Gilgo Beach suspect’s wife — and family dog — in court to support accused serial killer
Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann had a new supporter in the courtroom Tuesday — a scraggly black lab mix named Stewie.
Asa Ellerup showed up in a Long Island courtroom Tuesday cozying up with the family dog as her troubled husband made his latest appearance before a Suffolk County judge — with the pup suited up with a harness marked “Service Dog.”
“I mean, it’s his dog,” defense attorney Michael Brown told reporters. “I don’t know if he saw Stewie but I did mention that his dog was there.”
Heuermann, 60, is charged with the gruesome murders of six women between 1993 and 2010 and dumping their bodies in a desolate stretch of Southern Parkway.
The murders of the women, all of them sex workers, went unsolved for more than a decade until Heuermann’s arrest last year in the first three of the slayings tied to him.
Brown said Tuesday he would request that at least some of the murder cases be tried separately, particularly victims Jessica Taylor and Sandra Costilla.
Those were the last cases linked to Heuermann, who had initially been charged in the deaths of four women known collectively as the “Gilgo Four” and whose killings seemed to differ from Taylor’s and Costilla’s.
“They have nothing to do with the other four. There is nothing, no relevance to the other four,” Brown said. “The MO is different. The way the murders were carried out were different. Those bodies were, I hate using these words but, deposited or left, is completely different.
“So as we know here about this Gilgo, the Gilgo Beach murders, those two have nothing to do with it,” he added. “But the prosecutor has put them in the grand jury. It’s one indictment. And yes, we’re going to move at some point to sever those victims.”
Ellerup initially distanced herself from her architect husband, but in recent months has dutifully been in the courtroom for his appearances and has visited him in jail regularly, officials said.
Absent from the courtroom Tuesday was the couple’s daughter, Victoria, with Ellerup instead bringing Stewie along to keep her company as the two sat at the rear of the room during the proceedings.
Heuermann was sporting a new black suit, blue tie and a new haircut as he faced Suffolk County Judge Timothy Mazzie — repeatedly shaking his head during the brief court appearance.
Prosecutors have alleged that the hulking architect kept a sick “planning document” with how-to and lessons-learned sections that was recovered from his home computer.
The DA’s Office said it has so far turned over a massive trove of records to Heuermann’s defense, including more than 60,000 pages of documents seized from the accused killer’s Massapequa Park home, 1,600 pages of lab reports and about 2,000 pages of DNA data.
“We’re going through the material, that’s all I can say,” Brown said. “It’s a voluminous amount of material.”
Heuermann is due back in court on Oct. 16.
