It’s Splitsville for accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann and his wife of more than 20 years, according to a new filing in Suffolk County matrimonial court.
Asa Ellerup, 59, who shared a home with the architect and suspected murderer up until he was arrested on July 13, filed for divorce on Wednesday.
Heuermann was charged last week with the death of three sex workers whose bodies were dumped in the marsh along a desolate strip of Long Island. Suffolk County prosecutors, who have been investigating the deaths for more than 10 years, believe that he is also responsible for the death of a fourth woman whose corpse was discovered in the same general location.
Ellerup and Heuermann share two adult children and have lived in the same Massapequa Park, Long Island home for more than 20 years, according to The New York Times.
“This is all still a whirlwind,” her lawyer Robert Macedonio told Fox News. “Her and her children’s lives have been completely turned upside-down.”
Ellerup’s Twitter handle @ElvenMaiden chronicles her trips to ComicCon conventions in California, Boston and Baltimore. The user name is a reference to the video game “The Elder Scrolls IV”
The wife, who immigrated from Iceland with her sister when she was very young, grew up in Farmingdale and attended the local high school there.
Ellerup, whose hair was found on the bodies of some of the slain women, has not been implicated in the crime.
Prosecutors have noted in court filings that she was traveling when the crimes were committed. She was in Iceland in July 2009 when Melissa Barthelemy, 24, went missing from her Bronx home. Ellerup visited Maryland in June 2010 when 22-year-old Megan Waterman was last seen on surveillance video leaving a hotel with a client, believed to be her killer. And a few months later, the wife headed to New Jersey when Amber Lynn Costello, 27, disappeared in September 2010.
A local grocery store worker who had seen the wife and kids frequently wondered if Heuermann wasn’t also terrorizing his family.
“Could he have been a monster who killed those girls and an angel at home?” store manager Mery Salmeri told the Times. “Or maybe his family was just so scared of him that they were like his prisoners who would never tell anyone, even if they had some idea of what he was capable of.”
