Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann’s three chilling words before disgusted judge issues sentence
A disgusted Long Island judge slammed Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann Wednesday, calling the hulking fiend a coward before hitting him with three life sentences and telling officers to “get him out of here.”
Heuermann, who admitted that he strangled and butchered eight sex workers on the island between 1993 and 2010, faced the wrath of more than a dozen relatives of his victims for the first time — before Surffolk County Judge Timothy Mazzei gave him a chance to speak.
“Stand up!” the judge snapped.
“There are no words I can say, but I am responsible for what was said in this room today,” the killer told Mazzei. “The words I would say would have no meaning, and I’m going to leave it there at this time.”
Then it was the judge’s turn.
“I know that you’re sorry you got caught,” Mazzei said, barely containing his disgust “I assume that you’re sorry for what you did to your wife and children.
“Are you a little bit sorry for what you did to these poor innocent women – eight women you strangled to death, at least eight women that we know of,” he added. “Are you at least a little bit sorry about that. Yes!?”
Heuermann, 6-foot-4 and grossly overweight, stood emotionless as several stone-faced officers hovered near him.
“You’ve been described as a very big man but you’re a disgusting and despicable small man — if you’re a man at all — and you’re a coward,” Mazzei said, turning to the court officers.
“Get him out of here.”
The crowd erupted in cheers, with some in the courtroom audience chanting “Ogre! Ogre!” as Heuermann was cuffed behind his back.
The scene capped an emotional day for the families of the victims — and the judge, who wiped tears from his eyes from behind the bench several times during the heart-wrenching victim impact statements.
Heurmann, 62, pleaded guilty in April to the heinous murders — all but one of which unfolded in a basement “kill room” in his family’s Massapequa Park home.
He entered the courtroom wearing a black suit — and sporting the same sinister stare he wore in a new mug shot released this week by the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office.
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney then provided new insight into the sick killer’s torture methods.
“When he talks about what he needs to dispose of, he talks about props, toys, wood items,” Tierney told Mazzei. “Wood items that he made himself with members of his own family that he kept in his house and he used during the execution of these murders, only to destroy them.
“He’s treating this as if it were as sport,” the prosecutors said. “The taking of lives as though it were a sport.”
The grim details prompted one relative to cry out, “I can’t,” before she was helped out of the room by court officers.
Outside the Riverhead courthouse, a group of sex workers protested against the killer.
The confessed killer’s plea deal with Suffolk County prosecutors called for the three life sentences — and his sentencing Wednesday closed out a national-headline-grabbing case involving a grisly string of killings that haunted the region for decades.
Heuermann confessed to killing eight women and dumping their dismembered bodies along desolate stretches of Long Island, where they were found starting in December 2010.
But the cases remained unsolved for decades until the investigation was reopened in 2022 and led to Heuermann’s arrest the next year — partly thanks to a pizza box he tossed in the trash outside his Manhattan office.
In April, the confessed killer admitted he murdered all but one of his victims in a basement “kill room” in the family home while his wife and two kids were away, eventually developing a meticulous four-day routine to plan his crimes, clean up afterward and dispose of the bodies.
He kept a Tinder account and buzzed prostitutes on burner phones more than 500 times while also embarking on “significant searches for pornography related to bindings, torture, rape, snuff videos, crying, bruised and impaled women and/or girls,” authorities said.
Some of the victims were dismembered and wrapped up in burlap before being dumped.
The killings remained a dark mystery until former NYPD Chief Rodney Harrison took over as Suffolk County police commissioner and reopened the cases.
Heuermann was finally arrested in July 2023 outside his office and charged with three of the cold-case killings, with DNA evidence later linking him to four more women — and eventually another in a surprise development.
The sicko confessed to killing Amber Lynn Costello, 27; Megan Waterman, 22; Melissa Barthelemy, 24; and Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, who were famously known as the “Gilgo Four” — as well as Valerie Mack, 24; Jessica Taylor, 20; and Sandra Costilla, 28, the first victim killed in 1993.
He also copped to killing Karen Vergata, 34, whose 1996 murder had not been linked to him.
Michael Brown, Heuermann’s lawyer, told reporters that his client was not involved in two other Gilgo Beach slayings — Shannon Gilbert, a sex worker who disappeared in 2010, and an unidentified victim known only as “Asian Doe.”
Suffolk County officials said Heuermann has been held in solitary confinement at the county jail since his arrest, whittling away his time with books and the occasional outdoor time in the jailyard — alone.
Sources revealed that the killer has also found a sympathetic pen pal while locked up — Keith Jesperson, the notorious “Happy Face Killer,” who is serving a life sentence at the Oregon Correctional Facility.
Jesperson, a truck driver who got the moniker for signing taunting letters to cops and media outlets with a smiley face, was arrested in 1995 and confessed to killing eight women between 1990 and 1995 in California, Washington, Oregon, Florida, Nebraska and Wyoming.
Jesperson said he advised Heuermann “not to go to trial” following the hulking architect’s 2023 bust, and urged him not to waste time going through a high-profile trial, the Daily Mail reported.
