Rex Heuermann admitted he killed 8 women. What about Gilgo Beach’s other bodies?

Rex A. Heuermann, the Gilgo Beach serial killer, pleaded guilty in court to the murders of eight women. (James Carbone/Pool/Newsday via CNN Newsource)

The path to identifying Rex Heuermann as the Gilgo Beach serial killer began with Shannan Gilbert.

Gilbert, a 23-year-old sex worker, had gone missing in May 2010 after a visit to a client in Oak Beach, a Long Island, New York, community near Gilgo. Spurred by her mother, police began to search for her – and ultimately uncovered the remains of nearly a dozen people, mostly young female sex workers, along a stretch of Ocean Parkway.

Yet when Heuermann pleaded guilty to murdering eight women earlier this month, Gilbert was not among the victims.

In fact, Gilbert is one of at least four people whose remains were found along the parkway who have not been connected to Heuermann’s killing spree. Aside from Gilbert, the deaths of a mother-daughter pair have been tied to a different suspected killer in an ongoing murder case. Meanwhile, the remains of an Asian person found in 2011 have still not been identified.

“Gilgo Beach can be described as a dumping ground,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly said late last year in announcing an arrest in the mother-daughter killings. “There are a number of bodies that are not connected to the Gilgo Beach killer. It’s a wasteland out there. It’s probably a good place to drop a body.”

Heuermann, a 62-year-old architect, is expected to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole at a hearing June 17. He pleaded guilty to the murders of seven women – Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, Sandra Costilla – and admitted to killing an eighth, Karen Vergata. Costilla was the only victim whose remains were found elsewhere.

Here’s a closer look at the four other people found dead along Long Island’s Ocean Parkway in 2010 to 2011 and the status of their investigations.

Shannan Gilbert

Featured in the non-fiction book “Lost Girls,” and later in a Netflix film starring Amy Ryan, Gilbert may be the best known of the Gilgo Beach victims – even though officials have not connected her death to Heuermann.

In the early morning hours of May 1, 2010, Gilbert, a sex worker who advertised on Craisglist, was driven to a home in Oak Beach to meet a client, according to Suffolk County police. In the house, Gilbert called 911 and repeatedly said, “There is somebody after me,” according to audio released in 2022.

She fled the home and asked for help from multiple neighbours, who also called 911, and then went into a nearby marsh, according to police.

Her skeletonized remains were found in December 2011 in the marsh, partially entangled in overgrown shrubbery, the Suffolk County Office of the Medical Examiner wrote. Her cause and manner of death were listed as “undetermined.”

However, an independent autopsy performed by former New York chief medical examiner Michael Baden concluded there was “insufficient information to determine a definite cause of death, but the autopsy findings are consistent with homicidal strangulation.” He noted that part of her neck bone was missing from her remains – parts that may be fractured during a homicidal strangulation.

Suffolk County police cleared the driver and client of any criminal involvement and said they do not believe Gilbert was killed.

“Based on the evidence, the facts, and the totality of circumstances, the prevailing opinion in Shannan’s death, while tragic, was not a murder, and was most likely non-criminal,” former police commissioner Rodney Harrison said in 2022.

The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the Gilbert case.

‘Peaches’ and 2-year-old daughter

The killings of a woman and her young child, whose remains were found along Ocean Parkway, have been connected to a suspect living in Florida.

On June 28, 1997, the dismembered torso of a woman was found in a wooded area of a state park in West Hempstead on Long Island, according to the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office. The unidentified body had a distinctive tattoo of a peach, earning her the nickname “Peaches.”

Swabs of her remains detected the presence of semen, according to the district attorney’s office.

Then in April 2011, amid the search for bodies on Long Island, investigators found the remains of a toddler off Ocean Parkway in Gilgo Beach. Investigators also found additional remains of “Peaches” on the westbound side of the parkway in the Zachs Bay area. The child was determined to be her biological daughter, the office said.

The two remained unidentified for more than a decade, and they were not included in the charges against Heuermann.

In April 2025, with the help of genetic genealogy, Nassau County officials and the FBI announced their identities: Tanya Jackson, a 26-year-old US Army veteran, and her 2-year-old daughter, Tatiana Dykes.

Jackson, originally from Mobile, Alabama, served in the Army from 1993 to 1995. She and her daughter were living in Brooklyn and were estranged from their family at the time of their deaths, officials said.

Then in December, the child’s father, Andrew Dykes, 66, was arrested in Florida and charged with Jackson’s murder, according to the district attorney’s office.

“Tanya Jackson was not murdered by a serial killer, but allegedly by the man she loved, and the father of her child,” said Donnelly, the district attorney.

Dykes was a married father of two and member of the US Army when he began a relationship with Jackson in Texas, the office said. He fathered Tatiana and was listed on her birth certificate, the office said. Dykes was transferred to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn in 1995, and Jackson and Tatiana soon joined him there before they went missing, according to the office.

Dykes served in the Army from 1980 to 2001 as a military instructor specializing in anatomy and physiology, and then worked as a Florida state trooper, officials said.

After identifying Jackson and Tatiana, investigators surveilled Dykes in Tampa, Florida, and recovered a Charleys Cheesesteaks plastic cup and straw he had thrown in the trash, officials said. His DNA from that straw was connected to DNA from Jackson’s remains, officials said.

There was not enough evidence to go forward with a murder charge for the child’s death, Donnelly said, even though she believed he was responsible.

Dykes has pleaded not guilty to one count of second-degree murder. He faces up to 25 years in prison.

The case is “slowly proceeding” and remains in the discovery phase, defense attorney Joseph A. Lo Piccolo told CNN in an email. The next court hearing, a status conference, is set for Friday.

‘Asian Doe’

The skeletal remains of a person referred to as “Asian Doe” were found off Ocean Parkway in April 2011 and remain unidentified.

The victim was an Asian biological male who was found wearing women’s clothing, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said in 2024.

Tierney said the remains were found along the same stretch of parkway as serial killer victims Waterman and Taylor.

“Because the victim was wearing exclusively women’s clothing at the time of death, it is possible that they identified as a woman or were known by others as being a woman,” he said.

Investigators believe the victim died in 2006 or earlier from blunt force trauma, Tierney said. The victim was between the ages of 17 and 23, about 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and was wearing a blue, ribbed short-sleeve shirt, women’s pants and a bra, he said. Investigators believe the victim may have been working as a sex worker and spent some time in New York City before their death.

One challenge for investigators is Asian people are underrepresented in the genealogy database, Tierney said.

Speaking after Heuermann’s guilty plea this month, Tierney said investigators are still working to identify the victim.

“A huge step in moving that case forward would be to finally identify that individual,” he said.

When asked whether he believed the death was connected to Heuermann, he deflected.

“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said, “it matters what I can prove.”

By Eric Levenson, CNN