NY Firefighter: How I Realized My Neighbor Was a Suspected Serial Killer

On the morning of May 17, police helicopters clattered overhead and squad cars again closed off the block in suburban Massapequa Park, just as they had a year before.

The first search had been immediately after the hulking architect in the ramshackle house on First Avenue was arrested as the Gilgo Beach Killer. It lasted for 13 days in July of 2023, and it seemed the investigators must have collected everything of evidentiary value from the ranch house Rex Heuermann shared with his wife and two grown children, a daughter in her twenties and a stepson in his early thirties.

Heuermann was indicted for murdering four young sex workers whose remains had been among 10 bodies dumped roughly 500 feet apart along a deserted quarter-mile stretch of beach previously known as one of Long Island’s better surfing spots. The Gilgo Four, as they were called, had disappeared between July 2007, and September 2010.

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Six weeks ago, the police were suddenly back to conduct a second search. Heuermann was indicted on June 6 for killing two other women. (Heuermann was remanded without bail. He is due back in court on July 30.) One alleged victim, 28-year-old Sandra Costilla of Trinidad and Tobago by way of Queens, had been murdered and dumped near a highway toward the end of Long Island in 1993. This was 14 years before the earliest of the Gilgo Four.

And that meant Heuermann was alleged to have begun killing at least two years before FDNY Firefighter Etienne de Villiers and his wife, Patricia, moved in next door.

For 30 years, this proud serial rescuer with Engine Company 303 in Jamaica, Queens—who spent every working day ready to risk all to save lives—unknowingly lived next to a suspected serial killer who is alleged to have meticulously planned how to hunt, torture, and murder his victims.

The de Villiers came to suburban Massapequa, L.I. from Astoria, Queens, in 1995, and one difference in their new home was that they now had a yard where Patricia could sunbathe. One unwelcome twist was that the 6-foot-4-inch Heuermann took to peering over the fence and trying to make small talk when de Villiers was on duty at the firehouse (where he is known to colleagues, because of his distinctive surname, as “Frenchie”).

“Every time she’s out there and I’m at the firehouse working, Rex would hang over the fence, talking to her,” de Villiers recalled. “She finally told me that he was creeping her out.”

De Villiers, who is 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and weighs 170 pounds, confronted his much larger neighbor.

“I had a talk with him, and he said, ‘Oh no, no, I’m just so tall and you know…’ de Villiers recalled. “And I said, ‘Rex, please stop.’”

Heuermann continued gawking at Patricia.

“Finally, I literally threatened the guy,” de Villiers said. “I figured if I got to fight the guy, I got to fight the guy. I don’t care how big he is. I told him, ‘Don’t make me…’ I said ‘STOP!’”

Heuermann heeded the warning.

“Not only did he stop, he didn’t get mad,” de Villiers recalled. “He didn't come back at me, which kind of surprised me. He said, ‘I won’t do it no more,’ and he backed off immediately. So I went, ‘OK.’”

From then on the two were friendly, if not quite friends.

“We didn’t have a beer together or play cards or anything together. But whenever I came out to get my car, he we would always say, ‘How’re you doing?’”

The two would then sometimes have what de Villiers later termed “a little two-minute chitchat.”

“That’s pretty much how it went, how it stayed over the next 30 years,” de Villiers said.

Heuermann invariably made reference to his size.

“Every time, you’d talk to the guy, he’d throw that in; ‘Me being six-five, 250,’” de Villiers recalled.

Heuermann also told de Villiers that he had a big gun collection and liked hunting. Heuermann said he was an architect who facilitated renovations in Manhattan, which surprised de Villiers given the rundown condition of the man’s home. Heuermann had grown up there and bought it from his widowed mother in 1994. He spoke about renovating it, but let it fall into further disrepair.

“A shoemaker with holes in the soles,” de Villiers later said. “People would say, ‘Oh, you live next to that house.’”

Others in this suburban neighborhood would cross the street when they saw Heuermann.

“The neighbor to the other side of him had these big trees put up so you can’t see his house at all, so he had zero contact with the guy,” de Villiers said. “So it’s sad to say that pretty much the only one who spoke to that guy was me.”

Heuermann asked de Villiers several times if he played cards. De Villiers lied and said no.

“Show me a fireman who doesn’t play cards,” de Villiers later remarked.

De Villiers recalled that Heuermann had two or three friends who came by occasionally early on, but they were scruffier than typical Massapequa residents, many of whom are cops and other firefighters.

“They seemed a pretty low life type,” de Villiers said. “You could pick them up and put them in a trailer park.”

“I went outside and said, ‘Rex is the Gilgo killer?’”

A year after de Villiers moved there, and three years after Heuermann allegedly began killing, the architect married Asa Ellerup. The best man was Heuermann’s brother, Craig, who was on parole after being sentenced to three years for criminally negligent homicide. He had killed a New York City Housing Police captain while driving drunk, and what court papers describe as “coked up,” at 9:30 a.m.

During a few random encounters, de Villiers found Craig to be “a nasty and mean motherfucker.” Heuermann was by the firefighter’s experience “kind of a wuss.”

Ellerup moved into her husband’s home and they had a daughter, Victoria, two years later. Ellerup already had a son, Christopher Sheridan, who was then 8 years old and, by her account, has “developmental disabilities.” De Villiers noted that the boy seemed extremely withdrawn, and appeared to be friendless as he grew older.

In the wake of 9/11, de Villiers was at Ground Zero for days, joining his comrades in searching for bodies. He only recently learned that his neighbor had allegedly been working at the same time on what Heuermann termed a “post event” to-do list.

According to court papers, Heuermann began a computer document he labeled “HK2002-04” in 2000, and was still editing it in 2002. The document was deleted at some point, but was recovered by investigators in March during an exhaustive examination of some 30 computers seized from Heuermann.

One section headed “body prep” concerned measures to prevent bodies from being found and identified, the very opposite of the mission of de Villiers and his fellow firefighters in their continuing recovery effort.

“Wash body inside and all cavities… remove ID marks… remove head and hands,” it read.

By 2004, de Villiers began to suffer the after-effects of searching the toxic ruins of the World Trade Center. He retired with the satisfaction of having spent his adult life saving lives. He did not imagine that his next door neighbor might be responsible for the grisly discoveries at a beach across the Great South Bay from Massapequa.

In Dec. 2010, Officer John Mallia of the Suffolk County Police Department’s K-9 unit was searching the edge of a roadway when his German shepherd, Blue, alerted him. Mallia had been looking for a missing sex worker named Shannon Gilbert, but instead found the remains of Melissa Barthelemy, who had disappeared in 2009. She would become one of the Gilgo Four. Police would come to believe that Heuermann used her cellphone after the murder to make obscene and threatening calls to her 15-year-old sister, asking if she was also “a whore.”

Blue kept searching and found four more of the 10 that would be discovered there. Police announced that Long Island had another serial killer, preceded by Joel Rifkinin who is believed to have killed 17 women before his arrest in 1993, and Robert Shulman, who was arrested in 1996 and convicted of killing five women.

Now there was The Gilgo Beach killer. Investigators initially suspected a disgraced high-ranking police official with a sadistic streak. But DNA convinced them otherwise.

At 5:30 a.m. on July 14, 2023, police knocked at de Villiers’ door and asked him to move his cars from his driveway and the front of his house.

“I said, ‘Yes officers, absolutely. But could you tell me why?’ They said, ‘No,’” de Villiers recalled.

De Villiers did as he was told, then turned on the news. He was stunned by what he heard.

“I went outside and said, ‘Rex is the Gilgo killer?’” de Villiers remembered. “The guy looked at me and said, ‘That’s why I can’t talk.’”

As it happened, Heuermann’s stepson had begun to make a kind of social breakthrough thanks to another dog, this a black Lab mix named Stuart he had acquired a few weeks before.

“Once he got the dog, the kid just came out of his shell a bit,” de Villiers said. “It was like, so nice to see he would walk around with the dog, take him out for walks regularly. Four or five times a day he’d be taking that dog out. He finally has, like, a friend.”

And Christopher seemed to open up more after his father’s arrest.

“It looked like the dog was a good thing for him, but the really big change came when the father got arrested,” de Villiers reported. “He’s come along a long, long way. It seems like mentally, he progressed. Now you could have a conversation with him.”

Ironically, one of those conversations was about Heuermann.

“He looks at me and says, ‘I don’t think my father did that,’” de Villiers recalled. “And I said, ‘Chris, it’s OK, you shouldn’t think your father did that. It’s OK. In America, you’re innocent until proven guilty.’”

An empath by inclination as well as profession, de Villiers also felt sympathy for the 27-year-old sister, Victoria.

“She’s like going around with purple colored hair and stuff like that, but at the same time very, very reserved,” de Villiers said. “I never really had a conversation with her, just waving and smiling at each other. And you know, I always felt sorry for her, because between the house and Rex and everything, I would imagine that the kids in high school [had] probably made fun of her.”

“What a horror for that kid”

Then came the second search. Ellerup, who had by then secured a post-arrest divorce from Heuermann, temporarily relocated along with her children and the dog.

After the second search ended on May 23, the family returned. Christopher seemed more withdrawn. He told de Villiers the family’s lawyer had told them not to talk to anybody.

On June 6, Heuermann was charged with two more murders; his earliest on record, Castilla, in 1993 and his second, 20-year-old Jessica Taylor in 2003. The indictment reported that Taylor’s torso had been found shortly after her disappearance in a wooded area near a rifle range where Heuermann had briefly volunteered as a gun safety instructor.

Her head and forearms had not been discovered until eight years later, 40 miles west, on the same road where the remains of the Gilgo Four were found. An investigator who asked not to be identified suggested that the failure to discover the severed parts may have convinced Heuermann that Gilgo Beach was a good dumping ground.

The decapitation and severed limbs were in keeping with “HK2002-04,” the murder manual that the indictment says Heuermann was working at the time de Villiers was searching for those lost on 9/11. Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney later described it as a “planning document” to “methodically blueprint and plan out his kills with excruciating detail."

“His intent, specifically, was to locate these victims, to hunt them down and to bring them under his control and to kill them,” Tierney would note in a June 6 press conference. One section is titled TRG, which investigators believe stands for “TARGETS.”

“Small is good,” the document says.

De Villiers later noted to The Daily Beast that this would have applied to his wife.

“She’s a petite girl, 105 pounds, smoking hot,” he said. “So you know it's scary now, when you stop and think that the girls all look like my wife.”

Now, the hulking architect who had once leered over the fence at Patricia was being held without bail, having pleaded not guilty to six murders. De Villiers looked over at Heuermann’s yard, where the grass had grown long during the second search. He saw Christopher preparing to cut it with an antiquated rotary mower that looked considerably older than Christopher himself.

De Villiers had learned over the years that the son was not fond of physical labor, and the lawn seemed a challenge. The firefighter’s heart went out to the son of the accused serial killer.

“I saw him mowing the lawn with that rusty old piece of shit, and you know, you almost feel like saying, ‘Let me buy you a freaking mower,’” he said. “What a horror for that kid. He just started to come out of his shell, and then the whole world gets upside down.”