Victim's Son Sues Heuermann, Family Over Gilgo Beach Wrongful Death

Benjamin Torres filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Rex Heuermann, his ex-wife Asa Ellerup, and his daughter Victoria Heuermann in Suffolk County State Supreme Court, seeking not only monetary damages but also the return of profits he alleges the family derived from true-crime media deals built on the notoriety of his mother's killing.

The complaint was filed in the days bracketing Heuermann's guilty plea and names Torres as the son of Valerie Mack, who vanished in 2000 and whose remains were identified years later through advances in DNA analysis and genetics-assisted testing as part of the Gilgo Beach and Manorville discoveries. It is the first known civil suit brought by a Gilgo victim's family to name both Heuermann and his relatives as defendants.

The filing asserts that Mack was "tortured ferociously" and that her death deprived Torres of emotional and economic support he would otherwise have received. Beyond those personal claims, the complaint reaches further: it alleges that members of Heuermann's family received payments or profits from media arrangements that capitalized on the case's infamy, and it asks the court to compel the return of that money. A separate allegation of concealment broadens the scope of wrongdoing the suit attributes beyond Heuermann alone.

Targeting Ellerup and Victoria Heuermann alongside the convicted killer signals a deliberate legal strategy. Naming the relatives as defendants opens the door to depositions and document discovery that could surface communications, financial records, and timelines not captured by the criminal proceeding. Civil discovery operates on a lower evidentiary threshold than a criminal prosecution, giving Torres's attorneys tools to compel disclosure that Heuermann's plea effectively forecloses in criminal court. Legal analysts who reviewed the filing noted it could produce document troves and sworn testimony that reframe public understanding of the years between Mack's 2000 disappearance and Heuermann's 2023 arrest.

Heuermann's plea sets him on a path toward lifetime incarceration, but it answers few of the questions Mack's family has carried for more than two decades. The stretch of South Shore barrier land running from Manorville to Gilgo Beach became synonymous with one of Long Island's darkest chapters, and the criminal case's resolution through a plea did nothing to address claims that others profited from what happened there.

For Torres, the civil filing is both a financial demand and a bid to establish on the public record a fuller accounting of his mother's fate. If discovery compels the production of contracts, wire transfers, or internal communications tied to any media deals, the civil proceeding could expose a financial picture the criminal case never examined, one that extends the public reckoning with the Gilgo killings well beyond Heuermann's sentencing.