Rex Heuermann's Attorney Said the Guilty Plea Brought Him 'a Huge Sense of Relief'

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Sentencing Day. Rex Heuermann strangled eight women over 17 years and dismembered some of them in his own basement. Then went upstairs and lived life. Planned the killings around his family's vacation schedule. His attorney said the guilty plea brought him a huge sense of relief. Isn't that nice? In court, he said strangulation to every question about cause of death and the same flat voice and never once turned around to look at anyone behind him. The question underneath all of it is whether the normal suburban dad was the mask or whether both versions of Rex Heuermann were completely real.
One of the disturbing things that we've learned, and people can't really stop talking about, so we'll talk about it for a moment. Her bedroom now, I mean, she had a bedroom upstairs. Yes, they came in and the feds raided and they... But the rest of the house, apparently, you know that she made better again. The basement was his lair, the basement was the kill room, the basement was his own bedroom, the basement was where he did all of his stuff. After he's out, after the raids are done, after they hire contractors to come in and fix everything up, I can't imagine being those contractors.
She chooses to go down to the basement, to his old bedroom, to the room he's admitted was the kill room, where he would take his victims and torture. It was horrendous. Just the horrendous things that went on in that room. And she's finished it out, put her bed in there, has a bunch of plushies and beanie babies and sleeps in there.
That felt disturbing in that documentary when we saw that. And I've been sitting with it and she says that there'll never be peace for any of this, there'll never be, you know, reckons. She used some term of like, there's never going to be peace. And maybe there won't be for her or for anybody. I mean, how do you get on with this?
But she says she has nightmares and she goes down there and she still sleeps every night. It's almost was a weird, I don't know, atonement for her husband's deeds. It kind of felt like, were we watching performative grief and performative atonement in that where, oh, I'm so troubled by this, this is horrible. And I'm going to take the pains and I'm going to, I'm going to endure these every night. I mean, there was cameras watching. I get it. And I get, if you're going to be there and it's your house and that's what you want to do, and that's what you feel you need to do, then do it. Is that something that needed to be on camera? Or is that, was it performative? Or does Asa not really understand that that could come across as rather performative as well if done on camera? I don't know. I feel like Asa is probably the same Asa camera or no camera.

**Robin Drake** (3:05)
It's our word of the day, performative in Asa.

**Tony Brueski** (3:07)
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, she just kind of strikes me as aloof in every stretch of the word.

**Shavaun Scott** (3:13)
Yeah, that is definitely one of the most disturbing scenes down in that room. And I think for most of us, we would, I mean, I can't really put myself in that situation, but I think most people, it was like the Dahmer apartment building. You raise it, you tear it down, you get rid of it. And I think most of us would want that house gone. You know, I mean, it would be-

**Tony Brueski** (3:39)
I mean, it sounds like something the killer would do, quite honestly. It doesn't sound like something the wife of the killer voluntarily does once he's been arrested.
It seems insane. It seems dangerous. It seems there's something very screwed up going on here. So I don't want to get- I mean, I'm just kind of done with the, I want to give a bunch of empathy over here. Like I do to a certain extent, but there is a whole other side to this shit where it's like, I'm sorry, what the fuck are you doing? I mean, are you basking in this? I mean, this is what the killer themselves would do. Go and bask in the kill room. Not, I mean, so who the fuck are you going in there and doing this? I'm sorry, it's fucked up.

**Robin Drake** (4:25)
Do you think that, you know, because she said, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, you know, I watched the interview, you know, the special a couple weeks ago. Didn't she say she wanted to get to know him, that other side of him?