The sister of one of the Gilgo Beach killer’s victims confronted the hulking monster in Long Island court Wednesday — asking him to look at her as she reminded him of the taunting phone calls he made to gloat about the murder.
“Look at me while I’m talking,” Amanda Funderburg told Rex Heuermann, the serial killer who strangled her sister, Melissa Barthelemy, to death in 2009 — saying he should at least look her in the eyes.
Funderburg was just 15 when her sister was murdered in 2009 — and was forced to endure cruel calls from Heuermann after the grisly slaying.
“I was forced to live with crippling anxiety, depression, PTSD, and destroyed nervous system constantly staring at my phone,” Funderberg told the killer. “Because of the several times you had called me from my sister’s phone telling me she was a whore.”
Funderburg was one of 13 relatives of Heuermann’s eight victims to speak before he was sentenced — facing the cowardly killer for the first time since his 2023 arrest.
The 62-year-old architect confessed in April to slaying eight Long Island sex workers between 1993 and 2010 — as part of a plea deal that saw him sentenced to three life terms on Wednesday.
Melissa Cann, whose sister Maureen Brainard-Barnes was among Heuermann’s victims, also scolded the admitted killer.
“Rex, I noticed a slight smile,” Cann said, growing physically emotional during her statement. “There is no honor in this. You’re a coward who hid behind a mask. You hunted and murdered to satisfy the darkness within you.”
Nicolette Brainard-Barnes, Maureen Brainard-Barnes’ daughter, was 7-years-old when her mother was killed.“I was a little girl and I needed my mom,” she said. “Like every sex worker, my mother was an entire human being. You make me sick, and I don’t forgive you.”
Jasmine Robinson, the cousin of Heuermann victim Jessica Taylor — the youngest of the slain women at 20 when she was killed in July 2003 — said the life sentence was not enough.
“A million years isn’t enough,” she snapped at the killer. “Nothing will ever make this right.”
Heuermann, a married father of two from Massapequa Park, remained at large for 13 years after the last murder until he was finally busted outside his Manhattan office in 2023.
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said Heuermann killed all but one of the women inside a “kill room” in his basement, carefully planning and pulling off the horrific murders when his family was away.
The gruesome murders, which haunted Long Island for more than three decades, was the subject of a four-part Peacock documentary, “The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets.”
The series featured exclusive interviews with Heuermann’s wife, Asa Ellerup, and daughter, Victoria Heuermann — both of whom were reportedly compensated for participating.
That didn’t sit well with Elizabeth Meserve, the aunt of Gilgo Beach victim Megan Waterman, who was killed after Heuermann picked her up at a Hauppauge Holiday Inn in June 2010.
“These individuals profited from the monstrous acts committed against our loved ones by the demon sitting in this courtroom,” Meserve said. “This is the kind of world we live in.
“A demon tortures and kills our loved ones and his family gets filthy rich off his crimes,” she added.
Ellerup’s lawyer and the docu-series’ producers have not revealed how much the family was paid for their participation, but some reports have estimated it was more than $1 million.
