Asa Ellerup once insisted her husband was innocent. Then her ex-husband, Rex Heuermann, confessed — to her face — that he killed eight women.
The journey from fierce defender to reluctant believer played out across Peacock’s docuseries The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets, which concluded with its fourth and final episode on April 23, 2026. The series gave an inside look at how Heuermann’s family processed his guilty plea in connection to eight killings.
On April 8, 2026, Heuermann pleaded guilty to murdering seven women and admitted to killing an eighth. As part of his plea deal, he is expected to receive three life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Everything Ellerup has said about the case, below.
Rex Heuermann’s Ex-Wife Didn’t Believe He Was a Murderer
When Ellerup first broke her silence in the three-part docuseries, she was resolute in her husband’s defense.
“[Did I] know what? My husband was home here. He is a family man,” Ellerup told the cameras. “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?”
She continued, “He comes home and he eats my dinner. It isn’t good enough? No. I don’t believe my husband did this.”
Ellerup also shut down suggestions that there were warning signs. “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,” she said.
At the time, she said she would need to hear it directly from her husband. “I would need to hear it from Rex face to face that he killed these girls for me to believe it,” she said. “My husband never kept me out of anything.”
Rex Heuermann’s Face-to-Face Confession
Heuermann sat down with Ellerup and their daughter, Victoria, for separate conversations with therapist Alison T. Winter so he could confess to the killings.
“I’m scared. There’s no doubt about that. I’m nervous, but I have questions to ask and I’m gonna need him to answer them for me. Number 1 is, ‘Did you kill any of these women? Then it would be, ‘OK, how many of these women did you kill?’” Ellerup said before the meeting. “I need to hear from him whether he did this or not. I can’t process things I don’t know.”
Ellerup added that “the hardest part” of the whole situation was accepting that she was possibly married “to a serial killer.”
While the meeting itself wasn’t filmed, Ellerup detailed the confession to cameras afterward.
“He looked very nervous. Very, very nervous. And I said to him, ‘So Mr. Heuermann, I understand that you are confessing to me on these murders. Can you please tell me how many of these women did you kill?’” she said. “He said eight.”
According to Ellerup, Heuermann said she wasn’t home for any of the murders and he killed all of his victims in their home except for one.
“He said he never really intentionally tried to kill these women. He said he just killed them. But he doesn’t know how he killed them,” Ellerup said.
However, Winter said that while Heuermann claimed he didn’t know he was going to kill his first victim, he “planned to kill” the others.
Following her conversation with Heuermann, Ellerup said she finally believed he was the Gilgo Beach Killer.
Rex Heuermann’s Daughter Reacts to His Confession
“Ever since my dad was arrested, it has been a combination of humiliation, confusion, sadness and uncertainty,” Victoria said. “Nobody really thinks about the daughter of the serial killer … People are just making up stories about it.”
After her father confirmed he killed eight women, he insisted the first murder wasn’t planned. “I also asked him about his planning document that was created in 2000 before Valerie Mack’s murder. My dad told me he first created that document as a way to try to distract himself from actually having to do the act himself,” she said.
When she asked why he committed the murders, “he said that his demons got to him.”
Rex Heuermann’s Ex-Wife Now Lives in the Basement Where He Committed Killings
After Heuermann officially pleaded guilty to killing the women in his family’s basement, Ellerup explained she moved into the crime scene.
“This whole basement looks very different. It’s been completely gutted and redone,” she said.
“The brutal truth is that Rex Huermann said he dismembered the bodies in this room. That is the brutal truth,” Ellerup continued. “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’m really sorry for what these victims went through. Every night that I go to bed and go to sleep, I am haunted by dreams.”
After noting that the dreams “follow me for the rest of my life,” she added there will “never be any justice for anyone and there will never be any way to forget about this.”
Rex Heuermann’s Ex-Wife Hopes to Understand Killer Side of Him
Ellerup shared that she has seen Heuermann 12 times since he confessed to her.
“I want to get to know this other side of Rex. I want to know why Rex killed these women,” she said. “What his triggers were. I’m processing the information in a very different way because now I see the evil in him.”
Ellerup filed for divorce shortly after Heuermann was arrested in July 2023. They reached a settlement in early 2025.
This story was compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists.
