Drinking a beer and cracking jokes with colleagues, he seemed like any co-worker enjoying a night out after a busy day in a Manhattan office.
But once he left the bar and headed back to his Massapequa Park, Long Island home the architect Rex Heuermann allegedly went Jekyll and Hyde and prowled his neighborhood looking for his next victim to kill as his wife and children slept.
Katherine Shepherd worked with Heuermann in the same midtown Manhattan office at 525 Seventh Avenue in New York City’s Fashion District during the early 2000s.
She was working for an architectural design firm and his company was providing city permits.
On occasion, she and her co-workers would gather at Pete’s Tavern in Gramercy Park.
She remembered Heuermann acting like the life of the party which later earned him the nickname ‘Sexy Rexy’ amongst colleagues.
‘He was fun. He was funny,’ Shepherd told Daily Mail. ‘He would tell funny stories and jokes that made everyone laugh.’
During working hours, she said he was always professional towards her and the other female employees.
‘If he ever made me feel uncomfortable, touched me in any way or would’ve made any inappropriate sex jokes there was no way I would have worked with him,’ she said.
‘Never ever did he ever make me feel uncomfortable,’ she added.
However, she said he liked pretty girls in the office and using them to help get what he wanted professionally.
‘He knew how to get permits and was renowned for it. He knew all the people and had all the relationships,’ she said.
‘He had women in the office that were petite and beautiful and he would send them down to the city to get those permits.’
Heuermann was arrested two years ago in July 2023 and initially charged with the murders of three women: Amber Costello, Melissa Barthelemy and Megan Waterman.
Since then, he has been charged with the murders of four more victims: Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Sandra Costilla, Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack.
All the victims were working as sex workers when they vanished after going to meet a client.
Their bodies were found dumped along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach and other remote spots on Long Island.
Some of the victims had been bound, others had been dismembered and their remains discarded in multiple locations.
The 61-year-old has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him.
Shepherd said: ‘It’s just hard to come to grips that this is the same person. It just doesn’t match. It doesn’t match.
‘Though I know in my heart he did it. The evidence is overwhelming.
‘He was able to separate his life – somehow put a divider in-between murderous spawn of Satan to a caring father and business owner. I don’t know how but he was able too.’
She recalled the first time she met him and said she was stunned by his 6ft 4ins size – a client of one of his alleged victims has described him as resembling an ‘ogre’.
‘He’s one of the biggest men you’ll ever meet in your life. It is very intimidating having someone that large,’ Shepherd said.
‘He joked around a lot and made you feel comfortable because he knew he was big and intimidating. I think he was trying not to be intimidating,’ she added.
However she said he was ‘soft spoken’ and described him as coming off as ‘arrogant and cocky’. She said: ‘He was very smart. He was very confident.’
Shepherd remembered how kind he was to her when she injured herself on black ice on a city street and took her to the emergency room when the pain became too much to bear.
That day in the hospital, she said he waited for her for hours as she took tests, including an MRI.
Once discharged, they went by cab to her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and after he got her settled, he went to the pharmacy to pick up her painkiller prescription.
She remembered he made her a slice of toast when he returned before leaving her by herself.
‘I was grateful for his help. I felt like he was almost taking care of me like a dad would,’ Shepherd said.
The day that happened was November 17, 2003, four months earlier one of Heuermann’s alleged victims 20-year-old Jessica Taylor’s body was found decapitated with her hands cuts off in a wooded area in Manorville, Long Island.
‘He (allegedly) cut her head and hands off, spread them around Long Island and four months later took me to the hospital because I was in pain and needed help,’ she said.
When Shepherd learned Heuermann had been arrested for murder and was not the ‘normal, everyday, nerdy guy’, she thought he was but a cold blooded killer she was stunned.
‘I have a totally different view of this guy because like I said, he took care of me. He helped me. He took time out of his day, his job to take me to the hospital to take care of me. I saw that as, “Wow what a good co-worker realizing that I needed help stopping his day to help me. No one else did,”‘ she said.
In 2005, she started consulting on her own and working with Heuermann directly. She said, they’d meet at job sites and one time, the avid hunter and gun aficionado, taught her how to shoot a gun while they were at a job site in the Bronx.
She said she didn’t plan on it but went for it. ‘It was a 9mm – the kind you see in movies all the time – the black square gangster gun,’ she explained.
‘Anyway that is what I fired. He was telling me where to put my hand because when you shoot the whole top part goes back and if you put your hand in the wrong spot you can hurt yourself’.
On some days they’d travel in the same vehicle to a job. She said their conversations were always focused on business and that he would never talk about his wife or kids.
However, she did meet them once when she went to his home to do some measuring for a home renovation project he was planning.
She was horrified to later learn that she took measurements in the same area that held a secret room where he would allegedly torture his victims.
She recalled her final communication with him was in summer 2011 while she was working in California.
She sent an email to Heuermann for some permit expediting work she needed done.
She said she jokingly called him ‘Rexy’ like ‘Sexy Rexy’ – the playful term that she and her colleagues sometimes used.
It was also the time when some of the bodies were being discovered along Ocean Parkway in Suffolk County’s GIlgo Beach. She said that he never responded.
This month marked two years since Heuermann’s arrest and the interior designer still grapples with the idea that her kind-hearted co-worker who became her knight in shining armor when she was in distress, is the accused Gilgo Beach serial killer and charged with the brutal murders of seven women.
‘I didn’t even know about the Gilgo Beach Killer until two years ago. It feels like someone is playing a trick on me. It feels like you are talking about someone else.’
‘I am a little bit in denial, still. The practical side of me understands what happened but I just don’t get it. It is really hard to comprehend.
‘I didn’t know he was capable of that. How is anyone capable of that? He has kids. How do you have kids and a wife and go off and do something like that,’ she added.
After all this time, Shepherd said her time with Heuermann still haunts her but she concluded: ‘It is good to talk about it. Every time I talk about it – it is like a little therapy and it helps me.’
