Silence of the lambs

Serial Killer: Gary Heidnik

Serial Killer Gary Heidnik, along with enthusiasm from Ed Gein, was The Real-Life Buffalo Bill. Gary Heidnik didn't just abduct, torture, and murder women in the basement of his home of horrors in Philadelphia...he got one of his casualties to help. Gary was so awful and demonic, he fed one of his victims to the other captives held.

 

Serial killer Gary Heidnik was every bit as twirled as the infamous movie character he inspired: 

 

Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. He used his victims as sex slaves, forced them to torment each other, and even ground one of their corpses up and forced the other women to consume her flesh mixed in with the dog food he generally fed them when he fed them at all. He frequently starved them for days at a time.

 

And yet, to the 50 members of his congregation, he was Bishop Heidnik, head of the United Church of the Ministers of God. They would meet every Sunday inside his house to listen to his extraordinary spin on the Bible.

 

Could they have ever visualized that, in the basement under their feet, Gary Heidnik had six women chained up in a pit?

 

The Young Life Of Gary Heidnik

Gary was born in Ohio in 1943, he ultimately learned how to control people after a tough start to his life. He’d undergone an abusive childhood during which, he contended, his father abused him and even mocked the young boy’s bedwetting by forcing him to hang his soiled sheets for the neighbors to see.

 

His troubles continued through high school, where he remained isolated and socially stunted before joining the Army after graduation. Following his discharge due to mental health problems (namely schizoid personality disorder) after just 13 months, Heidnik worked briefly as a nurse before discovering a way to govern people via religion.

 

Gary Heidnik started the United Church of the Ministers of God in 1971 in Philadelphia with just five followers and a $1,500 investment — but things grew wildly from there. He eventually raised more than $500,000 for his odd cult. Largely he learned how to utilize people, and he put that mastery to use on the women he’d began keeping locked up the pit he dug in his basement.

 

He’d been accused of crimes associated with sexual assault before but never fulfilled any substantial time. He’d even been charged with spousal rape of Betty Disto, the Filipino mail-order bride he wed in 1985 and who left him in 1986 but not before bearing him a son, Jesse.

 

Heidnik had two other children with two different women, both of whom had also protested his abnormal sexual practices and the tendency for locking them up. But soon, those inclinations were about to reach new depths.

 

Josefina Rivera

 

Heidnik’s first fatality, Josefina Rivera, during an interview in 1990.

 

Gary Heidnik abducted the woman conventionally cited as his first victim, Josefina Rivera, in 1986. And it’s hard to infer, but he turned her, by many accounts, into his confederate. The way he originally captured her, though, was as vicious as the capture of any of his other victims.

 

Like all of the women Heidnik targeted, Rivera was a prostitute, lured into his home by the promise of money in exchange for sex. While Rivera was getting her clothes back on, Heidnik came up from behind and choked her. Then he pulled her down to his basement, tied her limbs together with chains, and sealed the bolts in with superglue.

 

Her life flickered before her eyes. “All I could recall was, like, a film projector of things that were going on in my life,” Rivera would later say. “It was, like – y’know, just flipping back.”

Gary Heidnik then whips her with a stick until she stopped sobbing for help. Then he threw her into a pit, boarded it up, and sealed her in. The only light that seeped in came through the thin tears between the wood covering overhead.

 

He would abduct five more women in just three months, all in the same way as Rivera. They were choked, chained up, thrown into the pit, and boarded up inside, only brought out to be raped or tormented.

 

Josefina Rivera tells her story...

 

“Anytime that you’re cut off from the world exterior,” Rivera acknowledged after she was freed, “whoever’s holding you captive … you’re going to thrive to like him regardless because he’s your only connection to things that are outside. He’s your only source of survival.”

 

Rivera came over to Heidnik’s side and he made her the boss of the other women. It was his way of pitting the women against each other. If she did what he said, he’d bring her hot chocolate and hot dogs and let her nap outside of the hole. But he made it clear: If she violated him, she could lose all of her freedoms.

 

Violating him was harmful. When one of the women humiliated him, Heidnik would put them “on punishment”: They would be hungered, beaten, and tormented. Sometimes, he would wrap duct tape around their mouths and gradually jam a screwdriver into their ears, just to watch them squirm.

If Rivera was going to keep her freedoms, she realized, she had to aid in the distress. Once, he had her fill the pit full of water, attach a stripped extension cord to the other women’s chains, and electrocute them while he watched. The shock was so painful that one of the women, Deborah Dudley, was electrocuted to death.

 

Heidnik barely reacted. “Yeah, she’s dead,” he said, after testing her body. “Now I can get back to having a delicate basement.”

Even more so than that of Dudley, the most terrible death in that basement was the demise of Sandra Lindsay, a mentally impaired woman who Gary Heidnik lured in shortly after Rivera.

Lindsay couldn’t take the abuse as well as the others, so Gary Heidnik put her “on punishment” and hungered her for days. When he attempted to give her food again, she didn’t move. He released her chains and she slumped onto the ground.

 

The women were only authorized a few moments to panic. When they began crying at the sight of their dead friend, Heidnik told them to “cut out [their] bullshit” or they would die next.

He then pulled her corpse upstairs and cut it into pieces. He cooked her ribs in the oven, boiled her skull on the stove (neighbors’ complaints of the smell provoked a police visit but he alleged he’d just absentmindedly burned a roast), and put her arms and legs in a freezer. Then he ground her flesh up, mixed it with dog food, and brought it down to the other women.

 

Three of the women were still “on punishment.” A few days before, he’d let them watch TV and one had infuriated him by saying she was so hungry that the dog food in an ad looked “good enough to eat.” She’d get dog food, Heidnik said her, and she and the other two women would eat it – with Lindsay’s corpse parts mixed it (though some sources deny this account and say that Heidnik made it up to support an insanity defence later). The survivors say it’s valid though.

It would afflict them for the rest of their lives, but they didn’t have much of an option. They had to either eat her or perish. As one of the women, Jacqueline Askins would later say, “If it wasn’t for me eating her or eating dog food, I couldn’t be here today.”

 

Josefina Rivera Escapes...

 

Finally, confederate or not, Josefina Rivera saved them all. Toward the end, Heidnik was using her as a trick to catch more women. He’d let her reach the outside world to help him pick up other women and attract them into his home, always keeping her close by his side.

 

She used the goodwill she’d received to get these temporary trips out of the basement. On March 24, 1987, after helping Heidnik kidnap the seventh victim, she managed to persuade him to let her go for just a few minutes so that she could see her family. He would wait at the gas station, they agreed, and she’d come right back.

 

Rivera walked around the corner and out of his spectacle. Then she rushed over to the nearest phone and called 9-1-1. Officers shortly arrested Gary Heidnik right there at the gas station and then invaded his house of horrors. After four months of detention and torture, the women were finally free.

 

Despite his tries to get off on a madness defence, Gary Heidnik was convicted in July 1988 and punished to death. He tried to murder himself the following January and his family attempted to get him off death row in 1997, but all to no avail.

 

Eventually, on July 6, 1999, Heidnik received a fatal injection and became the last person to be executed in Pennsylvania.

 

The Silence of the Lambs ties in...

 

A decade earlier, while he was still in jail, Heidnik’s heredity in pop culture was secured when the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs was founded on him. The character’s house of horrors and tendency for keeping women restricted in a basement recalled Heidnik’s crimes.

 

His Cult-Following...

 

As for Heidnik’s cult, it’s hard to say how much they knew. Even after he was imprisoned, they kept coming to church. While every news channel was blaring tales about Heidnik’s den of women and the way he harmed them, his followers kept coming out to his home for Sunday services.

At least one follower, a man named Tony Brown, certainly helped Heidnik torment the women. He thought of himself as Gary Heidnik’s best friend. He was there when Heidnik starved Lindsay to demise and he was there when Heidnik dismembered her corpse and wrapped her limbs up and labelled them “dog meat.”

 

Brown, nonetheless, was mentally impaired. He was a victim of Heidnik’s manipulation, according to his lawyer. He was harshly mentally challenged.

 

According to Heidnik’s neighbours, the members of his cult fit this description just as well. “He held these church services on Sunday. A lot of people came,” one of his neighbours remembered. “They were usually mentally retarded.”

 

Like Rivera, Gary Heidnik’s followers were victims of his manipulation.