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Almost 10 years ago, a woman’s date with Gilgo Beach murder suspect Rex Heuermann turned creepy.
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“Do you like true crime?” he asked over seafood. “Do you know anything about the Gilgo Beach killer?”
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Heuermann “weirded me out,” she remembered. “I didn’t want dessert.”
Maybe it was his announced obsession with true crime. Or how he couldn’t stop talking about the Gilgo Beach serial killings — and knew things about the case that hadn’t yet been in the papers.
But nearly ten years ago, Nikkie Brass, then in her mid-20s, hit the brakes hard on what she calls her “date” with Rex Heuermann — the Long Island, New York, man charged with killing three sex workers and leaving their bodies to rot in the underbrush along a bayfront highway.
As she put it in a TikTok post from Monday through her account, @your_recovery_stylist, he “really weirded me out.”
“I didn’t want dessert,” she remembered of hightailing it out of dinner.
Heuermann, a 59-year-old father of two, was arrested last week after federal, state and local investigators linked him to the long-cold case through a cache of evidence including cell phone tower site data, DNA from hairs left at the scene, and an internet search history heavy with torture porn.
She’d met him on “one of the sketchy sites, back then,” Brass, 34, joked to Insider on Tuesday of the dating websites she frequented while living on Long Island.
“I just want girls to understand how dangerous those sites can be,” the hair stylist and mom, who now lives in New England, said of why she’s coming forward, including to Insider and Good Morning America, which will air an interview with her on Wednesday morning.
Brass, like many Long Islanders, followed closely the then-unsolved Gilgo Beach serial murder case — including the four petite, young sex workers, all in their 20s, whose deaths prosecutors have alleged were committed by a single client — Heuermann, a Manhattan architect.
What freaked Brass out most about Heuermann?
He knew about a victim whose death, at the time of their date, hadn’t been publicized yet, she said.
“So, I don’t really know where to totally begin with this,” Brass began, nervously describing the date in Monday’s TikTok post.
“It was anywhere from 2014 to 2016,” she said.
“And part of me thinks that I should go to the cops and talk to them, because he did say information that like wasn’t let out to the public,” she said.
“And honestly that’s what made me lose the date,” she said of her decision to bail.
“Because I knew. Because I was watching the news and I was following this case.”
They met “at a place in Port Jeff,” she said in Monday’s post, meaning the town of Port Jefferson, a 50-minute drive from where Heuermann lived with his family in Massapequa Park.
“A seafood place,” she said. “And I kinda had a bad feeling to begin with, but I don’t always trust my gut. I was young and dumb, and so I went,” she said, giving the camera a wry smile.
Dinner began with a drink and what she called “normal” conversation. “What do you do?” they asked each other. “What are your hobbies?”
“And then, he brought up, ‘Are you into true crime?'”
“He was like, ‘Are you a true crime fan?’ And I was like, ‘Actually, I am. I could probably tell you more about serial killers than their own mother can. It’s bad.'”
Heuermann then asked a question that, in retrospect, now sounds chilling: “Well, do you know about the Gilgo Beach killer?”
Of course, she remembered answering.
“Everybody on Long Island does,” she told him. “We’re all following that case.”
Heuermann started spouting off about his knowledge of the case, she said. And he knew a lot, including, she said, “about a body that wasn’t announced on the news yet.”
“It was not just him,” she said, adding that Heuermann’s descriptions leads her to believe now that, “there were other people involved.”
“He is taking the fall though, I think, for all of them,” she said in the post.
The architect was very detailed, she said of his knowledge of the Gilgo Beach case. And as he spoke, he seemed “like he was reliving it in his head,” she said.
“He seemed like, excited. Like it peaked his interest. He sat up straighter.”
Brass changed the subject, and tried to speed things along, she said.
When dinner ended, and Heuermann asked, “Well, do you want to go back to my place?” Brass hesitated.
“I don’t know,” she told him. “I’d have to follow you in my car.”
“No, no, no,” she said Heuermann insisted. “Get in my car with me. Leave your car here.”
“I’m not going to leave my car in a random lot in Port Jeff,” she said she protested.
Heuermann kept trying to persuade her into his car.
“It’ll be fine. No big deal. Just come with me,” she said he told her.
When Brass stood her ground, telling Heuermann that she didn’t feel comfortable getting into the car alone with a stranger, he turned angry and insistent, she said.
“That made me even more like — ‘I gotta get out of here.'”
Brass shakes her finger at the camera as she closes the post with this thought: “Thank god. I trusted my gut. I left after that check came.
“And I never spoke to that man again.”
Read the original article on Insider
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