The sister of one of the Gilgo Beach serial killer’s victims says she would go to see him behind bars — but only if she believed he would finally tell the truth about what happened to her sister.
Amanda Corsi, of Buffalo, New York, opened up to the Daily Mail’s The Trial: USA podcast about the agonizing 17-year wait to face the man she called a “repulsive monster,” Rex Heuermann.
Amanda was only 15 years old when her older sister, 24-year-old Melissa Barthelemy, vanished in July 2009.
In the days that followed, the grieving teenager was subjected to sickening phone calls from killer Rex Heuermann, beginning just one week after Melissa disappeared.
During the next five weeks, he rang Amanda four more times using Melissa’s phone, taunting her with claims that he had raped and murdered her sister and left her body to decompose.
Melissa’s remains would not be discovered for another year. She was the first of Heuermann’s victims to be discovered.
For nearly two decades, from 1993 to 2010, Heuermann had led a double life while masquerading as a married father-of-two in Massapequa Park, Long Island, while commuting to his architecture practice in Midtown Manhattan.
Investigators later found that Heuermann used burner phones to set up meetings with young sex workers before strangling them and discarding their bodies around remote shorelines and woods on Long Island.
Melissa Barthelemy (left) went missing in July 2009. She was murdered by Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann (right)
Melissa Barthelemy (left) and her sister Amanda Corsi (right) celebrating one of Melissa’s birthdays
Amanda Corsi, sister of Melissa Barthelemy, outside the court in Riverhead, New York, alongside other family members of victims, after serial killer Heuermann’s sentencing
Heuermann was arrested on July 13, 2023 for the 2009 murder of Melissa Barthelemy and two other victims as part of a case that had terrorized almost a dozen families and plagued a Long Island community for decades.
Three years after his arrest – and with the murder charges mounting – Heuermann finally pleaded guilty this April to seven murders and admitted to the eighth murder of Karen Vergata, for which he had not been charged.
The monster is now serving more than three life sentences. Investigators are still trying to determine if he’s responsible for additional killings.
Amanda was one of 13 family members and relatives who read victim impact statements during Heuermann’s sentencing.
‘I hope you suffer to the fullest extent in the hands of others the way you made our girl suffer. And I hope the word ogre, you know, the media called me an ogre,’ her statement said.
‘I hope that sticks with you because that’s truly what you are: a large man with unpleasant traits, a violent man, a repulsive monster, a demon inside and out.’
But brave Amanda also paused at one point in her statement to call out Heuermann for refusing to make eye contact with her, telling him to ‘Look at me when I’m talking’.
Speaking about finally getting to confront Heuermann, Amanda said: ‘It was exhilarating, honestly. I mean, I wanted to ask the judge if I could approach him so I could stand right in front of him and speak to him.
Heuermann’s victims clockwise from top left: Sandra Costilla, Karen Vergata, Melissa Barthelemy, Valerie Mack, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Jessica Taylor
A search of Heuermann’s home in Massapequa Park, Long Island, in July 2023, just days after his arrest
Aerial view of Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach, where the remains of 11 victims were discovered
‘But I was like, “Do I want to get denied on camera instead of all these people?” I really just wanted to stand right in front of him.’
She added: ‘But I wasn’t afraid. I’m not going to do anything to him. But I would have liked to have almost forced him to look at me, because even when I said “look at me when I’m talking”, you know, I’ve waited a long time for this moment, he looked at me for maybe a millisecond and looked away.’
However, Amanda told The Trial: USA hosts that she wasn’t looking for an apology from her sister’s killer.
She said ‘I put it in my statement to not bother saying he was sorry because we all know that he’s murdering someone. You know that wasn’t an accident. You planned it. You did it on purpose. You’re not sorry.
‘You wouldn’t have done it continuously over a span of what 30 years. You just don’t accidentally do that for that long of time over and over again.’
While Heuermann’s conviction was ‘a weight lifted off your shoulders’, Amanda says she would go and see him in prison if she had the opportunity so she could get closure on the specifics of what happened to her sister.
She said: ‘I’ve told everybody now that I’m close with him. I was really hoping that he would come to the Attica prison, that’s about an hour away from my house.
‘I would go there as many times as they would allow me to, and I would sit there and I would stare at him and make him feel uncomfortable like a crazy person, and then eventually I’d try to talk to him.
Gilgo Beach Serial Killer Rex Heuermann appears in court in Suffolk County for his sentencing in June
‘I know anything that he’d say to me would probably just be him trying to manipulate me and brainwash me and take it with a grain of salt. But I would still, I think, I’d do it.
She added: ‘Maybe eventually, over time, he would be truthful. What he did was gruesome.
‘But we’d rather know than not know, because over the span of the years that we’ve been waiting, we have come up with all of these different scenarios ourselves of what happened, how they happened, how many days they happened, sick things.
‘So it’s like I’d rather just know. It’s still heartbreaking to hear things like that, yes, but I feel like it would put my mind at ease because I still, to this day, come up with scenarios of how things could have gone.’
