiedShareShare articleWhen you're standing on it, the long expanse of Ocean Parkway in Long Island's Gilgo Beach looks like a vast stretch of nothing. Just off the roadway, the gentle slope falls away into a tangle of thick shrubbery, weeds and marshland. The water is calm, the area quiet enough to hear any incoming cars with plenty of time to hide. It was — for at least one killer — the perfect place to leave a body. A New York architect was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences plus 100 years after pleading guilty to the murders of at least eight women in Long Island's Gilgo Beach. In total 11 human remains were found on or around that Gilgo Beach stretch of Ocean Parkway: nine female, one male, and one child, all found in the span of just a few months in 2011. One man, New York City architect Rex Heuermann, has now claimed responsibility for seven of them. Heuermann is an imposing figure, more than six-foot tall and towering over the officers tasked with escorting him in and out of court for the last three years. Along with pleading guilty to those seven murders, Heuermann admitted to an eighth, a woman whose body was found in nearby Southampton in 1993. In late 2025 another man was arrested for the murder of one of the women found, 26-year-old Tanya Jackson. He was also charged with the murder of the child, two-year-old Tatiana Dykes, identified as his and Ms Jackson's daughter by police. That leaves one set of remains unidentified. It also leaves one last victim, the woman whose disappearance kicked off a chain of events leading to the discovery of a serial killer. Shannan Gilbert disappeared in May 2010. Shannan Gilbert was 23 years old when she disappeared on May 1, 2010. Growing up, she had been the oldest of four daughters to her mother, Mari, and was frequently in and out of foster care. Mari Gilbert, mother of Shannan Gilbert. (Getty Images: Barcelo Stephen/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service) After graduating high school, she had started nursing classes and worked at a hotel, at a restaurant, at a senior centre and as a secretary. But by 2007 she had moved to New York City and was working as an escort, later advertising herself on classifieds website Craigslist. Online she could charge hundreds of dollars an hour for sex work, splitting the fee with a driver. Her driver, a man named Michael Pak, on that warm May night dropped her off at a home in the gated community of Oak Beach just after 1am. Just before 5am, the client tapped on the car window, and told him Shannan wouldn't leave the house. Inside, Pak said he found Shannan upset and scared. "You guys are trying to kill me," she told him, according to his story in a 2013 book about the killings in Gilgo Beach. There was an altercation — Shannan still refused to leave, crawling away from the two men through the living room, and finally sprinted out into the dark. Two neighbours called the police after Shannan pounded on their doors, screaming for help. By the time they arrived 45 minutes later, Shannan was gone. Seven months later, a police officer and his dog pulled over to the side of the road on Ocean Parkway. Suffolk County Police Officer John Mallia had been asked to help in the search for Shannan by the department's missing persons unit. Gilgo Beach is one of three beaches facing out onto the Atlantic Ocean in Long Island's Babylon. (Reuters: Shannon Stapleton) He and his German shepherd Blue had searched up and down Oak Beach, then fanned out over Ocean Parkway. "I assumed we would find her," he told the New York Times in 2011. Shortly before 3pm on December 11, 2010, Blue uncovered the first set of human remains inside a hessian sack about 15 metres from the road. Two days later police found three more bodies, each about 150 metres apart from one another and each the same distance from the roadside. None of these four bodies, later dubbed the "Gilgo Four", were Shannan. Police released images of the "Gilgo Four" after they were identified. (Reuters/Suffolk County Police Department) It would be another month before police acknowledged they were looking for a serial killer. In March, 2011, more human remains were found along Ocean Parkway, linked to a woman whose torso had been found in 2003. In April, 2011 the remains of an unidentified Asian male and the then-unidentified child were found. The bones of the child's mother were found near the Jones Beach water tower a week later. A skull found that same day was linked to an unidentified woman whose body was found on nearby Fire Island in 1996. Despite the books, documentaries, podcasts and news reporting being released in the interim, it would be more than a decade before police honed in on Rex Heuermann. In March 2022, a renewed investigation linked a Chevrolet Avalanche once registered to Heuermann to the disappea

Inside the decades-long hunt for a Long Island serial killer

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Inside the decades-long hunt for a Long Island serial killer

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