The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  At five o’clock the following morning, police with a search warrant broke down the door at 3520 North Marshall Street – arousing the neighbours – and rushed down to the basement. On a mattress in the middle of the room lay two black women, huddled under blankets; they screamed as the police burst in, but when they realised that the intruders had come to rescue them, they shouted ‘We’re free!’ and kissed their hands. Neither seemed to be embarrassed by the fact that they were naked from the waist down. In a deep hole in the floor – covered over by a board – there was another black woman, this one completely naked, with shackles on her ankles and her wrists handcuffed behind her back.

  The story that emerged was appalling and incredible. Josefina Rivera had been the first captive. Heidnik, driving an expensive car, had picked her up towards midnight on 26 November 1986. Josefina was also impressed by the walls of his bedroom, which were papered with five and ten dollar bills. After sex, she began to dress again, but as she did so, Heidnik seized her by the throat and throttled her until she came close to blacking out. When he released her, she gasped that she would do whatever he wanted if he promised not to hurt her. He handcuffed her and took her down to a cold, mildewy basement. There he chained her, fixing around her ankle a clamp of the type used to suspend a car exhaust. The next day, he came down to the basement, and dug a hole in a spot where the concrete had been removed. She was afraid it was her grave, but his manner as he talked reassured her. He told her that what he wanted most in all the world was a large family, and that he intended to capture ten women, keep them in the basement, and make them all pregnant. He explained that he had once had a baby daughter by a black woman – he seemed uninterested in whites – but he had helped her sister to escape from a mental institution. As a result he had been charged with the rape of the sister and sentenced to four years in prison – which was unfair, since the sex had been voluntary. His daughter had been placed in a home. ‘Society owes me a wife and family,’ he told her – after which he made her perform oral sex on him, then had vaginal sex with her.

  Later that day, Josefina succeeded in forcing open the boarded-up window, and screamed as loud as she could, but the run-down neighbourhood was used to screaming women; the only person who paid any attention was Heidnik, and he beat her and threw her down the hole he had dug. Then he left her with the radio playing rock at top volume.

  Two days later – on 29 November – Heidnik added another captive to his harem, a woman called Sandra Lindsay, who was black and mildly retarded. She had apparently known Heidnik for years, and had even carried his baby – Heidnik had been furious when she had had an abortion. She told Josefina that she had no idea why her former lover had made her a captive. She also mentioned the astonishing fact that Heidnik was a bishop in his own church.

  The following day Heidnik made her write a note to her mother, telling her that she would be in touch; he mailed this from New York.

  The basement was cold, permanently lit by a naked bulb, and covered in litter. The daily routine consisted of beatings, rapes, oral sex and a prison diet of oatmeal and bread. No-one in the outside world seemed to know or care where they were. In fact, Sandra’s mother had reported to the police that she thought her daughter was being held by a man called Gary Heidnik, but a mentally retarded friend of Heidnik’s whom the police questioned mis-spelled the name Heidaike, and when it failed to show up on the police computer – where there were several entries under Heidnik’s name – the search was dropped.

  One by one, other captives were introduced to the basement. On 22 December it was Lisa Thomas, a black high-school dropout who accepted a lift in Heidnik’s Cadillac. On 1 January 1987 Deborah Dudley was added. Heidnik was to regret this – Debbie proved to be more argumentative than the other two, and had to be beaten more often. On 18 January eighteen-year-old Jacqueline Askins, another prostitute, was ‘captured’. Her ankles were so small that he had to shackle them with handcuffs. On 23 March he brought his final captive, a twenty-four-year-old prostitute named Agnes Adams; Josefina Rivera – now allowed out of the cellar – had been with him when he picked her up. By then, two of his captives were dead. In February, Sandra Lindsay had been suspended from the ceiling by her hands for a week as a punishment for trying to escape from the hole. On 7 February she died of exhaustion. On 18 March Heidnik filled the pit with water, made three women – exempting Josefina – climb into it, then tortured them with shocks from a bare electric wire. It touched Deborah Dudley’s chain and killed her.

  By that time, most of Sandra Lindsay’s body had been put through a meat grinder, and her head cooked in a saucepan. Three days after her death, neighbours complained of the stench of cooking meat. The policeman who investigated the complaint accepted Heidnik’s assurance that he had merely burnt his dinner. He did not ask to look into the cooking pot on the stove.

  In an attempt to make his captives deaf – so they could not hear him – Heidnik had pushed a screwdriver into their ears and twisted it round, damaging the eardrums. Josefina Rivera was the only one who was not subjected to this treatment. She had gained Heidnik’s trust by ‘snitching’ on the others when they plotted to escape, and beating them under Heidnik’s orders. (She was not the only one; Heidnik forced them all to beat one another.) She was often taken out to fast-food restaurants, and for rides in his Cadillac and Rolls-Royce. On 24 March she finally persuaded him that it was time to go and see her family. He trusted her, and dropped her off at the spot where he had picked her up four months earlier. She lost no time in rushing to the apartment of her boyfriend; by the next morning Heidnik was in custody. The sergeant who had arrested him had found a human forearm in the freezer. A few days later, Josefina led police to the body of Deborah Dudley, buried in a shallow grave in a wood in New Jersey.

  Any police officer with a knowledge of serial killers would have been able to predict certain elements in the early history of Gary Michael Heidnik, as it emerged during his psychiatric examination that he hated his father – probably his mother too, that his childhood had been loveless and lonely, that he had been ridiculed by other children, that he was shy, and that much of his childhood had been spent in a world of fantasy. All this would have been correct. In fact, he was an object of ridicule because of the shape of his head: he was called ‘football head’, and this was due to the fact that, at an early age, he had fallen out of a tree on to the crown of his head. (As already remarked, there seems to be a remarkably high incidence of childhood head injuries among serial killers.) After that, said his brother Terry, he had experienced a personality change.

  Gary Heidnik had been born in November 1943, son of a toolmaker in Cleveland, Ohio. His mother was of Creole descent, and was a heavy drinker. The result was that Heidnik’s parents separated when he was two. Ellen Heidnik would commit suicide in 1970 when dying of cancer. The father, Michael Heidnik, soon remarried, and the stepmother did not take to her new children. The father showed them little affection; he was a stern disciplinarian. Gary was a bed wetter – another characteristic that the Quantico research unit found to be typical of serial killers – and his father would hang the soaking sheet out of Gary’s bedroom window for everyone to see. This is perhaps one reason why Gary loked forward to becoming a soldier. He attended a military academy in Virginia before – at the age of eighteen – he joined the army.

  From an early age Gary Heidnik had been fascinated by high finance – perhaps because his childhood fantasies involved becoming a millionaire. He read the financial pages as other children read comics, and when the opportunity finally presented itself, showed himself to be a skilful operator in the stockmarket. He never became a millionaire, but at the time of his arrest he had more than half a million dollars.

  In the army Heidnik saved his money and became a ‘loan shark’. He lost $5,000 when he was suddenly sent out to Germany. Here he was beset by the the mental problems that were to plague him for the rest of his life. He suffered from dizzy spells and headaches. This may have been due to
the head injury as a child, or to the fact that, like so many of the flower children of the sixties, he had been taking hallucinogenic drugs. Doctors prescribed Stelazine, a major tranquilliser with powerful effects. In January 1963, when he was nineteen, the army decided that he was a schizophrenic personality and granted him an honourable discharge.

  Back in the US, he went to Philadelphia and began training as a psychiatric nurse; he also gained credits in a number of subjects at the University of Pennsylvania, including marketing. (His IQ was 130, about 30 above average.) Attempts at settling with his mother, then his father, were failures. His father wanted to get him permanently out of his life, and broke with him (as he had done with Gary’s brother Terry). From then on he was in and out of mental hospitals – a total of twenty-one times. He also attempted suicide thirteen times. (His brother Terry also had mental problems and was suicidal.) He took many overdoses, drove his motor cycle head on into a truck, and drank down a ground-up light bulb.

  In the spring of 1971 he drove to the west coast on a sudden impulse and, as he stood on the sea shore, had a revelation from God: to start a church. While still under psychiatric treatment he joined the United Church of Ministers of God and founded his own congregation in Philadelphia. His aim, he says, was to care for the mentally and physically handicapped. In this he was undoubtedly sincere. Although his church did not take up collections, it went in for fundraising activities such as bingo and loan-sharking. In 1975, Heidnik was able to open an account with the stockbrokers Merrill Lynch, in the name of his church, with $1,500. With skilful investment, it made him a rich man.

  In 1976 Heidnik had his first brush with the law. A man to whom he was renting an apartment tried to climb into a locked basement to switch on the electricity, which Heidnik had turned off. Heidnik was waiting for him with a gun, and fired; the man turned his head and was only grazed. For reasons that are unclear, the charge of assault with a deadly weapon was dismissed.

  By March 1978 Heidnik was a father; the mother of the child was a mentally retarded black woman named Anjeanette Davidson. She had a thirty-four-year-old sister named Alberta, who was in a mental institution near Harrisburg. On 7 May 1978 Heidnik and Anjeanette went to see Alberta and took her on an outing. When they failed to return her, police searched the house where Heidnik was living, and found Alberta hiding in a basement. Medical examination revealed that she had recently had sexual intercourse, and gonorrheal infection in her throat revealed that she had recently been subjected to oral sex. Heidnik was arrested and charged with unlawful imprisonment and deviate sexuality. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, most of which was spent in a mental ward. At least one of the guards concluded that he was faking when, after years of ‘mutism’, he met an old friend and began chatting normally. Heidnik would later tell Josefina Rivera that if he was caught, he would be able to fake insanity.

  Heidnik’s house was always full of women; he seemed to be sexually insatiable. There were many regular girlfriends; one of them told how Heidnik would insist on having three-in-a-bed sex. He also had a taste for mentally retarded black women – many drawn from his congregation.

  In 1983 Heidnik decided that he wanted an oriental wife having heard, no doubt, that oriental girls are trained to obey their husbands in all things. A matrimonial agency found him a Filipino girl named Betty Disto. In September 1983 she flew from Manila to Philadelphia; they were married within three days. A week later she came in from a shopping trip and found her husband in bed with three black women. Heidnik assured her that all American males did it. From then on he often brought home mentally retarded black women for sex. He often made her watch, after which she was ordered to cook for him. He also forced her to submit to sodomy. She left him in January 1986. A court ordered him to pay her $135 a week.

  In November of that year, Heidnik decided it was time to inaugurate his plan for a harem, and kidnapped Josefina Rivera . . .

  When the story of Heidnik’s arrest broke on 26 March 1987 newspaper headlines declared: MAN HELD IN TORTURE KILLINGS, MADMAN’S SEX ORGY WITH CHAINED WOMEN, and WOMEN CHAINED IN HORROR DUNGEON. No-one realised at the time that the description ‘madman’ was literally true, and that Heidnik was as psychotic as Albert Fish. When the information on Heidnik’s background emerged, it was inevitable that his defence would be one of insanity, and when Heidnik’s trial opened in May 1978, this is the course his attorney, Charles Peruto Jnr, chose. Even as he did so, Peruto must have realised that the jury would be unlikely to accept it: that in a case involving rape and torture, a sentence of detention in a criminal lunatic asylum would be regarded as a disappointing anticlimax. One psychiatrist, Dr Clancy McKenzie, argued that the birth of Heidnik’s brother Terry when he was seventeen months old had caused a trauma that meant that a part of his brain had failed to mature beyond seventeen months, and that it was this infantile part that had kidnapped and raped women. Judge Lynne Abraham was openly sceptical of this explantion. Nevertheless, McKenzie’s theory of why Heidnik kidnapped six women was highly plausible: that after his wife left him, he was determined that no woman should ever leave him again. When the prosecutor Charles Gallagher asked whether it was possible to fake schizophrenia, McKenzie replied indignantly that it would be impossible to fake it with him. His impatience is understandable; he was aware that no amount of psychiatric evidence would convince the jury that Heidnik did not deserve the death sentence.

  He was right. On 1 July 1988 Gary Heidnik was found guilty on eighteen counts, including two of first-degree murder. The following day, he was sentenced to death. When someone telephoned Heidnik’s father, asking if he wanted to know what the verdict was, he replied: ‘I’m not interested.’

  Heidnik’s life story seems to be typical of the serial killer: the hostile father, the broken home, the head injury, the lonely and introverted childhood, the abnormally powerful sex drive. We can also see that one of his basic problems was self-esteem. His preference for black, semi-retarded women reveals an inferiority complex; he feels he lacks the qualifications for approaching middle-class white girls; if he had found himself in bed with such a girl, he might well have become impotent. In order to be potent, he must feel that the partner is thoroughly ‘below’ him, little more than a sex slave.

  From the psychiatric point of view, the revelation on the Pacific coast was one of the most interesting events in Heidnik’s life. It can be seen as a cry from the unconscious mind, a demand that he should find some way to develop self-esteem. Becoming a bishop in his own church was the answer; it offered him an established position in the community, and an abundance of sexual partners. His subsequent success as a stock-market speculator confirmed that new position. In a mentally stable person, all this success would have brought about a personality transformation; but Heidnik’s psychoses were too deep-rooted for that. To feel wholly secure, he needed to be a family man as well as a bishop. At first his Filipino wife seemed to offer the solution; but it was essential that, like the wife of some oriental potentate, she should accept the rest of the harem. When she refused to do so and left him, the whole structure of self-esteem was suddenly threatened. The solution was something that the sane part of him knew to be criminal: to kidnap women and keep them as sex slaves. But how could a bishop be a criminal? This is tantamount to asking the question: how can Dr Jekyll co-exist with Mr Hyde? Heidnik’s response was the same as that of Albert Fish: collapse into a delusional state in which anything he did was justified by some divine command. From then on, he could kidnap, rape and torture with total moral self-approval.

  Then was the jury mistaken to decide that he was sane? Not entirely, for Heidnik had undoubtedly learned to use his mentally unstable state as a weapon of survival. Like Albert Brust, he knew he was mentally ill, and was cunning enough to use it to his advantage. We can observe the same mechanism in Heinrich Pommerencke. The craving for sexual satisfaction had produced powerful sexual tensions, but ‘Dr Jekyll’ was too strong to allow Mr Hyde to commit rape. The catalyst was
an American biblical epic, The Ten Commandments. When he saw the half-naked women dancing around the golden calf, Pommerencke suddenly decided that women are the source of all the world’s troubles, and that he would be justified in committing a sex crime. Did he really believe anything so illogical? The answer to that question depends on what we mean by belief. The Ten Commandments provided the excuse he required to overcome his scruples about murder and rape. Most ‘conversion’ is of a similar nature. A system of belief offers a release of tensions and a design for living. Some beliefs may be regarded as more or less realistic – such as the belief in political freedom. Others – Nazism is an obvious example – are little more than an excuse for the release of negative emotion. Pommerencke accepted the ‘revelation’ that women are evil as an excuse to release his sexual tensions; he had entered into a state of ‘voluntary delusion’ – but Dr Jekyll was not wholly deceived, and the ‘mistake’ that led to Pommerencke’s arrest suggests that he was fighting back.

  Gary Heidnik went one step further: the craving for mental and social stability also led to the belief that women are evil and deserve to be treated as slaves; but the ‘conversion’ was so complete that Dr Jekyll was not only overruled but consigned to oblivion in some remote Siberia of Heidnik’s mind.

  The Heidnik case suggests the conclusion that in most murders that involve inhuman sadism – Fish is another obvious example – the criminal is technically insane: that is, suffering from delusions that disguise what he is doing from himself. This conclusion is supported by a case that occurred in Italy during the period when Heidnik was kidnapping his ‘sex slaves’.