“Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer” rose to Netflix’s No. 1 in April on a similar thesis: the intersection of the curiously-long Gilgo Beach murder investigation, and the culture of police corruption that caused many feet to drag.
From Executive Producer 50 Cent, “The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets” — now streaming on Peacock after premiering on Tuesday, June 10th — platforms both this saddening truth and the overwhelm of evidence past regimes had to sit on before being given the go to take this case all the way home.
However, it adds one element that its predecessor did not: $1 million exclusive interviews with both Asa Ellerup and Victoria Heuermann—wife and daughter of Rex.
The lifelong Massapequa Park resident was originally arrested in July 2023 outside his Manhattan place of business, where he worked for decades as an architect while his dilapidated childhood home became his arrested developmental stomping grounds.
He was charged with the murder of three sex workers who disappeared on the job from 2007-2009; their mutilated bodies were discovered at their killer’s South Shore dumping site shortly thereafter from 2010-2011.
Nearly two years after the world finally put a face to the elusive name that long-held tabloid fame, Heurermann has been charged with four more murders—and investigators are actively racing to tie him to more.
Through his attorney, he of course swears his innocence. As does seemingly doting wife Asa, who despite their recent divorce, cannot wrap her mind around Rex being the monster who made a soundproof kill room out of their basement every time the family went on vacation.
“Do people really believe everything they hear?” she asked interviewers before providing interior tours of their search warrant-ransacked home, even fielding a brief but chilling phone call with Rex himself on air.
Victoria, on the other hand, seemed far more open to the prospect of one day accepting that the man she knew and will forever love as her father may have lived this dark and twisted doubled life; one wherein he repeatedly committed heinous crimes—kidnapping, rape, torture and cold-blooded murder—essentially in plain sight for quite some.
Having worked under Rex as a secretary for the better part of her 20s until his arrest, Victoria, her half-brother Matthew (Asa’s from a previous marriage), and Asa often convey a two-pronged sense: solemnness that all this has happened, but stubbornness nonetheless.
Almost admirably so, they won’t soon be bullied by the media and the world at large to move out of their home until they are damn well ready to do so on their own accord and of their own volition.
A title card upon the final installment’s conclusion confirmed Asa and the kids are indeed prepping to move down South; she will return for Rex’s trial.
Proclaimed best friend of Heurermann David Jimenez also tearfully spoke on the record about how he finally came to believe the man he thought he knew had been capable of such devil-on-Earth crimes. He described visiting him in prison and being taken aback by what he encountered.
According to Jimenez, Heurermann did not outright deny the killings when prompted as he assumed he would, and only ghostly hung his head frozen to withhold himself from crying.
This behavior was in stark contrast to the beginning of the visit, where Heurermann allegedly exhibited brashness when declaring to Jimenez that no amount of ongoing searching of his Massapequa home would produce palpable evidence.
Jimenez also shared a frightening memory of a time when the hulking Heurermann drew a gun on him during a day at the range. An awkward sequence of sounds created by the retrieval of a gun off the ground had a shaken Heurermann convinced Jimenez had the drop on him until proven otherwise.
Meanwhile, in 2021, various Suffolk County, New York State and Federal agencies combined forces to indeed corner Heurermann—and he has been off the streets ever since.
As his trial awaits, local Long Island citizens and law enforcement leaders alike relish in refreshing themselves on how far they have from a regrettable past under rotten eggs such as Former Police Chief James Burke.
Oft-discussed within episode one of Peacock’s three-part saga: Burke’s penchant for prostitutes and questionable removal of federal officers from the Gilgo investigation.
Burke’s subsequent fall began with his merciless, in-custody beating of Christopher Loeb for stealing a bag of pornography and sex toys from his police car, and kept going when he, former Suffolk DA Thomas Spota and others tried to cover it up. He was later arrested for public lewdness in Aug. 2023.
His successors continue to work the case of the century within these parts, ever undoing what Burke and company failed to do in the first place.
“‘I want to work with the Sheriff’s Office on every case possible, including Gilgo,’” DA Ray Tierney swore upon assuming office in 2022, as Suffolk County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon, Jr. recalled in the new Peacock doc.
The very next year, they had their man.