As Rex Heuermann, an architect charged with murdering several sex workers around Gilgo Beach on Long Island, awaits a trial, a new docu-series about the case is coming out on Netflix on Mar. 31.
The three-part series, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, directed by Liz Garbus, features friends and family members of the victims and law enforcement authorities who have been working on the case since Shannan Gilbert, a sex worker, first went missing in 2010. 
Garbus had interviewed some of the victims’ loved ones for Lost Girls, a 2020 feature film inspired by the case starring Amy Ryan and Lola Kirke and based on journalist Robert Kolker’s book Lost Girls: The Unsolved American Mystery of the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer Murders.
“We were hoping it would [put] more public pressure on getting justice for these families,” Garbus tells TIME.
When Heuermann was arrested in 2023 and charged with murdering seven women, she got back in touch with some of the families and started work on a docu-series.
Here’s how Gone Girls details the milestones that led to the 2023 arrest.
How the suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer got arrested
When Suffolk County got a new police commissioner, Rodney Harrison, in 2021, he created a Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force in 2022, consisting of federal, NY state, and local law enforcement officials. They worked on digitizing the evidence to make searching easier.
Authorities were on the lookout for someone who could be over six-feet-four-inches tall and drove a Chevy Avalanche. They knew that the women who had gone missing had all received calls from a burner phone, and authorities figured out that the burner phone belonged to someone who commuted from Massapequa Park on Long Island to New York City.
The first meeting of the task force was Feb. 1, 2022, and about six weeks later, on March 14, 2022, the task force started tracking Heuermann, a husband and father of two who worked at an architecture firm in Manhattan. They saw that wherever Heuermann went, so did the burner phone. Authorities saw him pay to add minutes to a burner phone and found anonymous email accounts that he was using to contact escorts. To get his DNA sample, authorities retrieved a pizza box that he discarded and took his leftover pizza crust. The DNA sample matched what police had found from hairs retrieved from one crime scene.
In Gone Girls, one of Heuermann’s former employees recalled that he was very knowledgeable about Long Island beach areas. Police discovered he had hundreds of firearms in his basement and seized his computer to see his Internet searches. A lot of them were related to the Gilgo beach murder investigation, the victims, and pornography focused on abusing women.
In a major break, police recovered a deleted document from a hard drive in the Heuermann house that detailed best practices for torturing victims, lists of equipment required, and how to get rid of evidence.
Heuermann has pleaded not guilty to all seven murder charges.
The biggest mystery to this day is why these women were murdered. Garbus did not come away from the documentary with any conclusive idea of what would drive alleged murderer Heuermann to prey upon sex workers, but notes sex workers are a very “vulnerable” population. “He went on dates with people who were working as escorts, and they were suspicious of him, but those women wouldn’t go to the cops because they didn’t want to be arrested.”
Amanda Funderburg, sister of another victim Melissa Barthelemy, called Heuermann a “monster.” When asked what she would want to say to Heuermann if she could say something to him, “He’s not as smart as he thought he was.”
Other loved ones of victims are cautiously optimistic about the outcome. “When someone is found guilty, that’s when it will be like…we found Megan’s killer,” says Elizabeth Meserve, aunt of Megan Waterman, one of the women that Heuermann is charged with killing. “But I think nobody wants to get too hopeful, to be disappointed.”
Why it took so long to solve the murders
While Gone Girls does examine the local politics that bogged down the case, Garbus also cites a larger societal stigma against sex workers.
“When you start to learn about these families who lost their loved ones, hopefully it makes you question that as you look at these stories in the future,” Garbus says.
She hopes that the film will create more empathy for not only the missing sex workers, but also any victims of crimes who are on the margins in society in terms of race and class.
As she puts it, “I think what documentary and filmmaking in general does is it allows you to walk in other people’s shoes. It brings you as close to them as you might ever get in your life. The more that we walk in other people’s shoes, the more we can have empathy for them and be connected in a society.”
