Late on the night of March 24, 1987, a thin 25-year-old woman stood at a pay phone in North Philadelphia and dialed 911. Josefina Rivera had been missing for four months. She told the dispatcher that a man had kept her chained in the basement of his house on North Marshall Street, that two women had died there, and that three more were still down in the cellar. He was parked a few blocks away at that moment, she said, waiting for her to come back from what he believed was a short visit to her family.
The officers who met her were doubtful until she showed them the marks on her ankles and wrists. Within hours they had arrested Gary Michael Heidnik, a 43-year-old self-styled bishop with a Cadillac, a stock portfolio worth more than half a million dollars and a long record of psychiatric hospitalizations. In his basement they found three women in chains. In his kitchen they found human remains. What police learned over the following days filled Philadelphia's newspapers and television news for weeks, and the case ended twelve years later with the last execution the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has carried out.
Heidnik was born in 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio. His family, as his niece Shannon Heidnik later described it, was Pennsylvania Dutch and Irish, comfortably off, and, in her words, "really sick." She told Philadelphia Magazine that his father, whom Oxygen describes as an alcoholic, once beat him with a wooden toy airplane after the boy wet himself. She also said his mother died by poison. Gary and a brother later left Ohio for the Philadelphia area.
After high school he joined the Army and trained as a medic. He was posted to Germany, where, according to the prosecutor who later tried him, Charles Gallagher, he stopped obeying orders and was given a medical discharge for mental illness. That discharge shaped the rest of his life. Gallagher believed Heidnik had been faking illness all along and said he eventually drew a 100 percent disability rating. John Cassidy, who described himself as Heidnik's best friend, told a different version: Heidnik claimed the Army had given him LSD in Germany, and Cassidy believed he had suffered a real breakdown, then realized that the diagnosis could pay him. The psychologist Jack Apsche, who reviewed his records for the defense, counted about 22 psychiatric hospitalizations and a long history of schizophrenia. A 1987 Associated Press report, cited by Oxygen, said he had spent more than four years moving between mental hospitals and prisons.
He earned a nursing degree and worked at a veterans' hospital until he was fired for poor attendance and attitude. The Daily Pennsylvanian later identified him as a former employee of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1971 he founded the United Church of the Ministers of God and named himself its bishop. A neighbor, Doris Zibulka, recalled Sunday services attended mostly by people with intellectual disabilities. Cassidy believed the church began as a tax dodge, and a federal bankruptcy judge, writing in 1988, described it as "apparently formed to maximize tax exemptions." Through it Heidnik invested in the stock market with real skill. His stockbroker, Robert Kirkpatrick, later testified that the account grew from $1,500 to $531,702. Heidnik owned a Rolls-Royce and a Cadillac, and yet, Cassidy said, at one point lived in a trailer parked on a street in Southwest Philadelphia.
Heidnik's first serious criminal case foreshadowed the second. He had been seeing a woman named Anjeanette Davidson, and in 1978 she gave birth to his daughter, Maxine. Anjeanette's sister, Alberta Davidson, was 34 and had an intellectual disability so severe that Oxygen describes her as having the mental capacity of a five-year-old. She lived in an institution. Heidnik signed her out and did not bring her back. After nine days the institution obtained a warrant, and on a second search police found Alberta in a storage room in his basement. A medical examination showed evidence of recent intercourse and a sexually transmitted infection.
He was charged with kidnapping, rape, false imprisonment, unlawful restraint and interfering with the custody of a committed person. He pleaded not guilty and waived a jury. Judge Charles P. Mirarchi ordered a psychiatric evaluation, which warned of a "high probability" that he would offend again. But Alberta Davidson was found unable to testify, and the most serious charges fell away. Heidnik was convicted of unlawful restraint, interfering with custody and reckless endangerment, and received the maximum, three to seven years. "If it had been in my power to give him longer, I would have," Mirarchi said, as quoted in a later book by Peter Davidson. The Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed a judgment of sentence against him in May 1981, apparently in this case.
He served much of his time at Graterford. At parole hearings, his later defense lawyer Chuck Peruto said, Heidnik would answer questions about the case only by writing, "The devil put a cookie in my throat." He was paroled on March 24, 1983, four years to the day before Josefina Rivera's call. After his release, Rivera later said, he complained that he could not find Anjeanette and felt that society owed him a wife and a family.
He tried to build one. Through a matrimonial service he began writing to Betsy Disto, a woman from the Philippines, and in 1985 she came to the United States and married him. The marriage lasted months. She accused him of rape; the charge was dropped after she missed the first hearing. Zibulka recalled that the young wife left after he hit her while she was pregnant. Their son, Jesse John Disto, was born in September 1986. Heidnik had a third child, Gary Jr., with a woman named Gail Lincow. Both that boy and Maxine were placed in foster care. "I got kids already but the state keeps taking them off me," he told Rivera, by her account.
By late 1986 Heidnik lived at 3520 North Marshall Street, a two-story house in the Franklinville section of North Philadelphia, with a sign for his church on the front. Over the next four months he brought six women there. All six were Black. Most were young women living on the margins of the city, several of them working the street, and one a former member of his own congregation. He told his captives he wanted them to bear his children. Peruto later said Heidnik spoke of fathering "a perfect race of children."
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, summarizing the trial evidence, described the pattern. He approached each woman on the street, and each agreed to go to his house. After sex, he choked her until she lost consciousness and chained her to a sewer pipe in the basement. He had dug a pit in the basement floor, roughly four feet deep, and covered it with boards and bags of dirt; it could hold up to three women. He beat them, starved them, played loud music to cover the noise, and raped all but the last woman repeatedly.
Josefina Rivera was first. She was 25, a mother of three, and supported a cocaine habit through sex work. Her son Ricardo had been born prematurely a few weeks earlier and was still in the hospital. On the night of November 25, 1986, around 11 p.m., Heidnik pulled up near 3rd Street and Girard Avenue in a new Cadillac and offered her $20. She did not normally go to clients' homes but made an exception. She noticed that the front door needed a key to open from the inside. Upstairs, after sex, he choked her. "If you stop struggling, I'm not going to keep choking you," she remembered him saying. When he forced her down the cellar stairs and she saw the dirt floor, she later told People, her first thought was whether he meant to bury her there.
Sandra Lindsay was next, and her family's long search for her is one of the most painful threads of the case. Reported as 24 by Oxygen and 25 by her family, she had an intellectual disability and had attended Heidnik's church services. Her sister Tracey Lomax, who shared a bedroom with her, remembered how Sandy talked about trips with the bishop and other young people to an amusement park, followed by burgers and fries at McDonald's. To them, Lomax said, he "was like a hero." On the day after Thanksgiving, November 28, 1986, Sandra went out to buy pain medicine at a store and did not come home.
Lisa Thomas, 19, was picked up near 6th and Lycoming Streets in late 1986. Heidnik took her to dinner first, she later recalled, then to the basement. By the time she was freed she had lost about 50 pounds.
Deborah Dudley, 23, arrived around New Year's Day 1987. Accounts of the basement describe her as the captive who would not stay quiet, and Heidnik singled her out for punishment.
Jacqueline Askins, known as Jackie, was 18. She was brought in later in January 1987 and had been working under the street name Donna. Decades later she told 6abc what happened when they reached the basement. "He stripped me of all my clothes, my wig and everything, and I'm screaming," she said. She was handcuffed and taken below.
Agnes Adams, 24, was the last. She too worked the streets. By then Heidnik had begun taking Rivera with him when he went out, and Rivera helped him find Adams. She was taken in the week after Deborah Dudley's death, only days before the escape. The court later recorded that every woman but the last had been raped repeatedly.
In early February 1987, as punishment, Heidnik hung Sandra Lindsay by one handcuffed wrist from a hook in the basement ceiling. For three or four days she was given only bread and water and was beaten, and he forced another captive to beat her as well. She said she felt sick and collapsed. He released the cuff, pushed her into the pit, could find no pulse, and announced that she was dead. Gallagher, and later Peruto, said she had suffocated while hanging. Heidnik then dismembered her body in the house.
Outside, the Lindsay family was still looking. They reported her missing on the Monday after she vanished and were assigned a detective, Julius Armstrong. Lomax remembered Armstrong asking why they were so worried about a 25-year-old. He knocked at Heidnik's door, got no answer, and concluded she had gone away voluntarily. The family kept working. Through a friend who attended the services they obtained Heidnik's phone number; he hung up on them. A neighbor told them Sandra had been seen at his house recently. Then a Christmas card arrived for her mother, in Sandra's handwriting, with $20 inside and word that she was all right. Rivera later said Heidnik had made Lindsay write it and had handled the money so as to leave no prints. After the card came, Lomax said, the police investigation stopped.
Neighbors on North Marshall Street noticed a burning smell. A police officer, Julio Aponte, answered a complaint, knocked for ten or fifteen minutes and saw a large pot boiling over through a rear window. Zibulka recalled that Heidnik eventually answered and blamed a burnt roast, and the police accepted it. Another neighbor, Ivonne Rodriguez, told UPI that police had been called about two weeks before the arrest and had not gone inside.
In mid-March Heidnik showed Deborah Dudley what remained of Lindsay and warned her that she would end up the same way. On March 17, 1987, he filled the pit with water, put Dudley and two other women in it, and made Rivera touch a live wire to their chains. The other women survived. Dudley's screaming, in the court's words, "stopped abruptly." Heidnik stored her body and later drove it to New Jersey, where he left it in Wharton State Forest in the Pine Barrens. He then had Rivera, and by her account Askins as well, sign a note falsely stating that they had helped kill Dudley. He told Rivera that if he were ever arrested he would "act crazy" in court.
Rivera's strategy, she said for the rest of her life, was to become the captive Heidnik trusted, because a trusted captive might be unchained and might someday be let outside. "My main focus was to get out of there alive and get the others out alive," she told the Philadelphia Daily News in 2012. The other women saw her rise with horror, and two of them would later want her prosecuted.
On March 24, 1987, Heidnik agreed to let her visit her family as a reward. She asked to be dropped near 6th Street and Girard Avenue and promised to be back in about 25 minutes. Instead she ran to her home and then to a pay phone and called 911. Officers, among them David Savidge, met her at 6th and Oxford. UPI, reporting the next day, said she reached a patrol car at about 1 a.m. on Wednesday, March 25. She told them where Heidnik was waiting.
Officer John Cannon found the Cadillac near 6th and Girard and ordered him out. Heidnik, the court recorded, asked, "What's this all about, Officer? Didn't I pay my child support?" (Peruto later remembered the arrest at Heidnik's front door, with officers smelling the house. The officers' own accounts place it at the car.) He was carrying nearly $2,000 in cash.
Lieutenant James Hansen was among the officers who went into the house. In the basement officers found two women lying on a mattress, bruised and shackled to the pipe. Under a board in the corner, behind bags of dirt, a third woman lay handcuffed in the pit. The officers had to fetch bolt cutters from a firehouse to free them. In the kitchen they found human remains in bags and in the freezer. The deputy medical examiner, Dr. Robert Catherman, said his office recovered a little over 24 pounds of remains. Gallagher said investigators never found the hands.
The four survivors were taken to hospitals and treated for malnutrition and dehydration. A hospital spokeswoman said two of them were in fair condition and alert.
The case moved fast because the witnesses were alive and could talk. Rivera's account led detectives directly to Deborah Dudley. "A witness took us directly to the body," a district attorney's spokesman, Terry Williamson, told UPI, and by late afternoon on March 25 New Jersey investigators had recovered a young woman's body under twigs and debris in Wharton State Forest, in Waterford Township. Early reports tentatively identified her under the wrong surname, as "Debbie Johnson," before the identification was corrected to Deborah Dudley.
Police spokesman Ed Tenuto told reporters that Heidnik might own as much as $500,000 in stocks and bonds and several cars besides the 1987 Cadillac. Officer Joseph Scott of the sex crimes unit, a 20-year veteran, said he had never seen anything to match it. The immediate charges were murder in Dudley's death and four counts each of rape and kidnapping for the surviving women. By April 1987 the district attorney's office had charged him with two counts of first-degree murder, adding the killing of Sandra Lindsay. Tracey Lomax spent her 21st birthday at the police station on the day her sister's remains were found.
The investigation also exposed how the system had missed him. Lindsay's family had named Heidnik to police within weeks of her disappearance, a neighbor had placed her at his house, an officer had stood at his back window, and neighbors had complained of the odor. The Christmas card was enough to end the missing-person inquiry.
The money became its own legal fight. Within weeks of the arrest, several of the women filed a civil suit in state court to freeze his assets, which exceeded $500,000. Heidnik responded by filing for bankruptcy, on April 20 and April 28, 1987, for himself and for his church. The bankruptcy filings froze the women's suit, and the court appointed trustees for both estates, who sold his stock holdings before the October 1987 market crash. The trustees planned to pay creditors, among them the women he had held. Heidnik's lawyer, A. Charles Peruto Jr., at first won approval to be paid from the estate, then proposed instead to take a third of any proceeds from book or film rights. Heidnik's former wife objected on ethical grounds, the district attorney objected under the state law meant to direct such proceeds to victims, and Peruto withdrew, saying he would "not be a party to an unethical agreement." On March 31, 1988, Judge David A. Scholl ruled that no estate money could be spent on Heidnik's criminal defense. Each of the four survivors eventually received a $30,000 settlement.
The trial opened in Philadelphia in June 1988 before Judge Lynne Abraham, who in 1991 became the city's district attorney. Charles Gallagher prosecuted. Peruto, then a young defense lawyer, argued that Heidnik was legally insane, a defense that under Pennsylvania law Heidnik had to prove, and he suggested to the jury that Rivera had been the one in charge.
Rivera was the prosecution's central witness. The survivors' accounts of the basement, of Lindsay's death and of Dudley's electrocution supplied most of the facts later recited by the state's highest court.
Peruto's experts tried to explain the man. Dr. Clancy McKenzie, a psychiatrist, testified that Heidnik had schizophrenia and acted from the "infant brain" of a 17-month-old, a trauma he tied to his mother's giving birth to another child. Dr. Kenneth Kool described a "systematized delusion" that God wanted him to have many children, a "pact with God." Apsche, after reviewing records back to 1962, concluded that Heidnik could not tell right from wrong during the months of the crimes. Gallagher thought McKenzie unpersuasive, and the judge limited Apsche's testimony.
The prosecution's rebuttal was built around ordinary witnesses who had watched Heidnik function. The forensic psychiatrist Dr. Robert Sadoff testified that his reasoning was intact and he knew right from wrong; Heidnik would not answer Sadoff's questions. Kirkpatrick, the stockbroker, walked the jury through the growth of the portfolio. A car salesman, David Pliner, said Heidnik had bought a Cadillac like any other customer. A New Jersey hospital social worker, Ernestine Simpson, called him "rational and intelligent." A court reporter read transcripts of his family court appearances, which the trial court called "cunning and deceptive." A court psychologist, Eva Wojciechowski, reported an IQ of 148. Dr. Richard W. Hole, a psychiatrist, said he had prescribed Thorazine to Heidnik in December 1986, while women were chained in his basement, despite finding no active problems.
Peruto later admitted that he had had Heidnik stop bathing and trimming his beard for months before trial so he would look insane. Zibulka, who knew him as clean-cut, said the lawyer made him "look like Manson." It did not work on the judge. Abraham said years later that she "very quickly realized in my mind he was faking to affect mental illness."
On July 1, 1988, the jury rejected the insanity defense and convicted Heidnik of two counts of first-degree murder, six counts of kidnapping, five of rape, four of aggravated assault and two of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. At the penalty phase it found that both killings were committed during a felony and by means of torture. For Dudley it found two further aggravating circumstances: that he had created a grave risk of death to the other women in the pit, and that he had already committed a murder. It weighed these against a single mitigating factor, that he had no significant history of prior convictions, and returned a death sentence for each killing.
The jurors did not all leave at peace. Marcella Lenhart said afterward that a man lucid enough to make a fortune in the stock market did not seem insane, but years later she told Philadelphia Magazine that she was not sure whether he was crazy and that she regretted her vote for death.
The trial court formally imposed the two death sentences on March 2, 1989, and added 150 to 300 years for the other crimes.
Heidnik told his lawyer to drop his appeal; he wanted to be executed as quickly as possible. Pennsylvania law did not allow that. Every death sentence had to be reviewed by the state Supreme Court, which heard argument on December 3, 1990, and decided the case on March 7, 1991. Writing for the court, Justice Rolf Larsen found the evidence sufficient both for first-degree murder and to prove Heidnik legally sane, found that each aggravating circumstance was supported, and held the sentences "neither excessive nor disproportionate." The court ordered the record sent to the governor.
No warrant followed for six years. Heidnik waited at Graterford. On March 20, 1997, Governor Tom Ridge signed a warrant setting his execution for April 15.
The fight that came next was over Heidnik's mind. On April 11, lawyers from the organization CLEADA, led by Billy H. Nolas, asked a Philadelphia court to stop the execution on the ground that he was too mentally ill to be executed. At a hearing on April 14 before Judge Poserina of the Court of Common Pleas, Heidnik said he did not want his lawyers to appeal. He described conspiracies, insisted on his innocence and said, "I say real or phony, they can execute me, because I am innocent and I can prove it." A court psychiatrist, Dr. John O'Brien, testified that Heidnik understood what was happening and could make his own decisions. Poserina found him competent.
On April 15, the day set for the execution, Heidnik was being driven toward Rockview when his transport was stopped and he was brought back to the federal courthouse in Philadelphia. His daughter Maxine Davidson White, now an adult, had asked to act as his "next friend," a person allowed to litigate for a prisoner who cannot do so himself; his former wife also sought that role. Judge Van Antwerpen kept the courthouse open and heard testimony from 7 p.m. until after midnight. Three psychiatrists for the family, Lawson Bernstein, Stewart Wellman and Clancy McKenzie, called Heidnik a paranoid schizophrenic whose delusions left him incompetent. O'Brien held that he was knowingly giving up his appeals. Van Antwerpen found that Heidnik did suffer from paranoid schizophrenia but that the family had not shown it impaired his ability to make a rational choice, and denied relief. A lawyer who visited him reported that Heidnik believed his death warrant was invalid because it bore the name "Tom Ridge."
On April 18 a panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding that nothing in the record showed Heidnik could make a rational decision to forgo appeals, and ordered that White be named next friend and a stay entered. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated that stay within hours. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had issued its own stay, and the warrant expired on April 19 with Heidnik alive.
In August 1998 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Zappala, set out the rules for next-friend petitions and found Heidnik competent to be executed. Chief Justice Flaherty concurred because he believed the court lacked jurisdiction to do otherwise, but he wrote that he thought Heidnik was insane: "I cannot stand by and say nothing while an insane person is put to death by the state."
White kept going. In September 1998 she filed a post-conviction petition on her father's behalf. On January 29, 1999, four psychiatrists examined him for about two and a half hours, and Poserina held a hearing in March. O'Brien, now appointed by the court, and Sadoff found Heidnik able to give up his appeals rationally; Dr. Neil Blumberg and Bernstein, for White, called his reasoning delusional. Heidnik told the court his resolve had not changed. He gave a reason that the courts found rational: he hoped that his execution, which he regarded as the execution of an innocent man, would lead to the abolition of capital punishment, as he believed a wrongful execution had in Britain. On April 27, 1999, Poserina ruled that he was competent and that White had no standing.
On May 12, 1999, Ridge reset the execution for July 6. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed Poserina on June 23. After a two-hour hearing in Easton on June 30, Van Antwerpen dismissed White's federal petition on July 3, and the U.S. Supreme Court turned her away on July 6.
Heidnik spent his last days at the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, near Bellefonte in Centre County, meeting lawyers and spiritual advisers through a Plexiglas wall. He asked for a radio playing country music. His last meal was two slices of cheese pizza and two cups of black coffee. Maxine, then a student at Temple University, visited him for about an hour and did not stay for the execution.
He was put to death by lethal injection that night and pronounced dead at 10:29 p.m. He was 55. In the witness room sat Jackie Askins, Tracey Lomax and relatives of Deborah Dudley. Lomax said he never looked at them, never acknowledged them and never said he was sorry. When he was declared dead, witnesses applauded and one called out, "Thank you, Jesus!" Askins said she had made sure he saw her face. "I watched him die," she said. "It didn't bring no satisfaction."
Kathy Swedlow, Maxine's lawyer, said the state had "executed an extremely mentally ill and psychotic man." Peruto was invited by the governor's office to attend and did not go. Rivera stayed away. "It would have been better for him to sit in a 4-by-4 cell," she said years later.
He was the last person executed in Pennsylvania. In 2023 Governor Josh Shapiro, a former prosecutor, said he would allow no executions during his term and asked the legislature to repeal the death penalty. "The commonwealth shouldn't be in the business of putting people to death. Period," he said. As of October 2026 there has been no execution in the state since 1999.
All four women left the basement with injuries that did not heal on any court's schedule. According to Oxygen, Lisa Thomas and Agnes Adams struggled for years with mental illness and addiction. Little else about their later lives has been published.
Jackie Askins stayed in Philadelphia, cleaned houses and raised two sons. She takes medication for anxiety, has flashbacks and cannot go into a basement. She lives with her past, she told 6abc, not in it, and still asks, "Why me?" For years she hated Rivera. When the two met again on camera for an Oxygen documentary, she told her, "I think the plan you did was the best one," because they were still alive.
Rivera returned to sex work for about a year after the trial, then gave up drugs and the street. She worked as a waitress, a clerk, a security guard and a day care worker, reconnected with her three children and became a grandmother. She married in 2001 and divorced about four years later. In 2012 she was living in a one-room apartment in Atlantic City with her fiancé, Chris Lyle, went to counseling and a church group, and collected sea glass on the beach. She still had panic attacks and avoided television images of chains. In 2014 she published a memoir, Cellar Girl.
Tracey Lomax said years later that her family was still struggling, and that her brothers had not been able to attend the trial. She chose, she said, to "celebrate how my sister lived" rather than how she died.
The case received weeks of saturation coverage in Philadelphia, the newsman Larry Kane recalled. Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs, filmed in 1991, drew in part on Heidnik for the killer Buffalo Bill, who keeps a woman in a pit in his basement. Books on the case include work by the author Ken Englade, who later said he found Judge Abraham hostile to the defense, RJ Parker's The Basement, and a chapter in Peter Davidson's Death by Cannibal (2006). Philadelphia Magazine published a long oral history of the case in 2007. Oxygen's documentary special in 2021 brought Askins and Rivera together, and an Investigation Discovery series, People Magazine Investigates, revisited Rivera's story in an episode titled "Surviving the Bishop's Basement."
Insanity. Whether Heidnik was mentally ill, faking or both was argued for 25 years. A jury and every appellate court accepted that he was legally sane and later competent to die. But a federal judge found he did have paranoid schizophrenia, the Third Circuit briefly found him unable to choose rationally, and Pennsylvania's chief justice wrote that he believed Heidnik was insane. Peruto's own view was that his client met the clinical definition of insanity but not the legal one.
Cannibalism. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court's summary of the trial evidence states that Heidnik mixed some of Lindsay's remains with dog food and fed them to the other women, and survivors described this. Gallagher, the prosecutor, told Philadelphia Magazine that no physical evidence supported it, and Peruto said he had first raised the idea himself. It rests on the women's testimony.
Rivera's role. Two survivors wanted Rivera charged for her part in the abuse and in Dudley's death. The district attorney's office declined, and Gallagher argued at trial that she had acted under compulsion. Askins later came to accept Rivera's explanation.
The arrest. Court records and the arresting officers place the arrest at Heidnik's car near 6th and Girard. Peruto remembered it at the front door. Most accounts date Rivera's call to March 24, 1987; UPI and the Daily News placed her escape in the early hours of March 25.
Lindsay's age. Her family and Philadelphia Magazine say 25; Oxygen says 24.
How he found women. The Daily Pennsylvanian reported in 1991 that Heidnik ate daily for six years at a McDonald's at 40th and Walnut Streets and that he reportedly found victims there. The trial evidence as summarized by the court says only that he approached the women on the street.
1943: Gary Michael Heidnik is born in Cleveland, Ohio.
1971: Founds the United Church of the Ministers of God and names himself bishop.
1978: His daughter Maxine is born to Anjeanette Davidson. Around this time he takes Alberta Davidson from an institution and holds her in his basement; he is later sentenced to three to seven years.
May 1981: The Superior Court affirms the sentence.
March 24, 1983: Paroled.
1985: Marries Betsy Disto; the marriage ends within months.
September 1986: His son Jesse John Disto is born.
November 25, 1986: Abducts Josefina Rivera.
November 28, 1986: Sandra Lindsay disappears.
Late 1986: Abducts Lisa Thomas.
About January 1, 1987: Abducts Deborah Dudley.
January 1987: Abducts Jacqueline Askins.
Early February 1987: Sandra Lindsay dies after days hung by one wrist.
March 17, 1987: Deborah Dudley is electrocuted in the flooded pit.
March 1987: Abducts Agnes Adams.
March 24-25, 1987: Rivera calls 911; Heidnik is arrested; three women are freed; Dudley's body is recovered in Wharton State Forest.
April 1987: Charged with two counts of first-degree murder; files for bankruptcy.
March 31, 1988: Bankruptcy court bars use of his estate for his defense.
June 1988: Trial opens before Judge Lynne Abraham.
July 1, 1988: Convicted on all counts; jury returns two death sentences.
March 2, 1989: Death sentences formally imposed.
March 7, 1991: Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirms.
March 20, 1997: Governor Ridge signs a death warrant.
April 14-19, 1997: Competency hearings and stays; the warrant expires.
August 19, 1998: State Supreme Court finds him competent to be executed.
April 27, 1999: Judge Poserina rules him competent to waive appeals.
July 6, 1999: Executed at SCI Rockview, pronounced dead at 10:29 p.m.
2023: Governor Shapiro says he will allow no executions during his term.