Asa Ellerup breaks into a smile as she remembers her husband Rex Heuermann revealing that he had a ‘big surprise’ waiting at home.
It was July 2009 and Ellerup had gone to Iceland for five weeks to visit family with her two children, Victoria and Christopher.
Heuermann stayed behind on Long Island, saying he was busy with work at his Midtown Manhattan architecture firm.
‘He said to me: “I made a big mess,”’ Ellerup beams fondly in the new Peacock docuseries ‘The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets’.
Heuermann had gutted the basement bathroom, totally remodeling it from the tiles to the toilet.
‘That was Rex. He’s a problem solver,’ she says of her beloved husband of 27 years.
To Ellerup, this was a romantic gesture from a doting family man, her ‘tall, dark and handsome hero who had taken her and Christopher in when she was a young, single mother working at a 7-Eleven.
But, according to authorities, it was something far darker: a calculated move by a suspected serial killer intent on covering his tracks and destroying forensic evidence of the murder of a young woman inside his own home.
Another 14 years would pass before Heuermann, now 61, was arrested in July 2023 and later charged with murdering seven women – many of them sex workers -between 1993 and 2010. He pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
Rex Heuermann and Asa Ellerup at their 1995 wedding – two years after he allegedly killed his first victim
The family pictured together before Heuermann’s arrest on suspicion of being a serial killer
Prosecutors allege in court documents that he lured victims to his house when his wife and children were away.
It was during Ellerup’s July 2009 visit to Iceland – and Heuermann’s sudden surprise bathroom makeover – when Melissa Barthelemy went missing.
Barthelemy, 24, told a friend she was going to meet a client and was never seen alive again. Her remains were found in December 2010 wrapped in burlap along Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach, beside three other victims.
In the days following her disappearance, Barthelemy’s teenage sister received taunting calls from her sibling’s phone.
The male caller branded Barthelemy a ‘whore’ and gloated he had ‘killed her’.
The calls stopped when Heuermann flew out to join his family in Iceland.
Inside the remodeled bathroom, where Barthelemy may have died, Ellerup appears more upset at the state in which investigators left it than by the horrors that might have happened there.
‘They took it – brand new,’ she says in the show, gesturing to where the door used to be.
‘They ripped it up looking for trace evidence of blood,’ she adds, as the camera reveals a panel in the bathtub cut out during a police search.
A family rift
The docuseries marks the first time that Heuermann’s relatives have spoken publicly since his arrest – and it exposes an explosive split at the home over his potential guilt.
Throughout the episodes, Ellerup doesn’t waver in her belief that the man she married could ever be a serial killer.
She lights up when talking about their lives together, proudly referring to him as her ‘hero’ and takes issue with the suggestion that he used sex workers.
Asa Ellerup insists that authorities have the ‘wrong man’ in the new Peacock docuseries
‘They’re telling me that he was soliciting sex with sex workers? I don’t have sex with my husband? I don’t satisfy him?’ she asks incredulously.
‘He comes home, he eats my dinner. It’s not good enough? No, I don’t believe my husband did this.’
Even after Heuermann has spent two years behind bars, Ellerup describes seeing him at court hearings as ‘comforting’ and likens her prison visits to going ‘on a first date’.
When confronted with DNA, timelines, his chilling computer hard drive and cellphone data, she refuses to consider that the allegations are true.
‘I would need to hear it from Rex, face-to-face, for me to believe he killed these girls,’ she says.
Meanwhile, their daughter Victoria, 28, is less certain.
In a bombshell moment, after reviewing case files, she admits to having reached the gut-wrenching conclusion that her father is ‘most likely’ the notorious Gilgo Beach serial killer.
Attorney Bob Macedonio, who represents Ellerup, tells the Daily Mail that ‘time will only tell’ if she will ever accept she may have been married to an alleged serial killer for almost three decades.
Victoria Heuermann inside the basement where her father allegedly killed his victims
‘After Victoria viewed the information and after it was explained to her, she was able to process and form her own opinion that her father most likely is the Gilgo beach serial killer,’ Macedonio says.
‘Asa, on the other hand, maintains the belief that Rex, the father of her children and her ex-husband of 27 years, is not capable of committing these horrific acts.’
But attorney John Ray isn’t convinced by Ellerup’s denials.
Ray represented some of the victims’ families and, for years, kept attention on the case – loudly criticizing the investigation when it was being hampered by corrupt law enforcement.
He tells the Daily Mail that he finds it hard to believe that mother and daughter are living under the same roof while being at odds over Heuermann’s guilt.
‘You mean to tell me that they are just happily getting along?’ he questions.
‘One person said my husband did not slaughter women and chop them up in that house or anywhere, and the other one says yes he did.
‘They made it sound like an academic debate. It is impossible for those two people to live together and not have a completely dramatic falling out if they maintain those positions.’
Asa Ellerup refuses to believe that her husband could be the Gilgo Beach serial killer
Ray also doubts Heuermann’s family didn’t know what the man they lived with was allegedly doing.
‘It’s a sham,’ he says, adding that Ellerup’s outright denial and Victoria’s turmoil before reaching her conclusion is all about them ‘creating [their] innocence’ in the case.
‘They are both very cleverly distancing themselves from any responsibility to what happened – and that is a consistent theme.’
In the Peacock series, Ellerup and Victoria say they didn’t notice any signs of Heuermann’s alleged crimes and they have not been accused of having any information prior to his arrest.
Horror in the family home
But regardless of how much they may wish to distance themselves, the women in Heuermann’s life have been thrust into the heart of the case.
While his family is not suspected of any involvement in the crimes, the home where Ellerup, Heuermann, Victoria and Christopher shared so many family memories is also believed to be the place where other families’ sisters, daughters and mothers took their last breaths.
In the docuseries, the two women are seen in the basement where authorities believe victims were held, tortured and killed.
As a child growing up in the home with his parents, the basement was a space where a young Heuermann had his bedroom.
As an adult living there with his wife and children, it became the site of a large gun vault – and, inside that, a hidden room that no one else was ever allowed to enter.
The vault – dubbed the ‘kill room’ – was a focal point in the police searches. A chilling planning document found on Heuermann’s computer hard drive allegedly indicated it was where his victims died.
Heuermann’s wife and daughter have also been unwittingly allegedly linked to several of the murdered women through DNA evidence.
Hairs found on six of the seven murdered women have allegedly been matched to Heuermann, Ellerup Victoria or a woman he lived with between 1990 and 1993.
Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Amber Costello, 27, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, and Megan Waterman, 22, (clockwise from top left) were known as the Gilgo Four
According to prosecutors, hairs belonging to Victoria were found on the bodies of victims Amber Costello and Valerie Mack.
Victoria was just three years old when her father allegedly murdered and dismembered Mack in 2000.
Despite DNA evidence thrusting Ellerup and Victoria into Heuermann’s criminal case, according to criminal defense attorney Sam Bassett, the family’s public comments could impact whether they are called as witnesses.
While witnesses cannot testify about their ‘general opinions’, Bassett says – if he were Heuermann’s defense attorney – he would be paying attention to what Victoria and Ellerup say about his innocence or guilt.
‘It could impact their testimony on cross-examination for example if the daughter takes the stand and says: “I think he’s absolutely innocent.” Then they could be cross-examined on any contradictory statements they made in the documentary,’ he tells the Daily Mail.
However, while Victoria’s belief may make her an unfavorable witness to the defense, Bassett believes she is unlikely to be called anyway, due to her age at the time of the killings.
Ellerup, meanwhile, married Heuermann two years after he allegedly killed his first victim, Sandra Costilla.
A fairytale love story
Ellerup looks back fondly on her love story with the man now accused of being a serial killer.
She was 18 and working in a 7-Eleven when she first met the ‘tall, dark and handsome’ college boy.
Despite being ‘madly in love’, both Ellerup and Heuermann ended up marrying other people.
The happy couple pictured in what appears to be a picturesque mountainous region
Ellerup reveals her first marriage ‘did not go well at all’, and that her ex-husband ‘became somebody completely different’ after their son Christopher was born.
When she tried to seek a divorce, she says he ‘wasn’t very nice about it’ and made it clear he wouldn’t accept her being happy with someone else.
The way Ellerup tells it, Heuermann was something of a knight in shining armor, accompanying her to pick up her son and helping to take her ex-husband to court.
‘So fast forward, I got my divorce. There was no reason to hold back. You know what I mean?’ she says of her relationship with Heuermann, smiling.
Following her divorce, Heuermann took her and Christopher into his home. Not long later, Ellerup became pregnant with Victoria and the couple married in 1995.
‘There’s a picture of me and I’m looking up going: “I finally got him. He’s mine,”’ she says, thinking back on their wedding day.
Ellerup describes their love story like a fairytale – where Heuermann rescued her and they lived happily ever after.
‘He’s my hero,’ she says.
Choosing ‘weak wives’
Dr Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, tells the Daily Mail that serial killers deliberately choose certain types of spouses – ‘weak wives who are malleable, with low self esteem, who will believe or at least go along with what they say and can be controlled.
‘Mostly they marry docile, passive, controllable partners. Partners who won’t question them or push back,’ she says.
Valerie Mack, 24, (left) disappeared in 2000. Jessica Taylor, 20, (right) vanished in 2003
Sandra Costilla, 28, (left) was murdered in 1993. Karen Vergata, 34, (right) who disappeared in 1996, has not been named as a victim of the suspect
‘The wife may, for her own needs, feel her husband is good and decent because believing he is a murderer would make being with him intolerable and she needs him.’
Besides a troubled first marriage and life as a young single mother, Ellerup – who was adopted from Iceland – had suffered other traumas at the hands of men.
She was sexually assaulted by a classmate aged 16 and tried to kill herself. At 19, she narrowly escaped a kidnapping attempt by hiding in a dumpster for hours.
As well as choosing someone who ‘needs’ him, Saltz says that serial killers also often marry ‘to keep an appearance of normalcy to the outside world, to look non-suspicious, more than actually having a real relationship’.
And, for 27 years, Heuermann appeared to do just that, keeping up the act of being a loving ‘family man’ as the couple lived something of a typical suburban family life on Long Island.
They raised their children in the popular commuter town of Massapequa Park while he traveled into the city to work as an architect.
How could you not know?
Ellerup insists that she never saw any signs that her husband was leading a double life.
‘I know what bad men are capable of doing,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen it, and I’ve heard it from other men. Not my husband. You have the wrong man.’
Victoria also insists her dad was never violent. The biggest display of rage she ever saw was when he threw plates into the sink after what she believed were stressful days at work.
Tanya Denise Jackson, 26, (left) and her two-year-old daughter Tatiana Marie Dykes (right) were identified this year
Still, Ellerup faces skepticism about whether she truly knew nothing of her husband’s alleged crimes.
‘How could you not know? How could you not know that your husband was a serial killer?’ Ellerup says.
‘Know what? My husband was home. He is a family man,’ she insists.
It’s a question Kerri Rawson, the daughter of BTK serial killer Dennis Rader, says she and her mother have heard a ‘million times’.
‘I understand having reasonable questions. Is she in denial? Is she lying? Is she disassociated?’ Rawson says in the show.
‘The thing is, when you’re sitting in the cheap seats with the popcorn, you’re in hindsight-land… you’re not sitting in the everyday with a normal man.’
She says that people underestimate ‘the control’ and ‘manipulation’ in such situations.
While Rawson and her mother never saw signs of her father’s double life, they accepted his guilt after he was arrested.
Rex Heuermann’s Massapequa Park home where police conducted multiple searches
‘No matter what’
After sitting ‘on the fence’, Victoria appears to be doing the same – envisioning a future where she has a ‘love-hate relationship’ with the man who raised her.
‘Whether I like it or not, he is my dad. I think if he was guilty, it would be a love-hate relationship. This is my dad and I love him as my dad,’ she says. ‘The hate is the other side of him that came out.’
But Ellerup’s seems to be still in a place of denial about the man she has known and loved since the age of 18.
Professor Salz says that a wife may align with a suspected serial killer if she ‘cannot accept this was their marriage, their partner and they feel overwhelming shame and guilt and so they deny to themselves this could be true.’
Even if Ellerup’s changes down the line, she shows little sign of wanting to let go of what she thinks of as their fairytale.
To the man accused of slaughtering multiple women, she has an unwavering, romantic message: ‘I love you, no matter what.’
