The arrest of Rex Heuermann, allegedly the infamous Long Island serial killer, makes for riveting drama in Netflix’s latest true crime docuseries Gone Girls — but while the series focuses on the victims and sheds light on Heuermann himself, viewers may find themselves more fascinated by another important facet of the investigation: just how close the case came to never being solved at all.

The new series from Liz Garbus spends time on LISK’s first four located victims and the long search for justice their families undertook. These women — Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Lynn Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, and Megan Waterman — were originally known as the “Gilgo Four” because they were all found along the same stretch of Long Island’s Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in 2010 and 2011 during a search for another missing woman, Shannan Gilbert.

In 2023, Heuermann was arrested for the murders of the Gilgo Four. Since Gone Girls wrapped, he’s been charged with three additional murders — those of Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack, and one woman, Sandra Costilla, who’d long been thought to be the victim of an entirely different serial killer. Because these arrests happened after or near the end of Gone Girls filming, the documentary doesn’t spend much time at all on these three women. It spends even less time on LISK’s four other probable victims, three of whom are currently still unidentified. With the investigations into the first seven murders wrapping up, it’s uncertain what will happen to these final four cases.

Here’s a look at the main new details we learned from the docuseries and more about what we didn’t.

Local authorities could have solved the murders much, much earlier than they did

For years, the Suffolk County Police, under the leadership of longtime Chief James Burke, fielded criticism for botching the LISK case, even as the case became national news, an infamous true crime mystery, and a frequent topic of true crime docuseries— even a previous Netflix docudrama. But just how badly they botched it didn’t become clear until the investigation was in new hands.

Once the old guard was no longer in the picture, the new investigation ramped up with remarkable speed. In 2018, a new police chief took over and promptly restarted the investigation. In 2020, authorities released the most famous piece of evidence in the case — the belt buckle found at the Brainard-Barnes crime scene. Then, in 2021, came yet another new police chief, Rodney Harrison. Shortly after assuming office, he announced a new task force dedicated to solving the crime.

Harrison’s task force, working from an abundance of phone records tied to the suspect’s trove of burner phones, identified Heuermann within just six weeks of starting to look for him.

Why, under Burke’s tenure, in one of the........

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