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 on his guilt until the end of the trial.
Heuermann is accused of murdering four women who worked as online escorts and disappeared between 2007 and 2010.
“I convinced him of the benefit, 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 incapable of the crimes he is accused of,” Macedonio said in a 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 depends on the outcome of what happens in her husband’s trial.”
Macedonio says Heuermann’s arrest was “like the death of a relative or a child, or every day you learn to adapt a little more and more to the new reality.”
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“No one wants to believe that the person with whom they were married for 27 years and with whom they slept in the same bed and with whom they had a child is capable of such crimes,” he says. “Nobody wants to believe that.”
Heuermann, an architect and married father of two, is charged with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello and Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
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All four women worked as online escorts and went missing between 2007 and 2010. Their bodies were found along a stretch of Ocean Parkway in Long Island, New York in December 2010.
Heuermann was allegedly linked to the murders by telephones used to meet with the victims, as well as a piece of his hair allegedly found at the bottom of the burlap bag in which Waterman’s body was wrapped.
Maureen Brainard-Barnes; Melissa Barthelemy; Megan Waterman; Amber Lynn Costello.
Suffolk County Police Department; the Barthelemy family; Suffolk County Police Department (2)
He was also traced to a Chevrolet Avalanche that was registered to him and was reportedly 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 were looking for articles about a task force set up to investigate the murders.
In a statement, Ellerup said she “sincerely sympathizes with the victims and their families, ‘no one deserves to die this way’.”
Macedonio says Ellerup and her two grown children continue to live in the home they shared with Heuermann and plan to “wait until the outcome of the trial to decide what to do with the house.”
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Source: HIS Education