For three years after his arrest, Asa Ellerup defended Rex Heuermann on camera. She called him a family man. She said they had the wrong man. Then on April 8, 2026, he pleaded guilty to eight murders — seven inside their home. He told Asa directly. Twenty-seven years inside that house. The same meals. The same routines. The same man — who was living an entirely different life.

He told her seven of the eight murders happened inside the home they shared for 27 years. Their daughter broke down in tears in the courtroom. How does a person go from “you have the wrong man” to accepting that the person she called her hero confessed to being a serial killer? Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott says the answer is more complicated than yes or no — and that the mechanism behind it has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with how agency erodes so slowly that confronting reality becomes psychologically impossible.

Scott recently wrote about this on her Substack, Spotlight on Psychology. In this conversation with Tony Brueski, she pairs the Ellerup case with Eric Richins — a man who saw the danger completely and still could not leave — to examine both sides of the same coin. The psychology underneath extends far beyond serial killers.

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Asa Ellerup sat across from the man she was married to for decades and heard him say he killed eight women — most of them inside their home. She asked about dismemberment. He told her yes. She walked out of that jailhouse, told a camera crew she still believes he loved her, and moved back into the house where it happened. Into the room where it happened.

This week's review brings together the most powerful Gilgo Beach conversations — the ones that went beyond the courtroom and into the wreckage left behind.

Victoria Heuermann visited her father and asked the questions nobody else could. Did you think about me while you were doing this? No. Did you see them as people? No. Victoria said she forgives him — not because the answers were acceptable, but because carrying the rage would destroy her. She's the daughter of a man who described a four-day kill cycle with clinical precision and told a therapist he cannot connect the person he is to the person in the evidence. She didn't choose this. None of the families did.

The families of the eight women Heuermann confessed to killing sat in that Suffolk County courtroom and listened to him describe how he met, strangled, and disposed of each victim. Some wept. Some stared. They've waited years — in some cases over a decade — for answers, and what they got was a negotiated plea that also quietly resolved the Karen Vergata case without a separate hearing and included a cooperation agreement that reportedly can't be enforced.

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott walks through every psychological dimension — Asa's denial architecture, Victoria's survival-driven forgiveness, and what Heuermann's emotional flatness tells us about who he actually is beneath the confession. The plea may be done. The damage isn't close to finished.

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Rex Heuermann set the terms of his own confession. Before he stood in a Suffolk County courtroom and pleaded guilty to murdering eight women, he arranged private jailhouse meetings with his ex-wife and his daughter. He chose the order. He chose the setting. He decided what they would hear and how they would hear it. Even in the act of admitting to being the Gilgo Beach serial killer, Rex was orchestrating the experience.

The Peacock documentary captured what happened in the aftermath of those meetings — Asa Ellerup walking out and saying she believes Rex loved her, Victoria Heuermann forgiving her father almost immediately, and both women returning to the house where seven of the eight murders were committed. It also captured something the public has never seen — extended therapy sessions where Rex described the mechanics of his killing in clinical detail. The four-day cycle. The stopwatch-timed body dumps. The childhood bedroom converted to a kill room. The claim that he can't connect the person in the crime scene photos to himself. And alongside it, John Douglas's assessment that Rex is a malignant narcissistic sadistic psychopath who likely has hidden victims in states where he faces death penalty exposure.

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins me for a comprehensive three-part series analyzing every person at the center of this case. Asa's psychology. Victoria's reckoning. Rex's mind. No angles left unexamined. This is the definitive psychological breakdown of the Heuermann family — and of the documentary that exposed them to the world.

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John Douglas looked at the full picture of Rex Heuermann — the four-day kill cycle, the stopwatch-timed body dumps, the kill room in his childhood bedroom, the planning document that referenced Douglas's own book — and delivered an assessment that should keep investigators working this case for years. He said Rex is a malignant narcissistic sadistic psychopathic serial killer.

He said he doesn't believe Rex started killing at thirty. And he raised the specter of death penalty exposure in states like South Carolina, where Rex owned property and where investigators have been looking at missing persons cases that could be connected. Douglas compared Rex to Dennis Rader — BTK — and said something striking. He said Rader would be jealous of Rex. Because Rader had the fantasy of keeping a victim in a room, of having total control in a contained space. But Rader never had the room. Rex did. Rex had the space, the privacy, the time when his family was out of state, and the methodical precision to carry out every element of the fantasy that most serial killers only imagine.

The documentary also revealed that Rex told his daughter the planning document was created as a way to try to curb the urge — that if he put it on paper, maybe he wouldn't need to act it out. That claim doesn't hold up against the timeline.

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins me to analyze the full psychological profile of Rex Heuermann as revealed by the documentary and Douglas's assessment — the gap between confession and truth, the narcissism that's still operating even after the plea, and whether Rex Heuermann will ever stop controlling this narrative.

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Rex Heuermann asked to confess to his daughter before he confessed to the world. That was one of his conditions for taking the plea — private meetings with Victoria and Asa before the public allocution. He wanted to control how his family heard the truth.

Even in confession, Rex was managing the narrative. Victoria walked into that jailhouse room and saw her father handcuffed to a chair. She said he looked nervous — the first time she'd ever seen him that way. She called him Dad. She asked how many women he killed. He said eight. She asked if any were killed in the house. He said yes — all except one. He said Sandra Costilla was killed in the Dodge Ram Charger that Victoria rode in as a child. He told her about the planning document. He said he took two photos during the killings and destroyed them. He said he didn't see the victims as human. And when Victoria asked if he ever thought about her while he was doing it, he said no. The two worlds never crossed. Victoria took all of that in. And then she said she forgives him. She said she can't move forward unless she does.

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins me to analyze what Rex's private confession to his daughter reveals about the psychology of both father and child — why Rex needed to control how Victoria learned the truth, what his carefully managed disclosure tells us about the narcissism that drives him, and how Victoria's response reflects a young woman navigating an emotional landscape that has no roadmap and no precedent.

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Rex Heuermann didn't just hide what he was from his ex-wife — he built the world she lived in. Every wall. Every doorway. Every belief she held about who he was and what their life meant. And then he filled that world with a version of himself that made the real Rex invisible.

The Peacock documentary revealed how total that control was. The family therapist described a dynamic where anything Rex told Asa became her operating reality. When he said he was innocent, that wasn't just something she believed — it became the only truth her mind could process. Evidence didn't matter. Investigators didn't matter. DNA didn't matter. Rex said he didn't do it, so he didn't do it. That's not stubbornness. That's not loyalty. That's the end result of a man who found a woman with no psychological foundation and poured himself into every crack until he was the only thing holding her together. Asa was adopted and never bonded with her family.

She was assaulted at sixteen. She attempted to end her life. Rex saw all of that — and whether consciously or not, he used it. He became her safety. Her anchor. The one person in her entire life who made the chaos stop. And he did it while killing women in the basement of their home.

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins me to analyze the specific control dynamics Rex Heuermann exerted over Asa — how he maintained a double life not through elaborate deception but through the psychological architecture of the relationship itself, and what the documentary reveals about whether Asa can ever fully separate from the man who defined her existence for three decades.

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Before Rex Heuermann stood in Suffolk County Court and pleaded guilty to the Gilgo Beach murders, he was given something almost unheard of — a private meeting with his ex-wife Asa Ellerup and their daughter Victoria to confess to them first. The final episode of the Peacock docuseries House of Secrets captures both women recounting that meeting. And what they describe goes to places the courtroom allocution never went.

Asa called him Mr. Heuermann. She asked how many women he killed. He said eight. He told her seven died in the basement of their Massapequa Park home while she and the children were away. He told her one was killed in his vehicle. He said every murder except the first was planned. Victoria asked if he ever saw his victims as human beings. He told her he didn't.

But the confession is only half of this story. The other half is what Asa did with it. She visited him twelve times after that conversation. She went home and gutted the basement — new floors, new walls, new everything — and moved into it. She sleeps every night in the room where Heuermann says he killed. She told the cameras it's spiritual. She says she's apologizing to the victims. And on recorded phone calls, Heuermann still calls her "dear" and she still smiles at the sound of his voice.

I go through every detail — the confession, Victoria's account, the murder that allegedly happened days before Rex and Asa's destination wedding, the crime scene book found on the kitchen table, and what Asa's transformation from defender to basement dweller reveals about what three decades of unknowing trust does to a person when the truth finally arrives.

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Rex Heuermann married Asa Ellerup in April 1996. According to the Suffolk County DA, he also strangled and dismembered Karen Vergata that same month. He admitted to it in open court during his guilty plea — an eighth killing he was never formally charged with. The confession was part of the deal: admit to Karen’s murder, never face prosecution for it. Seven indictments. One admission. Eight women dead.

The final episode of “The Seven.” Karen Vergata was 34, living in Hell’s Kitchen, working as an escort, battling addiction. Her sons had been taken by child welfare services four years earlier. She called her father on Valentine’s Day 1996 — his birthday — from behind bars. That was the last time anyone in her family heard from her. Weeks after the alleged killing, her legs were found in a garbage bag on Fire Island by two brothers searching for driftwood. She became Fire Island Jane Doe. Her skull was found near Gilgo Beach in 2011. She was Jane Doe Number Seven until genetic genealogy identified her in 2022.

Her father Dominic searched for decades. Hired a PI. Was turned away by the NYPD when he tried to report her missing. Filed to have her declared dead. Was told in October 2022 that his daughter had been identified. Died two months later at 87. Never saw accountability.

Karen’s case fills the gap between Sandra Costilla (1993) and Valerie Mack (2000), and adds Fire Island as a new dump site — expanding the geography of Heuermann’s admitted crimes beyond Manorville, Ocean Parkway, and Southampton. As part of the plea, Heuermann agreed to cooperate with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. His attorney said the plea brought his client a “sense of relief.” Karen’s full story, the evidence trail, and what it means to be the uncharged name in an eight-victim confession — all covered here.

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