For more than thirty years, Sandra Costilla’s murder belonged to someone else.
Investigators spent years trying to pin it on John Bittrolff, a convicted killer from the area who’d already been linked to two other women’s deaths. Bittrolff lived in Manorville. He had the profile. He had the proximity. And for a long time, that was enough to keep investigators circling back to him — even when they couldn’t make it stick. Meanwhile, according to prosecutors, the man whose DNA allegedly ended up on Sandra’s body was building an architecture career in Manhattan, commuting from a quiet house on Long Island, raising kids, living completely undisturbed. Sandra was 28 years old when she was found. She’d come to New York from Trinidad and Tobago. And if the prosecution’s case holds, she wasn’t just another cold case — she was the beginning. The first in a line of women who, according to authorities, would not survive an encounter with Rex Heuermann. He was 30 years old in 1993. Not a middle-aged man hiding behind a suburban facade. Not a father using his family’s travel schedule as cover. Just a young architect at the start of his career — and, prosecutors allege, the start of something else entirely.
Here’s what makes Sandra’s story different from the others in this series — and what makes it harder to tell. We know almost nothing about her life. Not in the way we know about Melissa Barthelemy’s dream of owning a salon, or Maureen Brainard-Barnes fighting to keep custody of her kids, or Amber Costello’s roommates describing her as the kind of person who’d give you the shirt off her back. Sandra doesn’t have those details in the public record. What we know is clinical: she was from Trinidad and Tobago, she was living in New York City at the time of her disappearance, and her body was found in November 1993. That absence of personal detail isn’t a footnote — it’s the story. Sandra Costilla existed in a space where a woman could be murdered, and the full picture of who she was could simply (Continued In Video 👆)
This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.
The Podcast.
Listen on your fav Podcast App!
Pick Your Player Here!
