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........

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