Burlap and Blueprints: Rex Heuermann and the Gilgo Beach Murders

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He had a word document on a hard drive in his basement.

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It had sections labeled "targets, supplies, body prep, and things to remember."

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Under things to remember, he had written "use heavier rope and don't charge gas."

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He was an architect by trade, a husband and a father.

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Yet a house in the suburbs where he grew up.

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And for at least 30 years, he was also a serial killer operating out of Long Island.

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This is Rex Heurman and the Gilgo Beach Murders.

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[Music]

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There was a house on 1st Avenue and Massa Pequopark, Long Island,

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that Rex Heurman lived in for nearly his entire life.

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He grew up there as a kid, bought it from his mother in 1994,

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and raised his own family inside it.

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Neighbors thought it was a bit spooky looking,

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always slightly rundown looking, the sort of house where kids dare each other to go ring the doorbell.

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The man who lived there was, by all outward appearances, just a large, somewhat disheveled architect,

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who commuted to Midtown Manhattan and mostly kept to himself.

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He ran his own firm, R.H. Consultants and Associates,

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built a professional reputation over the decades, had a wife, two kids,

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and a personality that co-workers described as socially awkward but professionally competent.

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In the way suburban Long Island produces people who are just quietly there, occupying space without much ceremony,

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Rex Heurman seemed thoroughly unremarkable, other than his size.

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He was also, as of April 2026, confirmed a serial killer,

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who had been operating out of that house since at least 1993.

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Rex Andrew Heurman was born September 13, 1963,

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Long Island South Shore in the early '60s ran on post-war suburban aspiration.

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A place where you kept the lawn trimmed, you kept the front door painted,

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and projected normalcy outward without asking too many questions about what was behind it.

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His father, Theodore, was a World War II veteran,

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a former Air Force second lieutenant in Aerospace Engineer and a Cabinet Maker.

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That blend of technical precision and physical craft left a mark,

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pulling Rex toward architecture,

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a field that required the same synthesis of abstract spatial planning and hands-on execution.

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Theodore died in 1975 when Rex was 11 or 12.

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His mother Dolores ran the household after that,

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and neighbors described her as "very controlling".

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Classmates at Berner High School remembered Rex's towering, quiet, intelligent,

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and a consistent target for bullying.

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The actor William Baldwin recalled him as "largely on the margins",

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which, right, is exactly where you want to be if you're the biggest person in the room

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and somehow invisible to most of it.

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He earned his architecture degree from New York Institute of Technology,

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became very good at designing structures and even better at constructing facades.

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By the mid-90s, the surface-level narrative was tidy.

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He bought the house from his mother, started the firm,

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married a Swedish woman named Assa Ellarup in 1996,

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at two children,

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an ordinary, long-eiling commuter life with nothing about it to suggest otherwise.

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Sandra Castilla was 28 years old when she was killed in November of 1993.

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Her remains were found in North Sea, New York.

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Hureman admitted to her murder as part of his April 2026 guilty plea.

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Valerie Mack followed in 2000.

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Her remains scattered between the Manorville Woods and Cedar Beach at Gilgo.

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Jessica Taylor disappeared in 2003 and was also dismembered.

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Her remains found in two separate locations, years, and miles apart.

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The gaps between these crimes stretched from months to years.

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He was patient, and with each one, he was getting better at this.

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Forensic investigators later recovered a word document from a hard drive in his basement.

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It read like an internal project brief,

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with sections for targets, dump sites, supplies, body prep,

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and a section called Things to Remember.

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Under supplies, he listed burlap, acid, police scanners, and booties.

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Under Things to Remember, use heavier rope and don't charge gas.

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The top entry under problems was DNA.

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He was designing his crimes around the forensic science that might eventually catch him,

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updating his approach between the killings, the way any professional revises their plan,

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after a bad sight inspection.

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Between 2007 and 2010, four more women disappeared from the South Shore.

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Marine-Branored Barnes, a mother of two facing a viction,

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who was fighting to keep her family in their home,

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Melissa Barthellamy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Castillo.

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All four were petite and in their 20s.

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All four were found wrapped in camouflage burlap,

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along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in December 2010.

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When a police dog on a completely unrelated missing person search,

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wandered off its assigned path and stumbled across Marines' remains.

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A dog, following its nose, found what years of investigative work had not.

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After Melissa Barthellamy disappeared,

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someone began calling her teenage sister from Melissa's own phone.

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The calls were extended, taunting, and sadistic.

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Investigators believed that caller was Rex.

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Whatever he got from the crimes themselves apparently was not enough.

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He wanted to reach out to the people who loved these women the most

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and keep the damage going.

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In 2010, a witness placed a very tall man

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in a green Chevy Avalanche near one of the victim's dump sites.

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That description was documented and filed.

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In 2012, a federal report used cell tower data

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to conclude the Gilgo Killer likely lived in Massa Pequot Park

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and worked in Midtown Manhattan.

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That report was delivered to the Suffolk County Police Department

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and was effectively ignored.

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Standard cell tower analysis that could have linked to your men

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to his burner phones, to his personal devices, was never performed.

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Investigators had a working profile of their suspect in their own files

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and walked right past it for over a decade.

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The reason for all of that is James Burke.

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Burke became Suffolk County Police Chief in 2012

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and moved quickly to Consolidate Power,

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removing veteran detectives who had found the Gilgo Beach 4

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and held the most institutional knowledge of the case.

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He blocked his department from sharing information

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with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit,

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the specialist trained to build criminal profiles

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in exactly these situations.

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He stated justification and departmental pride.

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His actual motivation was keeping the FBI away from himself personally.

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Burke had his own complicated history with sex workers

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and an FBI investigation circling the Gilgo murders

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was a situation that he could not afford.

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Then, in 2012, a man named Christopher Loeb stole a bag

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from Burke's personal SUV.

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Inside the bag were a sex toys and pornography.

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Burke then had Loeb assaulted in custody

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and then organized a cover-up that consumed the SCP-D's

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senior leadership for years.

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Burke was eventually convicted of federal civil rights violations

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any serve time.

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The Gilgo Beach investigation sat dormant through all of that.

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One man's need to conceal his own behavior

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gave a serial killer extra years he never should have had.

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In February 2022, new Commissioner Rodney Harrison

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formed the Gilgo Beach homicide task force.

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They went back to the 2010 Chevy Avalanche witness description

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cross-referenced it with vehicle registrations and mass-a-pequel park

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and Rex Heurman surfaced almost immediately.

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Investigators began surveillance,

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watching him admittance to prepaid burner phones

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and then use those phones to contact sex workers.

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Analysis of his email accounts turned up thousands of searches

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for the Gilgo investigation, the victim's families,

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and also violent pornography.

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He'd been following coverage of the search for himself

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in real time.

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He thought he was still ahead of them.

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In January 2023, investigators followed Heurman

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to his Manhattan office at lunchtime.

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He ate pizza and he tossed the crust into a street trash can

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and went back inside.

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They retrieved it.

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DNA from that crust matched a male hair recovered

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from Meghan Waterman's remains.

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DNA from trash outside the Rex Heurman home matched

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hairs found on three other victims, too, his wife,

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Assa Ellerup, who had no involvement in the crimes.

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What that evidence established was that those women had been

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inside of that house and first avenue in the basement

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and what Heurman would later call his "kill room".

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He was arrested in July 2023.

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In April of 2026, Rex Heurman pleaded guilty.

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Before the public allocation, he met privately with his family,

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setting the terms of his own confession

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with the same careful deliberateness

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that he brought to everything else.

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He described four-day rituals surrounding each murder.

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Stopwatch time-body disposals.

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Windows calculated for when his wife and children were

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out of the state.

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He'd been doing this since 1993 across 30 years and eight victims.

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Maureen, Melissa, Megan, Amber, Sandra, Valerie, Jessica, and Karen.

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They were real women with families who spent years waiting for answers,

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treated by institutions as people whose disappearances

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didn't quite warrant the same urgency as someone else's.

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New York State has since passed the Sex Worker Immunity Act,

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the Survivor's First Act, and broader reforms of how law enforcement

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handles missing and murdered women, particularly women of color.

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Those eight names are attached to actual changes in the law.

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Rex Heurman built a lot of things across 30 years,

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a career, a reputation, a domestic facade convincing enough

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that his own wife never saw what was behind it.

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The last thing he built was a confession,

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and it arrived three decades too late.

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[Music]

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder,

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Bingeable True Crime Stories.

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I'm Joe, hello.

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I'm the host, and here's an email.

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Subject, your consistency is underrated.

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Hey, Joe, I was thinking the other day about how rare it is

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for a podcast to stay consistent over time.

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A lot of shows start strong and then slowly turn to inside jokes and rambling.

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Yours still feels focused and intentional,

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which is probably why I've stuck around so long.

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Random question though, do you ever take a full break from listening to podcasts

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or are you always consuming something in the background?

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Rachel and Carrie North Carolina.

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Rachel, thank you for listening for so long, and also thank you for reaching out.

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And to answer your question, yeah, I'm always, I'm almost always listening to something in the background,

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or I'm researching something for the podcast.

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In the background, not always podcasts,

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but currently I'm trying to work my way through the stand by Stephen King,

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and it's a full-blown marathon.

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It's very long, but it's also really good.

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So it's not always true crime-related stuff that I've got going on in my life.

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I used to listen to a lot of podcasts before I started doing my own,

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and I cut way back on that because I needed that time to research for this podcast,

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as well as my newer podcast True Crime Blueprint,

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which by the way, my ADHD brain wants to remind you that if you thought today's episode was interesting,

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there's a longer version of the Go Go Beach murders on True Crime Blueprint.

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It's out right now, and you can go listen to it right now.

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Whereas this one is 10 minutes talking about this case,

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that one on True Crime Blueprint is like 30 minutes talking about this case.

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I go into a lot more detail about everything surrounding it,

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and everything that went on with the case,

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and specifically, more about what went on with Sheriff Burke.

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Alright, if you're a new listener to the podcast, welcome.

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Make sure you put your feet up, get comfortable,

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because there are literally hundreds of back episodes for you to catch up on,

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and more importantly, make sure you hit subscribe to 10 Minute Murder.

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You can also go to 10minuteMurder.com.

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There you'll find, listen, links to, listen, and different places.

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Also, links to where you can find me on social media.

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That's at 10minuteMurder.com.

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And that's going to do it. That's your episode for today.

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Thank you for listening to 10 Minute Murder.

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See you next time.