On April 14, 1997, five days before the State of Pennsylvania meant to execute him, Gary Heidnik took the stand in a Philadelphia courtroom to argue for his own death. Lawyers from a capital defense group had asked the Court of Common Pleas to declare him mentally incompetent to be executed. He wanted no such help. Under oath he told the judge that he was innocent of murder, that two of the women he had held captive had done the killing, and that executing an innocent man would end capital punishment in America.
Over four months beginning in November 1986, Heidnik abducted six women and kept them chained in a pit he had dug in the basement of his house on North Marshall Street in North Philadelphia, where he raped, starved and tortured them. Sandra Lindsay died after he hung her by her wrists from a beam for days. Deborah Dudley died when he forced the women into water and ran an electric current through it. Josefina Rivera, the first of them, persuaded him to let her go out with him in March 1987 and ran to the police. In 1988 a jury convicted him of both murders and he was sentenced to death.
The judge found him competent. His daughter, Maxine Davidson White, then went to federal court as his next friend, and on April 18 the Third Circuit Court of Appeals granted her standing and continued a stay, printing the passages below in its opinion, In re Heidnik, 112 F.3d 105, to show the delusional beliefs the district court had found. The litigation ran two more years. Pennsylvania executed him by lethal injection at Rockview on July 6, 1999, and no one has been executed in the state since.
These eight passages are all of Heidnik's own sworn words that the Third Circuit printed. They are a few hundred words from a hearing that ran most of a day, and each is labeled with the paragraph of the opinion where it appears, so any of them can be checked against 112 F.3d 105. The bracketed words and the one "[sic]" are the court's, and so are the ellipses. The long passages of psychiatric testimony in the same opinion are the doctors speaking, not Heidnik, and are not reproduced.
Heidnik's claims here are false. He was convicted of both murders at trial, and the women he accuses by name are the survivors who testified against him. The Third Circuit quoted these passages to show the fixed delusional system that three psychiatrists described, not as evidence of what happened in the basement, and the trial record says otherwise on every point he raises. They are printed because they are what he said under oath about his crimes and about his own death.
A published opinion of a federal court carries no copyright, and the text here follows the opinion as it is published on OpenJurist and CourtListener. The full transcript of the hearing, which the opinion cites as "Tr. 4/14/97," is held by the Office of Judicial Records of the Court of Common Pleas, First Judicial District of Pennsylvania, in Commonwealth v. Heidnik.
Nothing here was scanned or retyped by us, and nothing has been corrected, including "them two women" and "the last man in this country ever executes." We have only set each passage apart under the number of the paragraph it comes from.
Paragraph 4 of the opinion
I think they killed Ms. Lindsay--it's possible that they killed her because she was a lesbian. And I didn't know that, and you know, up until that time.
Paragraph 6 of the opinion
The reason I mentioned this was because they killed her the next day, they killed her the next day, which suggests that they either killed her because she was a lesbian or this gave the excuse they were looking for.
Paragraph 8 of the opinion
Rivera was the brains behind it. But Ms. Thomas I'm pretty sure did the actual killing.
Paragraph 10 of the opinion
And do you understand I'm guilty of everything but murder? I didn't murder those two women. Do you understand that?
Paragraph 12 of the opinion
bracketed words are retained as the court printed them.] [The FBI is needed so] I could prove I had not murdered these two women ...
Paragraph 14 of the opinion
I say real or phony, they can execute me, because I am innocent and I can prove it. That is the end of capital punishment in this state. When you execute an innocent man, knowingly execute an innocent man, you know there will be no more capital punishment in this state and possibly anywhere else in this country. And you know I didn't kill them two women. Go ahead and execute me. That's going to be the last time you ever execute anybody in this country. That's the end of capital punishment.
Paragraph 16 of the opinion
Yes, I want you to execute an innocent man so there will be no more capital punishment....
Paragraph 18 of the opinion
I want to be executed because I want to be the last man in this country ever executes [sic], that's the end of capital punishment ... You don't do that shit, not in America. And you're not going to do it anymore because I'm ending capital punishment.