Gilgo Beach Killer Lived in Chaos and Control
Gilgo Beach Killer Lived in Chaos and Control
Rex Heuermann was an experienced architectural consultant and a self-styled specialist at navigating the complexities of New York City’s building code. He worked out of an office that was located near the Empire State Building. Rex Heuermann was a master of the detailed. He managed to win over the loyalty of some customers while driving others completely bonkers with his stringent requirements.
While some of Mr. Heuermann‘s neighbours in Massapequa Park on Long Island perceived him as nothing more than an ordinary commuter dressed in a suit, others thought of him as a potentially menacing figure. While he glared angrily at the nearby residents and swung an axe in the front yard of a low-slung, run-down house, the parents of the youngsters in the neighbourhood warned their children not to go near the house on Halloween. After being caught shoplifting at Whole Foods, the store expelled him.
“We would cross the street,”
Nicholas Ferchaw, a neighbour who is 24 years old, stated. “He was the kind of person you didn’t want to get too close to.”
On Friday, prosecutors from Suffolk County revealed that residents of Massapequa Park had a serial killer living among them and that the information was released. They accused Mr. Heuermann, who was 59 at the time, of leaving a trail of the dead of young women on the South Shore of Long Island in what became known as the Gilgo Beach Killings. They claimed that because he was so cautious in disguising his tracks, it took them close to 15 years to finally be able to apprehend him.
Mr. Heuermann, who was arrested in Midtown on Thursday night, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder on Friday, and he was ordered held without bail during a brief appearance at a courthouse in Suffolk County. The incident occurred after Mr. Heuermann was taken into custody. Mr. Heuermann, according to his attorney, who was present outside the courthouse, denied involvement in the killings.
Mr. Heuermann would join the ranks of serial killers who lead parallel lives,
one of which was very mundane if he was found guilty of these crimes and sentenced to prison. In the state of Illinois, John Wayne Gacy worked as a building contractor. Richard Cottingham, also referred to as the Torso Killer, worked as a computer operator for an insurance company in the state of New Jersey.
Mr. Heuermann comes across as a recognisable character in a video interview that was uploaded to YouTube the previous year and conducted at his entirely unremarkable-looking office on Fifth Avenue. He is described as being tall and heavyset, sporting a toupee-like haircut from the 1970s, and wearing a blue dress shirt with a pen peeking out of the pocket.
“When a job that should have been routine suddenly becomes not routine,” he explains to the interviewer, Antoine Amira, “I get the phone call.”
Mr. Heuermann’s clients included American Airlines,
Catholic Charities, and the city’s own Department of Environmental Protection, as stated on his resume and on the website of his company, RH Consultants & Associates. He claimed responsibility for hundreds of successful applications before city authorities and represented clients before the Landmark Preservation Commission multiple times.
A property manager in Brooklyn named Steve Kramberg, who had worked with Mr. Heuermann for approximately 30 years, referred to him as “a gem to deal with” and described him as “highly knowledgeable.” According to Mr. Kramberg, Mr. Heuermann was “a big goofy guy, a little bit on the nerdy side” who worked long hours and was available day and night. He also kept very strange hours. However, he was extremely dedicated to his wife, according to Mr. Kramberg,
who struggled with her health, as well as to his mother, who was in her later years.Mr. Heuermann,
the son of an aerospace engineer, resided in the house that he grew up in and tinkered with furniture in the workshop that belonged to his father in the hamlet of Massapequa Park, New York. Massapequa Park is a closely griddded community of immaculate homes with manicured lawns. A man who attended the same high school with him said that when he was a teenager, he was bullied but that he sometimes fought back. In 1990, he tied the knot with a high-ranking executive at a company that specialises in office supplies. He employs his daughter at the company that he runs.
Mr. Ferchaw related various unpleasant encounters he’d had with his neighbour over the years. There was the time when he greeted Mr. Heuermann while he was splitting wood, and Mr. Heuermann reacted by looking back at him silently while he continued to chop wood with his splitting maul. On other occasions, you could find him sitting on the porch next to his stack of wood and watching an outdated television.
Mike Schmidt, who has been a resident of the area for the past ten years, is good friends with a person who lives behind Mr. Heuermann. Mr. Schmidt would occasionally pay his friend a visit, drink a few beers in the backyard, look out at the collapsing Heuermann house, “and say, ‘He probably has bodies there.'”
On Halloween of the previous year,
Mr. Schmidt and his friend made a pact to take their children trick-or-treating at the home of Mr. Heuermann, just so they could sneak a peek inside. They were taken aback when Mr. Heuermann personally answered the door and presented each child with a miniature plastic pumpkin that was stuffed to the brim with candies.
When Mrs. Schmidt found out where the candy originated, she demanded that her husband get rid of it immediately.
At work, some individuals didn’t like how meticulous Mr. Heuermann was about things, and it showed. According to Kelly Parisi, a former president of the co-op board of a building in Brooklyn Heights that engaged Mr Heuermann to oversee renovations, he was “adversarial with everyone” and so “overly fastidious” that the board eventually sacked him. Mr Heuermann was contracted to oversee renovations at the building.
Another one of the building’s former presidents, Paul Teitelbaum, referred to him as “a really kind of cold and distant person, kind of creepy.” He continued by saying, “There was an air of swagger about it—’I’m the expert, you’re lucky to have me.'”
