Rex Heuermann's Estranged Wife Says Suspected Serial Killer 'Is Not Capable' of Murder: Lawyer
Rex Heuermann has been charged in the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Amber Costello
Asa Ellerup, the estranged wife of Long Island Serial Killer suspect Rex Heuermann, says she plans to “listen to all the evidence” and withhold judgment about his guilt until the end of his trial.
Heuermann is charged with murdering four women who worked as online escorts and had been missing between 2007 and 2010.
“I have given him the benefit of the doubt, as we all deserve,” Ellerup said in a statement released on her behalf by her attorney Bob Macedonio.
Ellerup visits her husband regularly and “still maintains that Rex is not capable of the crimes he is accused of,” Macedonio said in the statement.
Macedonio tells PEOPLE that Ellerup's life is “on hold.”
“This has become the new normal for her,” he says. “And obviously a lot hinges on the outcome of what happens at the trial with her husband.”
Macedonio says Heuermann’s arrest was “like a death of a relative or a child or every day you learn to adapt a little bit more and more to the new reality."
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“No one wants to believe the person they were married to for 27 years and slept in the same bed with and had a child with was capable of these kind of crimes,” he says. “Nobody wants to believe that.”
Heuermann, an architect and married father of two, was charged with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello and Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
All four women had worked as online escorts and had been missing between 2007 and 2010. Their bodies were found along a half-mile stretch of Ocean Parkway in Long Island, New York, in December 2010.
Heuermann was allegedly linked to the killings by burner phones used to rendezvous with the victims, as well as by a piece of his hair allegedly found at the bottom of a burlap bag used to wrap Waterman’s body.
He was also traced to a Chevrolet Avalanche that was registered to him and was allegedly seen at the time of Costello's disappearance.
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Authorities said investigators also found evidence that Heuermann was allegedly obsessed with the case and searched for articles about the task force that was formed to investigate the murders.
In the statement, Ellerup said her “heartfelt sympathies go out to the victims and their families, ‘nobody deserves to die in that manner.’”
Macedonio says Ellerup and her two adult children continue to live in the home they shared with Heuermann and plan to “wait until the outcome of the trial to decide what they're going to do with the house.”
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