Rex Heuermann Pleaded Guilty to Protect Something. It Wasn't His Family.

Serial killers confess all the time. Pleading guilty is something else entirely.

In the summer of 2009, fifteen-year-old Amanda’s phone rang. She glanced down and saw her missing sister’s name on the screen. Melissa Barthelemy, 24, had vanished from the Bronx a week earlier. Amanda couldn’t wait to hear her sister’s voice.

Instead, a man spoke. His tone was flat, monotone. He had a Long Island accent. He knew Amanda’s name. He knew what she looked like.

He called seven times over the next several weeks, always from Melissa’s phone, always from crowded locations in Manhattan where he could not be traced. He told Amanda her sister was a prostitute. He told Amanda he had killed her. He told Amanda he had sex with her. In the final call, on August 26, 2009, he said he was watching her sister rot.

Those calls were not made to the police. They were not sent to the media. They were directed at a teenager, and their purpose was to make her suffer. Suffolk County law enforcement would later conclude that the caller’s behavior was indicative of a sadist.

This morning, sixteen years later, the man who made those calls stood in a dark suit in Suffolk County Court, hands shackled behind his back. Rex Heuermann, 62, pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder and acknowledged intentionally causing the death of an eighth victim, Karen Vergata. He admitted to meeting all eight women, strangling them, and dumping their bodies across Gilgo Beach, Manorville, and Southampton over 17 years.

Today is April 8, 2026. The hearing lasted about 30 minutes.

For nearly three years, Heuermann maintained his innocence. Stone-faced through every court appearance. Not guilty to every charge. And then, five months before trial, a reversal so complete that his own defense team offered no public explanation. When the judge asked if he felt it was in his best interest to plead guilty rather than go to trial, Heuermann replied: “Yes, your honor.”

The question is why. And the answer has everything to do with those phone calls.

Serial Killers Don’t Plead Guilty

Or at least they rarely do. Bureau of Justice Statistics data from the 75 largest U.S. counties shows that 88 percent of violent felons are convicted through guilty pleas. Murder is the dramatic exception: 41 percent of murder convictions come at trial rather than through a plea. Serial murder pushes that number even higher.

Some of this is practical. Serial murder cases carry the highest possible stakes, the death penalty or life without parole, and the sheer volume of evidence gives defense attorneys more to work with. But the deeper reasons are psychological. Serial killers have spent years, sometimes decades, successfully deceiving everyone around them. They are, by definition, people who got away with it for a long time. Surrender is antithetical to the self-concept that made the crimes possible in the first place.

Ted Bundy went to trial. So did John Wayne Gacy and Richard Ramirez. The default posture is denial, even when the evidence is crushing. Fighting the case is a continuation of the same dynamic that characterized the offending: I set the terms. I control the narrative. You don’t get to decide when this ends.

Every Guilty Plea Has a Price Tag

The guilty pleas that do happen are rarely acts of conscience. They are trades.

Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, was 74 years old and facing the death penalty when his attorneys went to prosecutors with a simple offer: he would plead guilty to 13 murders if they took execution off the table. Prosecutors said no. Then COVID hit, the witnesses aged out of safe courtroom attendance, and suddenly a guaranteed life sentence looked better than a trial that might never happen. Gary Ridgway made the same trade in the Green River case, pleading guilty to 48 murders to stay alive. In both cases, DNA or genetic genealogy had already made conviction a near-certainty. The plea wasn't a confession. It was a negotiated surrender. And the timing was no accident: the plea comes only after the evidence makes fighting pointless.

Heuermann was in the same position. Police had matched his DNA from a discarded pizza crust to a hair found on one of the victims. They had his burner phone records. They had connected him to the green Chevy Avalanche a witness saw the night one of the women disappeared. And they had found files on his computer that investigators described as a blueprint for the killings, complete with checklists: limit noise, clean the bodies, destroy evidence. His defense team had already tried and failed to get the DNA thrown out and to split the case into separate trials. He was going to be convicted. The only question was how much the jury and the public would see along the way.

Why the Insanity Defense Fails the Methodical Killer

A smaller subset of serial killers try not guilty by reason of insanity. It almost never works. Jeffrey Dahmer entered an NGRI plea; the jury rejected it on all counts. Albert Fish’s jury acknowledged he was likely insane but convicted him anyway. Edmund Kemper’s defense entered an NGRI plea because his detailed confession left nothing else to argue; three court-appointed psychiatrists found him legally sane.

Data from the Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database, which tracks over 5,700 serial killers worldwide, confirms how rare insanity pleas are in this population and how rarely they succeed. Only 5.4 percent of serial killers attempted an insanity defense. Of those who tried, fewer than one in five succeeded. Roughly one in every hundred serial killers in the database was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity.

The reason is baked into the definition of the crime. Planning, victim selection, evidence concealment, cooling-off periods between murders: these behaviors demonstrate exactly the kind of organized, goal-directed cognition that defeats an insanity claim. The methodical nature of serial murder is its own rebuttal. The better you were at hiding what you did, the harder it is to argue you didn’t know what you were doing.

The Killers Who Confess to Everything and Admit to Nothing

Many serial killers confess without ever entering a formal guilty plea. It's easy to confuse the two.

The Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database puts a number on it: two-thirds of serial killers with known data (66.6 percent) confessed. The popular image of the defiant, silent predator is the exception, not the rule. But confession and capitulation are not the same thing. Of those who confessed, 8 percent still attempted an insanity defense, fighting the charges in court after having already told police what they did. Another 73 confessed and then recanted entirely. Telling someone what you did is not the same as accepting the consequences.

Samuel Little confessed to 93 murders while already serving a life sentence, largely in exchange for a prison transfer and, it seemed, because he enjoyed talking about his crimes. The FBI confirmed at least 60 of his claims, making him the most prolific confirmed serial killer in American history. He sat calmly, sketched portraits of his victims from memory, and described each killing with the tone of someone reviewing old business transactions.

Edmund Kemper called the Santa Cruz police from a pay phone in Colorado to confess. They didn’t believe him. He had to call back repeatedly to convince officers who knew him from the local bar that he was serious.

Henry Lee Lucas confessed to approximately 600 murders, the vast majority of which were fabricated. An investigation by the Dallas Times-Herald showed it was physically impossible for Lucas to have committed many of the crimes he claimed. He was a serial confessor, not a serial killer on the scale he described.

Dennis Nilsen gave reportedly hundreds of hours of taped confessions in his own time, not under police questioning.

The motivations for confession vary enormously: ego, notoriety, a transient sense of relief, manipulation of the criminal justice system, simple exhaustion. A confession is an act of disclosure, voluntary and often expansive. A guilty plea is a legal instrument, controlled and minimal. Heuermann did the latter, not the former. He admitted the bare minimum required by the court. He did not explain, elaborate, or express remorse.

When the Audience Stops Believing

I did not expect Heuermann to plead guilty, certainly not as long as his family believed in his innocence. His family had stood behind him for nearly three years. His ex-wife, Asa Ellerup, maintained publicly that the man she was married to for 27 years was not capable of these crimes. His daughter, Victoria, attended court hearings alongside the family attorney. When there is still an audience that believes the performance, the performer has every reason to stay on stage.

But that audience was eroding.

In the Peacock documentary The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, released in June 2025, Victoria was visibly conflicted. She said she was “on the fence” about her father’s guilt. She acknowledged there were times during her childhood when she didn’t know where he was, including family vacations he skipped that coincided with murders he’s accused of committing. A week before the series aired, she told producers she now believed her father was most likely the Gilgo Beach killer.

Ellerup continued to insist on his innocence, but she had filed for divorce. The family home in Massapequa Park was being sold. The family was relocating to South Carolina. These are not the actions of people who believe an acquittal is coming.

Even Heuermann’s best friend, architect David Jimenez, visited him in jail and came away shaken. “I said, ‘Did you do it?’” Jimenez recounted in the documentary. “And then he teared up a little bit and started crying. And that’s when I get the feeling he did it.”

The evidence against him did not meaningfully change in the final months before the plea. The DNA was the same DNA. The checklists were the same checklists. The burner phone records were already in. What changed was the family. The evidentiary walls had been closing for years. The psychological wall fell last.

I am still not convinced that Heuermann would have pleaded guilty if his family refused to believe it. As long as Ellerup and Victoria showed up in court, sat with the attorney, took his calls from jail, maintained publicly that the man they knew couldn’t have done this, Heuermann still had a version of the double life operating. He was still, in some residual way, the father and husband who had been wrongly accused. The not-guilty plea was not just a legal position. It was the last surviving compartment of the identity he had built. The family’s belief was the wall of that compartment.

Once that wall came down, the not-guilty plea was protecting nothing. It was just prolonging exposure. If the family had held, he would have gone to trial. The evidence would have convicted him. And he would have sat through every day of it, stone-faced, because the performance would still have had its audience.

This dynamic shows up across serial killer cases. Dennis Rader’s family was blindsided by his arrest as BTK. His daughter Kerri publicly repudiated him. His guilty plea, like Heuermann’s, came after the evidence was incontestable and the family could no longer serve as a psychological anchor for denial. Gary Ridgway and Joseph James DeAngelo had no meaningful family investment in their innocence; their pleas were purely transactional, faster, and cleaner. The presence or absence of a believing family doesn’t change the legal calculus. It changes the psychological one. It was no accident that Victoria Heuermann sat down with Kerri Rawson to compare notes on what it means to be the daughter of a serial killer.

Not Narcissism. Sadism.

But, if Heuermann is a narcissist protecting his image, why wouldn’t a trial appeal to him? Serial killers with strong narcissistic features often relish their trials. Bundy represented himself and turned his defense into a performance. Kemper gave expansive, articulate interviews. David Berkowitz taunted police and media throughout his killing spree, though he ultimately pleaded guilty against the advice of his own attorneys. A trial is the biggest stage an offender will ever have.

Heuermann didn’t want a stage. Go back to the phone calls to Amanda Barthelemy. Those calls weren’t directed at law enforcement or the media. He wasn’t seeking credit. He wasn’t taunting the investigators. He was calling a 15-year-old girl and making her listen to what he had done to her sister. The calls were an extension of the crime itself. He was still feeding, just on a different person’s suffering.

A narcissist wants to be seen. A sadist wants to see you suffer, and he wants to be close enough to feel it. These are entirely different appetites, and they produce different relationships to public exposure.

A trial is a public spectacle, but it is not an intimate one. The courtroom is structured to prevent direct contact between the offender and the people he has hurt. The victims’ families sit in the gallery. The defendant sits at the defense table. Lawyers argue about DNA evidence and the chain of custody. For an offender whose gratification comes from the private, up-close experience of inflicting pain, a trial offers nothing. It is exposure without access. For a sadist, that combination has no value.

What a Sadist Protects

If the core drive is sadistic rather than narcissistic, the guilty plea is not about controlling the narrative. It is about containment.

The checklists on Heuermann’s computer were not trophies. They were operational documents. Limit noise. Clean the bodies. Destroy evidence. These reflect someone who treated murder as a private craft, something to be perfected and protected. Having those documents read aloud in court, analyzed by forensic experts, projected on screens for a jury and a gallery full of cameras, would not just be humiliating. For a sadist, it would be a violation of the most private thing he possesses: his interior life. The fantasy, the method, the experience. That is the territory he guards most fiercely, because that is where the power comes from.

A 30-minute guilty plea lets him keep that box sealed. No cross-examination. No crime scene photographs displayed for a jury. No expert testimony walking through what each victim experienced. He said the minimum the law required: Yes, I met them. Yes, I strangled them. Yes, I left their bodies where they were found. And then he sat down.

The Jesperson correspondence supports this reading. When the Happy Face Killer wrote to Heuermann from Oregon, Heuermann responded warmly, thanking him for his “letters and advice” and calling them “a help and comfort.” He complained about jail food and exercise conditions. He worried that guards were reading his mail. He did not posture, perform, or try to impress a fellow killer. He talked about bread and butter and walking in circles in the yard.

That is not a man looking for a spotlight. That is a man looking for comfort in captivity. The real interior, the part that drove 17 years of murder, is not something he shares. It is something he takes. And by pleading guilty, he has ensured that no prosecutor, expert witness, or jury will ever get close to it.

Thirty Minutes, Eight Murders, No Answers

The public tends to read a guilty plea as an admission, a capitulation, maybe even a flicker of conscience. In Heuermann’s case, it is none of those things. It is the final act of a man who spent nearly two decades controlling every detail of his crimes: the timing (when his family was out of town), the method (strangling), the disposal (remote stretches of beach and parkland), the digital trail (burner phones, obsessive internet searches about his own case). The guilty plea is one more act of control. It determines what gets said, how much gets revealed, and when the public record closes.

The victims’ families understand this. Sandra Costilla. Melissa Barthelemy. Megan Waterman. Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Amber Lynn Costello. Jessica Taylor. Valerie Mack. Karen Vergata. Eight women, most of them young, all of them in vulnerable circumstances, all of them chosen by a man who believed they wouldn’t be missed. With no trial, their families will not get the answers they have waited years for. They will not hear what their daughters and sisters experienced. They will not see the evidence laid out in a way that honors the scope of what was done to them. The plea forecloses all of that. It gives Heuermann his sentence and gives the families their verdict, but it withholds the thing a trial would have provided: a full accounting.

Rex Heuermann will spend the rest of his life in prison. He will receive three consecutive life sentences without parole, followed by four sentences of 25 years to life. His sentencing is set for June 17. He has waived his right to appeal.

And the box stays shut.

References

Aamodt, M. G., Leary, T., & Girimurugan, S. (2023). Radford/FGCU annual report on serial killer statistics: 2023. Radford University. https://www.fgcu.edu/skdb/

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2006). Violent felons in large urban counties (NCJ 205289). U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vfluc.pdf

Dietz, P. E., Hazelwood, R. R., & Warren, J. (1990). The sexually sadistic criminal and his offenses. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 18(2), 163–178.

Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D., is a forensic psychologist, licensed private investigator, and the author of Serial Killers: 101 Questions True Crime Fans Ask. She writes about the psychology of crime at The Mind Detective on Substack.