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Since his July 2023 arrest, accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann has been under a microscope. Still, the 61-year-old architect from Long Island remains a puzzle.
Peacock’s eye-opening documentary The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, now streaming, shares insights from the alleged murderer’s estranged wife and grown children — as well as another surprising inside source.
“I’m in a story that I never wanted to be [in],” David Jimenez, who knew Heuermann for 17 years before his arrest, says in the documentary. “I’m the best friend of a serial killer. The odds are one in 250 million. It’s like I hit lotto, but I didn’t win any money — not a good lotto.”
Jimenez, who is also an architect, said that Heuermann could be “really nice” but could turn in a flash. He said he found that out when he came face to face with “the monster that’s hiding in there.”
Heuermann has been charged with killing seven women whose remains were found along the southern shore of Long Island, near the water. He’s pleaded not guilty to all charges.
How did Rex Heuermann and David Jimenez become friends?
“I met Rex at the Building Department in 2006,” Jimenez told producers. “Big old Rex comes in and he says, ‘Hi, I’m Rex. Really friendly, really nice.” Besides their careers, the men clicked over mutual interests in guns and shared political views. “All the macho stuff,” Jimenez explained.
At one point, Heuermann invited Jimenez to his home in Massapequa Park on Long Island, where Heuermann gave his friend a tour of his gun vault. “The famous gun room,” Jimenez said on The Gilgo Beach Killer. “I recall vividly that he said, ‘In 30 years, you’re the fourth person to ever be in this room.’”
“He started collecting rifles and all kinds of guns early on, when he was 18,” Jimenez added. “It was an amazing collection.” After Heuermann’s arrest, more than 200 firearms were found in a vault “downstairs” in his home, NBC News reported after his 2023 arrest.
David Jimenez meets “the monster” in Rex Heuermann
Jimenez told the documentary’s producers that Heuermann “was easy to be friends with. We’d go to the range and shoot rifles, pistols, all kinds of guns.”
But Jimenez recalled that during one of these outings, he had a stark awakening when he “made the mistake of touching the gun when Rex was down range picking up targets.”
Jimenez demonstrated for cameras the sound that Heuermann heard when he handled the gun.
Heuermann’s reaction to the movement shocked Jimenez. “He pulled out his gun,” Jimenez shared. “He started running to me, ‘What the f–k are you doing? What are you doing?”
Jimenez described how Heuermann got in his face and pointed a gun right at him. “He got this close to me like this,” Jimenez said. “And I put up my hands and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Rex… Rex, put the gun down.”
Of the incident, Jimenez said, “It was really scary. Thinking back now, I think that was the monster that’s hiding in there.”
“I think he did it,” Rex Heuermann’s friend says
Since his arrest, Heuermann has been behind bars at the Riverhead Correctional Facility in Suffolk County, New York, where Jimenez has been one of just a few visitors.
“It was surreal,” Jimenez said of visiting his friend in the facility. “The guard lets me in, and that’s when I see him sitting down in the middle of the room behind a low partition wall, and he says, ‘Hi David, thanks for coming to see me.’ And I said, ‘Rex, this is really bad.’”
Jimenez said that during the visit, he challenged Heuermann. “I said, ‘There’s so much evidence against you, I don’t even believe you, Rex, and you’re my friend,” Jimenez said he told his friend. “Unless you have something to explain to me and how you didn’t do it, then, come clean… If you did it, confess.”
Heuermann didn’t declare his innocence at the time, Jimenez said. “He teared up a little bit and he started crying,” said Jimenez. “I expected to hear, ‘David, I’m innocent. Can you help me out?’… And that’s when I get the feeling, I think he did it.”
Watch Peacock’s The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, now streaming in full, to learn much more about the case.
