Welcome back to Kern Affairs, our show about the cases of love gone fatally wrong that are in the news right now.

If this is your first love murder episode, tune back in on Wednesdays for our main full-length episodes.

Rex Heuerman stood in a packed courtroom in Riverhead

Long Island on Wednesday, April 8th, and admitted to killing eight women over a 17-year-span.

The 62-year-old architect pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder and confessed to the killing of an

eighth victim he hadn't even been charged

with. For anyone who has followed the Gilgo Beach case, and at this point, that's most of the

true crime world, this is the moment families have waited more than a decade for. Quick background.

In December 2010, police searching for a missing 23-year-old woman named Shannon Gilbert

stumbled onto something far worse along a desolate stretch of Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach.

They found the remains of four women in the scrub brush wrapped in camouflage burlap within

half a mile of each other.

All four were petite.

All four had worked as escorts who advertised on Craigslist. They became known as the Gilgo Four, Melissa Barthelamy, Marine

Bernard Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello. Over the following months, more remains

turned up nearby. The body count climbed to at least 10 sets of human remains along that stretch of coastline.

And then the case went cold for over a decade.

It became one of those cases that haunted Long Island, spawned Robert Coker's acclaimed book

Lost Girls, a Netflix film, documentaries, tons of content, but zero arrests. Victims' families

were furious. They felt law enforcement hadn't taken the case seriously, in part because the

women were sex workers. That changed in 2022 when Suffolk County formed a new multi-agency task force.

Within weeks, investigators identified Hewerman as a suspect.

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