Summary
The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets benefits from an impressive level of personal access and a unique position in an ongoing case. But these things also strip it of a more potentially cogent point of view.
The weirdest episode of Cribs you’ve ever seen, The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets has a pretty clear selling point. The three-part Peacock docuseries, produced rather mysteriously by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s G-Unit Film and Television, provides the first-ever look into the home of the alleged Gilgo Beach Killer, Rex Heuermann, including exclusive commentary from his wife, children, and friends.
I should be careful here, since Heuermann hasn’t been convicted of anything, and he has consistently pleaded not guilty to the seven charges of murder committed against sex workers between the years of 1993 and 2011. But this documentary largely proceeds as if Heuermann’s conviction is a foregone conclusion, and uses his family’s repeated insistence on his innocence as an oddly persuasive argument for his guilt. You’ll see what I mean when you watch it.
A key element of the case is that several of the murders were supposedly committed in Heuermann’s home, in a reinforced soundproofed basement, and it’s therefore highly improbable, if not outright impossible, that they could have been carried out without the complicity or at least the knowledge of Heuermann’s wife, Asa Ellerup. With this context, Asa’s surety that Heuermann is innocent rings false. It’s an interesting quirk for the series to have either way, since it’ll benefit in hindsight from Asa being proved right or becoming suddenly much more suspicious if Heuermann is found guilty.
The degree of access that The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets boasts is something of a coup, then, which makes it surprising that after an ominous opening, you don’t really see Asa for ages. Instead, the earliest portions recount with painstaking detail the steps taken by law enforcement to zero in on a suspect as the bodies of sex workers kept mounting. Naturally, their fates were of lesser concern due to their chosen vocation, a grim recurring motif in our present true-crime obsession. Here, the filmmaking is serviceable but familiar, lacking the interesting hook provided by the insider details that come later.
There’s no nice way of saying this, but Heuermann’s Massapequa Park home looks like a few people might have been murdered in it. This may be a consequence of footage being filmed in the aftermath of a police raid that left the place devastated, but there’s an eerie quality all the same which is enhanced by teetering piles of boxed belongings in much the same way as it is the presence of a vault-style iron door that Heuermann’s neighbor saw being lugged onto the property. There are a bunch of other suspicious details in the building that complete the image of Heuermann as a very viable suspect, and thus his wife as a very viable co-conspirator. The sentimentalized, almost ridiculous way she speaks about Heuermann is similarly odd, and ultimately clashes with the testimony of his children (a late statement reveals that his daughter, Victoria Heuermann, has been met which such compelling evidence during the filming of the documentary that she now believes he is “most likely” the Gilgo Beach Killer).
This is all fascinating in how it positions this docuseries in the midst of a case with no clear answers, filmed during a period of uncertainty where evidence and public sentiment swayed this way and that. It bogs down the underlying message and strips House of Secrets of a more cogent viewpoint, but it also gives it the curious quality of a component in an ongoing investigation that still has more to reveal. By the time it’s over, amateur sleuths may well be returning to Peacock to read more into what’s shared here, and I can’t think of anything they’d enjoy more than that – or anything more beneficial to a true-crime doc in an endlessly vast streaming library.
