Suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuerman was a ‘blank cipher’ who lacked empathy and had a habit of rubbing his colleagues the wrong way, according to former peers.
Design director Neve Miyasota, who worked with the architect for years after meeting in the 1990s, revealed that the two sometimes clashed when Heuermann worked with his firm to expedite architectural drawings through the New York City Buildings Department.
Speaking to DailyMail.com on Monday, Miyasota, 62, described his colleague as a hard-nosed architect who ‘annoyed a lot of people because he liked to go to war’ and didn’t say a word as he instructed people. Comply with the code.
Another former colleague who shared similar sentiments described Heuerman as a stickler who liked to toot his own horn about his accomplishments in the field.
Miyasota said, ‘We used to hang our heads sometimes. ‘I’m a creative so I wanted to keep my creative stance, and he would bring things back to reality.’
Designer Neve Miyasota, 62, described former colleague Rex Heuerman as a hard-nosed architect who ‘annoyed a lot of people because he liked to go to war’. He is pictured with murder suspects and former colleagues, including interior designer Catherine Shepherd (left), during a happy hour event in 2005.
Speaking to DailyMail.com, Miasota, who was his firm’s design director, said that the two occasionally ‘butt heads’ due to Human’s ‘hard-nosed’ and carefree work ethic.
According to the designer, the 59-year-old murder suspect was considered ‘weird’ among colleagues but would still join the group for lunch, happy hour and other social events.
Miyasota said, ‘He was socially awkward in many ways. ‘I think the word for it is, he doesn’t seem to have empathy.
‘He was sort of like a cipher, what is this person? I didn’t get angry, kind or sad from him. I just got blank. I didn’t get his contract.’
Manhattan architect Rex Heuerman, 59, is charged with three murders attributed to the Gilgo Beach serial killer, and is the prime suspect in the killing of a fourth victim.
Earlier on Monday, DailyMail.com published exclusive photos showing Heuerman having a few pints and mingling with colleagues at a social gathering at Pete’s Tavern, a pub in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood.
Heuerman, who runs RH Consultants & Associates, was arrested outside his Manhattan office last Thursday night, leaving colleagues ‘shocked’ by the sudden break in the unsolved Gilgo Beach murders.
The married father of two, who lived in Massapequa Park, Long Island, has been charged with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, whose bodies were found in 2010.
Miyasota is one of several colleagues who have now come forward in their encounters with the alleged killer who managed to fly under the radar of investigators for nearly two decades.
In her interview with DailyMail.com, she also recalled the eerie sight of Heuermann’s car, which was cluttered with discarded wrappers, boxes and coffee cups.
DailyMail.com published an exclusive photo of Heuerman having a few pints and mingling with colleagues at Pete’s Tavern, a pub in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood in 2005.
Several former colleagues have recalled their encounters with the ‘strange’ and ‘socially awkward’ architect who is now accused of murdering at least three women in 2009 and 2010.
Heuerman, who runs RH Consultants & Associates, was arrested outside his Manhattan office on July 13, after investigators made a sudden break in a years-long cold case.
‘It was filled with rubbish, stacked up to the top of the dash,’ he said. ‘I just thought what would happen.’
The vehicle’s description echoed that of Heumann’s neighbors, who said his home was also in disarray.
Miyasota was also aware that Heuermann had several guns and firearms.
Colleagues assumed he was stockpiling weapons in preparation for some kind of apocalypse, but did not suspect he could be violent.
A female colleague, who worked in his office for years, also told DailyMail.com that Heuermann has made no secret of his love of firearms, telling supporters when hunting and eating deer at the gun range and in the woods. Venison from his kill.
He was awkward, but not shy, he explained. He loved waxing about his work and showing off his skills.
“He was a bit of a narcissist,” said the woman, who did not want to be named.
‘He liked to talk about himself, you know, shouldering himself for all his achievements, that he was an architect, that he knew the building code well.’
‘He was socially awkward, but he loved to talk,’ she added. ‘Certainly he was not lonely. If you see him standing in line somewhere, he’ll strike up a conversation.’
Heuerman had lived on his Massapequa Park, Long Island property with his wife, Asa Ellarup, and their two children since 1980.
Drone footage of Heuerman’s home shows police outside the one-story building and the basement entrance
Interior designer Kathryn Shepherd, 47, worked with suspected serial killer Rex Heuerman, 59, for five years, including a 2005 project on his Massapequa Park home.
But this former co-worker never visited her home or went out with her socially, said Heuermann, who usually doesn’t mix her professional and personal life.
‘He kept professional and personal life completely separate,’ he said. ‘I worked together in the office with him and we’d go to client meetings, and that was it.’
At least four long-barreled firearms, as well as several blue plastic boxes with weapons in them, were seen carrying at least four long-barreled firearms from Human’s ‘dungeon’-like Massapequa home Sunday morning, days after his arrest.
And in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com earlier Monday, interior designer Kathryn Shepherd, who has worked on projects with Human, recalled that he once refused to let her into a locked room in his basement in 2005 when she was appraising the property.
Heuermann planned to renovate the kitchen but also wanted precise measurements of the rest of the house, for which he enlisted Shepherd.
He went into the room to take measurements and she followed him downstairs.
‘In the basement, this one room was locked, and he said I couldn’t go into that room,’ she told DailyMail.com.
‘I was – what the hell? It’s boring. And he kind of joked, like, oh you can’t go there because there’s stuff. And then he said, “I’ve got a bunch of guns.”
New York state police removed a large weapon from Heuerman’s Long Island home on Sunday after searching the property to determine if he had left behind any ‘trophies’ from his three alleged victims.
An officer was seen removing two additional firearms from the home on Sunday
‘He was weird about it, and I was, like, fine,’ Shepherd told DailyMail.com. ‘I could measure around it.’
He remembers finding his reaction strange at the time and now wonders what else he could have hidden in the 12’x15′ space.
‘I couldn’t understand why she was so weird about it, and now I’m wondering ‘what was she hiding?’ ‘ said the shepherd.
‘It was a big room. What was happening in that room? Is that where he took the women?’
Shepherd describes how he developed a friendly, working relationship with the architect who even once took him to a firing range in the Bronx where he taught him how to fire a 9mm handgun.
On another occasion when she fell on the ice, Heuerman took her to a hospital and then back to his apartment in Manhattan where he gave her medicine.
Shepherd worked with Heuerman from 2002 to 2007 and shared office space with him for those two years in Manhattan.
As a freelance interior designer she regularly traveled with him to job sites. At the time she found him smart and mostly friendly and called him ‘socially awkward’ like many of his peers.