The film-maker Liz Garbus was on vacation in July 2023 when she got the call that an arrest had finally been made in the case of the Long Island serial killer. Since 2010, when the bodies of four women were found along an isolated stretch of highway near Gilgo Beach, authorities had looked for a presumed serial killer with little progress and plenty of consternation. Garbus was one of the most prominent chroniclers of the grassroots effort to force authorities into action; her 2020 feature film Lost Girls, an adaptation of Robert Kolker’s book of the same name, depicted the fight by a group of working-class women to figure out what happened to their loved ones – all women who participated in sex work on Craigslist – with or largely without police help.
It was the star of that film, Amy Ryan, who alerted Garbus to the arrest of Rex Heuermann, a 60-year-old Massapequa-based architect who regularly commuted to midtown Manhattan. Ryan had played Mari Gilbert, the late mother of Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in the early hours of 1 May 2010 after meeting a client on Long Island. Mari Gilbert relentlessly pressured the police to remember her daughter, who they dismissed as a prostitute on the run; it took eight months for Long Island authorities to begin a comprehensive search for her, finding instead the bodies of the so-called “Gilgo Four” – Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello, who went missing between July 2007 and September 2010. By spring 2011, authorities identified the remains of 10 possible victims of the same perpetrator. It was long suspected, based on cellphone data, that the killer lived in central Long Island and commuted to the city. In truth, Heuermann was a fairly successful architect who consulted on numerous buildings in New York – including Ryan’s home.
