Lightroom won't delete images from drive

I have been marking images “reject” for a long time and recently ran out of space on my hard drive. I decided it was time to delete the thousands of rejected pictures from my disk. I did hit remove from disk but after going through each folder and restarting Lightroom I had gained no hard drive space, no images ended up in my apple trash to delete, the images are gone from the LR catalog. I am desperate to get rid of the images but I don’t know an easy way to either get the images back into my LR catalog with some sort of marking so I can try again, or how to know which images I need to delete in the finder since they are not marked (to my knowledge) and I can not distinguish them. If it were just a few hundred images then I could just painstakingly go through the catalog and write down the names but there are just too many. Do you have any answers for me or a link?