The Monster of Gilgo Beach

"Just a businessman" with torture porn and 92 gun licenses

What happens when we find a real life monster among us?

Like a lot of people, I imagine, I spent yesterday refreshing news stories about the arrest and charging of accused serial killer Rex Heuermann. The 59-year old New York architect was arrested Thursday night outside his midtown Manhattan office and accused of murdering at least three and possibly four of nine women whose bodies were found wrapped in burlap and tossed like trash near a Long Island beach more than ten years ago. Their sandy decomposed bodies were discovered not far from each other, during a search for one of them - 24 year old Shannan Gilbert - in 2010.

In court, the “meticulous” architect was disheveled. It is impossible to look at the lardy, six foot four giant towering over cops who perp-walked him, and not think of the tiny women he allegedly hired for sex and then murdered.

The first time I remember hearing about the unsolved murders was in a haunting book called Lost Girls. Bob Kolker, an occasional colleague of mine at NYU’s graduate journalism school, researched and wrote about the lives of the dead women, all of whom were poor, in their 20s, and advertising their bodies for sale on Craigslist, in what has come to be called sex work. At the time, cops seemed to have given up trying to find their killer.

Craiglist was one of the first platforms by which people who earned a living servicing men’s bodies could make direct contact with customers. The site removed the need for a middleman, the pimp or the advertiser who took a cut. Before Craigslist, they might have had to pay more to advertise on the back pages of The Village Voice, New York City’s so-called Prostitution Hub, a project that provided one-seventh of the paper’s annual income until it was shut down in 2012.

The Gilgo Beach girls, then, were what passes for individual entrepreneurs in the sex for sale business. They were $200 an hour escorts. Good money, a lot more than you can make as a waitress.

But they were utterly vulnerable.

Tiny - only one was over five feet tall.

If they had any sort of assistant, it was the car service driver, always a man, who usually just dropped them off outside the john’s door. Few waited - if they had, the women would be alive. And some of these drivers are witnesses, the last people to see the victim alive, before they disappeared.

Shannan Gilbert, a 24 year old aspiring actress with often unmedicated bipolar disorder, was with her driver when she tried to save herself on a 5 a.m. call to 911. "There is somebody after me," she told a dispatcher multiple times. “Somebody’s after me — please,” she said. She didn’t give her location but said she was on Long Island. At times during the call, she was heard speaking to her driver and security, Michael Pak, saying “Please, get me out of here, Mike.”

But Mike didn't get her out of there. Instead of getting in his car, she ran off into a wooded area, in hysterics, leaving tiny footprints in the sandy soil. Searching for her, cops turned up ten other corpses on the area, many similarly wrapped in burlap.

Unlike the other dead girls, Gilbert had a college degree, “She was book smart not street smart” her mother would say. But after a stint at Applebee’s, she joined an escort business for what seemed like easy money.

It wasn’t that easy: She was once beaten so badly she needed a titanium plate in her jaw, but she kept at it.

To a woman, the victims were poor. Why else would they choose to be “sex workers”? Some needed money for children they were raising alone. Some needed money for drug habits. Some just needed money. Other than actual children, they were some of the most vulnerable people on Earth.

Enter The Ogre. That’s how the cops described the grainy photo of their suspect before they knew his name, a giant, bushy-haired “ogre-like” figure caught on camera soliciting one of the dead girls.

As cops were looking for him, Heuermann donned a suit every day and lumbered into midtown Manhattan. Clients found him meticulous, annoyingly fastidious, but otherwise effective.

Neighbors who have talked to reporters saw a different side of him. A Boo Radley. He and his wife and two kids lived in a disheveled house with an unkempt yard. He sometimes glared at them while swinging an axe chopping wood. He stuffed handfuls of Clementines from a bowl of free ones Whole Foods laid out for children, into a filthy shirt pocket. Parents told their kids not to knock on his door on Halloween.

He also apparently stockpiled weapons: he has licenses for 92 guns.

“We would cross the street,” said a neighbor. “He was somebody you don’t want to approach.”

The monster eluded authorities for more than a decade. After years of investigative drift, police formed a special unit in 2022.

What we know about how they caught him is already an astonishing chronicle of painstaking police work - and a testament to the advantages cops get from digital surveillance and genetic identification.

Witnesses had described a black truck in one of the victims’ driveways before she disappeared. Incredibly, authorities were able to identify the make of the truck from those sketchy memories. They then identified all the owners of black Chevrolet Avalanche trucks in New York State and cross-referenced their addresses with location data of incoming calls to the dead women’s phones.

Bingo. Heuermann owned the make of truck and had addressees at both the Manhattan and Long Island phone ping locations connected to the women’s last incoming calls. Cops started tracking him and eventually collected DNA Heuermann left on a pizza box and tossed into a 5th Avenue trash can. It matched a male hair on one of the corpses. Cops also somehow gained remote access to his computer, on which he used an alias to download torture porn, and to run hundreds of searches about the investigation and the names of his victims and their family members.

Selling sex is a dangerous profession for women, as quotidian and accepted as it is. I sometimes think of a left-ish nice male friend of mine who makes regular appointments for a“rub and tug” - he considers it a form of self care. He tells the women jokes while they work on him, and he thinks they like him for it. Maybe they do. Maybe not. Believing they like him could also suggest a failure to imagine the desperation that goes into jerking off strangers for a living, or trading bodily fluids with them. Besides the squeam factor, it’s dangerous. How do you know in advance whether you’re getting a nice guy looking for self care and a monster looking to satisfy a torture fetish?

A 2020 study linked below is one of many finding female sex workers have the highest rate of incidents of violence among women - all of whom are subject to gender-based intimate partner violence.

His lawyer said he cried when he was arrested and insisted on his innocence. He’s locked up now. The judge ordered him held without bail “because of the extreme depravity of the allegations.”

Related reads

Timeline

NYT latest

Village Voice ads

Study on sex workers and violence.

Bob Kolker’s Lost Girls