Female designer says Rex Heuermann asked her about Gilgo Beach murders

A female interior designer has revealed that the suspect charged with killing three of the 11 people whose remains were found on Long Island once asked her about the Gilgo Beach murders.

Rex Heuermann, an architect, has been charged with killing Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Costello and Megan Waterman. He is also considered the prime suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, authorities said.

Heuermann’s lawyer, Michael Brown, entered a not guilty plea on his behalf on Friday in state court in Riverhead, New York. He was ordered jailed without bail. Brown told reporters after the arraignment that Heuermann told him: “I didn’t do this.”

The remains of the women known as the “Gilgo Beach Four,” all of them sex workers, were found in 2010 by police searching for another missing woman, Shannon Gilbert. By the following year, 11 sets of human remains in total had been found on the same stretch of Gilgo Beach—nine women, a man and an infant.

Dominique Vidal, an interior designer, told ABC 7 that Heuermann once asked her about the killings.

“He asked me if I knew about the Gilgo Beach murders,” she said. “And back then, I was ‘Oh you know, he’s just from the area'[…]but now I just see it as a serial killer kind of just putting it in somebody’s face.”

Vidal also said that Heuermann left her a voicemail in February after she left a networking group for architects and designers that she said they were both in.

“I assumed he just wanted to do some work together, but he always made me a little bit uncomfortable,” Vidal said.

Newsweek contacted Vidal and Heuermann’s lawyer for further comment via email on Sunday.

Heuermann, the owner of RH Consultants & Associates, has lived in Massapequa Park, a community just north of the stretch where the remains were found in 2010 and 2011, for decades.

He was arrested on Thursday, 18 months after a new task force to investigate the murders was formed in 2022. Heuermann became the focus of the investigation within a month, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said during a press conference on Friday.

Investigators first identified him as a suspect after linking him to a pickup truck that a witness reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared in 2010.

In March, detectives tailing Heuermann recovered his DNA from pizza crust in a box that he discarded and matched it to a hair found on a restraint used in the killings, authorities said.

Prosecutors said investigators were also able to link Heuermann to other evidence, including burner phones that were used to arrange meetings with the slain women, and taunting calls that a person claiming to be the killer made to one of Barthelemy’s relatives using her cellphone after she disappeared in 2009.

Tierney said Heuermann sought to keep tabs on the probe, and “searched obsessively” for facts about the killings, including the names of women he is accused of killing, as well as podcasts and documentaries about the case.

Authorities moved to charge Heuermann with three of the killings “out of concern for this defendant fleeing and the danger to the community,” Tierney said. They are continuing to work toward charging him in the death of Brainard-Barnes, he said.