On March 24, 1987, a woman named Josefina Rivera got away from Gary Heidnik long enough to reach a telephone. She had been held in the basement of his house on North Marshall Street in North Philadelphia since November. Over the months she had gained enough of his trust to be allowed out with him. When she reached the police, officers went to the house and pounded on the door, and Heidnik came outside. They arrested him there.
In the basement they found three more women, chained. Inside the house they found human remains. Two other women had died in his custody.
Gary Michael Heidnik was born in 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents were well off but, according to his niece, emotionally abusive; she said his father beat him with a wooden toy airplane after he wet himself. The family later moved to Pennsylvania. After high school he joined the Army, served as a medic and was sent to Germany. He stopped following orders and was given a medical discharge for mental illness. Whether he was ill or faking it to collect disability payments was argued about for the rest of his life. Prosecutor Charlie Gallagher said he eventually received a 100 percent disability rating.
He earned a nursing degree and worked at a veterans' hospital until he was fired for poor attendance and attitude. In 1971 he founded what he called the United Church of the Ministers of God and styled himself a bishop. He held services for a small congregation, many of whose members had intellectual disabilities. Philadelphia Magazine's oral history of the case describes the church as a source of income. He also traded in the stock market. He had a long history of psychiatric hospitalizations.
In the late 1970s Heidnik took Alberta Davidson, a 34-year-old woman with an intellectual disability, and kept her in the basement of his home. He was charged with kidnapping, rape and false imprisonment, but Alberta Davidson was found unable to testify, and the most serious charges were dropped. He was convicted of unlawful restraint, interfering with the custody of a committed person and reckless endangerment, and given the maximum of three to seven years. "If it had been in my power to give him longer, I would have," Judge Charles P. Mirarchi said.
His girlfriend at the time, Anjeanette Davidson, gave birth to his daughter, Maxine, in 1978. After his release, Rivera later said, he complained that he could not find Anjeanette and felt society owed him a wife and a family. In 1985 a woman from the Philippines, Betsy Disto, came to the United States to marry him. He had three children with three women, two of whom were placed in foster care.
Between November 1986 and March 1987, Heidnik abducted six women and held them in the basement at 3520 North Marshall Street. All six were Black. He picked up several of them by offering money for sex. He kept them chained, confined them in a pit he had dug in the basement floor, starved and beat them, and raped them. He said he wanted them to bear his children.
Josefina Rivera was 25, a mother of three who had struggled with drug addiction and was doing sex work when he took her in November 1986. Sandra Lindsay was 24. She had an intellectual disability and had attended his church services, and she was the first woman brought to the pit after Rivera. Lisa Thomas was 19. Deborah Dudley was 23. Jacqueline Askins, known as Jackie, was 18. Agnes Adams was 24.
Askins later remembered being dragged downstairs. "He stripped me of all my clothes, my wig and everything, and I'm screaming," she told 6abc.
Sandra Lindsay's family looked for her. Police treated her absence as voluntary, in part because Heidnik had made her mail a card saying she was fine. As punishment, he hung her by one wrist from a ceiling beam for days, and she died. He dismembered her body. Deborah Dudley, who would not stay quiet, died when Heidnik filled the pit with water and forced Rivera to touch a live wire to the chains of the women in it. Her body was left in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
Heidnik made Rivera take part in the abuse of the others and in Dudley's death, and he took her with him when he abducted Agnes Adams. Rivera said she went along to get them all out alive. The district attorney declined to charge her, although two of the other survivors wanted her charged.
In April 1987 Heidnik was charged with two counts of first-degree murder along with kidnapping, rape and torture counts. His trial opened in June 1988 before Judge Lynne Abraham, who later became Philadelphia's district attorney. His lawyer, Chuck Peruto, argued that he was insane and suggested Rivera was the one in charge. Peruto later admitted he had dressed Heidnik to look unstable. Abraham said later that she "very quickly realized in my mind he was faking to affect mental illness."
After a trial of a little over a month, the jury convicted him on all counts in July 1988 and sentenced him to death. One juror said afterward that a man lucid enough to make a small fortune in the stock market did not seem insane to her, but she questioned whether the defense had done enough. Another juror told Philadelphia Magazine years later that she regretted her vote.
Heidnik maintained his innocence and refused to pursue appeals. In a 1997 hearing on a stay of execution he described himself as a disabled veteran and said he could prove his innocence but would not appeal. His daughter, who had been part of the court fight over his appeals, visited him before he died.
He was executed by lethal injection at the State Correctional Institution at Rockview on July 6, 1999, at 55, and pronounced dead at 10:29 p.m. Jackie Askins was there, as were relatives of Sandra Lindsay, Deborah Dudley and Askins. Rivera did not attend. Lindsay's family said Heidnik "never looked at us" and "never acknowledged us." Her sister Tracey Lomax, who watched, said later that she had wanted him to stay in prison, but that her healing began only after he died. "I watched him die," Askins said. "It didn't bring no satisfaction."
He was the last person executed in Pennsylvania. In 2023 Governor Josh Shapiro said he would allow no executions during his term and asked the legislature to abolish the death penalty, and as of October 2026 none has been carried out since 1999.
Each of the four surviving women received a $30,000 settlement. According to Oxygen, Lisa Thomas and Agnes Adams never fully recovered and struggled with mental illness and addiction. Rivera returned to sex work for about a year after the trial, then gave up drugs and prostitution, worked as a waitress, security guard and day care worker, reunited with her three children, who had been adopted, and married. Askins stayed in Philadelphia, cleaned houses and raised two sons. She said she still could not go into a basement. In a later television documentary she met Rivera again. She had hated her, she said, but came to understand the position Rivera had been in.
The 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs drew in part on Heidnik for its killer, Buffalo Bill.