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 in April to murdering eight women, Gilbert was not among the victims. At his sentencing Wednesday, the families of those eight victims were present and many spoke to the court – but Gilbert’s family did not.
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.”
