Is He The Gilgo Beach Serial Killer? What Did They Know?? Rex Heuermann’s Family FINALLY Breaks Their Silence!

Rex Heuermann’s wife and daughter are finally speaking out.

On Tuesday, Peacock released The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, a three-part docuseries diving into the personal life of Rex Heuermann. And it includes extensive interviews with both his wife Asa Ellerup and daughter Victoria Heuermann. Buckle up for everything they have to say.

As we’ve been following, Heuermann was arrested in 2023 and charged in connection with the deaths of several missing women — Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, and later Sandra Costilla, Jessica Taylor, and Valerie Mack.

Related: Manhunt For Father Of 3 Murdered Girls Takes Disturbing Turn

Since being hit with the charges, Heuermann has pleaded not guilty and his family has kept extremely quiet about his alleged connection. But that’s all changed with the new doc…

Asa Ellerup

Asa Ellerup is clinging to the idea that her husband, a “family man,” is innocent despite all the charges. When asked the question everyone wants to know — whether she knew — she fights back:

“[Did I] know what? My husband was home here. He is a family man. 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.”

If she didn’t believe it, why did she divorce him in 2023, after his arrest? Hmm. Later in the doc, Asa talks about her relationship with Rex:

“The two of us were married for 27 years. I met Rex when I was 18 years old. He’s the kind of guy you turn your head and you go take a look at. He was a tall and handsome young man. I love tall, dark and handsome. At that time, I was madly in love with the man. There’s no doubt about that.”

But despite her infatuation with Heuermann, she ended up marrying someone else — her first husband Christopher Sheridan. But kept in touch with Rex all that time:

“I met my first husband and got married. But things didn’t go well at all. After my son, Christopher, was born, my ex-husband became somebody completely different. I was in the process of getting a divorce. Christopher’s father, he wasn’t very nice about it. He said to me that there’s no way in the world he was going to be OK with me being happy with somebody else.”

So, Heuermann stepped in to offer her support:

“Rex was the kind of person that you could call. We were friends. Rex was standing there and he heard what he said. Rex then says, ‘OK, I’m not worried. Let’s get a lawyer and let’s take him to court.’ Then he paid for the lawyer to take him to court.”

And immediately after her divorce, she got into a relationship with the alleged murderer:

“There was no reason to hold back. So Rex said to me, ‘I’ve got a nice house. It’s not big and not elaborate. But how about you come and see if you’d like to stay there?’ Then I found out I was pregnant with Victoria. He said to me, ‘Well, how do you feel about marrying me?’ I said yes. There’s a picture of me on our wedding day and I’m looking up going, ‘I finally got him. He’s mine.’”

And according to her, there were never any red flags:

“There’s no abnormal behavior that I had ever actually noticed. If there was any knowledge at all of some unusual behavior in that man, I would have walked out the door.”

Victoria Heuermann

Victoria tells the camera crew she didn’t ever notice any warning signs, violence, or odd behavior prior to his arrest:

“Sometimes he would come home frustrated. He needed to wind down. But he never hit any of us. The worst he would do is throw a plate in the sink. My dad was an open book.”

What he DID have, though, was a LOT of guns. But that was apparently pretty open information in Heuermann’s circle. Victoria continues:

“A lot of people who knew my dad, like long term clients and people he worked with for years: it was no secret he hunted. It was no secret he had guns. He was an open book.”

Not that unusual in many parts of the country, of course. Not exactly evidence…

Victoria says she spoke with serial killer Dennis Rader’s daughter Kerri Rawson — and has really thought about this. She admits there were periods of time where she couldn’t account for her father’s whereabouts, but she was not willing to make the leap to personally rule him as guilty of the accused crimes. She adds in a confessional:

“I didn’t see anything. How did I not know? I was 10 or 12 or 13 years old when these girls were murdered. I was in school. That’s exactly how I wouldn’t know anything. Now that I actually look back on my childhood, I do find it very hard to believe my dad actually really did all this.”

She recalls positive memories with her father:

“I saw him at regular times every day, morning and night — and the vacation that he did join us on. But like I said, there were a lot of hours out of the day that I also was not home — including vacations that he did not join us on. That’s exactly what I mean by on the fence. I can’t know whether or not he did or did it because I was not around for it. I was too young to understand.”

At that moment in the doc, an offscreen producer encourages her to address her mixed feelings:

“Me standing on my ground and wanting to see the evidence first is, in a way, protecting myself. It keeps my head on straight with everything that everybody is saying. Whether the world likes it or not or whether I like it or not, he’s my dad. They can’t take that away from me.”

She concludes:

“I don’t know what acceptance looks like. Acceptance to me is just, ‘F**k I have to move on.’ If he was guilty, it’s going to start to become like a love-hate relationship. This is my dad and I love him as my dad. The hate is the other side of him that came out. Going forward, I’m not gonna interact with him the same way. I would have if this never happened. Both the feelings of love and hate, they can coexist.”

FBI visit

Victoria recalls receiving a visit from the FBI the day before Heuermann was officially charged:

“I knew my dad had stuff with the IRS and Department of Labor but [not the] FBI. They started asking about if my dad was ever sexually [abusive] toward me or touched me. I said, ‘No, I do not recall any time he was like that.’”

His wife Asa adds she thought the visit was in regard to Rex’s extensive firearm collection — consisting of 279 guns. OK, that is a lot…

Their home was eventually raided for evidence and according to the mother and daughter, left in shambles:

“When we got back home, after they raided it, it was not recognizable. No beds, no clothes and the bathroom sink was broken. They should have actually deemed our house uninhabitable. It was as if they were trying to leave us for dead.”

Wow. Not just their life gutted… their home was, too.

Family’s reaction to the charges

Rex’s ex claims the charges left her, as well as Christopher and Victoria in shambles:

“The kids, they were crying themselves to sleep before we actually got into the house. We were all doing it. Fear, anxiety and guilt. All of those emotions were like going on a roller coaster. But we needed to come home. They have a lot of sentimental stuff in the house — and I still feel Rex is here.”

According to Ellerup, the family does not at this point in time consider their patriarch guilty:

“Nobody deserves what they got. 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 … That’s why I’m going to the courthouse. That’s why I want to see it for myself. It’s important for me to know what he’s going through. I want to be a part of him. I really liked seeing him. There was comfort in seeing him.”

She continues:

“I just don’t see him that way. That’s not the Rex I know. If they’re gonna sit there and tell me that he only did this during this particular time period that I was away on vacation then I’d have to question that. If a man is that much of a genius that he’s capable of doing that — I don’t believe it.”

Addressing the timeline

Ellerup looked back at the timeline of when some of the girls went missing. What was Rex doing? Where were they? On Melissa Barthelemy, she claims:

“I remember July 2009. I planned a trip to Iceland for five weeks to visit my family. The reason why my husband didn’t go with us on vacation is because construction is highest in New York City during the summertime. He would also try to take advantage of times that we were not in the house to do some reconstructing in the house. When I was in Iceland, I remember that conversation when he called me the night before he left. He said to me, ‘I made a big mess and I have a big surprise for you when you get home.’”

That’s ominous in retrospect! According to her, Heuermann claimed he “ripped apart the whole bathroom” while they were gone:

“He threw everything out. He had to pick up some supplies. There are receipts from when it was purchased. He had put in the toilet and the sink downstairs in the basement. He had redone the plumbing. The bathroom had been completely gutted from top to bottom. That was Rex.”

Again, pretty sus considering. Like… he had to get rid of evidence maybe??

On Maureen Brainard-Barnes’ disappearance two years before that, she adds:

“I was trying to do something fun with my kids. There were credit card receipts of us being in Atlanta City at this particular time period. They’re alleging that my husband managed to go to work, solicit sex from a sex worker, sit on a train and then come home to make plans to pick them up, kill them and dump them. Then he turned around to go to Atlantic City to come see us? I’m sorry. It’s bulls**t.”

Inneresting…

One of the reasons Ellerup has chosen to remain loyal is because of how open Heuermann always appeared to be with her:

“He’s never said to me, ‘Don’t use my computer.’ He’s never said, ‘No, I’m not going to give you the password.’ There is nothing off limits with Rex. I’m not picking a side just yet until I see the evidence. I need to hear it in a court of law. I need to hear it at trial.”

At one point in the doc, Ellerup takes a phone call with Heuermann:

“I’m talking to him all the time but he only has a certain amount of time to be able to make calls. So I can’t get too comfortable talking to him about things that are gonna hurt him … Like telling him that I love him. That will hurt him.”

Explaining The Divorce

A divorce settlement was reached between the pair in early 2025… Which Victoria has thoughts on:

“I understand why she divorced my dad. They did the divorce to protect the assets. It’s now legally her house. She was married to him so she gets the asset from the divorce. If we lost the house, we’d be homeless. It’s our house. It doesn’t mean that we’re not a family anymore.”

Ellerup did not personally clarify why she filed for divorce but confirmed she’s moving out of their home in Massapequa Park:

“Now that this life in this house is coming to an end, it makes me feel like there’s a new beginning. What that life is going to be like, I do not know. I will find out eventually. I will deal with it the best that I can. I did what I had to do to protect myself and my children.”

This is a lot more candor than we expected, to be honest.

Watch the trailer for The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets (below):

Thoughts, Perezcious readers?

[Images via Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office & Peacock]

The post Is He The Gilgo Beach Serial Killer? What Did They Know?? Rex Heuermann’s Family FINALLY Breaks Their Silence! appeared first on Perez Hilton.