What Asa Ellerup Does Every Night in Rex Heuermann’s Gilgo Beach Kill Room

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Let's move over to another case that you guys have a lot of questions about, a lot of thoughts on Rex Heuermann. Plead guilty to eight murders just the other week, sat across from Asa Ellerup and told her he killed seven of the eight women in their basement, and there was an eighth too. Surprise! And in the very house that Asa still lives in, rather than moving away, rather than going, I can't set foot in this house again, knowing my husband did these things over the course of our life over the last 30 years. No, she thought it is a great way. This is an HGTV moment. Gut the basement, pick up some Hello Kitty bedspreads over at the TJ Maxx and stuffed animals and set them up, set them up, make it a nice cozy little spot and sleep there. Then bring the documentary camera crew down to the basement to show just how cozy you made it. It's like trading spaces in hell.
Your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube as we continue our conversation on all of this. So here's one of these statements from our social media. Asa gutted the room where Rex said he dismembered seven women, decorated it with stuffed animals, moved in. She says it's spiritual. That's kind of how she positioned it in the doc. And I should say here too quickly, we're not accusing Asa of doing anything illegal or being involved in the crime or anything like that. We're just saying this is creepy and weird.
Listener says, I'm sorry, in what world is that a normal response to finding out your husband is the killer? Making a spiritual spot with Hello Kitty bedspreads in the kill room. Robin, your thoughts?

**Robin Dreeke** (1:50)
Well, yeah, it's not normal. I'm going to do my best to channel our inner Siobhan Scott, who explains, I think, Rex and Asa exceptionally well and completely agree with all of it.
No, normal people don't do that. And normal is also a word that requires definition. I'll just say healthy people don't do that.
She has this complete inability to see Rex as anything other than her knight in shining armor, her savior, her Jesus figure. I don't care what you want to call it. She will not let go of that. And she made that downstairs a shrine to what she wants him to be, what she envisioned him as. And so that's what, it's literally, she remade what his life was into what she always wanted it to be and has now wrapped herself around it. That's exactly what's going on. She has him captured in prison now, so he can't go around killing prostitutes. She kept his boyhood home and boyhood room and made it into a boyhood room that she now sleeps in with the man that she adored her entire life. She's completely wrapped herself around in the fantasy she told herself, but couldn't prove all these other years. She's now made it a reality.

**Tony Brueski** (3:15)
When you say making it a shrine to him, because it's not like there's pictures of Rex up on the wall or anything like that, but that doesn't necessarily mean there has to be to be.

**Robin Dreeke** (3:24)
Trying to how he made her feel.

**Tony Brueski** (3:25)
A shrine, it's an emotional shrine. And he made her feel essentially like a child, I think. I mean, because these are childhood things. I mean, these are children's toys. These are plushies and things that, you know, I went at Dave and Buster's for my daughter, you know? I mean, it's rather bizarre that a grown ass woman in her 50s or 60s is collecting that sort of, I mean, I guess it's not crazy, but is collecting that sort of thing in this sort of way.
Does the fact that all of these things are so childish, does it say something that she didn't go to the local florist and fill it with bouquets and things that a 50, 60 some year old woman would fill their home with, not children's plushies, but she filled it with plushies. Does that say something about her cognitive level of thinking, that she went to childhood stuffed animals, rather than, I guess more of an appropriate comfort type things of someone her age in life?

**Robin Dreeke** (4:39)
Our greatest motivation as a human being is fear.
And we want to feel safe. And so how that leaks out and we can observe it, shows what that person needs to feel safe and no longer feel fear. I mean, so just think about, we all do this. It's just how we, the actions we take for ourselves to do that is where it varies based on our context, our experiences, our genetics, our nature versus nurture, the blend of them together. And so what she's doing to feel safe, again, her entire world of what she made herself believe, and she did make herself believe because she's, I don't think it was intentional, is just how her brain worked with him. She saved, he saved her from the life that she was having. And so that he made her feel safe. And so in order for her to double down on a life that just got upended, her knight in shining armor is now behind bars. She dug deeper in the house, cause it's in the basement where it's even more insular from the world. She remodeled it to feel like a child again, whether she had those things growing up, her daughter had those things grow up. There's some sort of attachment to the visual stimulus she put down there to allow us her to feel safer than she otherwise would have. You know, human beings, abhor change, varying degrees depend on who we are, because change is fearful, because change means things are unknown. As a species, we don't like the unknown because it doesn't allow us to feel safe. It keeps coming back to that same thing. All these things she's doing is letting her feel safe and empowered. And it's that childish, because that's when we go through traumatic events, our developmental or mental developmental stops at that age. So for whatever reason, that's the age that she's stopped mentally developing in these areas. And so she just ratcheted right back down to that.