The Gilgo Beach Killer, a.k.a. The Long Island Serial Killer: A Mother's Hunt for Justice (Lighthouse Pictures, Sony Pictures Television, Lifetime, 2021; epilogue added 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 6) I watched a quite good Lifetime movie from 2021, originally called The Long Island Serial Killer: A Mother’s Hunt for Justice but reissued just now under the title The Gilgo Beach Killer because there’s just been a major development in the case. A new suspect named Rex Heuermann, a 59-year-old architect who (like many Long Islanders) worked in New York City but lived in Long Island and commuted to work, was arrested in July 2023 and charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of second-degree murder. The case kicked off in 2010 with the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert (Katherine Isabelle), older daughter of Mari Gilbert (Kim Delaney, top-billed), who occasionally worked as a prostitute and didn’t come home one night from a would-be trick. Mari, who lived with her younger daughter Sarra (Jessica McLeod) whom she was raising as a single parent (even though Shannan was 24 and therefore legally an adult; she had come back for Mari’s birthday and given her a fancy sweater as a present, which led to some The Easiest Way-style concerns from her mom over just how she got the money to buy it), got hyper-worried when Shannan didn’t return from her scheduled “date” on time, or at all. She traced Shannan’s movements and talked to three people who saw her the night she disappeared: Dr. Paul Hackett (John Innes), who supposedly gave drugs to Shannan and her driver Mike Pak (Brian Doe) the night Shannan went out and was never heard from again; the “john” she went to see and Tim Biltroff (Charles Zuckermann), who barely spoke English. Mari pumped these reluctant witnesses for information as best she could because the official police, led by Detective Dominick Varrone (John Cassini), aren’t interested in pursuing the case. Eventually Varrone starts taking the case seriously, but just then a new chief of police, James Burke (Patrick Sabongui), takes over and Varrone is threatened with either demotion or outright firing.

We already know that Burke is up to no good because before his appointment as police chief we’ve seen him at a sex party with a number of prostitutes, many of them underage, including 15-year-old Amy (Jordana Grace Largy), the one Burke hooked up with at the party. Virtually all the men at this party are current officers with the Suffolk County Police Department, which explains why the department was less than anxious to investigate the mysterious disappearance and possible death of a sex worker. Mari hires a Black private detective, an ex-cop from Suffolk County named Herc Zinneman (Eugene A. Clark), and between his contacts with the department in general and the medical examiner in particular and his knowledge of how the system works, as well as his own anguish because his son had run away from home at age 16 and never been seen or heard from again, Zinneman is able to get the cops to do a search of Gilgo Beach in Long Island. There they find the remains of four murdered sex workers, but the bodies had been there too long for any of them to be Shannan. Later they uncover six more victims, but Shannan isn’t one of them either, Shannan’s remains aren’t discovered until a year after her murder, in late 2011, when a pair of tourists on the beach find her purse and it leads them to her body. The medical examiner concludes that all the victims were strangled and the hyoid bones in their necks were broken, which leads her to assume that they were all killed by the same person or persons – especially when a search through cold-case files reveals four similar unexplained corpses found on a beach in Atlantic City in the early 2000’s. Chief Burke meets his downfall when a homeless drug addict breaks into the trunk of his car and discovers a satchel full of porn videos and magazines. Burke catches the man but, instead of treating him like a normal defendant, he beats the crap out of him in his cell and threatens to inject him with an overdose of heroin, a so-called “hot shot,” if he tells anyone about the encounter. Fortunately, the man is not discouraged or intimidated as Burke hoped he would be; instead he contacts a lawyer and tells him the whole story. This leads to an FBI investigation of the Suffolk County Police Department, and the FBI turns up Amy as a witness. Amy testifies that Burke picked her up at a party and paid her to have sex with him, then got more aggressive and physically violent when he couldn’t climax while fucking her. Burke ends up arrested, along with most of the Suffolk County detectives who’ve been attending the sex parties.

The actual story is a lot more complicated than the version we get from director Stanley M. Brooks and writer John Pielmeier; though midway through the movie we see Tim Bitrolff’s brother John (Alex Zahara) arrested, charged and tried for two of the murders, law enforcement authorities (including the presumably honest ones that take over after Burke and company get arrested and fired) insist the two he’s been tried for are the only ones John Bitrolff committed. More recently, authorities are insisting that the only murders they think Rex Heuermann committed were the three he’s been charged with (Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello) plus a fourth, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, in which Heuermann is still merely considered a “person of interest” rather than an actual suspect. The police also don’t think that Shannan Gilbert’s death was part of a series, and according to the Wikipedia post on the case they doubt that she was murdered at all: “Police have said the death of Gilbert, a woman whose disappearance triggered the search during which the first set of bodies was found, is not related to the Long Island serial killer case. Her now-dead mother Mari Gilbert advocated the theory that she had been murdered by a serial killer.” And Mari Gilbert’s own death is one of the many bizarre and tragic events of this tangled case: in 2016 she was stabbed to death by her surviving daughter Sarra during Sarra’s “psychotic breakdown.” Both her daughters had been diagnosed with mental illnesses – Shannan as bipolar and Sarra as schizophrenic – and there’s a chilling scene in the movie in which Mari is watching a pre-taped interview she gave to TV journalist Leann Cavanaugh (Stefanie von Pfetten) in which she described both Shannan and Sarra as “troubled,” and Sarra is hiding out in a corner of the house looking bitter as all get-out over mom going public with her mental issues. Later she tears into Mari and says, “How dare you describe me on TV as ‘troubled’?”

There’s also a scene in the film in which one of the crooked cops tries to convince Mari that Shannan wasn’t actually killed but died of an accidental drug overdose and just happened to collapse and expire on the same stretch of beach as the serial-killer victims. Mari fights hard to get access to the tape of the 911 call Shannan placed just before she died, in which she said that someone was chasing her and out to kill her, but the police ignored the call – they said later because they couldn’t trace her actual location. Mari finally gets a tape of the call, only in one of the dumbest directorial decisions ever made, Stanley M. Brooks drowns out the call with a droopy soft-rock ballad he’s used at various other points in the movie. C’mon, Stanley, we want to hear the call almost as much as Mari did! Aside from that big lapse, Brooks’s direction is strong if a bit overly intense, and Pielmeier’s script benefits from the discipline having a true story to work from generally imposes on Lifetime writers. The six reviews so far on imdb.com run the gamut from excellent to terrible, with almost nobody in between; one Long Island resident says the movie is wildly inaccurate (but doesn’t bother to say just what’s wrong about it) and another faults Kim Delaney for overacting (I think she gave an incredible performance; if she seems overwrought, it’s because she’s playing a mother literally fighting first for her daughter’s life and then for her memory, and someone in that situation would undoubtedly feel overwrought). The Gilgo Beach Killer ends with a brief postlude by newscaster Deborah Norville, one of the original executive producers, announcing Rex Heuermann’s arrest but still suggesting that that doesn’t solve all the murders.