NEW YORK — As news of Rex Heuermann’s arrest in the Gilgo Beach murders spread through his Long Island neighborhood, shock gave way to questions about another person in the dilapidated red house.
“I guess people don’t expect a serial killer to be married,” said Frankie Musto, who lives two houses away from Heuermann in Massapequa Park, a dormitory community an hour from midtown Manhattan. . Musto stood on his porch, chatting with family and neighbors about how a man a police officer described as “a demon that walks among us” could stay married for years.
During the years that investigators said Heuermann preyed on young women, he lived in the Red House with his wife, Asa Ellerup, 59, and their two children.
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Heuermann was arrested in midtown Manhattan and charged Friday with three counts of first-degree murder; he is also the prime suspect in the death of a fourth woman. His lawyer said Heuermann, who was held without bond, denies committing the murders and cried after his arrest.
His wife has not been charged, and investigators say she was out of state or country when all of the murders took place. Investigators said stray strands of hair helped link her husband to the bodies found in 2011. Questions about Ellerup arose Monday morning along the busy checkout counters at the IGA supermarket where she shopped several times a week for over 20 years.
“Could it have been a monster that killed those girls and an angel at home?” said Mery Salmeri, a store manager. “Or maybe his family was so scared of him that they were like his prisoners who would never tell anyone even if they had an idea of what he was capable of.”
Supermarket cashiers knew them as a quiet, sad family who shopped several times a week. Salmeri said she has watched their children grow over the past 25 years. One thing remained constant, she says: Heuermann never accompanied them.
“He never came with them,” she said. “I don’t know what that says about them.”
Ellerup looked depressed, Salmeri said, and the family often paid with food stamps, which is unusual at this store.
Prosecutors said Heuermann’s use of disposable burner phones — to contact his victims, to keep tabs on the investigation and to access cruel pornography — not only helped him evade authorities for years , but may have kept his wife in the dark.
Criminologists say serial killers can be married and seem well-adjusted. And, said criminologist and researcher Scott Bonn, “It’s not unusual for the wives and families of serial killers to be completely unaware of their darkest compulsions.”
“They are able to compartmentalize,” he said, “and see no contradiction in being a caring parent and partner in one aspect of their life and in another, torturing and killing people.”
The location of the family was unclear after Heuermann’s arrest. They weren’t seen over the weekend as crime scene workers hauled a succession of boxes of evidence out of the house in trucks, or on Monday when authorities searched a storage unit in Amityville, near.
The accused man and his wife spent their lives in the suburbs of New York. Ellerup grew up about 3 km from Heuermann after she and her sister emigrated from Iceland with their parents. Her mother died, according to neighbors, and her father still lives in the family home. He didn’t answer the door on Monday.
Ellerup attended Farmingdale High School and married briefly in her twenties and divorced in the early 1990s in Queens. It was unclear if she had a professional life outside the home.
On Ellerup’s apparent Twitter account, which hadn’t been active in a decade, she posted about her passion for comic book conventions, taking vacations and venting in the cold. Her handle, @ElvenMaiden, was an apparent reference to a video game.
The Mustos, like other neighbors, called Heuermann’s family reclusive and enigmatic. In a tight-knit block, they did not socialize. Their neglected house stood out almost as an extension of their nature.
To Musto, Ellerup didn’t seem concerned about appearances either. “It could be mid-afternoon and she looked like she just rolled out of bed,” she said.
“I’m friendly with everyone here, but she hasn’t spoken to anyone,” Musto said.
There was speculation but little information about Heuermann’s relationship with his wife and family life. Their closest neighbors said they didn’t know them well, and no neighbors recalled anyone outside the family ever being allowed – or wanting – inside the house.
The name of their couple’s son remained unclear. Their daughter, Victoria, 26, worked with Heuermann at his Manhattan business.
Musto’s daughter Taylor, 27, said she grew up and played with Victoria as a child.
“She was always silent. She was asking me to come,” Taylor Musto said. This did not sit well with Taylor’s mother.
“I didn’t want her in this house,” Frankie Musto said.
“He might just have two personalities,” said her husband, Bob Musto, a Heuermann neighbor and 40-year-old resident.
According to authorities, Heuermann was careful to hide his activity from his wife.
When one victim, Megan Waterman, went missing in June 2010, Ellerup was in Maryland, authorities said. She was in New Jersey in September 2010 when Amber Lynn Costello went missing, and in Iceland in July 2009 when Melissa Barthelemy was last seen.
Some serial killers are able to keep their secrets “in the same way that some men can have a second family on the sidelines and nobody knows about it,” said James Alan Fox, a professor at Northeastern University who has been studying serial killers for a long time. over 40 years. “It’s something they do in their spare time, and how would the family know?”
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