'July 15, 2023
Rex Heuermann was painstaking in his Manhattan professional pursuits. At home in Massapequa Park, he left neighbors discomfited.
www.nytimes.com
Ginia Bellafante, Corey Kilgannon and Michael Wilson contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.
''At his office near the Empire State Building, Rex Heuermann was a master of the meticulous: a veteran architectural consultant and a self-styled expert at navigating the intricacies of New York City’s building code. He impressed some clients and drove others crazy with his fine-toothed directives.
At home in Massapequa Park on Long Island, while some neighbors saw Mr. Heuermann as just another commuter in a suit, others found him a figure of menace. He glowered at neighbors
while swinging an ax in the front yard of a low-slung, dilapidated house that parents cautioned their children to avoid on Halloween. He was kicked out of a Whole Foods for stealing fruit.
“We would cross the street,” said Nicholas Ferchaw, 24, a neighbor. “He was somebody you don’t want to approach.”
On Friday, Suffolk County prosecutors said that residents of Massapequa Park had a serial killer living in their midst. They accused Mr. Heuermann, 59, of leaving a quarter-mile trail of young women’s bodies on the South Shore of Long Island in what came to be known as the Gilgo Beach Killings. Yet he was so careful in covering his tracks, they said, that it took them nearly 15 years to arrest him.
Mr. Heuermann’s friends and clients in the real estate business were flabbergasted.
His neighbor Mr. Ferchaw said, “I wasn’t surprised at all — because of all the creepiness.”
A yearbook photo of Mr. Heuermann from Berner High School in Massapequa.Credit...The New York Times
''Steve Kramberg, a property manager in Brooklyn who worked with Mr. Heuermann for about 30 years, called him “a gem to deal with, highly knowledgeable.” Mr. Heuermann was “a big goofy guy, a little bit on the nerdy side” who worked long hours and was available day and night, Mr. Kramberg said. But he was also devoted to his wife, who Mr. Kramberg said had health problems, and to his elderly mother.''
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''It was late last summer that Mr. Heuermann, sweaty and wearing a dingy T-shirt and shorts, was spotted at the Massapequa Park Whole Foods pilfering clementines from a bowl put out for children.
“He took three and put them in his pocket, then he took more,” said Tara Alonzo, a clerk at the store. After a few more rounds she called him out. “I said, ‘Sir, those are for the kids,’” she recalled. She said Mr. Heuermann yelled back and became so heated that her manager escorted him out.''