A suspected serial killer was arrested on Thursday night, over a decade after ten victims were found on Long Island beaches.

Police officers descended in droves on a quiet suburban street in Massapequa, New York late on Thursday night and Friday morning.

Law enforcement sources confirmed that officers arrested a suspect related to the Gilgo Beach killings, an unsolved series of murders that shook the island’s tony South Shore beach towns in 2010 and 2011.

The suspect’s name has not been officially released, but local law enforcement sources confirmed his identity the New York Times on Friday morning.

The suspect was identified as Rex Heuermann, a 59-year-old architect from Massapequa.

Heuermann runs RH Consultants & Associates, an architecture and architectural consulting firm in Manhattan, which was founded in 1994.

Suffolk County law enforcement and the FBI have announced a joint press conference about the arrest scheduled for 4.00pm on Friday.

The first victim was found in December 2010. It is not clear how many of the victims were killed by the same suspect.

Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker, disappeared from a Long Island client’s home in 2009.

A year before her disappearance, Gilbert left a 23-minute call to 911, where she told operators ‘they are trying to kill me.’

The massive search for Gilbert lead to the discovery of the bodies of four more women wrapped in burlap sacks and hidden in the marshes of Gilgo Beach: Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Lynn Costello, 27.

All four victims worked as escorts or sex workers and advertised their services on Craigslist. They all went missing between 2007 and 2010.

Coroners were able to determine all four died by estrangulation.

Investigators then uncovered six more sets of remains in 2011, all within the same marshy area of Gilgo Beach and Oak Beach, but dating back another 10 years.

Only two of the victims have been identified: Valerie Mack, a 24-year-old escort from Philadelphia who went missing in 2000, and Jessica Taylor, a 20-year-old sex from Manhattan worker who went missing in 2001.

Four bodies remain unidentified to this day. Two more were identified as women of similar age to the other victims.

Another was identified as an Asian male between the ages of 17 and 23, and the final was identified as a female toddler between 1 and 4-years-old.

The toddler is believed to be the daughter of one of the unidentified women.

Several of the corpses were linked to missing body parts found miles away at other crime scenes across Long Island.

The killings have gripped the public for the last decade. Several true crime documentaries have investigated the mystery, and the 2020 Netflix film ‘Lost Girls’ dramatized the search for Shannan Gilbert.

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