Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect Rex Heuermann was bisexual, brought hookers home while wife was there, witnesses say
NEW YORK — Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect Rex Heuermann’ s sexual proclivities included a swinger’s club, sex with at least one man and prostitutes who came to his Long Island home — while his wife was there, according to new witnesses.
New evidence released publicly on Wednesday suggested that Asa Ellerup, Heuermann’s wife, knew about her husband’s hooker habit.
But on one occasion, when she blew her stack about the strangers in her home, the rage she expressed was about a missing clothes iron, according to a new witness, one of four who has come forward to law enforcement authorities with new details about the defendant.
The witnesses, including two who submitted signed affidavits, expanded what investigators have already learned about Heuermann, according to John Ray, an attorney for several families of the serial killing victims.
“You see the pattern,” Ray said at a news conference with Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison. “There’s a pattern of a guy who likes to play kind of sporting games with the sex workers. Chases them, haunts them, hunts them. That’s what we’re looking at here.”
So far, cops have charged Heuermann, 60, for the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, whose remains were unearthed near Long Island’s Gilgo Beach in 2010.
He remains the prime suspect in the murder and disappearance of a fourth woman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, according to prosecutors, though he has yet to be charged in that case.
Ray claimed the new witnesses had evidence connecting Heuermann to the deaths of Shannan Gilbert and Karen Vergata.
Ray said one witness, who said she met Heuermann at a Manhattan swinger’s club, went to Heuermann’s house for a sex party in February 1996 with her police officer boyfriend and Vergata. Heuermann’s wife was at the house when they arrived,
The witness said that Vergata went downstairs and that Heuermann and her boyfriend vanished for a while.
Before they left, Vergata “suddenly ran outside, naked, and ran about by the garage,” according to the affidavit. The witness said she never heard about Heuermann or Vergata again until the architect was arrested in June.
A second witness, according to another affidavit, a taxi driver, said she once saw Gilbert and Heuermann together when she picked her up in the fall of 2009.
She said she was dispatched to the Sayville Motor Lodge to pick up a female passenger who had “locked herself in a bathroom.” Shortly after she arrived a “very large man” ran out of the room and a woman entered her car “crying and shaking.”
She said she picked up Heuermann in her cab on another occasion, and he threatened to kill her. She said Heuermann was armed.
An attorney for Ellerup, Robert Macedonio, denied the allegations and said they were “outlandish.”
“This is a desperate attempt by Johnny Ray to remain relevant in a case where he’s been chasing his tail for the past 12 years,” Macedonio said. “It’s hard to take anyone seriously wearing a purple hat that looks more like an audition for a Willy Wonka movie than an attorney representing a victim.”
Harrison said the task force is committed to investigating every lead.
“I want to make sure that people understand that we have a job here, as law enforcement, as the Suffolk County Police Department, to make sure we investigate every single complaint or interest in this case,” he said. “To make sure that we look under every single stone to see if there is any connection to Rex Heuermann, or if there is a connection to somebody else that may be involved with the bodies that were discovered on Ocean Parkway.”
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