The family of Gilgo Beach criminal Rex Heuermann is reportedly being shunned and forced to retreat to the home where he fatally strangled his victims.
Heuermann has admitted to taking the lives of eight women, whose remains were found along Long Island’s Gilgo Beach.
Robert Macedonio, the attorney for the criminal’s ex-wife, Asa Ellerup, said that she and her two adult children, Victoria Heuermann and Christopher Sheridan, were “completely blindsided” by Heuermann’s arrest on July 13, 2023.
Image credits: Getty/Pool
Trigger warning: This article contains graphic details that may be distressing to some.
Ellerup has also revealed that she is still “haunted” by the architect’s crimes every night.
Despite a rumored $1 million payment for participating in Peacock’s four-part docuseries The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, the family is paying a hefty price for their relationship with the perpetrator.
Image credits: Getty/Spencer Platt
Attorney Macedonio revealed that the family can’t sell the house because of IRS (Internal Revenue Service) liens and is struggling to find jobs.
“If anything, it’s cost them money,” he stated, as per The Post. “They’re unemployable at this point. Who’s hiring them? They are financially distraught because nobody’s hiring them, there’s no income.”
The family reportedly has “no social life” and is pointed at whenever they step outside the now-infamous home.
“People walk by the house constantly – it’s like a tourist attraction, taking pictures, pointing,” the lawyer described.
Image credits: Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office
“Everybody wants to make an issue about the Peacock, the money, money, money. But honestly, they can’t afford to leave that house. There’s nowhere to go. They’re honestly stuck in that house right now, horrific as it may be.”
According to Macedonio, Ellerup and her two children “were in complete denial” when they discovered the truth about the man that had been in their lives for nearly three decades.
“They thought it was a conspiracy theory, wrong person, there’s no way. This is not the Rex that they knew, this is not the dad that Victoria knew,” he said. “It’s been a process to bring them to the realization that Rex did this.”
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Heuermann was indicted for the slayings of seven women between 1993 and 2010.
He has confessed to taking the lives of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, Amber Lynn Costello, 27, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, Jessica Taylor, 20, Sandra Costilla, 28, and Valerie Mack, 24.
This month, the father pleaded guilty to the seven slayings and admitted to an eighth. He told authorities that he was responsible for the 1996 crime against 34-year-old Karen Vergata, a case that had not previously been linked to him.
As part of his plea deal, he will not be charged with the crime against Vergata and will cooperate with the FBI, as per NBC News.
Image credits: New York Daily News
Authorities said Heuermann targeted adult workers who were significantly smaller and shorter than him.
Only one of the crimes was spontaneous, Heuermann said. The rest were all premeditated, with the victims strangled inside the family’s home, most of them in the basement while Ellerup, Victoria, and Christopher were away.
Police do not believe that the family knew about Heuermann’s crimes. Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney explained that the successful architect lived a double life and used the “anonymity of phones and computers to shield himself from the rest of society.”
Image credits: Fox News
Ellerup filed for divorce the same month he was arrested after 27 years of marriage.
“My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families,” she said after Heurmann entered his plea deal. “Their loss is immeasurable, and the focus should be on them at this time in the moment.”
Speaking with The New York Post in 2023, the mother opened up about the trauma that her children have experienced since Heuermann’s arrest.
Ellerup and Heuermann share a daughter, Victoria, and Christopher, her son from a previous relationship.
“My children cry themselves to sleep,” she told the outlet. “I mean, they’re not children. They’re grown adults but they’re my children, and my son has developmental disabilities and he cried himself to sleep. He’s so distraught and doesn’t understand.”
Melissa G. Moore, the daughter of convicted criminal Keith Jesperson, launched a GoFundMe in 2023 to help the family restart their lives.
A breakthrough in the Heuermann case came in 2022 when a witness to Costello’s disappearance identified a first-generation Chevy Avalanche as the vehicle believed to have been driven by her attacker.
Motor vehicle records subsequently linked Heuermann to the truck, and he was further connected to the crimes through DNA evidence and phone records.
Heuermann reportedly conducted Google searches related to the investigation and researched “terrifying active” serial criminals.
Image credits: Peacock
In the Peacock documentary series, Ellerup, who was in the courtroom when Heuermann pleaded guilty, revealed she has renovated the basement where he strangled his victims before dumping their bodies along a nearby beach.
“Rex Heuermann said he dismembered the bodies in this room. That is the brutal truth, OK?” Ellerup said in the series. “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.”
The mother added, “I am haunted by dreams every night. It will never go away. It will follow me for the rest of my life.”
Heuermann, 62, is expected to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole at a hearing on June 17.
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