I had to wait 17 years to confront the Gilgo Beach serial killer who murdered my sister - but he still won't tell me the truth about her final moments

The sister of one of the Gilgo Beach serial killer's victims has said she would visit him in jail if she thought he would be honest about what happened to her sister.

Amanda Corsi, from Buffalo, New York, spoke to the Daily Mail's The Trial: USA podcast about the 17-year-long wait she faced to confront 'repulsive monster' Rex Heuermann.

Amanda was just 15 when her 24-year-old sibling Melissa Barthelemy went missing in July 2009.

The distraught teen was tormented by sickening phone calls from killer Rex Heuermann, starting only a week after her sister's disappearance.

Over the next five weeks, he called Amanda four more times from Melissa’s phone, gloating that he had raped and murdered her and left her body to rot. 

Melissa's remains were not found for another year. She was the first of Heuermann's victims to be discovered. 

Over a two-decade reign of terror from 1993 to 2010, he had led a double life while masquerading as a married father-of-two living in Massapequa Park, Long Island, and commuting to his architecture firm in Midtown Manhattan.

Police later discovered that Heuermann was using burner phones to arrange to meet young sex workers before strangling them and discarding their bodies around remote shorelines and woods on Long Island. 

Heuermann was arrested on July 13, 2023 for the 2009 murder of Melissa Barthelemy and two other victims as part of a case that had terrorized almost a dozen families and plagued a Long Island community for decades. 

Three years after his arrest - and with the murder charges mounting - Heuermann finally pleaded guilty this April to seven murders and admitted to the eighth murder of Karen Vergata, for which he had not been charged.

The monster is now serving more than three life sentences. Investigators are still trying to determine if he's responsible for additional killings. 

Amanda was one of 13 family members and relatives who read victim impact statements during Heuermann's sentencing.

Branding him an 'ogre' and a 'demon', she detailed how his phone calls had left her with lifelong PTSD, anxiety, and depression.

'I hope you suffer to the fullest extent in the hands of others the way you made our girl suffer. And I hope the word ogre, you know, the media called me an ogre,' her statement said. 

'I hope that sticks with you because that's truly what you are: a large man with unpleasant traits, a violent man, a repulsive monster, a demon inside and out.' 

But brave Amanda also paused at one point in her statement to call out Heuermann for refusing to make eye contact with her, telling him to 'Look at me when I'm talking'.

Speaking about finally getting to confront Heuermann, Amanda said: 'It was exhilarating, honestly. I mean, I wanted to ask the judge if I could approach him so I could stand right in front of him and speak to him. 

'But I was like, "Do I want to get denied on camera instead of all these people?" I really just wanted to stand right in front of him.'

She added: 'But I wasn't afraid. I'm not going to do anything to him. But I would have liked to have almost forced him to look at me, because even when I said "look at me when I'm talking", you know, I've waited a long time for this moment, he looked at me for maybe a millisecond and looked away.' 

However, Amanda told The Trial: USA hosts that she wasn't looking for an apology  from her sister's killer.

She said 'I put it in my statement to not bother saying he was sorry because we all know that he's murdering someone. You know that wasn't an accident. You planned it. You did it on purpose. You're not sorry. 

'You wouldn't have done it continuously over a span of what 30 years. You just don't accidentally do that for that long of time over and over again.' 

While Heuermann's conviction was 'a weight lifted off your shoulders', Amanda says she would go and see him in prison if she had the opportunity so she could get closure on the specifics of what happened to her sister. 

She said: 'I've told everybody now that I'm close with him. I was really hoping that he would come to the Attica prison, that's about an hour away from my house.

'I would go there as many times as they would allow me to, and I would sit there and I would stare at him and make him feel uncomfortable like a crazy person, and then eventually I'd try to talk to him.

'I know anything that he'd say to me would probably just be him trying to manipulate me and brainwash me and take it with a grain of salt. But I would still, I think, I'd do it. 

She added: 'Maybe eventually, over time, he would be truthful. What he did was gruesome. 

'But we'd rather know than not know, because over the span of the years that we've been waiting, we have come up with all of these different scenarios ourselves of what happened, how they happened, how many days they happened, sick things. 

'So it's like I'd rather just know. It's still heartbreaking to hear things like that, yes, but I feel like it would put my mind at ease because I still, to this day, come up with scenarios of how things could have gone.'