By Courtney Wood
Based on a True Story, this five-word tagline has been used countless times to provide legitimacy to movies that usually only used small aspects of true-life events. For anyone who has viewed the classic movie ‘Silence of the Lambs’, a small aspect was more than enough to create fear. As scary as the character of Jame Gumb, infamously known as ‘Buffalo Bill’, was, the fact that he was based on not one but three real life killers is far more terrifying. Thomas Harris, who wrote the novel that the movie was based on, took aspects from three different but equally disturbed monsters: Ed Gein, Ted Bundy and Gary Heidnik. Most people are familiar with Gein’s love of turning human flesh into material for clothing or household items and Bundy’s tactic of luring in victims while wearing a fake cast but not many know that there was an inspiration for the scenes where Gumb forces his victim to live in a pit underneath his home. Due to the amazing acting, incredible set designs and gorgeous cinematography viewers were filled with claustrophobia and were forced to feel a fraction of the anguish the on-screen victim experienced. Sadly, these scenes were not the product of Harris’s imagination but actually happened to six women in Philadelphia. The mentally unstable, woman hating Gary Heidnik abducted six victims between November 1986 and March 1987 and was only stopped when one of the women got away and called the police. The true story of what transpired in the basement of 3250 North Marshall Street is more terrifying, heart breaking and sadistic than the actions of any fictional character. What follows is what happened to these women who were seized, raped, tortured and forced to engage in cannibalism as a “punishment.”
Gary Heidnik was born on November 22nd 1943 in Eastlake Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland). He and his younger brother Terry lived with their parents, Michael and Ellen Heidnik, until their divorce in 1946. The two boys lived with their mother for four years until they were placed in the sole custody of their father and his new wife. This move was a huge turning point for the young boy as Michael was a very cruel man. As an adult, Heidnik claimed his father abused him physically by beating him with various items (including a wooden toy airplane) and psychologically by mocking him constantly about sensitive issues. The height of the psychological abuse was in response to Gary’s bedwetting as Michael forced his son to hang the soiled sheets outside for the neighbors to see. This abuse left a lasting impression as Heidnik would battle mental illness throughout adulthood, was in and out of mental hospitals and attempted suicide at least thirteen times. Mental illness was not only present in Gary, it ran through the entire Heidnik family. Terry, just like his older brother, had numerous stays in institutions and attempted suicide multiple times in his adult life. The worst affected member of the family may be Ellen, who not only struggled all her life but after being diagnosed with bone cancer killed herself by drinking Mercuric Chloride.
In middle school he was very isolated from his fellow classmates who consistently teased him about his appearance; specifically, the shape of his head. To combat the path of not fitting in, a fourteen-year-old Heidnik enrolled in Staunton Military Academy in Staunton Virginia. Three years later, he dropped out of high school all together to join the Army fulltime. In a short time, he showed a lot of promise by performing very well in basic training. Due to his early success the young cadet was transferred to San Antonio Texas to work as a medic and then again to the 46th Army Surgical Hospital in Landstuhl Germany. While overseas he made up for dropping out of school by earning his GED. Despite all of the positive events that occurred at this time, he began getting severe headaches, becoming dizzy and nauseous while having blurred vision; eventually he was diagnosed with Gastroenteritis. In addition to the physical ailments, doctors treated some of the mental illnesses and prescribed him Trifluoperazine. In October 1962, he was transferred to a military hospital in Philadelphia where he was diagnosed with Schizoid Psychiatric Personality and honorably discharged from military service.
After his military career was over, he became a Licensed Practical Nurse and started working with psychiatric patients. His medical employment however did not run smoothly as he was fired from both the University of Pennsylvania Hospital for below average work and from the Veterans Administration Hospital for being rude to patients. Working as a psychiatric nurse was the beginning of Heidnik learning how to control people with mental disabilities using religion and lead to him starting his own church.
Heidnik started the ‘United Church of the Ministers of God’ in 1971 with only five members and a fifteen-hundred-dollar investment. Eventually both the amount of funds and faithful grew as he raised an astounding five hundred thousand dollars and had a congregation of over fifty members. His flock faithfully met every Sunday inside of the “bishop’s” home to hear his unique spin on the bible. Alarmingly, given what we know now, most of the members were mentally disabled and Heidnik’s neighbors said he held “services in his home for retarded women”. It is unknown if anything unethical or illegal happened at this time, but it was obvious he was perfecting his manipulation skills by running the “church” as a cult and zoning in on what kind of people he would later target. At the time of his arrest the church was worth approximately half a million dollars.
In 1978, Heidnik signed out Auberte Davidson, the mentally disabled sister of his girlfriend, from the institution she was living in. Health care professionals reported the thirty-four-year-old Auberte had the cognitive ability of a five-year-old. Heidnik forced his easily controlled victim to stay in a small room in his basement, where he repeatedly assaulted her. When she was finally rescued from her captor, doctors discovered that she had been raped, sodomized, and had contracted gonorrhea as a result from her atrocious ordeal. Heidnik was charged with false imprisonment, interfering with the custody of a committed person, rape, and involuntary deviant sexual intercourse. Due to her inability to testify, some other charges were inevitably dropped. Luckily despite that unfortunate set back, there was still enough evidence to send the deviant predator to prison. He was sentenced to serve three to seven-years in between prison and a mental hospital for treatment. In 1983, he was paroled with the conditions of close monitoring and agreeing to join a state sponsored mental health program. This event is disgusting enough on the surface, but when we look deeper with the gift of hindsight, this was a clear trial run for what he would do in the future.
Even with all the support of his congregation, there was still something missing in Gary’s life; a family. To fulfill this desire deeply rooted from his turbulent childhood, he had three children with three different women. His girlfriend, Gail Lincow, gave birth to his first son Gary Junior, but gave the child to Child Protective Services shortly after the baby’s birth (not much is known about what happened to Gary Jr. as an adult). His next girlfriend, Anjeanette Davidson, gave birth to Gary’s only known daughter, Maxine Davidson White on March 16th 1978. Maxine was placed in foster care due to her mother’s mental inability to care for the young child and her father’s 1978 conviction for sexually assaulting Auberte Davidson. She would be a part of her father’s life later as an adult as one of his few allies and supporters. On October 3rd 1985 Gary married a Filipino mail order bride named Betty Disto. The couple had a son, Jesse John Disto, on September 15th 1986. Betty left Gary shortly after their baby’s birth claiming her husband sexually abused her and even made her watch as he had sex with other women, many of whom were prostitutes. Gary was charged with spousal rape, but despite previous offences did not serve any significant time. The lack of adequate repercussions for assaulting his wife is not only baffling but truly disgusting as it could have saved future victims a lifetime of anguish. Gary claimed to have four kids who were “snatched away from him”. He would later tell his first victim Josefina Rivera that he wanted a large family and has been quoted saying “I wanted to get ten women and keep them there and get them all pregnant. Then, when they had babies, I want to raise those children here too”.
On November 25th 1986 (the day before Thanksgiving) all of his past deviant behavior came to a head when he kidnapped his first victim; a twenty-five-year-old prostitute named Josefina Rivera. She was lured to his house by the opportunity to earn money for having sex. Rivera claims while she was getting dressed, he came from behind choked her, drug her down to the basement, shackled her limbs to a waterpipe with chains and sealed the locks with super glue. In later interviews, she attempted to describe what went through her head during the horrific experience saying “all I could remember was, like, a film projector of things that were going on in my life. It was, like you know just flipping back.” As if all of those events were not terrible enough, things just got worse when he beat the poor woman with a stick, threw her into a pit dug in the ground of his basement and then boarded it up; effectively boarding her in. The only light she had while in what was just a makeshift well, came in through the thin cracks between the wood. She would not be alone in there for long as Heidnik abducted a second victim days later on December 3rd 1986, twenty-four-year-old Sandra Linsay. Rivera said that the two women were left alone for a month where they did not get to bathe or comb their hair. Interestingly she claimed he brought them cups of hot chocolate for breakfast and fed them two or three hotdogs for dinner; which may not seem like a lot but was a lot more than what they would receive later.
It was at this time when Heidnik told the two women that he wanted a “farm full of women and kids” which may explain why he took four more women in just four months. He snatched nineteen-year-old Lisa Thomas on December 23rd 1986, twenty-three-year-old Deborah Dudley on January 2nd 1987, eighteen-year-old Jacqueline Askins on January 18th 1987 and finally twenty-four-year-old Agnes Adams on March 23rd 1987. All these women were captured the same way; choked, chained up then thrown in a pit only to be let out to be raped or tortured in front of the other women. A strong connection all these women shared was that they all were young, black prostitutes with some form of mental disability.
During their time in the basement the women were not only starved but tortured violently in several ways. The most common method was having duct tape wrapped around their mouths and having a screw driver slowly jammed deep into their ears until he saw blood. This cruel torture left all the survivors with severe hearing loss. Another one of the life-threatening punishments he inflicted was completely starving them while they were handcuffed to a beam above their head. Those being penalized in this way were only given small amounts of water and had to earn “privileges” back, which usually meant getting bread to eat. In February 1986, Sandra Linsay received this punishment but did not live long enough to earn any “privileges”. She did not eat for at least four days and once the handcuffs were taken off fell right to the floor cracking her head off the cement. Gary, with no remorse, announced to the other women that she was dead and the same would happen to them if they did not listen. Oddly, he cooked her head in a pot and her ribs in a roasting pan then placed her arms and legs in the freezer. Survivor Jacqueline Askins talked about how she was forced to help dismember the body saying "he took me upstairs to the bathroom, and he said, 'We all gotta play a part in this.' I said, 'Play a part in what?' He had me cut her limb... like, her arm." Even though the women were denied so many things, he did let them watch television and after a dog food commercial aired, one of the starving women said that “the dog food looked good enough to eat”. This comment angered Gary who ground up parts of Sandra Lindsey’s body, put them in a bowl of dog food and fed it to three of the women. When asked how she handled that, survivor Askins said "if it wasn’t for me eating her or eating dogfood I couldn’t be here today.”
Sandra was not the only woman who was mercilessly killed; on March 18th 1987 he filled the pit with water and placed electric wires on the chains of Deborah Dudley. As soon as he discovered that the woman had drowned (after being electrocuted), he decided to dump her body in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. After the body was disrespectfully disposed of, he made Rivera sign a document saying she helped kill Deborah. Fellow victim Jacqueline Askins signed as a witness under the name “Donna”. This document was brought up later as evidence that Rivera was an accomplice.
On March 24th 1987 Josefina Rivera shockingly convinced Gary to let her see her family. Once she was out of eyesight, she quickly ran and called 9-1-1. When police arrived at the house, they found three malnourished half naked women chained up in the cellar and twenty-four pounds of body parts in the freezer. The body parts were stored in white plastic bags and included two forearms, one upper arm and several pieces of leg; all of which were probably cut with a saw. Gary’s lawyer Chuck Peruto said "They [police] pounded on the door. He [Gary] opened the door and came out, and wouldn't let them in. They could smell the stench and didn't want him to go anywhere and busted him right there."
The concluded motivation for the victims he selected, other than wanting a family, was the easiness of controlling the mentally disabled, his hatred of women and his love of black people who he said “treated him better than any other race”. These factors may explain the duality of inflicting punishments while wanting to have children with these women. During his trial his lawyer Chuck Peruto said that his client “wanted to have a perfect race of children with these women”.
After the rescue of the surviving women, one huge controversy rose that is still debated to this day; the involvement of survivor Josefina Rivera, who some refer to as “The Boss of the Basement”. It is no secret that she was the only woman let out of the pit and that she was given control of the other women (either by Gary himself or by the other women due to her seniority) but what is debated is how much she helped with. Some of the women claim Rivera suggested methods of torture, inflicted punishment and told on them if there was talk of attacking Gary in exchange for special treatment including sleeping in his bed and the ability to leave the house with him. Survivor Jacqueline Askins commented how friendly the two were and that “they’d [Heidnik and Rivera] came back and tell us how wonderful their day was”. Rivera addressed this by saying “Anytime that you’re cut off from the world outside whoever’s holding you captive … you’re going to grow to like him regardless, because he’s your only contact to things that are outside. He’s your only source of survival”. The most damming claim against her was that she helped Gary lure in final victim Agnes Adams. Adams corroborated this by bitterly announcing in court how Rivera helped him. Due to that outburst there was talks of charging Rivera as a conspirator, but there was not enough evidence to prove she had any involvement. Rivera commented that the media stuck to the conspirator angle to make the story sexier and was their way of getting her back for not talking to them.
No matter which story you believe; the public does owe some gratitude to Rivera as her interviews gave us a unique insight as to what occurred in the basement and how it affected the women years after. She explained that after everything was settled the lawyers considered committing the women and putting them on anti-depressants to help them cope but said most refused that method and decided to treat themselves. In one of the most shocking revelations, she talked about how most of the women went back to being prostitutes saying "It didn't scare us straight. A lot of us went back up to Front Street [an open-air drug and prostitution market at the time]. I guess we just figured this is the worst thing that could ever happen to us, so why not go back up there to make money and get more drugs?". Luckily when cameras caught up with her, she was working as a waitress on the famous New Jersey shore and proudly talked about being a married mother of three and step mother of two. Viewers can still see both the mental scars, as she was a very guarded woman and the physical effects, as she had issues with hearing due to the screwdriver torture.
Given Heidnik’s long documented history with mental illness and the depraved nature of the crimes, it is no surprise that his lawyer tried to argue that his client was legally insane. What was surprising were some of the other defense arguments used in the trial. These arguments included that “the women were already in the house when he moved in” and that the F.B.I could help prove his innocence but refused. The most offensive and disrespectful defense was when they argued that the two victims had killed each other. Fortunately, the prosecution, led by Charles F. Gallagher III, used testimony from a reliable witness who worked for Heidnik at Merrill Lynch to disprove insanity and the jury saw the truth through the other lame arguments. He was convicted of two first degree murder charges in July of 1988. The jury deliberated for nearly two hours before handing out two death sentences. His family (led by daughter Maxine) tried to get him off death row in 1997 to no avail; Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge signed Gary’s death warrant two years later on May 12th 1999.
Even though the evidence was overwhelming and the paperwork was signed, he refused to admit any wrong doing. On July 6th 1999 (just three days before execution) he went as far as to say that him being killed while innocent would not only end the death penalty in Pennsylvania but America itself. Here is the entire statement, "this 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 ... Yes, I want you to execute an innocent man so there will be no more capital punishment."
The day before his death, Gary only had one visitor, his daughter Maxine; who despite all of her support could not bring herself to witness her father’s sentence being carried out. His final meal was black coffee and two pieces of cheese pizza. Interestingly, Department of Corrections press secretary, Michael Lukens, described him “as being as cooperative as he could be.”
On July 9th 1999 the long-awaited death sentence would be carried out. At 10:17 P.M Gary Heidnik was walked twenty feet from his holding cell, strapped to a linen covered gurney by ten belts (eight across his body and two on his head and feet) and was executed by lethal injection; a death far more humane and far less painful than the ones his victims received. The fifty-five-year-old murderer was pronounced dead by Centre County Coroner Scott Sayers at 10:29 P.M. In attendance were twelve witnesses; consisting of six from the media and six citizens. Sixteen minutes later that evening, at 10:45 P.M, Governor Ridge gave the public statement "So horrible were [Heidnik's] deeds, a jury of 12 Pennsylvanians determined unanimously that he must forfeit his life. Tonight, he paid that price. In doing so, he suffered far less than the women he tortured and killed. Our thoughts and prayers tonight are with them”. Gary was the three hundred fifty third person to be executed by the state of Pennsylvania and (at the time of this publication) was the last inmate to be executed. His body was cremated and given to his family. Before he died, his victims received roughly thirty thousand dollars each in settlements from his estate.
In addition to Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel Silence of the Lambs, which interestingly was published while Heidnik was still alive, Gary’s horrific crimes have influenced a lot of other pop culture; most notably music. A Philadelphia punk rock band wrote the song ‘Gary Heidnik’s House of Horrors’, a New Jersey punk rock band named themselves ‘Heidnik’s Stew’, a Belgium based heavy metal band wrote the song ‘Cadaverous Banquet’ and in 2018 the Australian industrial group Skynd (along with famed singer Johnathan Davis of Korn) created the song and music video entitled ‘Gary Heidnik’ which are both full of references to the case. It is clear that even three decades later people are still interested and macabrely inspired by Heidnik (fortunately these inspirations are limited to the creation of art and not copy cats looking to recreate or out do evil).
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written, less four picture captions for images the archive does not hold. Gary Heidnik has no entry in this archive's roster, so the figures here are checked against the court record rather than against our own. He was convicted in July 1988 of two counts of first degree murder, for Sandra Lindsay and Deborah Dudley, and executed on 9 July 1999. The other four women survived. Josefina Rivera's part in what happened in that basement is set out here as it was argued at the time, from both sides; she was never charged, and the reader should hold the accusations against her at that level. The 1978 conviction over Auberte Davidson is a matter of record, and he was on parole from it when he took his first victim in 1986. The article spells Sandra Lindsay's surname two ways, as the original did.