The wife of suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann claims he’s her “hero,” and that authorities “have the wrong man” in the murders of seven women found dead on New York's remote Gilgo Beach.
Asa Ellerup, 61, maintained her husband’s innocence during an interview for the upcoming Peacock docuseries “The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets,” which is centered around the investigation into the Long Island murders, according to the New York Post.
“I know what bad men are capable of doing,” she said. “I’ve seen it, and I’ve heard it from other men. Not my husband. You have the wrong man.”
“I want him to come back home to me,” Ellerup said. “They’re trying to sit there and tell me that, but I have no knowledge of what they keep talking about. ‘Oh, you must have known.’ Know what? My husband was home here. He’s a family man, period.”
Heuermann, 61, was arrested in July 2023 outside his Manhattan architecture firm and charged in the slayings of Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Lynn Costello, who were all killed between 2009 and 2010. In 2024, Heuermann was charged in the deaths of Maureen-Brainard Barnes, who, along with the three other women, are known to investigators as the Gilgo Four, as their bodies were all found near Gilgo Beach.
Last year, he was also charged in the murders of Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valerie Mack.
Investigators used DNA analysis to identify the victims, many of whom were sex workers. In some cases, they were able to connect them to remains found elsewhere on Long Island years earlier, prompting police to also reexamine other unsolved murders of women in the area.
As part of the upcoming docuseries, set to premiere on Tuesday, Ellerup said she met Heuermann when she was 18, working at a Long Island 7-11, and the two immediately hit it off.
Ellerup described Heuermann as her savior, saying they met after she had been molested by a classmate and tried to take her own life – and that he stuck with her through it all. She said he was also there for her during more recent struggles, including a double mastectomy.
“He’s my hero,” she said. “There were times where he was working, but I’d call him, and he would come by and pick me up.”
Even though Ellerup filed for divorce soon after her husband’s arrest, her daughter said the move was “to protect the assets.”
“I haven’t seen him in all this time, and when I went down there, I was excited, and like I was, I don’t know, I guess on a first date. You’re nervous, you’re scared. You don’t know how the date is gonna go,” Ellerup said.
Ellerup, however, has not gone to see him in several months over fears their conversations are being recorded.
“Telling him that I love him, that will hurt him,” Ellerup said. “What I want to say to him is, ‘I love you, no matter what.’ But I don’t even want to say ‘no matter what’ because I don’t believe he did this. I don’t see what everybody else is saying. I don’t see phone calls to sex workers.
“I’m trying to keep myself sane,” she said. “At the same time, people are saying, ‘How could you not know that your husband was a serial killer?’ Wait a minute, I picked him up from the train station every single day. He was home here on the weekends. He smoked a cigar in the garage.”
Ellerup continued: “If he told me that he went out to Lowe’s to pick something up and he was gone for an hour, no freaking way is this man going out soliciting sex from a sex worker, killing them and dumping them on Gilgo Beach.”
