The now 62-year-old’s daughter was facing him when he admitted to the grisly murders.

A former architect has admitted to killing eight women and dumping their bodies — more than a decade after the discovery of human remains in a beachside suburb sent shock waves through New York City and the US.

Rex Heuermann, 62, changed his plea in Suffolk County Court on Wednesday in connection with seven murders over 17 years.

He also admitted he intentionally caused the death of an eighth woman, Karen Vergata, who disappeared in 1996.

As part of the plea deal, Heuermann will not be charged with Vergata’s murder.

In court, he admitted to meeting all eight women, strangling them and dumping their bodies in Long Island where they were found across Gilgo Beach, Manorville and Southampton.

Heuermann also agreed to co-operate with the FBI as a part of the plea agreement.

He is expected to be sentenced to life in prison without parole, three consecutive life sentences, followed by four sentences of 25 years to life. His sentencing is set for June 17.

Heuermann’s former wife, Asa Ellerup, and their daughter were seated in the last row of the packed courtroom during the roughly 30-minute hearing.

It came just five months before Heuermann was set to stand trial, facing a sentence of life in prison without parole if he was convicted.

After the hearing, Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney apologised to the families of the victims and commended the authorities who ultimately caught Heuermann.

“He thought that by killing them he could silence them forever and get away with murder,” Tierney said of Heuermann, who he said tried to present himself as the “harmless father next door”.

“But he was wrong.”

Outside court, Heuermann’s defence lawyer Michael Brown said his client’s decision to plead guilty was a “sense of relief for him”.

“When you have that type of … in your head, and on your body, I think by admitting it, it’s cathartic to some extent,” Brown said.

Brown said Heuermann, who had maintained his innocence since his arrest in 2023, will not provide details of how he committed the crimes at the sentencing hearing.

Asked whether his client has expressed remorse, Brown said Heuermann is likely to have something to say in court on June 17.

“He certainly wanted to save the families of the victims the ordeal of going to trial, coupled with saving his family from that,” Brown said, noting there were ongoing conversations between Heuermann and his family about avoiding a trial.

Ellerup and her lawyer briefly spoke outside the courthouse, offering condolences for the victims’ families and asking for privacy.

“My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families,” Ellerup said.

“Their loss is immeasurable and the focus should be on them at this time, in the moment.”

A ‘sense of relief’

Family members of the victims also spoke after the hearing.

Melissa Cann, whose sister Maureen Brainard-Barnes was among those murdered, said there is “finally a sense of relief”.

“Today is not about the person responsible. Today is about the women’s lives who were stolen, about their voices, their future, their families. They are the reason we are here,” Cann said.

Brainard-Barnes was “carried in every breath, every journey, every fight for answers,” she said.

Cann also spoke directly to other family members going through something similar: “Keep going. Your loved ones matter. They are not forgotten, and one day answers can come.”

In total, 11 sets of human remains, most of them sex workers, were found between 2010 and 2011 along a beachside parkway in Gilgo Beach, a small oceanfront neighborhood on Long Island’s southern shore.

Authorities do not believe all the killings are connected to one person.

Shannan Gilbert disappeared in May 2010, sparking the search that led to the recovery of the human remains.

Heuermann is not charged with her killing.

Before she vanished, Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker, placed a 911 call from the Oak Beach home of one of her clients and then knocked on the door of a neighbor — Gus Coletti — before she ran away down the street.

Coletti’s daughter, Eileen Coletti Edwards, was outside the courtroom on Wednesday and said she has been following the case since it began, adding it was “quite the feeling”.

“I wanted to support the families of the victims, for one thing,” Edwards, 64, said.

Heuermann — who lived in Massapequa Park, a middle-class suburb roughly an hour east of Manhattan — was initially charged in 2023 in the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Costello, 27.

The women disappeared in 2009 and 2010.

All three women were among the “Gilgo Four” — a group of sex workers whose bodies were found in Gilgo Beach in 2010.

The bodies had been bound at the head, midsection and legs with burlap.

In 2024, Heuermann was charged with killing Brainard-Barnes, 25, the fourth woman of the “Gilgo Four”.

He was later charged with killing three more women whose remains were found on the beach parkway: Jessica Taylor, 20, who disappeared in July 2003; Sandra Costilla, 28, whose remains were found in Southampton in 1993; and Valerie Mack, 24, who disappeared in 2000.

In court on Wednesday, Heuermann admitted strangling all seven women to death and dumping their bodies along Gilgo Beach.

He also admitted having used burner phones to contact them.

Heuermann said he bound Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello the same way — by wrapping them in burlap — adding he agreed to offer them money before they met up.

‘It’s not over’

John Ray, a lawyer for Valerie Mack’s son, previously told NBC News his client was “cautiously awaiting the facts” about the plea deal.

He added if a deal were struck, much would depend on the information presented during a potential allocution — a pre-sentencing statement by a defendant who has been found guilty.

“If the full facts do not come out, make no mistake, we are going to pursue this,” he said. “It’s not over.”

Gloria Allred, who is representing most of the families, previously declined to comment on Heuermann’s plea change.

The serial killings have long rocked Long Island, an expansive and densely populated suburb that stretches roughly 160km east of New York City from Queens to the Hamptons.

In the years immediately after the remains were discovered nearly two decades ago, authorities came up empty-handed for suspects.

Tierney reopened the cases in 2022, breathing new life into the investigation.

The same year, authorities zeroed in on a Chevrolet Avalanche registered to Heuermann and which was flagged in an old witness tip about Costello’s disappearance.

Authorities also used a trove of cellphone evidence to pinpoint the crimes to a suspect who lived in the neighborhood, where Heuermann lived with his wife and two adult children, and commuted to Manhattan.

They said they discovered burner phones which Heuermann used to contact victims pinged at cellphone towers in both locations. Heuermann discarded the burner phones after he killed the women, authorities said.

Officials also used DNA evidence from a discarded pizza crust found in a midtown Manhattan garbage can to build their case against Heuermann.

Heuermann was arrested in July 2023. Surveillance video showed Heuermann being surrounded by several law enforcement officials in dark suits on the streets of midtown Manhattan, where he worked, during evening rush hour.

“Rex Heuermann is a demon that walks among us, a predator that ruined families,” Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison said at the time.

Authorities say his then-wife, Ellerup, was always out of town on the nights of the killings.

The pair divorced after he was arrested.