NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — The so-called Gilgo Beach serial killer, accused of strangling and dismembering women and scattering their remains around a coastal community near New York, was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison.

Rex Heuermann, 62, in April pleaded guilty to seven murders, plus an eighth that he had not yet been charged with, in a crime spree spanning 1993 to 2010 around Long Island, near New York City.

The Gilgo Beach case had stumped investigators for years with no suspects identified, and was featured in a number of true crime documentaries.

US media reported that family members delivered emotional victim impact statements during sentencing Wednesday, in which Heuermann received three consecutive life terms with no possibility of parole.

Heuermann, an architect arrested in July 2023 outside his Manhattan office, reportedly also addressed the Long Island court, saying, “I am responsible for all that was said in this room.”

Most of the women’s remains were found in 2010 and 2011 near Gilgo Beach, an Atlantic Ocean barrier beach on Long Island’s south shore. One victim’s body was discovered some 70 miles (110 kilometres) away in 1993.

As police failed to solve the murders, some critics alleged the case would have progressed more quickly had the women not been sex workers.

In 2022, detectives narrowed their focus onto Heuermann after he was found to be the registered owner of a vehicle one of the victims had been spotted in.

Since then, the case against Heuermann — a married father of two at the time of the killings — has been based on DNA evidence from a discarded pizza box and cell phone data linking him to the victims.

Some of that evidence was found in his family home in Massapequa Park, a suburban village, on Long Island.

Heuermann also performed hundreds of internet searches about the investigation into the murders, asking questions such as “Why hasn’t the Long Island serial killer been caught?”