The end of Elisabeth’s captivity came on April 19, 2008, when her daughter Kerstin, nineteen, became very ill. This time Fritzl was willing to take the sick young woman to the hospital, but the doctors needed the medical history of her mother. Fritzl took Elisabeth in, and the whole sick secret unraveled. Kerstin and her brothers Stefan, eighteen, and Felix, five, had never before seen daylight.
At his trial, Fritzl pleaded guilty to murder, rape, enslavement, and more and was sentenced to life in prison. Given that he was seventy-three at the time, chances are that his imprisonment will not be as long as his daughter’s was.
Gary Heidnik was born on November 22, 1943. His early childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, was marked by the divorce of his parents. Heidnik and his brother, Terry, after living briefly with their alcoholic mother and her new husband, moved in with their father, who had also remarried. The boys hated their “wicked” stepmother, and their father took her side in their frequent spats. An unpleasant living situation was made worse by Heidnik’s bed-wetting; his father punished Heidnik severely on these occasions, hanging his soiled sheets in the boy’s bedroom window for the neighbors to see. According to Heidnik, his father sometimes dangled him out the window as well, holding him by the ankles and shaking him.
When Heidnik fell from a tree, his skull was smashed, and his misshapen cranium is believed to have caused some behavioral aberration, as well as earning the boy the nickname “footballhead” from his schoolmates. Heidnik was intelligent and driven, but he suffered psychological disorders that kept him from achieving his full potential. He was discharged from the army after a year, earning a full disability pension and a diagnosis of “schizoid personality disorder.”
Heidnik’s mother’s suicide in 1970 prompted his first suicide attempt, one of many unsuccessful attempts resulting in frequent hospitalizations. A religious “epiphany” resulted in his becoming ordained by the United Church of the Ministers of God, and as Bishop Heidnik he founded the “Church of Heidnik.” With a fifteen-hundred-dollar investment in a Merrill Lynch account, the church amassed a fortune of half a million dollars.
Brushes with the law became commonplace for Heidnik, who was charged with aggravated assault after attacking a tenant of one of his properties, then with a multitude of charges for his kidnapping and rape of his mentally handicapped “girlfriend.” The aggravated assault charges were dropped, and in the other case he served most of his sentence at a hospital rather than in prison. In April 1983 he was released into the community once again.
Soon, Heidnik married a mail-order bride from the Philippines. That marriage was short-lived and marked by violence. His wife had a son, the existence of whom she kept from Heidnik until she sued him for paternal support. Other “girlfriends,” mostly mentally disabled women with whom he struck up relationships, also had children whom they then kept away from their father. The idea that he had yet another child to whom he had no access sent Heidnik into a spiraling rage, which ultimately resulted in the crimes for which he was arrested a final time: the kidnap, torture, and rape of six women whom he kept in the basement of his Philadelphia home, and the murder of two of them.
Heidnik’s first victim was a twenty-five-year-old African American prostitute named Josefina Rivera. On November 26, 1986, she was picked up by a white man driving a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. He took her back to his house; it didn’t look like much to her, inside or out, but she spotted a Rolls Royce in the garage. She and the john had sex, and as she started to get dressed, he attacked her, choking her and locking handcuffs around her wrists. Half naked, she was led into the cold basement room that was to be her new home.
Heidnik glued clamps around her ankles, then connected them to a length of chain and secured that to a pipe. Rivera wasn’t going anywhere. She watched him work on a pit in the basement floor, digging it wider and deeper, explaining as he did that he meant to have ten slaves and would need a much more substantial pit. He had four children by different mothers, but none of them lived with him. He wanted company, but without the niceties of an actual relationship. He wanted sex slaves to do his bidding. He wanted to get them all pregnant and create a large, mixed-race family.
If Rivera “misbehaved,” she was put into the pit, which was covered by a weighted board, so she tried not to upset her captor.
The next captive, Sandra Lindsay, was another African American woman. She was mentally disabled and had known Heidnik long enough to have become pregnant with his child and have it aborted. For Heidnik, it was payback time. He fed the women irregularly, kept them half-naked, and raped them whenever he wanted.
That December, he brought nineteen-year-old Lisa Thomas home and drugged her wine, and when she woke up, she was in the basement with the other women. A week later Heidnik grabbed Deborah Dudley, twenty-three. Dudley fought and challenged him at every opportunity, so she got more beatings and pit time than the others. Now Heidnik began to indulge himself in other ways, such as by forcing the four women to have sex with one another while he watched. Instead of continuing to feed them scraps from his own meals, he brought them dog food.
On January 18, 1987, he brought Jacquelyn Askins, eighteen, into the basement. Now he was halfway to his goal.
Heidnik became angry with Lindsay for some reason on February 7, and he punished her by hanging her by one wrist from a roof beam for two days. When he took her down, she had a high fever, and by morning she was dead. He took her body upstairs, cranked up a power saw, and dismembered her. He put her head into a large cooking pot, and he cut flesh (which he never admitted to eating) from wherever he could. Some of it he fed to his two dogs, and some went into the dog food that he gave his other captives.
After a couple of days, the police knocked on the door, wanting to know what the terrible smell was. The neighbors had complained. Heidnik said that he had burned his dinner, and the police took the explanation at face value.
Next in Heidnik’s repertoire was to tell the women that they would be rewarded for informing on one another. Rivera told Heidnik that the others planned to jump him; his response was to deafen the accused plotters by driving screwdrivers through their eardrums. He also took to applying electric shocks to everyone but Rivera. She had become his favorite, and sometimes he used her to help him torture the others. She had other “privileges,” such as occasionally being allowed upstairs to watch a movie or be raped in a more comfortable environment.
Dudley died while suffering electric torture. Heidnik and Rivera disposed of the body, then Rivera recruited a friend and sometime coworker, Agnes Adams, as Dudley’s replacement. On March 24, 1987, Rivera asked Heidnik’s permission to visit her family. As astonishing as it sounds, Heidnik agreed. Rivera raced home and told her anxious boyfriend where she had been. Then she told the police, and Heidnik was arrested. All of the stories Rivera told, however, couldn’t prepare the police for the horrific scenes they would discover in that Philadelphia home.
Heidnik was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, five of kidnapping, six of rape, four of aggravated assault, and one of involuntary deviant sexual intercourse. On July 6, 1999, after surviving several suicide attempts in prison, he was executed by lethal injection.
THE FOURTH SEASON of Criminal Minds ends with a two-part story, “To Hell . . .” (425) “. . . And Back” (426). In these episodes, the team heads to Detroit to catch a killer who is abducting homeless people, drug addicts, and prostitutes from the city’s Cass Corridor. Such places as skid rows, havens for the destitute full of drug users, sex workers, and the homeless, have been the hunting grounds for serial killers since Jack the Ripper lurked in Whitechapel.
Canada’s Low Track in Vancouver, British Columbia, is no different. In 1983 prostitutes started disappering from there. The police didn’t seem to pay attention until a sex worker advocate made the disappearances a personal crusade in 1998. Once the police began investigating, they eventually identified sixty-three missing women. Prostitutes are notoriously hard to keep track of, since they
tend not to favor official scrutiny, and when they disappear they are often not missed because they are already societal outcasts. In this case, however, given the large number of missing prostitutes, it was evident, even to those who usually wouldn’t notice, that something was going on. Some women turned up, either alive or dead from an identifiable cause, so they were crossed off the list. But even as the list shrank, more women were taken off the streets.
A tip pointed police in the direction of Robert William Pickton, who, with his brother David, owned a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. The Picktons also owned a salvage yard, which the tipster said was patrolled by a ferocious six-hundred-pound pig who ran with the guard dogs. Another side business, the Piggy Palace Good Times Society, was listed as a nonprofit charity that supposedly organized special events on behalf of worthwhile groups. The special events were actually drunken raves featuring prostitutes from the Low Track. David had been convicted of sexual assault once, and Robert had been charged with the attempted murder of a prostitute. Even though those charges had been dropped, the brothers were no strangers to police.
The pig farm was searched but nothing was found, and prostitutes kept disappearing. Another search, in early 2002, yielded more concrete results. Robert, fifty-four, was arrested on weapons charges. After being released on bail, he was then rearrested on murder charges because the investigators had finally found evidence of some of the victims on the farm, beginning with heads and bodies stored in freezers—victims that had all been taken after the tipster had fingered the brothers. By mid-2004, after two years of extensive searching, the authorities identified the remains of thirty women. There was evidence that a wood chipper had been used to dispose of some of the bodies by turning them into pig feed. There was also some speculation that human meat might have been mixed in with pork and sold for human consumption.
Because there were so many victims, a Canadian judge decided to try Robert Pickton in several trials. The first trial would be for six murders, then he would be tried for an additional twenty. After the longest criminal trial in Canadian history, Pickton was found not guilty of first-degree murder, but guilty of second-degree murder on all six counts. He was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for twenty-five years, the maximum sentence allowed.
The British Columbia attorney general decided that if Pickton’s appeal was denied, he wouldn’t bring Pickton to trial for the other twenty victims, since no harsher sentence could be imposed. At this writing, the pig farmer is still in prison, waiting for the Canadian Supreme Court to hear his appeal.
THERE ARE a few serial killers whose names are so familiar that even people who shy away from news coverage or fictional depictions of crime know them. Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy certainly fall into that category. One whose name is slightly less well known, even though his crimes are at least as notorious, is the shy, soft-spoken Ed Gein, whose case was fictionalized by Robert Bloch in his novel Psycho and made famous by Anthony Perkins’s character Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation.
Gein also provided inspiration for the movies The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs, and his supposed Oedipus complex is referenced in the Criminal Minds episode “Cold Comfort” (414), in which the unsub is trying to re-create someone he loved and lost.
Edward Theodore Gein was born on August 27, 1906, in Plainfield, Wisconsin. His father was an alcoholic who beat Ed and his brother, Henry. Augusta, Gein’s mother, ran a grocery store in La Crosse. After her boys were born, she bought a farm outside the town so that she could control their exposure to the world she hated. She worked hard to convince the boys of the evils beyond their own land, including the fact that all women—except for her—were good-for-nothing whores. She delighted in reading them the most graphic descriptions of murder and divine retribution from the Old Testament. She discouraged them from making friends, and she was convinced that her sons would turn out to be failures, just like their father.
Nonetheless, Gein loved his mother. After their father’s death, both boys took occasional odd jobs in town, and Henry was exposed to new ideas, which he brought back to Ed. Some of these were critical of their mother; Ed didn’t like it when Henry spoke ill of her.
On May 16, 1944, the brothers were fighting a brushfire on their land when they became separated. After the fire was controlled, Ed couldn’t find Henry, and he reported the disappearance to the police. When a search party was formed, Ed led the party directly to his brother’s body, which had bruises on the head and was lying on land the fire had passed over. Still, no one in the community believed that Ed Gein was capable of murdering his brother.
Now Gein had no one at home except Mother.
That year, Augusta had a stroke. Although Gein nursed her, on December 29, 1945, a more severe stroke took her away for good. Now Gein was alone.
He kept the farm, but thanks to government farm subsidies, he didn’t have to work it. Instead, he lived on his government checks and did occasional odd handyman work or babysitting for extra money. He sealed off the parts of the house his mother had enjoyed the most, and he used only the kitchen and an adjoining room that he turned into a bedroom.
Alone in his small part of the big house, Gein’s mind turned to strange pursuits. He read pulp magazines, horror and crime comics, anatomy texts, and accounts of Nazi atrocities. He had never been with a woman, but he found himself fascinated by their bodies. At the graveyard, he found that with some digging, he had a ready supply of available female bodies for closer examination. Examination alone wasn’t good enough, however, and he began to take parts from middle-aged women who resembled his mother.
Gein had long been enthralled by the power women had over men; his mother had, after all, controlled her husband and her two adult sons. Gein had dreamed of being a woman, and with the parts he took from the cemetery, he played at being one. He danced around the yard in the moonlight wearing skins he removed from the women’s bodies, and he even made a vest out of a pair of women’s breasts. He put female genitalia in his mother’s underwear and wore that. He preserved heads, which he kept around the house and which some of his rare visitors saw and commented on.
Dead women were soon no longer fresh enough for Gein. In November 1957, he was a frequent visitor to the Worden Hardware Store, owned by Bernice Worden and her adult son, Frank, a deputy sheriff. Deer-hunting season was upon them, and Gein kept asking Frank when he was going hunting. Finally, on November 15, Frank told Gein that he would be hunting the next day. Gein said he would be back in the morning for a gallon of antifreeze.
Sure enough, when Frank made it back to the store, the last sale Bernice had written up was of antifreeze. But when Frank made that discovery, late on a Saturday—after being surprised to find the store locked up and his mother not there—he also found a pool of blood. He called the sheriff and reported the exchange with Gein. Frank didn’t trust Gein, who seemed to spend a lot of time staring at Bernice.
Lawmen went out to Gein’s farm. Gein wasn’t home, but as the authorities were looking around the property, someone beamed a flashlight into a shed and saw Bernice’s body hanging upside down, disemboweled and decapitated, slit from crotch to sternum like a deer.
Gein had been home that afternoon when Bob and Darlene Hill, teenage acquaintances, came by the house. Bob was the closest thing Gein had to a friend—he sometimes showed the boy his pulp magazines and comic books, and he had even revealed a shrunken head that he said was a relic of South Seas headhunters. That day the teens were hoping for a lift into town to buy a new car battery. Gein came to the door in a blood-spattered leather apron, with blood spray on his face. He said he had just finished dressing a deer, and he drove Bob and Darlene on their errand. When they arrived back at the Hill residence after dark, their mother, Irene, invited Gein to stay for dinner.
He was still there when a neighbor came in to tell them the news that Bernice Worden had disappeared. After dinner, Gein was on his way to his car when some police
officers picked him up. Gein immediately insisted that somebody had framed him for Bernice’s murder—even though the police had not yet mentioned the dead woman.
None of the men who went inside Gein’s house that night ever forgot what they saw. The house was a cluttered wreck, full of trash, mildewed seed bags, and farm implements amid the furniture. Far worse were Gein’s souvenirs: a belt made of female nipples; a box of salted female genitalia; and chair cushions, wastebaskets, and lampshades made out of human skin. Gein’s bed had a skull on each of the four posts, and other skulls, some with hair still attached, were scattered about. One skull was being used as a bowl. His refrigerator contained wrapped human organs and flesh.
The walls of his makeshift bedroom were decorated with crudely fashioned death masks made from the faces of dead women. He had ten female heads, including that of Mary Hogan, a popular saloon keeper who had disappeared three years earlier. Worden’s head had been prepared for hanging, with twine threaded through the ears, but Gein hadn’t had a chance to put her up yet. Her heart was in a pot on the stove. The authorities also found Gein’s mammary vest, the one he wore to pretend to be a woman. It had straps on the back, and he admitted to wearing it with human “leggings.”
When the sheriff and his men tore down the boards that closed off the rest of the house, they discovered that part of it was preserved just as it had been more than a decade before, when Augusta Gein had ruled the home.
Gein denied any murders other than those of Worden and Hogan, although he was suspected of at least nine. He also denied engaging in necrophilia, but there was clearly a sexual component to his crimes, and he was never known to have had a sexual relationship with a living woman. He denied cannibalism as well, but he’d been known to give people “venison” even though he had never hunted deer. His treasures, he insisted, had been dug up from forty different graveyards, but he hadn’t killed for most of them.
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