Decade-long mystery: How one woman's vanishing exposed Long Island's serial killer

Eleven people were murdered or died under suspicious circumstances, including a two-year-old child. Shannan Gilbert's mother was fatally stabbed 200+ times by her own daughter in 2016.

Along a stretch of Long Island marshland, the disappearance of one young woman in 2010 set in motion an investigation that would take more than a decade to resolve, ultimately revealing a New York City architect as the perpetrator of at least eight murders spanning nearly two decades. Rex Heuermann's April 2026 guilty plea closed most of the case's open chapters, but not all — one victim remains unidentified, one death remains officially unexplained, and the machinery of grief that the case set in motion claimed lives of its own. It is a story about what hides in plain sight, and the long, une

Decade-long mystery: How one woman's vanishing exposed Long Island's serial killer

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