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Asa Ellerup is grappling with the reality that the man she was married to for nearly 30 years is suspected of being the Gilgo Beach serial killer.
Rex Heuermann, a hulking New York City architect, has been charged with killing seven women, most of them sex workers, and dumping their bodies on a desolate parkway not far from Gilgo Beach on Long Island. He has pleaded not guilty.
Ellerup, 61, filed for divorce in 2023, just days after the 59-year-old was arrested for the murders of three of the victims. She and her children are now speaking out for the first time in a new Peacock docuseries, “The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets.”
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“She’s a very damaged soul from all of this,” director Jared P. Scott told Fox News Digital. “You can see the scars of her life story. . . . We often think of denial as maybe a place you get stuck in. But to me, it seemed like denial was this search. It was constantly thinking about certain moments, replaying things back in her head, trying to reconcile 27 years of marriage to this man who ostensibly was living this double life.”
“I think she’s trying to make sense of the unimaginable within the familiar,” he shared. “She’s walking through her house. She’s looking at pictures. She’s reliving moments. . . . She’s searching for the familiar, the day-to-day, the routine.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Heuermann’s attorney for comment.
Although the divorce was finalized in April, Ellerup still believes Heuermann is “not capable” of committing the crimes he’s accused of.
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“My husband was home here – he is a family man,” Ellerup told the cameras. “They are telling me he has been soliciting sex from sex workers. What? I don’t have sex with my husband? I don’t satisfy him? He comes home and he eats my dinner. It isn’t good enough? No. I don’t believe my husband did this.”
“Nobody deserves what they got,” she said. “But Rex was not seeing [sex workers]. He’s a family man. He didn’t do this. I would need to hear it from Rex face to face that he killed these girls for me to believe it. My husband never kept me out of anything.”
While Ellerup defended her ex-husband’s innocence, their daughter, Victoria Heuermann, later said off-camera that she believes the patriarch “most likely” committed the killings.
The 28-year-old’s admissions were made through a statement from producers.
“She told us several times throughout filming that she was ‘on the fence,’” Scott said. “A lot of it has to do with the fact that this all happened when she was much younger. And as prosecutors have laid out in every indictment, the family was out of town every time one of these alleged crimes happened. So she just didn’t know. She didn’t see it. She was too young to remember any of this, so she didn’t see any signs.”
Scott said that after filming, it was Victoria who reached out to the producers.
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“She said, ‘I want to have a conversation about where I’m at now,’” he said. “She now wanted to express that she now felt that, based on what’s been presented and explained to her, she now believes her dad is most likely the Gilgo Beach killer. And that ‘most likely’ – that’s important. You can still see that hesitation. You can still see she’s wrestling with what that means.”
Looking back, the family described Heuermann as a doting father and husband.
Ellerup met the “talk, dark and handsome” Heuermann when they were both teenagers on Long Island. They quickly formed a close-knit friendship. And when she later left her tumultuous first marriage, it was Heuermann who stepped in as a “hero,” taking her and her son, Christopher, in. She married Heuermann in 1996, and they welcomed a daughter a year later.
“I was madly in love with the man,” said Ellerup. “There’s no doubt about that.”
Ellerup maintained that she saw no “abnormal behavior” in their nearly three decades of marriage. At the same time, she revealed that in July 2009, around the time one of his alleged victims went missing, Heuermann suddenly renovated a bathroom while she and their two children visited her family in Iceland. She noted that her former husband eventually joined the family for their final week of the trip.
“She does mention that she’s in denial,” said Scott. “She told me several times, ‘People are saying I’m in denial. Well, OK, I’m in denial, but what would you do? What would anyone do if they were in my shoes?’ . . . Asa is having a really hard time with the weight of this.
“She’s put out through her lawyer that she is still reserving her right for judgment if there’s a trial. She still, I think, wants to give her husband the benefit of the doubt. But also, who would want to believe this? Who would want to believe that their husband of 27 years was capable of this?”
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“Rex Heuermann, from our understanding, based on the facts that are publicly presented to us, seemed to be a master manipulator,” Scott continued. “. . . Asa’s journey is now one of constantly searching for answers, searching for memories, almost being stuck inside that house.”
“We spent a lot of time with the family in that house where the alleged crimes were allegedly orchestrated,” he reflected. “She’s walking through these rooms, and she has memories in that basement that are radically different from what we can infer from reading these very public indictments about what prosecutors believed happened down there.”
“She’s in this constant loop of trying to figure out just what the hell happened,” Scott added.
In the documentary, Victoria said her father was around the family “90% of the time” and was never violent toward any of them. However, she also acknowledged there were times when he stayed home while the family went on vacation. She was around 10 to 13 years old when the killings happened.
Prosecutors claim Heuermann committed some of the killings in the basement while his family was out of town.
Ellerup maintains investigators have the wrong man.
She dismissed a computer file prosecutors claim is a “blueprint” of his crimes, calling it “absurd,” The Associated Press reported.
According to the outlet, prosecutors say the document features a series of checklists for before, during and after a killing, such as a “body prep” checklist that includes, among other items, a note to “remove head and hands.”
The outlet also noted that Ellerup also shrugged off other evidence prosecutors have enumerated in court documents, including a vast collection of bondage and torture pornography found on electronic devices seized from their home, and hairs linked to Heuermann that were recovered on most of the victims’ bodies.
At one point in the documentary, the filmmakers captured Ellerup speaking to Heuermann on the phone from jail. Ellerup and her daughter have been regularly attending court hearings with their attorney.
“She has been looking at everything through the lens of her memories,” said Scott. “Not everything that we have seen in the media, not through the indictments that have been put out by the prosecution, but through her memories. And in that, I was struck by how ordinary it all seemed. And I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, but in the sense that it felt like she could be any of us.”
The family is now planning to move to South Carolina. In the documentary, Victoria said the separation was for financial reasons, to protect the family’s assets.
“The family of an accused serial killer is often met with, and understandably, with suspicion, revulsion, cruelty – they become collateral damage,” said Scott. “. . . They inherit the shame, the scrutiny, the guilt. And we’ve all heard of the stages of grief. I think they’re going through that as well.”
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One thing is certain for Scott – many lives were destroyed over the years.
“I ultimately hope that justice is served,” said Scott. “It’s important that we remember the victims in the story – all the victims. The women who lost their lives were more than how they were labeled. And the family that Rex Heuermann left behind, who are now experiencing a different kind of trauma, one they didn’t choose.”
“This is a tragic tale,” said Scott. “And it’s all the direct result of being in the blast radius of Rex Heuermann’s alleged crimes.”
“The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets” is now streaming. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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