As Donna Sturman, her graying Irish Wolfhound, Louise, and I pull into the overflowing parking lot of the Suffolk County Criminal Court complex on Wednesday morning, she begins to reminisce about her former boss, Rex Heuermann.
Sturman, 74, went to work in 2017 as Heuermann’s office manager/personal assistant/bookkeeper/etc, who did “everything” the Long Island resident needed to run his Manhattan architecture practice.
She tells me she took care of his breakfast every day – always two ham-and-egg sandwiches from Starbucks with a grande Americano, two sugars – delivered paperwork for him to the NYC Department of Buildings, drafted client proposals, cleaned his cluttered West 36 Street office in Manhattan, smoothed things over when he bounced checks to vendors, and even bought flowers for his wife when he forgot their anniversary.
Although he could be sharp and intimidating to others, Sturman says Heuermann, now 62, never spoke disrespectfully to her, that he doted on his adult daughter, and introduced his elderly mom to everyone at the company holiday party. Heuermann had few social graces, and didn’t seem to have any friends, but Sturman didn’t see her boss as a monster then, so much as a mess. She describes him as “schlubby,” “shy” and deeply awkward, with “no social skills,” someone she saw as a “dumb, goofy kid.”
Sturman, who was introduced to the hulking, 6-foot-4 Heuermann by a mutual friend, says he told staffers about his gun collection, said he liked to hunt, and had a mounted deer head on the wall across from his desk. But what stands out most to Sturman is how disorganized Heuermann was, while still maintaining a professional reputation for fastidious, painstaking work.
Sturman says Heuermann shorted her salary, bounced checks, and failed to reimburse her for $5,400 in food, supplies, and incidentals she paid for out of her own pocket.
Then there was the pizza. Heuermann enjoyed a slice or three from a place near the office, Sturman tells me. But, she says, Heuermann was the kind of guy who’d plow through slice after slice and still leave a ring of untouched crust on his plate. You should finish the crust, Sturman would tell him. It’s the best part, she said.
Still, Heuermann’s pizza crusts would always end up in the trash.
In 2023, once investigators had homed in on Heuermann as a possible suspect in a string of high-profile murders that had flummoxed police for decades, they tailed him to that same pizza parlor, waited for him to eat, then fished his uneaten crust out of a nearby garbage can and swabbed it for DNA.
The Suffolk County Crime Lab matched the DNA from the crust to a hair found on one of the victims, which, when combined with other evidence, identified Heuermann as the perpetrator. Ironically, Sturman notes, it was this trivial quirk that later became central to proving Heuermann was a serial killer.
“I used to always tell him, eat the crust,” Sturman says while gazing at the courthouse’s fortress-like jail, where Heuermann has been in solitary confinement since his arrest.
An hour or so later, Heuermann would plead guilty to strangling and dismembering seven sex workers between 1993 and 2010 and dumping their remains near Gilgo Beach, a secluded spot roughly 17 miles from the hulking father of two’s dilapidated Massapequa Park home. She is astonished to see Heuermann’s size when he appears before the judge in a navy suit and navy-and-white patterned tie, asking, “Who gains weight in prison?”
It still boggles Sturman’s mind that the penny‑pinching man she thought she knew would turn out to be the ogre‑ish murderer now convicted of slaughtering Jessica Taylor, 20; Megan Waterman, 22; Valerie Mack, 24; Melissa Barthelemy, 24; Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25; Amber Lynn Costello, 27; and Sandra Costilla, 28. During his plea hearing, Heuermann confessed to the killing of an eighth victim, 34-year-old Karen Vergata, for which he was not separately charged.
Before Wednesday’s hearing, attorney Robert Macedonio, who represents Heuermann’s ex-wife Asa, told reporters that discovering her then-husband had murdered more than a half-dozen women was “unimaginable,” and said there is “no way to prepare for it.”
Sturman was similarly stunned when she first learned of Heuermann’s arrest, she tells me. Amid an ongoing battle with her brothers over a financial issue, Sturman took a break from doing legal research online and was idly scrolling through the news when she spotted the name “Rex.” She says she skipped past it, assuming it was somebody else, then saw the word “architect” in a second headline, and “Massapequa” in a third. Finally, the words “serial killer” and “Gilgo Beach” appeared on the screen, according to Sturman, who had by then begun to connect the dots.
A review by police of Heuermann’s online searches revealed a penchant for violent torture porn, looking for rape videos and snuff films, according to authorities. Heuermann also checked the internet regularly for any updates on the investigation into the Gilgo Beach murders and the hunt for the killer, along with tips on how to dispose of a body, cops said.
“It was, quite frankly, almost like an out-of-body experience,” Sturman goes on, still visibly traumatized. “You know, this is a person I know that I used to spend time with? It's, I can't even… it doesn't gel in my mind, to tell you the truth. It just doesn't. Like, this couldn't be the same person I used to sit with, right? Who has a double-life going on and is a serial killer? How do you feel like you really know anybody after this?”
As for Heuermann’s apparent sexual fetishes, Sturman says, “He had no sexuality. I would have never thought of him as even having a penis.”
Following Heuermann’s guilty plea, his defense attorney, Michael Brown, told the assembled media that confessing to the eight murders gave his client a “sense of relief.”
Brown claimed Heuermann “certainly wanted to save the families of the victims” from having to endure a trial, and said that he was similarly concerned with “saving his family from that.”
To that end, Sturman doesn’t recall observing any particular warmth between Heuermann and his wife, but describes his daughter Victoria as the center of his world.
“They were very, very close,” she says, adding that Heuermann was “crazy about her,” and “very protective.”
Sturman imagines Heuermann’s instinct would be to protect Victoria from having to hear testimony about the goriest details from his years-long killing spree, suggesting that accepting a plea deal might have been, in his mind, a final act of protection.
In the end, Sturman left Heuermann’s practice over a payment dispute. She says she ultimately helped him successfully overhaul the business, was able to collect on a variety of bills that had gone unpaid while Heuermann’s brother, who lives in South Carolina, was keeping the books, and streamlined his daily schedule.
“I organized his life so much that he had more time to kill,” Sturman says, perhaps only half-jokingly.
Heuermann is set to be sentenced on June 17. He is expected to spend the rest of his natural life behind bars.
