MASSAPEQUA PARK, N.Y. — Neighbors breathed a sigh of relief this past week when an empty shipping container appeared outside the dilapidated red house in Massapequa Park that has become known as the home of the accused Long Island serial killer.
“The best thing that could happen is they knock that house down and build a brand-new one so that the memory of all this is obliterated,” said a neighbor, Albert Cella, 80.
“All this” referred to the sensation caused by the arrest last year of Rex Heuermann, 61, who prosecutors say presented himself as a family man in the little red house all while committing the Gilgo Beach murders.
With Heuermann in jail awaiting trial after pleading not guilty, and his wife, Asa Ellerup, being paid to participate in a documentary series, the family is moving out. Ellerup and the couple’s two adult children are relocating to a South Carolina property purchased years ago as a retirement home, and she will put the Long Island home up for sale after her divorce from Heuermann becomes final in about six months, their lawyers said.
At once, talk of the house as a headquarters of horror shifted to its potential as a real estate parcel: speculation about price, banter about a bargain buy and the hope that a sale will end an ugly chapter for the neighborhood.
Heuermann had lived his entire life in the dilapidated ranch house with the unkempt yard on First Avenue, including the past three decades with his wife and two children.
From there, he commuted to his architecture consultancy firm in Manhattan by day and, prosecutors say, on some fateful nights, headed out to meet escorts, kill them and dump their bodies along a nearby oceanfront parkway and elsewhere.
In the basement, they say, Heuermann kept an arsenal and a manual of grisly methods on how to hunt and kill women.
Heuermann is charged with killing six women dating at least to 1993. He has pleaded not guilty and has been held without bail at the Suffolk County jail in Riverhead since his arrest in July 2023.
Ellerup and their children have remained in the house, even as investigators rifled through it and removed evidence by the truckload.
Prosecutors do not consider Ellerup a suspect, nor the couple’s children, Victoria Heuermann, 28, and Christopher Sheridan, 35. They were away on trips when the killings happened, authorities have said.
Robert Macedonio, Ellerup’s lawyer, said the place had become a burden.
“People constantly stop in front of the house to gawk and point and take pictures,” he said. “She’s lost any emotional attachment she had to the premises because of everything that’s gone on, and the only way she can start recovering is to move.”
Also, he said, the house’s interior was left a shambles by searches this year and last. Investigators cut up floors, removed plumbing and found a cache of more than 200 guns. They dug up swaths of the backyard and removed furniture and bags of household possessions. The extensive damage to the interior was never properly repaired, Macedonio said. A bathtub was held together with duct tape.
“She has no money to repair it,” Macedonio said, adding that even Ellerup’s documentary payments were not enough.
Notorious properties present unusual challenges for sellers, buyers and brokers. In 2011, in nearby East Meadow, the four-bedroom ranch where serial killer Joel Rifkin grew up was sold by his family for $322,000, a $100,000 reduction from the initial asking price.
“I was able to negotiate because of the situation,” said Peter Hirschhorn, an agent with Coldwell Banker American Homes who represented the buyers, a young couple.
Rifkin, who admitted to killing 17 women, stored a victim’s body in the garage and may have murdered some victims there, too. It helped that he had been arrested 18 years earlier and sentenced to life in prison, Hirschhorn said.
“Before I showed my clients the property, I emailed them and said, ‘I want you to Google and do your research on the property, because unfortunate circumstances took place there that I want you to be aware of,’” he said. “They were fine with it. They said, ‘Yeah, we’re good.’ They fell in love with it and made it their own.”
Regarding the Massapequa Park house, he said, “I’d love to sell this home. It could be a nice starter home.”
But Louis Scrimenti, 39, an agent with Signature Premier Properties in Massapequa Park, said it will likely be bought by a builder, perhaps for around $600,000, and replaced with something that could sell for at least $1.5 million.
“I don’t think a regular consumer would buy that home,” he said. “I’d say 9 out of 10 consumers would be turned off by it.”
The sellers may be motivated. Vess Mitev, a lawyer for the children, said moving would help them start “the next chapter of their lives,” somewhere “farther away from the spotlight and farther away from this dark cloud that hangs over their heads.”
Before her father’s arrest, Victoria Heuermann worked for his Manhattan firm, which has closed. She has had trouble getting a job, Mitev said. As for the son, he said: “Chris can’t even walk his dog down the block. He gets photographed, people stop and take pictures, he’s catcalled, the whole thing.
“They can’t even check the mail,” he said. “That kind of scrutiny is not for my clients. They never asked for it.”
The house became a daily encampment for news crews and a tourist attraction for true-crime fans. Authorities sealed off the block for nearly two weeks. Neighbors weary of being interviewed still have “No Soliciting” signs on their front doors.
Days after Heuermann’s arrest, Ellerup filed for divorce after 27 years of marriage, but she continued to call and visit him in jail and attend his court hearings, often with cameras in tow from her Peacock documentary deal, reportedly worth $1 million.
Macedonio said the house cannot be listed and sold until after the divorce. He said Ellerup, despite relocating, plans to attend the trial, which will most likely be next year, and “still has the same opinion: She doesn’t believe he’s capable of what he’s been accused of.”
Heuermann’s family had made themselves scarce during the searches but surprised onlookers by moving back into the house despite its interior being a shambles. The family was left to sleep on mats, Macedonio said. They cooked on a grill in the front yard, defying news crews and curious visitors.
Some neighbors had hoped the village might buy the property to prevent anyone else from living there.
Cella, the neighbor, got used to saying hello to Heuermann’s son when he saw him walking his therapy dog, Stewie. Still, he added, it is probably time for the family and the neighborhood to turn the page “so that years from now, people won’t still be gawking and staring.”
“All neighborhoods heal,” he said. “Eventually.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
