Accused Gilgo Beach murderer Rex Heuermann was likely “always on the prowl” for another potential victim to fulfil his sick fantasies, according to a forensic psychiatrist.
The Long Island architect and married father is implicated in three murders but after his arrest last Thursday police said he had been soliciting sex workers and viewing violent rape and torture porn right up until he was nabbed.
“I think his pattern was carefully planned…he [allegedly] repeated the same pattern for years,” Dr. Carole Lieberman told The Post on Tuesday.
“I call him a serial sexual sadist. He was, in a way, always on the prowl…in the sense that his sexual sadistic urges were there all the time.”
Heuermann, 59, pleaded not guilty last week to multiple murder charges in connection with to the deaths of sex workers Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Amber Lynn Costello, 22, and Megan Waterman, 27.
Their bodies were all found near each other in burlap sacks after they had hastily been buried on Gilgo beach. Each’s death had been ruled the result of homicidal violence with the bodies showing signs of strangulation.
The architect and married father is implicated in the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Amber Lynn Costello, 22, and Megan Waterman, 27, officials announced last week.
He is also the prime suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25.
All four women disappeared between July 2007 and September 2010; they were each petite, and advertised as sex workers online.
Their remains were found within several feet of each other off Ocean Parkway near Gilgo State Park in December 2010.
Lieberman also suggested Heuermann’s seemingly high-flying professional life as a Manhattan architect may have been a “front.”
“He wanted people to think that he was very successful, with a Fifth Avenue office and so on,” Lieberman said, referring to the Midtown office of Heuerman’s company, RH Architecture, near where he was arrested last week.
“There seems to be a contradiction between how much money he was allegedly making – or wanted people to believe he was making – and his life,” she continued.
“His house is in total disrepair. Maybe it’s a front.”
After he was arrested it emerged Heuermann, who lived in a ramshackle home with his wife and children in Massapequa, was in serious financial trouble and owed a lot of money in back taxes.
Lieberman also speculated Heuermann’s professional grandiosity hinted at the more sinister, hidden side of his personality.
“[His Bonjour Realty interview] was all bluster,” Lieberman said, referring to the South Shore native’s sit-down with the YouTube channel in February 2022.
“He was egotistical, he was grandiose. When he said the tool he would want most was a hammer…that was such a clue to his need for control, why he [allegedly] needed to control these women.”
Authorities spent most of the weekend combing through Heuermann’s home, as well as a storage unit he kept in Amityville.
“I think absolutely that he would have taken trophies [from the victims],” Lieberman told The Post.
“Because when killers take trophies, it’s to allow them to relive the thrill and the power of the kill. That each time they hold or look at the trophy, it swells them with a feeling of pride.”
Earlier this week, Lieberman commented on the disturbing phone calls that the Gilgo murder suspect allegedly made to Melissa Barthelemy’s family after she vanished in 2009.
“He needed to taunt their families with calls to gloat about having killed their loved ones, in order to inflict pain on them as well,” she explained to Newsweek.
Heuermann was “like a pack rat” and stored dozens of bizarre objects as well as an arsenal of up to 300 guns in the suburban home, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison said on Monday.
“There is something paranoid about [the gun arsenal],” Lieberman opined.
“It’s paranoid and it’s also sexual. Because the gun is a phallic symbol. It’s like because he didn’t feel that his manhood was sufficiently powerful, he had to buy all these weapons to make him feel more like a man.”
Officials ultimately opted to arrest Heuermann at his office, instead of at home, to circumvent the threat of the intimidating gun collection, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney explained.
As for what could have inspired someone like Heuermann to commit something like the “Gilgo Four” murders, Lieberman indicated that the answer likely lay in the suspect’s childhood.
“[His childhood must have been] especially twisted because of his obsession with torture porn and child porn. That reflect sexual abuse, usually,” she explained.
In addition to bills for burner phones that linked him to the Gilgo victims, Heuermann also made internet searches for child porn and rape videos, court documents revealed last week.
It could also be notable that Heuermann’s brother, Craig, served a lengthy prison sentence after killing a police officer in a drunken, drug-fueled crash in 1988.
“The fact that there are two of them…’dysfunctional’ does not do justice to the kind of home [they could have come] from,” Lieberman stated.
The bodies of the Gilgo Four were found while police combed the somewhat remote coastal area for Shannan Gilbert, a Jersey City woman who was also a sex worker, who vanished from the neighborhood in May 2010 after leaving a client’s house.
In the months after the Gilgo Four were discovered, authorities stumbled upon six additional bodies off Ocean Parkway.
“[Heuermann] could be connected [to the other Gilgo bodies]. I’m just not sure,” Lieberman told The Post.
Gilbert’s body was found in December 2011. Her death was officially ruled an accident with it determined she got lost in the reeds and drowned, though this conclusion has been hotly debated by the public.
“I don’t think [Heuermann] killed Shannan Gilbert [but] I think that there is a lot more to this story,” Lieberman mused.
She also doubted that whoever is responsible for the Gilgo Four’s murders would stop killing after the final victim, Costello, who disappeared in September 2010.
“I don’t think he went 10 years and just didn’t kill anyone,” she said.