Gilgo Beach Killer Rex Heuermann’s Sheriff: ‘He’s a Sociopath’

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Rex Heuermann strangled eight women over the course of 17 years. I mean, that's the official count, if you will.
He took some of them apart. He scattered their remains in remote locations across Long Island, a long-ocean parkway near Gilgo Beach and the woods in Mandarinville and Southampton. He did all of this, according to his own admission, in the Suffolk County Courtroom, while commuting to Manhattan every day, running an architecture firm, raising two kids and sitting down to dinner with his family.
And when he finally ended up in a 6x9 cell at a Riverhead Correctional Facility, when the masks came off and the world found out what he had been doing since 1993, the one person Rex Heuermann chose to write back was to another serial killer.
That's right, Rex is now running the ranks of serial killers as a pen pal. It wasn't a letter to a priest, not a childhood friend, not a colleague. According to the Suffolk County Sheriff, Errol Toulon, the only person Heuermann responded to out of all of the mail that arrived at his cell, was Keith Hunter Jesperson, the Happy Face Killer, a man convicted of killing at least eight women during the 1990s, while working as a long-haul truck driver across the Pacific Northwest, a man serving multiple life sentences without parole at Oregon State Prison, and you'll note he pops up every now and then in current cases because he's known to be writing to other killers of his ilk.
What did Heuermann reportedly want to know from this man?
What happened? According to reporting, one of the questions in his letter was whether Jesperson had butter for his bread in prison.
Eight women dead, families destroyed, a community that spent over a decade terrified of a killer they couldn't identify. And the thing that mattered to Rex Heuermann six weeks into his incarceration was the food.
There's something else in that letter that we'll come back to. Something about Heuermann's state of mind that tells you more than his lawyers probably wanted the public to know. But first, you need to understand who was on the other end of that correspondence and why he reached out in the first place. Keith Hunter Jesperson earned his nickname by drawing smiley faces on letters he sent to police and media outlets during his killing years. Letters is his thing. That's not a quirk. That's a signature. Jesperson has spent his entire incarceration, decades now, performing for an audience. He's called newsrooms. He's given interviews to podcasters. Confessed to his eighth killing on camera during a recorded law enforcement interview in Oregon. Every act of communication with this guy, anything he's ever engaged in, has been a performance of status. The man doesn't just want attention. He needs it the way the rest of us need air. So when Rex Heuermann was arrested in July of 23, when the Gilgo Beach case exploded back into the national spotlight, Jesperson saw an opportunity. According to Sheriff Toulon, Jesperson wrote first and he didn't write once. He reportedly sent over 10 letters to Heuermann 2019 S. Sal Lynn Riverhead. That's how it was addressed over and over. Ten letters from a man Heuermann had never met, never spoken to, never had any connection to outside of one shared characteristic. A man in Oregon decades into a life sentence writing to a man in New York who had just been pulled off a Long Island street in charge of multiple murders.
According to a lot of the reporting, the tone of Jesperson's letter was instructional. He reportedly opened with something like a hypothetical. So let's say you just got arrested for multiple murders. Casual phrasing, but it function as a tutorial. He cited his own conviction history, his credibility, the prison equivalent of a resume. He reportedly urged Heuermann to confess, skip the trial, take the deal. The prison is better than jail. He allegedly told him the press coverage dies down. Prosecutors don't get to gloat. Jesperson was positioning himself as a mentor, the elder statesman, the man who'd been through it and could guide the newcomer. And that framing, that hierarchy, matters more than the advice itself. Now here's the part about the letter I told you that we come back to. According to reporting, Heuermann's response was dated August 31st to 23, barely six weeks after his arrest. He reportedly acknowledged that he'd received a flood of mail from strangers, interview requests, people wanting to be pen pals, one person who sent three separate letters asking Heuermann to write back so he could add it to his collection and according to reporting, Heuermann wrote that Jesperson was the only person he'd written back to and the only person he planned to write to. What about that? Out of everyone, everyone who reached out to him, journalists, true crime fans, curious strangers, collectors, the only hand Rex Heuermann reached back out for belonged to another convicted killer who'd done the same thing he did. He reportedly asked about day to day life inside the food, the exercise conditions, the routines. He expressed concern that guards might be reading his mail. And according to Jesperson, Heuermann wrote that the letters had been a help and a comfort. How nice. The tone, according to those who've read it, was calm, settled, not panic, not fighting. He wrote that he'd been doing a lot of thinking. If you track the timeline forward from that letter in August 23 to his guilty plea in April 26, you can see the arc. His attorney said the plea brought Heuermann a huge sense of relief.