The accused Gilgo Beach killer is expected to plead guilty. Will he speak at last?

The case has bedeviled investigators, agonized victims’ relatives and tantalized a true-crime obsessed public for years.

And now, the suspect will at last admit to killing more than a half-dozen women and dumping many of their remains on a remote stretch of parkway near Long Island’s Gilgo Beach over the span of 10 years..

Rex Heuermann, 62, faces charges for the murder of seven women, many of them sex workers, over a 17-year span. He is expected to plead guilty on Wednesday, which would put him in prison for the rest of his life.

According to Newsday, Heuermann will also cop to an eighth murder — one in which he has not yet been charged. That would be the 1996 killing of Karen Vergata, of Manhattan.

The expected plea would avert a September trial and culminate a 15-year investigation that captivated New Yorkers and the country starting in late 2010. It’s unclear if Heuermann will make a statement himself in court.

He hasn’t yet commented in front of any cameras. His lawyer, Michael Brown, has led that effort.

Suffolk County DA Ray Tierney, who refused to confirm whether Heuermann would indeed change his plea to guilty in the days leading up to Wednesday’s hearing, has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday afternoon, after the court appearance.

He will be joined by members of victims’ families and of the Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force, which cracked the case with the help of clues that included DNA lifted from a discarded pizza crust.

A message seeking comment was left for Brown.

Sources said Rex Heuermann is expected to plead guilty to more than half a dozen murders, confirming his involvement in the Gilgo Beach killings. NBC New York’s Greg Cergol reports.

How did we get here?

The Gilgo Beach investigation began in earnest in 2010 after police found numerous sets of human remains along a remote beach highway on Long Island’s South Shore, setting off a search for a potential serial killer that attracted global interest and spawned a Hollywood movie.

Investigators used DNA analysis and other evidence to identify victims. In some cases, they were able to connect them to remains found elsewhere on Long Island years earlier.

Remains of six victims — Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello, Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor, and Megan Waterman — were found in the scrub along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach. The remains of another victim, Sandra Costilla, were found more than 60 miles away in the Hamptons.

Police also identified an eighth woman, Karen Vergata, whose remains were found on Fire Island, more than 20 miles west, in 1996, and near Gilgo Beach in 2011. Heuermann had not yet been charged in Vergata’s killing as of Tuesday.

But despite the attention, including a documentary series and the 2020 Netflix film, “Lost Girls,” the investigation dragged on for more than a decade, punctuated by fleeting leads and dashed hopes.

In 2022, six weeks after a new police commissioner formed the Gilgo Beach task force, detectives identified Heuermann as a suspect by using a vehicle registration database to connect him to a pickup truck that a witness reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared in 2010.

Heuermann lived for decades in Massapequa Park, about a 25-minute drive across a causeway spanning South Oyster Bay to the sandy stretch where the women’s remains were found. He worked as an architect in Manhattan.

Some of the victims were believed to have disappeared from that community, and their cellphones were found to have pinged towers in the area, authorities said. Data showed Heuermann was in contact with some victims just before they disappeared, investigators said.

After the truck discovery, a grand jury authorized more than 300 subpoenas and search warrants, allowing the task force to dig into Heuermann’s life.

After Heuermann’s arrest, detectives spent more than 12 days searching his yard and home, where they found a basement vault that contained 279 weapons. On his computer, investigators said, they found what they described as a “blueprint” for the killings, including a series of checklists with reminders to limit noise, clean the bodies and destroy evidence.

Heuermann will be sentenced at a later date.

Prosecutors claim Rex Heuermann, the lead suspect in the Gilgo Beach serial killings case, made hundreds of calls to sex workers in the years before his arrest. NBC New York’s Greg Cergol reports.