What Asa Ellerup Is Still Protecting Gilgo Beach Killer Rex Heuermann From

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
You like this line? I'm doing great now that I've got you on the phone.
Interesting thing to say to your ex-husband.
That's incarcerated for taking the lives of eight S-workers that we're aware of. You're doing great now that you got old Rex on the phone.
Asa Ellerup said it on camera in the Peacock documentary.
She was smiling. The man on the other end of the line had been charged, like I said, charged with killing seven, committed to eight, and Asa Ellerup lit up the sound of his voice hitting the receiver. Boom, lights on.
Like he was calling from a work trip. Oh, Rex, not from the county jail, not a cell where he sat after being identified as a Gilgo Beach serial killer. Felt more like a work trip. Honey, I got the buffalo wings over at the Applebee's tonight. I'm really missing you. It was a lonely dinner. No.
She lit up, her face looked like relief, warmth, the particular kind of ease that comes from hearing the one person you've been waiting to hear from all day. Rex Heuermann pled guilty to eight murders. He strangled eight women over 17 years, dismembered three of them, and dumped their remains across Long Island. Seven were killed in the basement of the house he shared with Asa. He's now serving three consecutive life terms, plus a hundred years, with no possibility of parole. And since his confession, what his ex-wife has done with that information is a story nobody I think can make sense of.
Or feel remotely comfortable in observing, even. There's a photo from their wedding, April 1996 Asa is holding or is looking up at Rex, and she told the Peacock cameras that she was thinking in that moment, I finally got him. He's mine. April 1996 Remember that month. We're coming back to it.
This is not a piece about Rex Heuermann's crimes. You know those. This is about what his ex-wife did after he admitted to them, because the behavioral record Asa Ellerup has built on camera, on the phone and inside that house over the past three years tells a story that is hard to look away from. The imprisoned Rex Heuermann, the one behind Plexiglas, the one who calls on a schedule, the one who cannot disappear, may be the best version of Rex that Asa has ever had. Have you thought of that? We've touched on it a bit. But I want to really dive into that thought here in this piece. And I'd love for you to weigh in in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. Those links are in the description. She said something else on camera that cuts a little deeper than the smile on the recorded call. Something about protecting Rex's feelings. There's a weird nugget there. We'll get there. For 27 years, Rex was gone, not physically gone. He came home, he ate dinner, he lived in that house. But the real Rex, the real one, the deep one was somewhere else entirely. The one with 120 terabytes of material on 58 hard drives. The one who searched the internet for why could law enforcement not trace the calls. One who kept a planning document that prosecutors described as a blueprint for how to murder and dispose of a human body. That Rex lived in a world Asa could not see and did not enter. He truly had a double life. He disappeared into it whenever the family left town. Asa spent decades marrying to a man who was only partially in the room with her at any given moment. Now he calls on a schedule. She always knows where he is. He can't vanish into his second life. His entire world has shrunk to a phone line and a visitor window for 27 years. Asa tried to hold on to the man who was never fully there. He is now completely inescapably there. He literally cannot leave. She visits when she wants. She takes his calls on her terms. He told the documentary there was comfort in seeing him. That word comfort applied to visiting the confessed serial killer in the county jail. It makes no sense from the outside. It makes complete sense though if you understand what she is measuring it against. This is about putting yourself in someone else's shoes. These are some odd shoes to fill. These are really hard to fill. You are going to need the shoe horn. Have you ever used a shoe horn? I have it either. Whenever they suggest, do you need a shoe horn? When I am at the shoe store, I am like, ah, I am good because I couldn't tell you how to use it. Anyway, it is some odd shoes to fill, and it is really hard to do that. It is hard. It takes a little mental gymnastics, but try to follow along with me here, because it is a fascinating journey as we get close to the sun. She is comparing her sense of Rex to the 30 years of a partial Rex, and partial Rex is all she ever knew. He allegedly confessed to her first. The plea deal came. There gave him a private meeting with Asa and their daughter Victoria before the courtroom allocation. Set across from him, she addressed him as Mr. Heuermann.