by Gordon Kerr
Josefina Rivera awoke to the full horror of her situation. She lay on a dirty mattress in the centre of a small room. Metal clamps circling her ankles were connected to a chain which was fastened around a large pipe fixed to the ceiling. He had brought her here the previous evening after she had had an argument with her boyfriend and stormed out of the house. As he had been showing her round the house, he had jumped her from behind and started to choke her. Then he had pushed her into this room and chained her up. The last she remembered was him going to sleep, his head on her lap.
His name was Gary Heidnik and he lived at 3520 North Marshall Street, in North Philadelphia. This was not the first time he had done this.
Heidnik had not been very successful at school and, in 1961, he joined the army, serving as a medic. However, his mental instability resulted in an honourable discharge after 14 months. ‘Schizoid personality disorder’ was how they described his condition. He met a woman called Betty through a matrimonial service and, after writing to each other for two years, they married.
Heidnik’s first brush with the law, in 1976, resulted from a rent dispute with a tenant of a house he owned. He fired a gun at the man, grazing his face with the bullet. Then, in 1978, he kept his girlfriend’s cognitively disabled sister prisoner in a storage cupboard in the basement of his house. He had taken her out of the hospital in which she lived and, when she was eventually discovered, they found she had been raped and sodomized. He was arrested, charged with kidnapping, rape, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, involuntary deviant sexual intercourse and interfering with the custody of a committed person, receiving a custodial sentence of three to seven years. The sentence was overturned on appeal, however, and he spent three years in mental institutions, instead of prison. He came out in 1983.
In 1986, his wife, Betty, left him for good. The marriage had been an unhappy one and he had raped and beat her. She was pregnant, however, and gave birth to his son after she left him. He would never see the boy.
She went to the police and Heidnik was arrested yet again, on charges of assault, indecent assault, spousal rape and involuntary deviant sexual intercourse. He was lucky, however. Betty failed to show at the preliminary hearing and the charges were dropped.
In 1986, Heidnik hatched a plan to kidnap ten women who would have his babies. The first was Josefina Rivera, who he picked up on 26 November and took home in his silver and white Cadillac Coup de Ville. She was impressed by his expensive jewellery and watch and by the 1971 Rolls-Royce parked in his driveway. But she was puzzled by the seedy, dilapidated nature of the house, the cheap, dirty clothes he wore and the strange key he used to open his door. He told her he had fashioned it so that a part of the key remained in the lock. No one else could get in without that key.
Now, the following morning, she took in the room she found herself in. In the middle of the floor, a pit had been excavated. Heidnik returned and began to make this hole wider and deeper. To her increasing horror, he told her of his plan. He then raped her for the first of many times. Later that morning she began to scream, hoping to alert neighbours or passers-by, but Heidnik came back and used a stick to viciously beat her. He then shoved her into the pit, covering it with wood and weighing it down.
Not long after, Heidnik removed the wood above her prison and helped her out of the pit. There was now another woman in the room, and Heidnik introduced her as Sandy Lindsay. He had befriended her at the Elwyn Institute, a local hospital for the mentally and physically handicapped. She had already had an abortion when she became pregnant with Heidnik’s baby. When he had found out, he had been enraged and offered her $1000 (£500) to have his baby. She refused and he kidnapped her.
Sandy’s family began looking for her, and he wrote a note to her mother, posting it in New York, explaining that she was going away for a while.
Josefina and Sandy remained in the room together for weeks, being fed only now and then and being raped on a regular basis. They were beaten when they screamed for help and were punished by a visit to the pit whenever they breached one of his rules. He would also suspend them, for hours at a time, by one arm.
Meanwhile, Sandy’s mother told the police that she thought her daughter was being held against her will by a man she knew as Gary, and gave them Heidnik’s address. When an officer went to the house, he got no reply and the case was dropped.
In late December, Heidnik brought another victim into the room, 19-year-old Lisa. He was just under a third of the way to his ten slaves. 23-year-old Deborah Dudley, arrived shortly after. She was feisty, often fought back and was savagely beaten.
Heidnik now began to use the girls against each other, appointing one to be in charge when he went out and to report any infractions to him on his return. She would then be ordered to beat the others. If no one was reported to have misbehaved, he would beat them all, anyway.
Their food depended on his changeable moods. Eventually, he reduced them to a diet of tinned dog food, beating them until they ate it.
A fifth girl arrived in the middle of January – Jacqueline, a petite 18-year-old. She was so small, in fact, that the shackles would not fit, and he had to improvise with handcuffs. It was Josefina’s birthday that day, and he surprised them with a meal of Chinese food. Josefina was rapidly turning into his favourite. He also thought – wrongly as it turned out – that she and Sandy were pregnant by him.
In early February, Sandy grew sick and, after a week, she died. He dragged her upstairs and, before too long, the surviving girls were horrified to hear the sound of a chain saw. They could only imagine what he was doing – when one of his dogs came into the room carrying a long, meaty bone, their worst fears were confirmed. Heidnik had ground up Sandy’s flesh and began serving it to the girls mixed with dog food. He cooked other parts of the body and kept some in his fridge.
When the house began to smell very badly, as a result of the rotting flesh, the neighbours complained. Heidnik, smooth as ever, told the police officer who called round, that he had merely overcooked a roast dinner.
He became increasingly paranoid that the girls were plotting against him. Therefore, to put an end to this, he hung them from a beam, took a screwdriver and gouged inside their ears in an attempt to deafen them. The pain was intense and their screams were muffled by gags he had stuffed in their mouths. He left his favourite, Josefina alone.
One day, when Deborah had been causing her usual share of trouble, he unchained her and took her upstairs. When she returned, she was uncharacteristically withdrawn. He had lifted the lid of a pot on his stove, she told the others, and inside was the head of Sandy Lindsay. He showed her Sandy’s ribcage cooking in the oven and opened the fridge to show her an arm and other parts of her body. He warned her that this is what would happen to her if she persisted in causing trouble.
He introduced new punishments, electrocuting the girls with bare wires, all except Josefina, who now slept in his bed and spent time alone with him. One day, he ordered her to fill the pit with water and threw the girls in. He then touched Deborah with the exposed wire and she writhed in agony before collapsing into the water. She was dead. He wrapped her body up and put it in his freezer.
As the weeks passed, he began to soften slightly towards the girls, letting them watch TV and giving them mattresses, blankets and pillows. He also began to let Josefina accompany him on trips out of the house, on one of which they disposed of Deborah’s body. On another, they found a slave to replace Deborah, a woman called Agnes. Josefina, however, was merely waiting for her chance.
On 24 March, four months after she had been captured, she persuaded him to let her visit her family, on condition that she would bring back another woman. Naturally, as soon as her boyfriend opened the door to the apartment they shared, she blurted out her story. He found it hard to believe, and so did the police when they arrived. When she showed them the manacle marks on her ankles, they began to believe her.
They arrested Heidnik at a petrol station and then went to 3520 Nor
th Marshall Street, where they discovered the full horror of what he had done. The girls were chained to a beam and clad in nothing more than flimsy blouses and socks. They found Agnes cowering in the pit. In the kitchen, they found an industrial food processor, recently used, and an oven dish containing a human rib. When an officer opened the fridge door, he was confronted by a human forearm lying on one of the shelves.
Heidnik turned out to be a wealthy man, with $550,000 (£225,000) in an investment account. But it proved little help to him when he was put on trial. He was found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder, five of rape, six of kidnapping, four of aggravated assault and one of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. He was sentenced to death and, as he had done throughout the trial, showed not an iota of emotion as the sentence was read out.
Eleven years later, on 6 July, 1999, at 10.29pm, Gary Heidnik was executed by legal injection. No one came forward to claim his body.
Columbine Massacre
Columbine High School, Jefferson County, Colorado, USA
On 20 April 1999, two bitter and angry young men in trenchcoats opened fire on their class mates - joking flippantly that they were 'just killing people'. Until that day, Columbine high school had been just like any other, dominated by the same teenage mini-dramas, but then the carnage began, and going to school changed forever.
The signs had been there for all to see. 18-year-old Eric Harris’s website, originally created to host new levels for the computer game Doom, created with the help of his friend, Dylan Klebold, 17, featured a blog which began to detail how to make bombs. The blog, launched in early 1997, discussed Harris’s thoughts about parents, teachers and school friends. It demonstrated, to anyone reading it, just how much he was growing to hate the society in which he lived.
Few people visited the site, of course, but it was brought to the notice of the authorities when it ran death threats aimed at a Columbine pupil, Brooks Brown, as well as violent messages about students and teachers at the school. Jefferson County sheriff’s office investigator, Michael Guerra drafted an affidavit to search Harris’s home for explosives, but it was never executed.
Harris and Klebold had already been in trouble for stealing tools. Their sentence was attendance at various classes and regular meetings with parole officers. Harris was also seeing a psychologist, continuing to do so until shortly before the massacre. He had been put on a course of anti-depressants, including the drug Luvox, the side effects of which included increased aggression, loss of remorse, depersonalization and mania. With hindsight, this drug was not, perhaps, the best treatment for a young man at war with society.
As their murderous ambitions began to escalate, the two boys began to write journals in which they wrote about beating the death toll of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Ideas included hijacking a plane and crashing it into a building in New York City, but eventually they settled on a plot to massacre as many of their classmates and teachers as they could.
The plan was to set off a couple of bombs in the school cafeteria and then shoot students as they fled. They would then enter the school and shoot as many as they could. The attack would progress to people living in houses adjacent to the school.
On the morning of Tuesday 20 April 1999 – Adolf Hitler’s birthday and one day after the anniversaries of Oklahoma City and the deaths of David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in the 51-day siege at Waco – the boys made a video in which they said farewell to friends and families and apologized for what they were about to do. They loaded up explosive devices they had constructed and the arsenal of weapons they had acquired in the previous few months – two 9mm firearms and a couple of 12-gauge shotguns. They then climbed into their cars and drove separately to Columbine High School.
Arriving at the school at 11.10am, they parked in separate car parks. En route, they had stopped to set up a small incendiary device in a field about 0.8km (0.5 miles) from the school. It partially exploded at 11.14am and is thought to have been intended as a diversion to keep emergency personnel busy.
Harris and Klebold, wearing trenchcoats, met up and armed a couple of large propane bombs before carrying them in duffel bags into the cafeteria. These were set to explode at 11.17am, destroying the café and bringing the library located above it crashing down. However, as the two boys waited by their cars for the explosions, nothing happened, and it became obvious the bombs were duds.
Around this time, Brooks Brown, the boy Harris had threatened on his website, approached them; he and Harris had recently settled their differences. He asked them why they had missed a test earlier that morning, but Harris calmly told him it would be best if he went home. The tone of his voice suggested to Brown that something was seriously wrong and he did, indeed, set off for home.
As the bombs failed to detonate, the boys changed their plans, climbing, fully armed and carrying duffel bags filled with ammunition, to the top of the school’s west entrance steps. It was now 11.19am and they had a view of the side entrance to the cafeteria, the school’s main west entrance and the athletic fields. Harris yelled: ‘Go! Go!’ and the carnage began.
The first victims were Rachel Scott and Richard Castaldo, seated on the grass to the left of Harris and Klebold, enjoying lunch. Scott, hit four times, died instantly and Castaldo, hit eight times, was seriously wounded. It is reported that, as well as targeting the school’s ‘jocks’ – athletes who wore white caps to mark their status at the school – who, according to some theories, had been bullying Harris and Klebold and making homophobic remarks about them, they also wanted to target Christians. To this end, it is reported that the killers first asked Rachel Scott if she believed in God and when she innocently replied, ‘Yes I do’, they opened fire on her.
Harris now pulled out his semi-automatic and shot Daniel Rohrbough and two friends, Sean Graves and Lance Kirklin, who had been standing on the west staircase, wounding all three. They then shot at pupils seated on the grass next to the steps, hitting Michael Johnson on the face, arms and leg. Johnson escaped and Mark Taylor, hit in the chest, arms and leg, collapsed to the ground pretending to be dead. Klebold walked down the steps, pausing to shoot the wounded Lance Kirklin in the face. Daniel Rohrbough was shot again, in the back, and died. Anne-Marie Hochhalter was wounded in the chest, arm, abdomen, back and left leg as she tried to get away at the entrance to the cafeteria. Harris and Klebold now began to make their way to the West Entrance, throwing pipe bombs as they went.
Teacher Patti Nielson was on her way outside to find out what the noise was, but was shot and hit in the shoulder by shrapnel and ran back inside, heading for the library where she ordered the students there to hide beneath the desks. She also called the police.
At 11.24am, a sheriff arrived and began firing at Harris and Klebold, who returned fire. He called in for back-up.
The two boys entered the school, shooting Stephanie Munson in the ankle in the North Hallway, before heading for the library. Coach William Sanders met them en route and was shot in the chest. He struggled into a science classroom where students tried to staunch the flow of blood. They put a sign in the classroom window, saying ‘1 bleeding to death’. Sanders died a few hours later.
Harris and Klebold threw bombs into the cafeteria as they approached the library. This time they exploded. At 11.29am, they entered the library where 52 students, two teachers and two librarians were hiding. Harris screamed at everyone to get up, but when no one did, he changed his order to, ‘Everyone with a white cap or baseball cap, stand up!’ meaning the school athletes. Again no one stood, and Harris shouted ‘Fine, I’ll start anyway!’
The massacre in the library was horrific in the extreme, as the two wandered round firing randomly or leaning down to look at the terrified students huddled together under desks before shooting them. At one point, Harris banged a desktop twice with his hand and then leant down to see Cassie Bernall cowering in terror. ‘Peek-a-boo!’, he sneered, before shooting her in the head. Unfortunately for him, the recoil of the gun sent it bac
k hard into his face, breaking his nose.
In all, ten students died in the library and a further 12 were wounded.
Passing the library windows, they fired at police outside who were working to evacuate teachers and students. The officers returned fire.
At 11.37am, as they re-loaded their weapons, Klebold spoke to a student he knew, John Savage. When Savage asked Klebold what they were doing, he replied nonchalantly, ‘Oh, just killing people.’ He then allowed the boy to leave the library.
The two killers were now heard to remark how the novelty of shooting people had worn off. Klebold suggested it might be more fun to knife their victims. They then left the carnage of the library. It was 11.42am.
They wandered the corridors, firing randomly, and entered the cafeteria again, shooting at the propane bomb, trying, unsuccessfully, to detonate it. They threw a pipe bomb, which exploded, and headed back up the stairs. Passing a number of classrooms, they stared in the windows at the students cowering inside, but did not enter.
At 12.02pm, they went back into the library, now empty of all but the dead students. They shot at the police outside again and then, at 12.08pm, they turned their weapons on themselves. Eric Harris shot himself with a single shot in the mouth and Dylan Klebold shot himself in the head.
Going to school in America would never be the same again.
Ian Huntley
5 College Close, Soham, Cambridgeshire, England
The hunt for Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman was one of the most highly publicized missing person searches in British history. The whole nation grieved when, on 17 August, 2002, the remains of the two girls were finally found. Signals from Jessica's mobile phone were traced to an area near to 5 College Close - the home of a man who has since become infamous - Ian Huntley - child killer.
