Eight women, aged 20 to 34, were all murdered by the same man between 1993 and 2010. At least six of the women were sex workers.
The victim’s names are Amber Lynn Costello, Jessica Taylor, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Valerie Mack, Megan Waterman, Sandra Rajkumar-Costilla, Melissa Barthelemy, and Karen Vergata. I’m enshrining their names here, because too much media coverage of the decades-long case has displaced focus from the victims to spotlight the man who murdered them.
Rex Heuermann, an architect from Long Island, New York, pled guilty on April 8, 2026 to seven of the murders. The 62-year-old also admitted to killing Vergata, though he has not been charged with her death. His sentencing is scheduled for June.
On the night of April 23, two weeks after Heuermann entered his guilty plea, a group of sex workers based in New York City, where his victims also worked, organized a vigil to honor them.
Beneath the scaffolding of a construction site at the corner of East 40th Street and Park Avenue—near Grand Central Station in Manhattan—about two dozen sex workers and allies gathered in the crisp evening air. A dominatrix with red lips and sharp black eyeliner passed around small candles, which we lit one by one.
Prior to the vigil, some community members had pasted the victims’ photos onto the wall alongside a pointed message: “Sex workers are not a blight on society. Violent men are.”
Several people addressed the group. Sex worker advocate Kaytlin Bailey talked about vigils as a foundational piece of the sex worker rights movement. International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers began with a vigil for the victims of a Seattle-based serial killer who murdered scores of sex workers. Máxima, an activist for sex worker rights organization Decrim NY, talked about the dangers of stigma and criminalization.
Nicolette Brainard-Barnes, daughter of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, expressed how meaningful it was for her family to witness a group of strangers holding her mother’s memory with dignity and respect. Nicolette’s presence at the vigil, along with that of her brother, Dyllan Haggett, was a surprise blessing.
We held red umbrellas, the universal symbol for sex workers. We recited the victims’ names together, a chorus reverberating into the night with a promise to honor them as ancestors. A pole dancer emerged from the crowd to climb the scaffolding and hang flowers, further transforming the otherwise ordinary corridor into a portal of love and solidarity.
Midtown workers are our clients
I am a New York-based sex worker and one of the vigil’s organizers. We gathered just a few blocks from where the murderer’s architecture firm once stood, in an area where thousands of white-collar workers commute daily.
We chose this busy location because we wanted to assert our presence as sex workers and visibly mourn a group of women that most of the world would rather ignore. We were there to speak publicly on a topic that affects us directly: violent men.
The memorial was designed to be something people would have to confront the following morning on their way to work. After all, just like most of these eight women, for a lot of the city’s sex workers, the men of midtown are our clients.
Yet this is a conversation from which we are usually dismissed.
For all the contact we have with America’s fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers, the prevailing idea about us is that sex workers are somehow different from “regular people.” We’re seen as freaks, hovering grotesquely in some “other” place, somewhere outside of society.
But we are right here, among you. We are your family members, lovers, friends, and neighbors.
And your fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers keep murdering us. Heuermann himself was a married suburban dad, though his wife divorced him after he was charged with the crimes.
Violent men prey on sex workers
According to the United Nations, female sex workers have the highest homicide victimization rate compared to any other set of women ever studied.
The numbers are difficult to track, since studies don’t consistently include trans women. Nor do they include all forms of sex work, and they don’t always distinguish between autonomous sex workers and victims of forced sexual labor.
Besides, many sex workers keep their job a secret, even in death. What’s more, in America, homicides are often left unsolved, and many victims of serial killers are either not identified or not classified as victims of a serial murder.
What happened to the women Heuermann killed is not, therefore, an anomaly: They were targeted in their line of work by a predator who knew that their standing in society made them more vulnerable.
Sex workers are a criminalized and heavily stigmatized population. That, on the whole, makes it difficult for us to find safety networks outside of our community. Sex workers typically operate under the radar, because being found out can lead to disastrous consequences, such as prison, deportation, separation from children, loss of other jobs and housing, social pariahship, and more.
Being a woman, girl, or gender-expansive person already makes you vulnerable to fatal violence.
For all the contact we have with America’s fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers, the prevailing idea about us is that sex workers are somehow different from “regular people.”
Feminicide—the gender-based murder of women, girls, and people perceived to be such—has been declared a pandemic by the United Nations. Around the world, a woman or girl is intentionally murdered by a family member or intimate partner every ten minutes.
That number, of course, includes women who are sex workers. But it does not account for those killed by strangers or clients.
The misogyny that kills women, femmes, and gender expansive people everywhere is rooted in a desire to control our bodies and lives. The hatred, degradation, and discarding of sex workers is a manifestation of that desire.
Men who kill sex workers are a very serious social issue. Some are never caught, and some manage to kill dozens before they are stopped, even when they have criminal records for violent crimes against women and sex workers. What stands out about this case is not what Heuermann did, but the fact that he was caught.
And yet, most people remain committed to the illusion that this type of violence couldn’t touch their own life, just as most people are committed to the illusion that they don’t know any sex workers. The U.S. is so fascinated with serial killers that the “true crime” genre of storytelling has become a multibillion dollar industry. This very American mythology casts murderous men as intriguing anti-heroes and their victims as side characters or plot props.
There’s a cruel irony in leaving sex workers out of this conversation about crime. Our community, especially street-based and migrant workers, are at the forefront against violent men.
Most social norms call for women to place men’s comfort over their own safety, to the point of sometimes pushing aside gut instincts when a man seems “off.” But sex workers can’t afford to make that choice; the job requires us not to fool ourselves when it comes to red flags from men.
As a result, we have generations of hard-won wisdom around how to deal with them, including interpersonal strategies and policy solutions. From Scotland’s pre-social media “beware books” to today’s group chats and client-rating websites, sex workers around the world are constantly developing and honing systems to warn each other about dangerous men who pose as clients in order to attack us.
The broader solution to problems like Heuermann is clear: Decriminalize and destigmatize sex work to create a safer world, not only for us, but for everyone.
That is why everyone should look to sex workers—not to “true crime” podcasts or tabloids or journalists with no sex work experience—as leaders in the public conversation about men like Heuermann when they erupt into your field of vision.
Media inflicts more violence
When I spoke at the Midtown vigil, I talked about the injustices done to Heuermann’s victims through biased media coverage.
Like many dead sex workers and other disenfranchised people, these eight women have suffered more violence after death—this time, at the hands of the media.
In the decades between Heuermann’s murders and his 2023 arrest, there have been a slew of documentaries, books, podcasts, and articles about him. Before we even knew the killer’s name, the media gifted him several catchy little monikers. I won’t repeat them here, because I find that practice demented.
Unlike these eight women, who were writers, artists, hairstylists, moms, sisters, daughters, travelers, and generally just young people starting their adulthood journeys, Heuermann’s net contribution to society is an infinite negative.
He—and other men like him—don’t warrant our fascination. Vigilance, outrage, and intervention, yes, but not fascination. Violent misogynists are not inherently interesting people. They are predictable products of a patriarchal culture that protects men’s own entitlement while controlling women and queer people, and which places a target on the back of sex workers.
The targets are a warning: Don’t be like them, or else.
The vast majority of reporting about Brainard-Barnes, Taylor, Costello, Mack, Waterman, Rajkumar-Costilla, Barthelemy, and Vergata has been equally predictable. Stories often feature extremely graphic details about their deaths, with a hyperfixation on the fact that some of them were sex workers, but without a critical analysis of the media’s own role in stigmatizing them as such.
Like most storytelling about our community, a great deal of ink has been spilled to flatten these women into a vague blur, shaming them and even blaming them for their own deaths. Several prominent journalists have profited handsomely on this story through books, documentaries, podcasts, and even a fictionalized film, which feature this type of narrative.
This practice is so common that I’ve made a guide for assessing media bias in stories about sex workers.
Our lives and deaths are not a spectacle for consumption. The only time people should view sex workers as entertainment is when they pay us to entertain them—and even then, only within the boundaries of our consent.
To the sex workers reading: I know that many systems fail us, but we will not fail each other. We will remember all of our fallen sisters: Jessica, Valerie, Maureen, Amber, Megan, and Melissa. Karen and Sandra may not have been sex workers, but they’re our sisters too.
Every time we stand up for ourselves and each other, we strengthen the forcefield that binds us together.
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