The estranged wife of alleged Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann has finally broken her silence, offering her first statement on the arrest of her former husband last Friday. During her comments, Asa Ellerup alluded to suffering from major depression and trauma that has come about as the result of the stunning arrest. I mean, can you blame the poor woman? The person she thought was her life partner turned out to be a serial murderer, snuffing out the lives of innocent people for years on end. It’s hard to even fathom how devastating such a discovery would be.
The New York Post reported that Ellerup, who officially filed for divorce earlier in the month, was seen outside the home the couple shared in Massapequa Park early in the day on Friday for the second day in a row since investigators wrapped up a thorough search of the property.
“If you want to take pictures, go ahead. I’m OK with it now,” she said to reporters, according to an article put out by the Daily Mail. “If you want to stand up here and wait for something. I have a lot of work to do.”
“The sheer depression of what I saw was enough trauma,” Ellerup went on to add. However, it wasn’t made immediately clear what she was referring to. When a reporter asked her on Friday if she would be interested in a GoFundMe page that one of her friends was reportedly attempting to set up for her, she replied, “Yeah … it would be very helpful.”
Here’s more from the Post:
Ellerup, who sat on her front porch throughout the afternoon, appeared to be wearing the same blue jeans and green T-shirt she had worn a day earlier when she screamed at reporters and flipped off a camera.
At one point on Friday, Ellerup’s two children, 26-year-old Victoria Heuermann and Christopher Sheridan, 33, joined her on the porch. Macedonio & Duncan, LLP, the firm representing Ellerup in the divorce, said last week that she and her family were “going through a devastating time in their lives.”
Neither Ellerup nor her children have visited Heuermann in the two weeks he’s been jailed, the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to The Post.
The family showed up at the home after detectives finished a full-scale search of the property earlier in the week. The authorities, who referred to the search as “fruitful,” uncovered a huge walk-in vault on the property. It’s terrifying to think of what might be in that space. The imagination runs wild with the possibilities.
Heuermann, 59, was arrested July 13 over the deaths of three women — Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Lynn Costello, 27 — found dead along Gilgo Beach some 13 years ago.
Those aren’t the only murders that Heuermann is being eyed for. He’s also a suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, whose body was discovered along the same stretch of beach as the other victims.
Related: Portland Has an Apparent Serial Killer. His Accomplice May Be the Governor
Another report put out by the Post a few days ago revealed that Heuermann frightened many of his former classmates, who described him as an awkward loner who was picked on quite a bit.
“I was really scared of him. He was the type of guy if he snapped, he could really hurt you,” Berner High School graduate John Parisi said in a comment made to The New York Times concerning the 59-year-old murder suspect.
“He was disillusioned and he was misguided. You had to be very careful,” Parisi went on to say, adding later in the interview that the tall, lanky teenager was “everybody’s punching bag.”
“He got picked on a lot. He would take it and take it and walk away. I seen him pushed to his limit,” Parisi recounted in the report.
Parisi then recalled a time when the alleged serial killer was cruelly bullied by his fellow sixth-grade classmates. The bullying ended after a teacher stepped in, but kids made fun of Heuermann all the way up through high school.
Heuermann was also referred to as a “recluse” who was “very quiet” by fellow classmate Don Ophals.
Could this all have played a part in helping to forge the meek young man into a bloodthirsty monster? No doubt it did. Many serial killers hunger for control and dominance, mostly due to some sort of childhood trauma that stripped them of those feelings when they were young.
Often, a serial killer will be plagued by massive insecurities and not feel like he is a true, masculine man. This often leads to the inability to fulfill himself sexually, leaving him unable to climax during regular expressions of sexuality. The domination of victims can provide the release a serial killer needs in order to complete that act.
So, yes, the severe bullying Heuermann endured in school, along with lacking any sort of mentor in his life to show him how to overcome such adversity, probably contributed to his sick and twisted crimes later in life.
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