A burner phone traveled from Massapequa Park to Midtown Manhattan on July 12, 2009 — the exact route between Rex Heuermann's home and his office. Hours later, Melissa Barthelemy's phone traveled that same route in reverse. Melissa had told a friend she was meeting a man. She never came back. For the next five weeks, someone used her phone to call her 15-year-old sister Amanda — describing the killing in graphic detail. Always under three minutes. Always from crowded Manhattan locations. Always targeting the teenager, never the mother.
Melissa was 24. She'd graduated cosmetology school in Buffalo, earned her license, and moved to New York to build a career. The salon job was slow. The city was expensive. She ended up working escort ads on Craigslist from a basement apartment in the Bronx — a temporary solution that became permanent. Prosecutors allege Heuermann also searched online for images of the victims' families after their deaths — their sisters, their children.
While those calls were being made to a teenager, Heuermann was going home to his own family. Asa Ellerup, his now ex-wife, sat in the last row of a Suffolk County courtroom as he admitted to eight killings. She once called him her hero. She walked out into a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the son of victim Valerie Mack, alleging the family profited from a documentary and demonstrated disregard for the victims. Their daughter Victoria has publicly stated she believes her father most likely committed the killings. Asa's attorney has called the lawsuit's claims reckless.
This week's coverage examines Melissa's story and the phone evidence that anchors the prosecution's timeline, the wrongful death suit and its legal theory, and what the family fracture reveals. Robin Dreeke and Eric Faddis provide behavioral and legal analysis on the taunting calls, the civil exposure facing the Heuermann family, and how compartmentalization functions at this scale.
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