Gilgo Beach killer Rex Heuermann’s daughter was dismissed from a Long Island jury after a judge ruled that she would be too much of “a distraction.”
Victoria Heuermann, 30, was let go by a Nassau County judge after she responded to a summons last week to be a potential juror during a child molestation trial, sources told Newsday.
The serial killer’s daughter initially went unrecognized by State Supreme Court Justice Robert McDonald, the prosecutor and the defense attorney, despite her ample public appearances and interviews over her dad killing eight women.
But her high-profile ID became obvious during the public vetting portion when she was asked if she’d ever been convicted of a crime — or knew anyone who had, her attorney confirmed.
The judge then asked her if she could stay impartial even with her father’s notorious criminal history.
“When it came to that one question, she asked for a sidebar. They took her into chambers and she answered it, and then they chose to discharge her,” her attorney Robert Macedonio told the paper.
“She was still willing to serve, but I guess the defense, the prosecution, and the judge — I haven’t read the transcript, I’m not sure who decided that they didn’t want her there,” Macedonio said.
Macedonio said Victoria, of Massapequa Park, was anxious about entering a courtroom again after her father’s high-profile trial, and even offered to write her a letter to the court asking that she be excused.
“It’s not like there’s any kind of overwhelming desire to serve. Nobody has an overwhelming desire to serve on jury duty,” he said. “But when they ask her the question, she answers it honestly. ‘You think you could still sit here and be fair and impartial?’ ”
She could have said no, but “thought she could still be fair and impartial to the defendant’s rights and the prosecution’s rights, even having experienced all that. That’s her own personal judgment,” he continued.
“The easier answer would have been no, and then she would have been discharged. It’s harder to say yes,” he said.
The judge ultimately determined she would be a “distraction” during the trial.
Under New York law, all parts of the trial, including the jury selection process, are held in open court.
Heuermann, 63, was sentenced to three life terms in Suffolk County in June after pleading guilty to strangling his victims months earlier.
The hulking 6-foot-4 architect confessed to killing and torturing eight women beginning in 1993 and dumping most of their bodies along desolate stretches of Long Island, where they were found starting in December 2010.
The cases remained unsolved until the investigation was reopened in 2022 and led to Heuermann’s arrest the next year — partly thanks to DNA from a pizza box he tossed in the trash.
Victoria and her family will “suffer the repercussions” of Heuremann’s heinous crimes for the rest as long as they live, Macedonio said.
“When they’re put into public, when they go for job interviews, when any time something comes up with the name and people want to do any little background check, it’s going to pop up for the rest of her life,” he said.
