True crime docuseries love the first-episode cliffhanger, where after discussing the case for upwards of an hour, we see a key suspect or someone related to the perpetrator sit down for an interview. The device is obviously there to keep viewers watching, but sometimes saving that reveal until the very end of the first episode forces the filmmakers into a storytelling format that’s less than ideal, which is what we found in a Peacock docuseries about the Gilgo Beach murders.
Opening Shot: “May 1, 2010. Oak Beach, Long Island, New York.” As we see ink-black scenes on the beach, we hear the 911 call from Shannan Gilbert.
The Gist: The three-part docuseries The Gilgo Beach Killer: House Of Secrets starts with Shannan Gilbert’s disappearance, and how the search for her by Suffolk County police led to the discovery of the remains of four other women near Gilgo Beach. Most of the first episode goes over the investigation into the murders of the “Gilgo Four” — Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello — who along with Gilbert were all sex workers.
Interviews with Suffolk County and Nassau County police officials, as well as reporters for the New York Post and local TV that covered the case reveals that the investigation got pretty far in the first year after the Gilgo Four’s remains were found, but various circumstances led the investigation to a dead end that lasted almost a decade, until officials arrested Rex Heuermann for the killings in 2023.
But the real gist of the series comes at the end of the episode, when Heuermann’s wife Asa Ellerup sits down for an interview. The idea that Heuermann, an architect that commuted from Massapequa Park in Nassau County to Midtown Manhattan every day, might have invited sex workers into his house and then killed them there seemed incompatible with the idea that Ellerup and their daughter, Victoria Heuermann, lived there and had no idea what was going on. Both are interviewed in Episodes 2 and 3.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Gilgo Beach Killer: House Of Secrets is about the same subject as Netflix’s Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, but the focus of this series is completely different.
Our Take: Because the aforementioned Gone Girls docuseries concentrated on the victims, most notably Gilbert and the Gilgo Four, it took its time to show how the investigation stalled after 2012, with officials in both Nassau and Suffolk Counties admitting that the fact that the victims were sex workers was a factor in the intensity of the investigation slowing down. But The Gilgo Beach Killer only mentions this in passing, attributing the slowdown to James Burke, who was installed as Suffolk County police chief in 2012 and was arrested on assault and civil rights violations in 2015.
At first, we thought that the first episode of The Gilgo Beach Killer was a bit of a head fake by the show’s producers and director, given that they take the entire episode to examine the case and only show Ellerup at the end. But we more generously think that it’s more of a purposeful a decision to lay out the details of the case and investigation before bringing it into the intimacy of the Heuermann household.
Still, there are a lot of subtleties about the investigation that get lost in all the discussion about tracking burner phones and other details that put the police in a much better light than they were portrayed in most of the coverage and in the Gone Girls docuseries. It’s almost to the point where we wished that the show would have interspersed the details of the investigation after introducing us to Ana Ellerup and Victoria Heuermann. Yes, that kills the dramatic reveal at the end of the first episode, but it would have made things a bit more cohesive.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Ellerup says, “I don’t believe my husband did this.”
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Mary Murphy, a longtime television news reporter in New York who reported on the Gilgo case. Her bluntness and her accent reminded us of just how much grit and institutional knowledge is missing in New York local news these days, mainly because there are less natives from the New York area in the reporting ranks than there used to be.
Most Pilot-y Line: As usual, we’re not fans of reenactments, and this is full of them.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Just the fact that Rex Heuermann’s wife and daughter are interviewed makes The Gilgo Beach Killer: House Of Secrets worth watching. We just wish the docuseries was structured a bit differently than it is.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.