The ex-wife of Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann has moved her bedroom into the ‘kill room’ where he tortured, murdered and dismembered several of his victims inside their family home.
In a bizarre moment in the Peacock documentary The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, Asa Ellerup reveals her decision to begin sleeping in the basement after learning that seven women died at the hands of her husband of almost three decades in that very space.
Ellerup says that she wants to show how sorry she is for the victims, but also wants to ‘get to know’ the other side of the man she loves – the side which hunted and murdered vulnerable women for 17 years.
‘I have seen Rex about 12 times since he confessed to me that he had dismembered these bodies down here,’ she says.
‘I want to get to know the other side of Rex. I want to know why Rex killed these women, what his triggers were.
‘I am processing the information in a very different way because now I see evil in him.’
The show reveals that Ellerup moved into the basement room one month before Heuermann changed his plea to guilty for the murders of seven women and admitted to the murder of an eighth woman during a court hearing in Suffolk County, Long Island, on April 8.
Between 1993 to 2010, the 62-year-old had masqueraded as an architect and married father-of-two all the while leading a double life as a sadistic serial killer.
Asa Ellerup is seen in the basement of their family home before she tried to renovate him
Asa Ellerup and Rex Heuermann were married for more than two decades and lived in the home where he lured and killed his victims
He kept up the pretense even to his own family for decades before he was finally arrested in July 2023.
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney exclusively told the Daily Mail earlier this week how Heuermann killed seven of his eight victims – Karen Vergata, 34, Valerie Mack, 24, Jessica Taylor, 20, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Costello, 27 – inside the basement of their Massapequa Park home while Ellerup and the children were out of town on vacation.
The only exception was his first known victim Sandra Costilla, 28, who he murdered in his Ram Charger in November 1993.
At the time of Costilla’s murder, Heuermann had recently separated from his first wife and was not married to Ellerup.
He then killed his second known victim, Karen Vergata, just days before he married Ellerup in 1996, while she was pregnant with their daughter Victoria.
Vergata’s murder began his meticulous pattern of luring women inside the home, where he held them for some length of time, tortured and strangled them.
As well as the seven women being murdered inside the home, Vergata, Mack and Taylor were also dismembered there between 1996 and 2003.
The extent of the horrors that unfolded there is something only Heuermann fully knows.
Heuermann’s family was out of town at the time of the murders and neither they nor any neighbors noticed what was taking place when the serial killer was home alone.
But a planning document, found on a hard drive during a search and presented as evidence in court filings, has shone a light on some of the depravity.
Described as Heuermann’s blueprint for selecting, killing and disposing of victims, it includes sections such as ‘body prep’ detailing how to clean and dismember bodies and remove tattoos, as well as lists of supplies and tools for use in his crimes.
Rex Heuermann’s Massapequa Park home where he murdered seven of the eight victims
Law enforcement on the scene of Rex Heuermann’s home following his arrest in July 2023
As well as raising his own children, Victoria Heuermann and Christopher Sheridan, inside the ranch-style house, Heuermann had grown up there with his parents and siblings. The basement room where he committed the murders was once his childhood bedroom.
Yet, after buying it from his elderly mother, the professional architect let the house fall into disrepair – the property becoming an oddity among the well-kept suburban family homes with picket fences that line the rest of the street.
Despite divorcing him days after his arrest as the Gilgo Beach serial killer, Ellerup continued to stand by her husband and refused to believe he could be the serial killer for years.
In the new Peacock show, she now reveals that she has finally accepted the truth after he confessed to her in a jailhouse meeting last August.
‘The brutal truth is that Rex Heuermann said he dismembered the bodies in this room. That is the brutal truth,’ she says, sitting in the basement.
‘Now, there’s me. I am in this room. And I am here because I do feel spiritual. I’m trying to say spiritually in my own way that I am really sorry for what these victims went through.’
Despite her efforts to renovate the basement – saying she has ‘completely gutted and redone’ it with new floors, doors and moldings – Ellerup says she is haunted by her husband’s crimes.
‘Every night when I go to sleep I am haunted by dreams. Every night,’ she says.
‘It will never go away. It will follow me for the rest of my life. There will never be any justice for anyone and there will never be any way to forget about this.’
The victims clockwise from top left: Sandra Costilla, Karen Vergata, Melissa Barthelemy, Valerie Mack, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Jessica Taylor
Throughout the show, Ellerup is seen wrestling with her new reality that she was married to a serial killer for 29 years.
Ellerup was 18 and working in a 7-Eleven when she first met Heuermann.
By this point, she had endured a difficult upbringing. She was adopted from Iceland. And during her teenage years, she was sexually assaulted and attempted suicide.
Both she and Heuermann then had brief marriages to other people.
Ellerup has said that her first marriage ‘did not go well at all’ after her son Christopher was born and Heuermann became her ‘hero’ who helped her through her divorce and took her and Christopher into his home.
Alison Winter, a psychotherapist and family counsellor who has been working with Heuermann, Ellerup and Victoria since his arrest, tells Peacock that Heuermann had ‘such a big influence’ on her that she would never believe he was guilty unless she heard it from him.
It is revealed that Heuermann admitted to his attorney back in 2024 that he was guilty of the allegations and negotiated with prosecutors a plea condition that he be allowed to privately meet with both Ellerup and Victoria one-on-one to confess his crimes in person before it was made public.
In August 2025, Ellerup’s meeting with her husband took place.
During it, he admitted to her that he had murdered eight women, including the seven inside their home, she tells the documentary.
Rex Heuermann and Asa Ellerup at their 1996 wedding – days after he murdered Karen Vergata
Heuermann allegedly told her that none of the murders were planned, yet he told others that all but Costilla’s was.
Vergata – the first woman he admitted he had planned to kill – was murdered when Ellerup was two months pregnant with Victoria and had flown to Sweden with Christopher.
Heuermann murdered Vergata, dismembered her and dumped her remains in two locations: Fire Island and Ocean Parkway. He then flew out to Sweden to join Ellerup and Christopher and they married there on April 13, 1996.
In the show, Ellerup is heard speaking on the phone to Heuermann inside prison, asking if that was his ‘first planned event’ and saying how she had ‘gone in hand with a wedding dress to Sweden.’ Yet, during the call, Ellerup then voices concerns that ‘I might scare you off.’
Despite coming to terms with the fact that the man she spent her life with and raised children with is a serial killer, it emerges that Ellerup continues to visit him in prison and sees him ‘no differently’ to the man she thought she knew.
‘I am looking at him no differently than I ever saw him. That hasn’t changed in my view at all,’ she says.
When her attorney Bob Macedonio questions that there is a ‘whole side of him you never knew,’ Ellerup simply says that is ‘a new side to get to know.’
Pressed on how and why she would do that, she says by visiting him in prison and that she has an interest from a psychological standpoint.
Prosecutors have long maintained that Ellerup knew nothing of her husband’s crimes.
Asa Ellerup speaks outside court after her former husband pleaded guilty to the murders of seven women and admitted an eighth
In an interview with the Daily Mail, DA Tierney said the relationship dynamic between the couple was ‘not typical,’ with the serial killer controlling all aspects of their home life and finances.
‘Normally with offenders, especially when there is obsessive behavior, they don’t tend to associate themselves with people who are very suspicious,’ Tierney said this week.
He pointed out that, in typical relationships, spouses tend to know about each others’ finances and whereabouts – but this didn’t seem to be the case in their marriage.
‘I don’t think that was the dynamic in this particular relationship,’ Tierney said. ‘Rex liked to control. He controlled the finances. He really controlled everything. I don’t think that their dynamic was typical.’
Fears of a serial killer first emerged back in 2010 when the remains of the first of 11 bodies were discovered along the remote stretch of Ocean Parkway, close to Gilgo Beach.
The harrowing discovery came during a search for 24-year-old Shannan Gilbert, who had made a chilling 911 call and then disappeared following a visit to a client’s house in nearby Oak Park that May.
That December, Barthelemy’s remains were the first to be found. Within days, Brainard-Barnes, Waterman and Costello were found close by.
By the spring of 2011, 10 victims had been found in the area. The final victim found was Gilbert, who, to this day, investigators maintain died by accident and is not linked to the serial killer case.
Another 13 years would pass before a suspect fell on investigators’ radar, after Tierney entered office and launched the Gilgo Beach Task Force comprising multiple law enforcement agencies.
The family together before Heuermann’s arrest on suspicion of being a serial killer
We now know that between 1993 and 2010, Heuermann murdered eight women, dumping many of their remains on Gilgo Beach. But are there still more victims?
Heuermann was ultimately tied to the serial killings through a witness tip about his pickup truck as well as damning cellphone evidence and was arrested in July 2023.
Over the past two-and-a-half years, Heuermann fought the allegations while new murder charges mounted.
In a sudden reversal, he changed his plea to guilty on all seven murders for which he was charged – and also admitted to the murder of an eighth victim, Karen Vergata.
For the first time, he revealed how all of the women died by strangulation.
Under the plea agreement, Heuermann has waived all rights to appeal and will not face any additional charges over the eight murders. He has also agreed to cooperate with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.
He faces multiple life sentences at his sentencing on June 17.
