U.S. documentary details Gilgo Beach killer’s confessions to family

Rex Heuermann appears at Suffolk County Court in Riverhead, N.Y., on Feb. 25, 2025. (James Carbone/Newsday via AP)

NEW YORK -- A documentary released Thursday recounts the confessions of American serial killer Rex Heuermann, who recently admitted to strangling and dismembering women and scattering their remains around a coastal area near New York City.

Heuermann, 62, pleaded guilty in early April to seven murders, plus an eighth that he had not been charged with, in a disturbing crime spree spanning 1993 to 2010 dubbed the Gilgo Beach killings.

He faces life in prison with no chance of parole when sentenced in June.

Episode 4 of “The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets” focuses on Heuermann confessing his crimes to his ex-wife and their daughter as part of a family therapy session.

The confessions, which Heuermann made in 2025 at a Long Island jail, are not filmed but the two women recount them afterward on camera.

Asa Ellerup, his ex-wife, tells how Heuermann showed no remorse for his victims, adding: “I think the tears were for me.”

Their daughter Victoria Heuermann says her father explains that “his demons got to him.”

“When he was in a certain opportunity or there was a certain catalyst in front of him that would start to create these dark urges,” she says.

Recorded phone conversations between Heuermann and his family also feature in the documentary, of which three episodes already streamed last year.

The Gilgo Beach case had stumped investigators for years with no suspects identified, and some critics alleged it would have progressed more quickly had the women not been sex workers.

In 2022, detectives narrowed their focus onto Heuermann after he was found to be the registered owner of a vehicle one of the victims had been spotted in.

Since then, the case against Heuermann -- a married father of two at the time of the killings -- has been based on DNA evidence from a discarded pizza box and cell phone data linking him to the victims.

Some of that evidence was found in his family home in Massapequa Park, a suburban village, on Long Island.

AFP