WATCH: Gilgo Beach victims’ families speak after Rex Heuermann guilty plea

The families of Rex Heuermann’s victims, the now-confessed Gilgo Beach serial killer, stood alongside the Suffolk County district attorney on Wednesday to make their first comments since the man’s guilty plea in court.

The plea averts a September trial and culminates a 15-year investigation that captivated the country. Heuermann admitted to strangling all of his victims, dumping some in burlap along Long Island’s Ocean Parkway, and dismembering others, over the course of nearly two decades.

“This defendant walked among us, play acting as a normal suburban dad when in reality, all along, he was obsessively targeting innocent women for death,” District Attorney Ray Tierney said at Wednesday’s afternoon press conference.

“And while we in law enforcement, as well as our Suffolk County citizens, mourn the loss of these victims, we are also grateful to them and to their families because without them this defendant would have never been brought to justice and would still be walking amongst us,” the DA said.

Heuermann, 62, had been charged in the killings of seven women, many of them sex workers, over a period of 17 years, dating back to 1993. Previously, he pleaded not guilty. Copping to the eighth, the 1996 killing of Karen Vergata, of Manhattan, is part of his plea deal, which comes with life without parole, prosecutors said.

Gloria Allred, an attorney representing a number of the victims’ families, spoke on behalf of many of the relatives and invited them up to the microphone to state whether or not they accept Heuermann’s plea. All of the family members represented by Allred said they did accept his plea and were “thankful” for the peace and conclusion of the investigation.