A sadistic serial killer yesterday pleaded guilty in New York to killing a Sangre Grande woman and seven others from in and around the American city.
Rex Heuermann, a hulking, six-foot, four-inch-tall Manhattan architect, husband and father of two, lived a double life as a torturer and killer of women for three decades before he was arrested in 2023.
Sandra Costilla, previously Sandra Rajkumar, was 28 when she was tortured and killed by Heuermann. Her body was discovered by two hunters in the North Sea area of Long Island, NY on November 20, 1993. She is believed to be his earliest victim.
Sixty-two years old now, Heuermann would have been 29 when he murdered her.
Heuermann was scheduled for trial this September. He had pleaded not guilty to the murders of seven women—Costilla, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack.
But in a dramatic turn of events in the Suffolk County court yesterday, he changed his plea to guilty and also admitted to killing an eighth woman, Karen Vergata.
He pleaded guilty to first degree murder of three victims and second degree murder of four others, including Costilla.
Reporters who were in the courtroom say Heuermann spoke matter-of-factly about killing the women, confirming he dismembered some of them and bound others by their head and legs.
Costilla migrated to the United States when she was 17 years old. She was living in Queens at the time of her death.
flashback: Sandra Costilla, nee Rajkumar, in Trinidad in the early 1980s before she migrated to the US.
She was found “lying on her back with her arms outstretched over her head with her uncovered legs spread apart,” according to an indictment filed on June 6, 2024 by Suffolk Country District Attorney Raymond Tierney.
“The victim’s shirt had been pulled up over her torso and head, exposing the victim’s breasts. The victim had numerous sharp force injuries to, inter alia, her face, torso, breasts, left thigh, and vaginal area. Ms Costilla was a native of Trinidad and Tobago but had been living in New York prior to her disappearance and murder,” said the indictment.
Heuermann yesterday disclosed that he had strangled her to death, the same way he killed all his victims.
He is scheduled to be sentenced on June 17.
DNA evidence
The court filing on Costilla revealed that during the course of the 1993 investigation into her death, her body was examined by a forensic scientist from the Suffolk County Crime Lab (SCCL) who recovered three hairs.
One hair was found on her right arm, one from a tape-lift of a striped shirt above her head and a third from a tape-lift of a white shirt above her head.
DNA tests on those three hair strands proved that one belonged to a male and the other two to females.
Three decades later, the Gilgo Beach Homicide Task Force sent those hair strands for further testing.
In February 2024, those laboratory tests concluded that the male hair, the one recovered from Costilla’s striped shirt, matched Heuermann’s DNA.
One of the two female hairs was forensically identified as belonging to a woman who lived with Heuermann shortly before Costilla was murdered. The District Attorney stated in his court filing that the DNA evidence showed that “Rex A Heuermann mutilated, murdered, and transported the body of Sandra Costilla…”
STABBED REPEATEDLY: Sandra Costilla
Killing document
Like all Heuermann’s known victims, Costilla was a petite woman. On one of the 422 electronic devices seized from Heuermann’s home, police found what they described as his “planning document”.
One item in his plan read “SMALL IS GOOD”.
Another reads “HIT HARDER TOO MANY HIT TO TAKE DOWN. CONSIDER A HIT TO THE FACE OR NECK NEXT TIME FOR TAKE DOWN.”
On those digital devices police also found what they described as Heuermann’s “significant collection of violent, bondage, torture and child pornography, dating back to 1994. The pornographic images accessed by Heuermann include, but are not limited to, breast mutilation, vaginal torture, sex substitution (ie, penetration with an object), the sexualisation of decapitated women, bondage, and whipping”.
Police say those images largely coincide with how the remains of Costilla and two other victims were discovered.
While the bodies of some victims were dismembered, Costilla’s was not. Also, while Heuermann’s later victims were sex workers, no evidence has been found that Costilla was.
And while there was a mountain of evidence that Heuermann used disposable burner phones to contact most of his victims, this was not the case with Costilla because at the time of her murder cell phones were not yet commonly used.
Social media platforms, too, would become popular only in the 2000s.
It is still not known how she and Heuermann would have met.
