Gilgo Beach murders suspect Rex Heuermann was an awkward loner who “really scared” his peers and “got picked on a lot,” former classmates say.

“I was really scared of him. He was the type of guy if he snapped, he could really hurt you,” Berner High School graduate John Parisi told the New York Times of the 59-year-old, who was charged earlier this month with multiple counts of murder related to the deaths of three women between 2007 and 2010.

“He was disillusioned and he was misguided. You had to be very careful,” Parisi continued, adding that the gangly adolescent was “everybody’s punching bag.”

“He got picked on a lot. He would take it and take it and walk away. I seen him pushed to his limit,” Parisi recalled.

Parisi remembered a specific incident when a then-preteen Heuermann was “singled out” and set upon by cruel sixth-grade classmates.

The physical bullying stopped when a teacher intervened, he said, but students continued to make fun of Heuermann well into high school.

“He was a recluse, very quiet,” another former classmate, Don Ophals, told the Times.

“When I heard they arrested him, I was not surprised at all.”

Fellow Berner alum John DeMecoli recalled trying to recruit Heuermann into his friends’ street hockey game, to no avail.

“He just didn’t want any part of it, he didn’t want any part of sports,” he said.

“He didn’t want any part of anything.

“[He] didn’t have the social skills to hold a conversation — just a very weird character … he had a mean streak in him.”

“[Heuermann was] an outcast,” another childhood acquaintance, Dan Musto, agreed.

Actor Billy Baldwin graduated from Berner alongside Heuermann in 1981, and also remembered him from middle school.

“He was a bit shy, a bit insecure, a bit uncomfortable,” he told the outlet of his former classmate. 

“I wouldn’t say he was an outcast but he struggled to fit in and to find his crowd.”

In yearbook photos, Heuermann appears as a tall, unassuming teen with disheveled hair and large glasses.

One female classmate, however, previously alleged that he almost killed her with a misguided prank during a 1980 production of “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

According to Musto, everyone at school knew Heuermann had a difficult home life, and frequently clashed with his father — particularly after he was allegedly busted for shoplifting.

“Why is he getting in trouble? He’s fighting with his dad. It was common knowledge,’ he explained.

Heuermann was 12 when his father died in 1975, according to the Times.

He and his siblings — including his brother, Craig, who later served time in prison for fatally running down a police captain while drunk and high — were raised by their mother, Dolores, now 93.

Still, Heuermann’s unhappy childhood never elicited sympathy from his peers.

“That was just how it was at that time. You played the cards you were dealt,” Ophals shrugged.

Heuermann’s former classmates divulged their memories of him at the Berner High School Class of 1983’s 40th reunion, which took place at a pub just a few days after the bombshell arrest identified him as the prime suspect in the grisly Gilgo Beach murders.

One day after he was taken into custody near his Midtown office, he was hit with two counts each of first- and second-degree murder in connection with the strangulations of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Amber Lynn Costello, 22, and Megan Waterman, 27.

Who were the Gilgo Beach victims?

Suspected serial killer Rex Heuermann — a New York City architect and married dad of two — was arrested in connection with the long-unsolved Gilgo Beach murders. The arrest is tied to the so-called “Gilgo Four,” women found wrapped in burlap within days of each other in late 2010.

The years-long investigation that led to the arrest revolved around the discovery of more than 10 sets of human remains along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in Suffolk County between December 2010 and April 2011.

Most victims were petite female sex workers with green or hazel eyes. But there were also two exceptions: a 2-year-old girl and a young Asian man.

Melissa Barthelemy, 24

• Barthelemy was a sex worker who lived in the Unionport section of the Bronx and dreamed of one day opening her own beauty salon. She was last seen alive in her basement apartment on Underhill Avenue on July 12, 2009. Heuermann was charged for Barthelemy’s murder in July 2023.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25

• Brainard-Barnes was living in Norwich, Connecticut. She went missing after taking an Amtrak train from New London, Connecticut, to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan on July 6, 2007. Her remains were found in December 2010. Heuermann was charged for Brainard-Barnes’ murder in January 2024.

Amber Lynn Costello, 27

• Costello, 27, was a sex worker and heroin addict who lived in West Babylon, New York, at a home with a woman and two men. She advertised on Craigslist and Backpage to support her and her roommates’ drug habits. Costello was found on December 13, 2010, after having been last seen leaving her home September 2, 2010. Heuermann was charged for Costello’s murder in July 2023.

Megan Waterman, 22

• Waterman, a 22-year-old mom of one, was last seen on June 6, 2010. She lived in Scarborough, Maine, and earned a living as an escort. She was last seen by her family boarding a New York-bound Concord Trailways bus in Maine. Her body was found on December 13, 2010, on the north side of Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach. Heuermann was charged for Waterman’s murder in July 2023.

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Jessica Taylor, 20

• Remains belonging to Jessica Taylor, a 20-year-old woman working as an escort in New York City, were found in a wooded area in Manorville on July 26, 2003. Her additional remains — initially labeled “Jane Doe No. 5” — were discovered on March 29, 2011, along Ocean Parkway.

Valerie Mack, 24

• Valerie Mack was 24 years old and living in Philadelphia when she went missing. She worked as an escort, using the alias “Melissa Taylor.” Relatives last saw Mack in the spring or summer of 2000 in Port Republic, New Jersey, but she was never reported as missing to the police. Her partial skeletal remains were found in Manorville in September 2000 but were initially known as “Jane Doe No. 6.” More bones were found on April 4, 2011, along Ocean Parkway.

Unidentified Asian man

• The skeletal remains of a yet-to-be-identified Asian man were found along Ocean Parkway on April 4, 2011. It is estimated that the man was between 17 and 23 years old at the time of his death. He was approximately 5 feet 6 inches tall with bad teeth.

‘Peaches’ and her daughter

• An African American woman’s partial remains were discovered in Hempstead Lake State Park back in 1997, and she had become known as “Peaches” because of a bitten tattoo of a peach on her left breast. On April 4, 2011, police uncovered the remains of a toddler, who was about 2 years old at the time of her death. DNA testing confirmed that one of the skeletons was that of the 2-year-old girl’s mother, “Peaches.”

Karen Vergata

• A victim previously referred to as Jane Doe No. 7 has been identified as 34-year-old Manhattan woman Karen Vergata. Vergata is believed to have disappeared around Feb. 14, 1996; two months later, her legs were found in a plastic bag at a park near Fire Island’s Blue Point Beach. At the time of her disappearance, Vergata was believed to have been working as an escort. Two sets of Vergata’s remains were identified in August 2023.

Shannan Gilbert, 23

• Gilbert was a Craigslist escort who lived in Jersey City, traveled with her driver Michael Pak from Manhattan to meet a client, Joseph Brewer, at his home in the Oak Beach Association on the morning of May 1, 2010. She spoke with two neighbors before disappearing. Her body was discovered in a marsh near Oak Beach — about half a mile from where she was last seen alive — on December 13, 2011.

Jessica Taylor, 20

• Taylor, a 20-year-old woman working as an escort in New York City, were found in a wooded area in Manorville on July 26, 2003. Her additional remains — initially labeled “Jane Doe No. 5” — were discovered on March 29, 2011, along Ocean Parkway.

Sandra Costilla

• Costilla was murdered in 1993 but had not been included among the so-called Gilgo Beach victims — until now. Investigators suspected convicted serial killer John Bittrolff in Costilla’s death, but he was never charged in her slaying — which remains one of several unsolved Long Island murders.

He is also the prime suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, who was the first of the so-called “Gilgo Four” to disappear.

For a couple years after high school, the Times said, Heuermann did part-time cleaning and maintenance at Jones Beach, which is just a few miles west of where the Gilgo victims were discovered wrapped in burlap in December 2010.

Baldwin, who worked as a lifeguard at nearby Tobay Beach, called it “very disturbing and ironic” that Heuermann is charged with “burying bodies in the dunes, just walking distance from my lifeguard stand.”

Heuermann eventually went to the New York Institute of Technology, and later became an architect with an office off Fifth Avenue.

In the 1990s, the married father moved into a ramshackle house on First Avenue in Massapequa Park, just a couple miles from Berner High, which is now the district middle school.

While Heuermann built a professional reputation for being a “big talker” and go-getter — even working on a project at Donald Trump’s prized Wall Street building — neighbors also remember him as isolated and vaguely sinister.

Etienne de Villiers, who lives next door to Heuermann’s address, claims he once had to tell him off for leering at his wife while she was sunbathing.

De Villiers told the Times that Heuermann’s 26-year-old daughter, Victoria, only just got her driver’s license shortly before her father’s arrest.

“I wanted to tell her, ‘Just get in your car and drive and never come back,’” he said.