RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — Confessed serial killer Rex Heuermann’s ex-wife revealed she has moved into the “kill room” he set up in their basement, and where he admitted to killing seven of his eight known victims, according to her own words in a docuseries.
Asa Ellerup reveals it in the latest episode of “The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets” on Peacock, which first streamed Thursday morning.
“The brutal truth is that Rex Heuermann said he dismembered the bodies in this room,” she says in the episode. “That is the brutal truth. OK. Now. There’s me. I’m in this room. And I’m here because I do feel spiritual. I am trying to say spiritually, in my own way, that I am really sorry for what these victims went through.”
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She moved down there roughly a month before her ex-husband pleaded guilty, and said she’d visited him 12 times after he confessed privately to her.
“Every night that I go to bed and go to sleep, I am haunted by dreams,” she says. “It will never go away. It will follow me for the rest of my life. It will never be any justice for anyone, and there will never be any way to forget about this.”
Still, she says, she wanted to understand her ex-husband, at least psychologically.
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“I want to know why Rex killed these women, what his triggers were,” Ellerup says. “I’m processing the information in a very different way. Because now I see the evil in him.”
Her lawyer, Bob Macedonio, told Fox News Digital he believed she was still struggling with the fact that her husband of many years was living a double life as one of the most prolific serial killers in decades.
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“Not so much in the sense that she wants to know Rex the serial killer, she wants to know that side of Rex and also get to know herself and how she missed all this in 30 years,” he said. “She wants to know herself, not so much who Rex is.”
Ellerup also described the moment her husband confessed his crimes to her, ahead of his change of plea hearing earlier this month. He admitted to killing eight victims, and at the time he had only been charged with seven.
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On April 8, Heuermann, a 62-year-old former New York City architect, pleaded guilty to the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla, and Valerie Mack. He confessed to an eighth, uncharged murder, of Karen Vergata. All of the slayings took place between 1993 and 2010.
“This has been an extremely emotional and painful process for the family to endure and come to terms with the allegations that Rex Heuermann was the Gilgo Beach serial killer,” Ellerup’s attorney, Bob Macedonio, said in a statement. “Ms. Ellerup would like the focus to remain where it belongs — on the victims and their families, who have suffered immeasurable and lasting losses.”
Each of the victims had been strangled. Some were tortured. Three were dismembered. Most were found to the east of Gilgo Beach, on Ocean Parkway about 45 miles outside New York City. Some were scattered across multiple locations. Costilla, the first victim, was found in the Hamptons less than 48 hours after her disappearance in late November 1993.
She’s the only one Heuermann didn’t kill in his Massapequa Park home.
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He killed her in a vehicle that police recovered decades later in Pennsylvania, according to a source close to the family.
Heuermann was arrested outside his midtown Manhattan office in July 2023 and had maintained his innocence for nearly three years. A trial had been set for September.
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His killing spree went unknown for decades, until a 23-year-old woman named Shannan Gilbert vanished under alarming circumstances in 2010. She had placed numerous 911 calls, sounding heavily inebriated and begging for help after leaving a home in Oak Beach, which is down the road from Gilgo.
The search for her turned up the remains of 10 other people — seven of whom Heuermann has admitted to killing.
Suffolk County police have publicly described Gilbert’s death as an accidental drowning. The deaths of another victim, 26-year-old Tanya Jackson, and her 2-year-old daughter, Tatiana Dykes, have been blamed on a Florida man who was arrested last year.
Andrew Dykes has pleaded not guilty in that case and is due back in court in Nassau County Friday.
