Rex Heuermann said it himself. In a packed courtroom, he admitted to strangling eight women over seventeen years. He confirmed the murders. He confirmed the dismemberment. He showed no emotion. And Asa Ellerup was sitting in the back of the room while he did it.

For years, she said she did not believe it. She called him her savior. She dismissed the planning document. She described the hair evidence — her own hair, found on multiple victims — as circumstantial. She said she would need to hear it from him directly.

She heard it. Now a wrongful death lawsuit is asking whether she should have heard it decades earlier.

The son of Valerie Mack — who was six years old when his mother disappeared and was allegedly murdered by Heuermann in 2000 — has filed suit against Heuermann, Ellerup, and their daughter Victoria. The complaint alleges they either knew, concealed the truth, or deliberately looked away. It also goes after the money: a reported million-dollar payment from a Peacock documentary about the case.

Ellerup’s attorney says she had no knowledge and no involvement. Prosecutors have confirmed she was away each time a murder occurred. But the civil question is different from the criminal one. A jury will not need proof beyond reasonable doubt. They will weigh whether a woman who shared roughly 1,300 square feet with a man who killed eight people — a home with a secured basement room behind a metal door — could have lived there for nearly three decades and genuinely missed everything. Defense attorney and former prosecutor Eric Faddis examines which side has the stronger argument and what tips the balance.

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Rex Heuermann admitted to killing Valerie Mack in open court. He pleaded guilty to murdering seven women along the Gilgo Beach corridor and confessed to killing an eighth. For the families of the victims, the guilty plea brought a measure of closure that decades of investigation could not. But for Benjamin Torres — Valerie Mack’s son, who was six years old when she disappeared — the guilty plea became the foundation for a new legal fight.

Torres has filed a civil lawsuit in Suffolk County Supreme Court naming Heuermann, his ex-wife Asa Ellerup, and their daughter Victoria Heuermann. The complaint alleges the two women knew of or deliberately avoided learning about the murders, had access to a secured vault-like room in the basement of the Massapequa Park home, and collected over a million dollars through documentary and media agreements with Peacock. It accuses them of unjust enrichment, civil conspiracy, and concealment — among other causes of action.

The defense position is straightforward and aggressive. Ellerup’s attorney has called the filing reckless and unsupported by any evidence. He’s pointed to the fact that prosecutors themselves have said the family was away during the killings, that Victoria was approximately three years old when Mack was killed, and that law enforcement never charged either woman after an exhaustive investigation. The statute of limitations for wrongful death in New York is generally two years — and Mack was killed over two decades before this suit was filed.

I go deep into the specific allegations, the legal defenses available, how the hair evidence is being interpreted by both sides, and where this case is likely headed. Whether this lawsuit survives its first legal challenge could determine whether other victims’ families follow with filings of their own.

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They packed the courtroom — the mothers, the sisters, the partners, the friends who spent years wondering and waiting and hoping that someone would be held accountable for the women they lost. Some had been waiting since the 2000s. Some since 2010, when the first four sets of remains were found wrapped in burlap along an isolated stretch of Ocean Parkway. And on April 8, in a hearing that lasted roughly thirty minutes, Rex Heuermann gave them the one thing he'd refused to give for nearly three years — the truth.

Sandra Costilla. Valerie Mack. Jessica Taylor. Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Melissa Barthelemy. Megan Waterman. Amber Costello. Karen Vergata. Eight women. Eight lives ended by the same man over seventeen years. He described how he met them. How he strangled them. How he disposed of their remains across Long Island.

Elizabeth Baczkiel, the mother of Jessica Taylor, said the plea took a weight off her family. Missy Cann, whose sister Maureen Brainard-Barnes was killed, said it brought solace after nineteen years of living between heartbreak and hope. The families were given a choice — accept the plea or push for trial. They chose the admission. They chose finality over the uncertainty of a courtroom proceeding.

But finality comes with trade-offs. There will be no trial where every piece of evidence is laid out. No public cross-examination. No moment where a jury decides whether the prosecution's case held. The plea sealed the record on what happened in that proffer session. It protected Heuermann from further prosecution on any named victim. And it left the families of women who haven't been identified yet with the same unanswered questions they've carried for years. Heuermann's attorney says there are no other victims. The investigation hasn't stopped. And the question of whether eight is the real number belongs to the families who are still waiting.

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Benjamin Torres never got to grow up with his mother. Valerie Mack disappeared when he was six years old. Her partial remains — dismembered, decapitated, hands severed — were found in Manorville that same year. Nobody knew who she was. For twenty years, she was listed as an unidentified woman. Torres spent his entire childhood, his adolescence, and most of his adult life without knowing what happened to her, without anyone being held accountable, and without a single person in the system telling him his mother's name had been attached to the remains found in those woods.

Rex Heuermann has now pleaded guilty to killing her. That admission gives Torres something he never had — confirmation. But it doesn't give him everything. And that's why he filed a lawsuit that goes beyond the man who strangled his mother.

The complaint names Asa Ellerup and Victoria Heuermann. It accuses them of knowing about the murders, of concealing what was happening inside the home, and of collecting over a million dollars from a documentary about the killings while showing what the lawsuit calls callous disregard for the families left behind. The defense calls it baseless. They say the family cooperated with law enforcement from the beginning. They say Victoria was approximately three years old when Mack was killed. They say prosecutors have never pointed the finger at either woman.

Those are facts worth weighing. But so is the fact that a six-year-old boy lost his mother to a man who dismembered her body and hid the pieces across Long Island — and the people closest to that man collected a documentary payday while the victims' families were still burying what was left. Torres wants accountability beyond the guilty plea. Whether the court gives him that is a question the legal system will answer. But the question of who profited and who suffered is one the public is already asking.

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Sandra Costilla was 28 years old when her body was found in the woods of Southampton, Long Island, in 1993. For three decades, nobody connected her death to the Gilgo Beach case. Investigators looked at the wrong suspect for years. Meanwhile, according to prosecutors, the man whose DNA was allegedly on her body was living undisturbed — building a career, raising a family, and allegedly killing other women for nearly two more decades after Sandra was gone.

Rex Heuermann pled guilty to her murder. He pled guilty to murdering six other women. He admitted to killing an eighth victim — Karen Vergata. Life without parole. No trial. After nearly three years of fighting every piece of evidence, challenging the DNA, filing motion after motion, and losing each one — he stood in Suffolk County Court and admitted to all of it.

Sandra's case changed everything about the timeline. Before prosecutors linked her to Heuermann, the Gilgo Beach killings were understood to have begun in 2007. Sandra pushes it back by 14 years. The DNA evidence that connected Heuermann to her was matched through technology that didn't exist during her lifetime. The defense tried to get it thrown out. The judge ruled it admissible. That ruling may have been the moment the defense knew there was nowhere left to go.

Retired FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer examines what the plea means for the families — what it provides, what it takes away, and what remains unresolved along the Gilgo Beach corridor where additional remains were found beyond the victims Heuermann was charged with killing. Heuermann has agreed to cooperate with the FBI going forward. But cooperation doesn't answer every question. It doesn't replace the trial these families were preparing to sit through. And it doesn't give Sandra Costilla back the three decades she spent as an unconnected case file while the man who allegedly killed her lived freely on the same island where her body was found.

This is Episode 1 of "The Seven." One victim per episode. Their story first. The evidence second. Sandra waited the longest. Her name goes first.

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She called him her savior. He stood in a Suffolk County courtroom and admitted to murdering seven women. He admitted to killing an eighth. Rex Heuermann pled guilty. Life without parole. No trial. No testimony. Just an admission — and a family left to reckon with what was real and what was never what it appeared to be.

Asa Ellerup maintained she would have known. Their daughter Victoria sat in that courtroom and watched her father enter the plea. Victoria has publicly said she believes he most likely committed the killings. Asa stood outside afterward, asked for privacy, and expressed sympathy for the victims' families. Her attorney said she never claimed Rex wasn't guilty — she said the man she was married to for 27 years, the father of her daughter, she did not believe was capable of these acts. A mother and daughter. Same evidence. Same nightmare. Opposite conclusions.

Prosecutors allege Heuermann engineered his crimes around his family's schedule — acting when Asa and the children were away. Investigators found violent content and checklists on his devices. A deleted planning document recovered from his hard drive allegedly detailed the methodology. A basement vault held 279 weapons. Asa's own hair was reportedly found on victims. For nearly three decades, she reportedly saw nothing. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott breaks down the psychology of "not knowing" — how the mind builds walls that allow a person to live beside evidence they cannot process, and what a guilty plea does to the architecture that sustained decades of reported unawareness.

Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta examines why the plea happened. Every defense motion failed. Whole genome sequencing was admitted for the first time in a New York courtroom. The sentence was the same either way. Motta walks through what Heuermann gained — including cooperation with the FBI — and what the families of Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Amber Costello, Sandra Costilla, Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor, Megan Waterman, and Karen Vergata lost when a plea replaced the trial that would have put every piece of evidence on the public record. For every person who followed this case from the discovery of the first remains to the plea hearing, this is the reckoning — legal, psychological, and human — that closes one chapter and leaves the hardest questions unanswered.

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Rex Heuermann pled guilty. After nearly three years of maintaining his innocence, the accused Gilgo Beach Killer admitted in court to murdering seven women and killing an eighth — Karen Vergata. Life without parole. No trial.

For the families who waited over a decade for answers — some who waited more than two decades — a guilty plea provides certainty. It provides a sentence. But it also takes something away. There is no cross-examination. No testimony laid bare in open court. No moment where the prosecution walks a jury through every piece of evidence while the families watch. Eric Faddis — defense attorney and former felony prosecutor — walks through what a plea provides and what it costs with the honesty these families deserve.

We also break down the evidence that reportedly left Heuermann no path to acquittal. Prosecutors recovered a deleted planning document from his hard drive — allegedly a blueprint for the killings. Whole genome sequencing matched his DNA to hairs found on and near victims, admitted in a New York courtroom for the first time. The foundational connection started with a pizza crust collected during surveillance. Over 350 electronic devices were seized. Faddis explains what happens when a prosecutor holds both a planning document and DNA linkage across multiple crime scenes, why the defense challenged the science but not the document, and what the Frye hearing looked like from the inside. He identifies the single piece of evidence he believes sealed the outcome — and his answer goes to intent, not just forensic presence. For every person who has followed this case from the beginning, this is the legal and evidentiary reckoning that explains how it ended.

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Rex Heuermann got hustled on September 1, 2010 — and it may be the reason he's in prison. Amber Costello's roommate Dave Schaller ran a scam on a client at their West Babylon house. The client — described by Schaller as massive, an "ogre" — left, got into a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche, and sent a text: "That was not nice, so do I get credit for next time." The next night, the same burner phone contacted Amber. She walked out to meet the man. Schaller saw the truck again. Amber never came back.

Episode 7 of "The Seven" — the final installment. That Avalanche description sat in the case file until 2022, when the Gilgo Beach task force ran it through vehicle registration records. The name that came back: Rex Heuermann, architect, Massapequa Park. From there — surveillance, the pizza crust, the DNA match, the warrants, the house searches, the planning document, the arrest.

Cell tower data tracked the burner phone from Massapequa Park to West Babylon on both nights. Amber was 27, four feet eleven, battling addiction. Her sister said she forgives Heuermann. The evidence trail that started with a roommate's description of a truck and ended with an arrest — all covered here. The last known victim became the case that broke everything open.

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