♪ this is "nightline." >> byron: tonight -- >> did you do it? >> byron: more victims? the investigation expanding to three other states after the arrest of a suspected serial killer in the gilgo beach

murders. >> shame on us, looking into south carolina, even atlantic city. >> byron: what we're learning about rex heuermann. >> i'm an architectural consultant born and raised on long island. >> byron: the woman who ended their date early. >> i had a really bad feeling, i need to get away from him. >> byron: plus ocean fever. the global heat wave taking a toll on the environment. water temperatures soaring. >> it's very safe to say that it's the hottest it's ever been. >> byron: threatening to wipe out florida's coral reef. >> it's going to be like walking through a rain forest after a wildfire. >> byron: we take a deep dive for the firsthand look at the race to save nature's seawall. >> we're not going to give up. human is have caused this problem, humans can solve this problem. >> byron: the shocking revelation we discovered underwater. chasing history. opening ceremonies in new zealand as the u.s. women's national team looks to win a

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family cookouts! [blowing] [dice roll] ♪ playing games! [party chatter] dancin in the par—! ♪ >> byron: good evening. thank you for joining us. a week ago, rex heuermann was living an unassuming life. architect in new york city. husband and father in a long island suburb. today charged with three murders, and investigators in four different states are looking to connect did him to

unsolved crimes there. here's abc's senior investigative reporter aaron katersky. >> reporter: a week after the arrest of rex heuermann, the alleged gilgo beach serial killer, authorities across the country are chasing down multiple new leads and giving old cases a fresh look. police looking at whether heuermann may be connected to murders in other states. rock hill, south carolina authorities said they were investigating whether heuermann was involved in the 2014 experience of 18-year-old aleah bell. >> these are individuals who are real psychopaths and they do live compartmentalized lives. they have seemingly normal lives during the day and many of them are family men w are actually respted in their communities. >> reporter: properties heuermann owns becoming a prime focus for investigators, including in chester county, south carolina, where he owns four vacant lots. police seizing this older model

chevy avalanche from one of those lots, linking the vehicle to the long island investigation. >> now to a long island suburb reeling this morning, the stunning arrest in a string of killings on long island, the suspect hiding in plain sight all along. >> reporter: for 13 years there were no answers about what may have happened to the ten bodies dumped along the beach in this oceanside community on long island, new york. last friday, the 59-year-old heuermann, a suburban father of two, cuffed and brought to appear before a judge. >> rex heuermann is a demon that walks among us. >> reporter: prosecutors charging him with the murder of three victims they say were women he secretly solicited for sex, and he is the prime suspect in the murder of a fourth. heuermann pleaded not guilty to the charges. >> rex heuermann is our guy. we're going to see if we can attach him to anything else, any other murders murders throughout the country. >> i haven't heard anything about an eyewitness, about a confession -- >> did he have what investigators might call

trophies, things that came from the victims? >> we're going to find out once we evaluate this mountain of evidence that we're getting. >> reporter: multiple searches under way at heuermann's home in the small town of massapequa park and the fifth avenue a architecture firm where he worked. among the items, more than 200 guns. it's why they opted to arrest him outside his office last week. >> we wanted to take him into custody somewhere outside of the house because of access to those weapons. >> did he make any initial statements? >> i can't talk about the statements. suffice to say he was surprise the. >> reporter: authorities investigating whether more evidence could tie him to crime scenes across the country. >> we're looking from beginning with molecular evidence such as blood, hair samples, dna, fibers, all the way up. >> reporter: authorities have zeroed in on two additional states where heuermann may be connected to a string of unsolved killings. nevada and new jersey. police say heuermann owns a

timeshare in las vegas. in atlantic city, new jersey, police are looking at the possibility of a connection between heuermann and the murders of four prostitutes. authorities say those women's bodies were found in a watery ditch. >> shame on us if we don't look into las vegas, south carolina, even atlantic city. >> reporter: nikki brass says heuermann solicited her online around 2015 when she was working as an escort. >> i had a really, really bad feeling. my gut was telling me i needed to get away from him. >> reporter: at dinner she says he asked her if she had heard about the gilgo beach murders and something seemed off. >> he'd speak in a they, a hypothetical. but he had this smile on his face. made me really uneasy. he had this glossed-over look in his eye. >> reporter: she says she ended the date early. sheriff's deputies in new york are also interviewing incarcerated sex workers about their interactions with the suspect. >> he had reached out to them for sex.

they took the calls but did not meet with them. >> reporter: until his arrest, prosecutors say heuermann was living a double life, using burner phones and anonymous email accounts to arrange sex and search for child pornography. all while raising a daughter and stepson on long island and commuting into new york city for work. >> so this is an individual who clearly functioned extremely highly in his personal life, but had this dark alter ego which emerged when he flipped the switch. >> reporter: as he remains behind bars in a suffolk county jail, his wife of over 25 years filing for divorce, seen here in this foxnews.com photo wednesday. the docket says the divorce will be uncontested. in a statement shortly after heuermann's arrest, his defense attorney calling him a loving husband. but police say heuermann's wife and children were disgusted and embarrassed when they learned what he was accused of doing. kerry rossen was 26 when her

father, the so-called btk killer, dennis rader, was arrested in 2005 for serial killings in kansas. >> it alters everything. it's a massive impact. you're just riding these long waves of insanity, finding out all these insane things about what your father has done. it alters every little bit of your life. >> i'm an architectural consultant, i'm a troubleshooter, born and raised on long island. >> reporter: heuermann appeared in this youtube video a year ago around the time investigators formed a new task force to sol the gilgo beach murders and began to suspect he could an killer. prosecutors saying they zeroed on him using dna, car, and cell phone data. the four victims wrapped in burlap, found within a quarter mile of each other. prosecutors said the killer contacted his victims using burner phones and later took the victims' cell phones. those cell phone records narrowed the area where the

suspect could be, tracking them to locations near his office in midtown manhattan and heuermann's home in massapequa park. this trash can outside the office is where police say they found pizza crusts they used to take a dna sample, matching dna from a hair found on one of the victims. >> by the time the fbi and suffolk county police were attempting to get dna, they were on to their guy. but they needed his dna. that's why they formed a surveillance team and basically followed him until he ultimately ate something and threw it into a public trash can and they grabbed it at that point. >> reporter: the gilgo beach murders have become a source of morbid fascination. >> while searching for a missing dog, one of our officers located four bodies. >> reporter: a netflix movie based on the murder of sex workers on long island premiering in 2020. >> we don't have law enforcement agencies working together. there's nobody vying to connect the dots. >> reporter: as well as an a&e

documentary series. >> there's always the idea that he was a commuter. the first victim, maureen brainard barnes, disappeared from penn station. a lot of the cell phone pings came from massapequa. another victim was last seen going to massapequa. we knew massapequa was an important point. we also knew that penn station was an important point. if you know long island, from long island you know it's a commuter. >> reporter: josh zayman is director of "the killing season." >> it's human nature to want to know what's going on and to delve into the darkest part of humanity. >> reporter: as each day reveals new clues, it seems like this might become the latest face of these darkest parts of humanity. >> byron: our thanks to aaron. coming up, ocean fever. the historic heat wave threatening florida's coral reef. my active psoriatic arthritis can make me feel like i'm losing my rhythm.

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♪ >> byron: it's been hard to escape those scorching temperatures on land and at sea. off the coast of florida, they're raising alarms about the coral reef, an environmental disaster. abc's chief meteorologist ginger zee takes a deep dive for some answers. >> losing coral reefs here in florida in the greater caribbean, all around the world, is going to have rippling impacts and consequences. >> reporter: at university of miami's coral lab, researchers are hard at work in a race against rapidly rising temperatures to save the only

coral reef system in the continental u.s. >> what's most alarming is that it's incredibly hot for this time of year. ocean temperatures that we normally only see in august and september if we see them at all. >> reporter: florida's reef has taken a beating over the last four decades, losing more than 90% of its live cover to pollution, hurricanes, and consistently warming water. >> we're going to see pretty soon bleaching and mortality over the reef. it's going to be like walking through a rain forest after a wildfire. >> reporter: and experts fear it's about to get worse. ocean temperatures have surged past old record highs. the coral teetering on their tipping point. this comes as an intensifying heat wave stretches out of the ocean and across the country. >> it seems to be an entire swath from west to east. so everywhere from southern parts of california all the way across nevada, arizona, and into the eastern seaboard. >> reporter: from phoenix, arizona, where they broke their previous record with 20

consecutive days of more than 110-degree heat, to el paso, texas, which has annihilated its past record of 23 days at more than 100 degrees. they are now at 35 in a row and no end in sight. and it's not just the u.s. >> it's the high temperatures that we're seeing in parts of the middle east and eastern hemisphere approaching values that are going to be at or beyond the limit of the human body. >> reporter: earth's hottest 17 days ever recorded by human instruments have all been measured this month. we expected this to be a hot year because of el nino, a recurring warming of surface waters in the eastern pacific ocean. but human-induced climate change has definitely had a hand in amplifying the natural warming of our planet. and it's not just heat. climate change also has been known to amplify extreme weather events like the catastrophic flooding that we've seen in mississippi, vermont, and new york over the last couple of

weeks. >> when it comes to excess precipitation, it's falling in heavier, short bursts. but it's also falling in very, very high rainfall rates. so 2, 3 inches and more in an hour. and if that much rain falls that quickly, it doesn't have a chance actually to seep into the ground. >> reporter: here in the florida keys, the heat has officials and researchers on high alert. and is what we're seeing right now the hottest? >> yes. yeah, across southeast florida, down in the keys, hottest it's ever been. >> since we know? >> since measurements began. safe to say it's the hottest it's ever been. >> reporter: this year the high pressure system that typically brings refreshing trade winds to florida is further south and weaker. >> we've had relatively calm winds compared to normal. and so without that

cooling, the water sits and cooks. >> like a fan was turned off or a lid was put on the boiling pot, it boils fastener. >> right. >> reporter: it's causing ocean temps to rise into the low, mid, and upper 90s. up to 7 degrees above average, with no sign of a cool-down any time soon. posing a threat to the vital coral reefs that protect and serve the keys. >> coral reefs have many different benefits to humans. the reef itself is habitat for so many other species that we depend on in our economy. lobsters and commercially important fish species. when we lose the corals that build those reefs, and it no longer breaks the wave energy, it comes right up onto our beaches and our condos and everything else along the coasts. >> it's nature's natural fence? >> it's nature's seawall. >> reporter: a mass coral die-off would be devastating. about 25% of all marine life depend on the reef for survival.

it also brings billions of dollars of revenue into florida through fishing and tourism. >> for corals, if they have a year or two to recover, then they can keep up with that. but if we are just hitting record high, record high, record high every summer, they don't get that chance to recover. that is when you will pretty much always see bleaching and ultimately some mortality. >> reporter: kerry o'neil is a senior scientist with the florida aquarium's center for coral conservation. her team has been helping rehabilitate florida's reef by breeding the strongest coral possible to withstand a warming climate, raising baby coral in their ocean greenhouse. four years ago, they planted 200 coral. they've been thriving about five miles south of layton, florida. the team came out to monitor this site a few weeks ago and the corals were looking pretty good. but water temps at that time were 91 degrees on the dive computer.

so that's concerning. >> reporter: it's concerning because the florida keys just this week got put to the highest level of warning for coral bleaching. >> oftentimes, that means the coral is losing some of its nutrition, and it can lead to coral dying. >> what does it look like? >> it will really just look white. a very, very pale. >> we really don't know? >> we really don't know. the staff might come up high-fiving or they might come up in tears. >> reporter: within seconds, we saw it. >> so we've been looking at several patches. it's all white. it's dead. that means within the last two weeks, bleached, gone.

>> reporter: while we'll have to wait for noaa to make a full report this will likely be the worst bleaching event the florida keys has ever seen. is this worst-case scenario? >> from what we can tell so far, yeah. immediately when we went in, we saw white. big patches. >> as soon as i put my face in the water, my heart dropped into my stomach for sure. >> it's a lot of work to be lost in ten days due to high seawater temperatures. >> reporter: but they're not losing hope. parents of these corals are being housed in nurseries across the state of florida. scientists will breed them again to try to make what they hope is a stronger generation. >> the thing that really needs to stop is warming climate. we're not going to give up. humans have caused this problem, but humans can also solve this problem. >> these ar threatened species. so it's really important that

while they're here, we're giving them the best conditions possible. >> reporter: that's exactly what the humans back at the university of miami are also working to do. >> this is where we test the viability of coral reef intervention strategies, what you can think of as reef biohacking, to increase coral's resilience to bleaching during ocean warming. >> reporter: as extreme heat continues to break records across the globe, researchers hope that it spurs heightened awareness and investment in defending this essential resource. >> i am optimistic for the future. i think we cannot give up on coral reefs. coral reefs are far too important to the health of our oceans as well as humanity as a whole. >> byron: our thanks to ginger. coming up, chasing history. opening ceremonies at the women's world cup and the u.s. women's team looking to three-peat. with falling asleep... nah wrestles ...so he takes zzzquil. the world's #1 sleep aid brand for a better night sleep.

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♪ >> byron: finally tonight, the festivities down under. a dazzling display during opening ceremonies of the women's world cup. new zealand and australia sharing cohosting duties. but now all eyes are on team usa taking the field against vietnam in their first match, looking to become the first team, men or women, to win the world cup three times in a row. that's "nightline" for this evening. catch our full episodes on hulu. we'll see you right back here same time tomorrow. thanks for the company, america. good night.