The body parts, wrapped in plastic freezer bags, and marked “dog food,” in the refrigerator at 3520 North Marshall Street in suburban Franklinville, belonged to Sandra Lindsay, age, 25, 5-foot-6, with cocoa-brown skin and copprish eyes. She had lived in Philadelphia area with her mother, sister and brother. She wore thick bifocals and was classified as mildly retarded; her speech was impaired, and she was slow-witted. She walked with a limp and dragged one foot behind her.

Despite these handicaps, Sandra had the determination of a bulldog. Notwithstanding her child-like qualities, she managed to obtain enough credits to graduate from a special-ed class in high school, and she had high hopes of obtaining a livable vocation that would enable her to be independent enough not to depend on others, the day she enrolled in the Elwyn Institute, a school for the handicapped.

It was particularly windy and cold that Friday night in November 1986, when Lindsey had a sudden attack of menstrual cramps and decided to walk to the discount Drug Store. Somewhere between McDonald’s and the Philly Cheesesteak eatery, she vanished.

When Sandra failed to return home by the following morning, a hasty search by family members and a dozen neighbors was launched. They trickled out through the neighborhood searching through backyards and passageways. For blocks around, the narrow streets with their rows of attached houses were painstakingly explored by volunteers hoping to find some clue as to the whereabouts of the missing girl.

By Monday, her family had called all of her friends without learning anything about Sandra. Satisfied that something dreadful had happened to the girl, they called the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol and the Philadelphia police asking if she might have been involved in an accident. No information on Sandra came up on the computers.

The request for information on missing young women brought in more information to the officers. James Hansen, of the Homicide Division reported another almost identical baffling disappearance. About an hour before Thanksgiving, on November 26, Josefina Rivera, a slim, beautiful girl with cheekbones and eyes of her black mother, and bronze features of her Puerto Rican father, was hustling business on the corner of Third and Girard, like a puller-inner for a beggared second-hand clothing store. Her eyes brightened when a flake-white Cadillac Coup De Ville with the initials GMH inscribed on the door, pulled up to the curb. The driver, a white man with a neatly-trimmed beard, rolled down the window with the automatic button, and said, “You hustling honey?”

Despite the film of fog and drizzling rain, Josefina could see the expensive, diamond-studded watch sparking under the street light, and the flashy emerald ring. They were succinct and concrete in their suggestions: money.

She said Okey-Doke to twenty dollars and hopped into the passenger seat of the fresh-smelling Caddy. The driver pushed down on the accelerator and the car roared off, vanishing into the night like a hallucination. As they drove along, Josefina could see that her “John” was not the most sanitary man in the world. Even the new-car scent, with it’s waxed interior only 2 weeks off the showroom floor, failed to hide his reeky body odor. He didn’t talk, only cursed the pot-holes that were scattered in the street like land mines, as he swerved to miss them. As they passed under the street lights, she could see that his face was a mass of brush, neatly styled. But his clothes looked like they had been slept in for a week.

They drove into the outer-fringes of town, known as “The OK Corral” because of regular shoot-outs between competing drug lords who operated in the area like the ones on television. The Caddy turned one corner after another and finally pulled into a trash-strewn yard with a tumbled-down wire fence. On that note we say au revoir to beautiful Josefina Rivera, as we knew her. Police turned up no one who could recall seeing the girl getting into a car or any struggle to suggest she had suddenly become a human sacrifice for a mentally unbalanced wacko.

Gary Heidnik and Evidence

His crimes were more monstrous than anyone, at the time, could imagine in their wildest dreams. There was more sensational material for newsmen on December 22nd when 19-year-old Lisa Thomas, a desirable dark-skinned brunette, failed to return home from her Christmas shopping. She became a high-school dropout shortly after she learned she was pregnant and was living with her mother on Lehigh Street and collecting welfare. As pieced together by police, Lisa stood out like a fashion plate in a smorgasbord as she sashayed unconcernedly through the squalor side of town where no one should have been after dark. A man in a white Cadillac pulled near to the curb beside her. Right off, she noticed his ritzy watch and glittering emerald ring.

“You want to see my peter?” he asked. “I’m no prostitute!” Lisa snapped back indignantly. And she stretched her long legs toward Delaware Avenue. In an instant, he apologized and asked her if he could give her a lift to wherever she was going to make up for his rudeness. At first she declined, but under his carefully applied charm, and the charm of his new-smelling Cadillac, she hopped in beside him. “Where to?” he asked. “To my girlfriend’s house, I’ll tell you where to turn,” she smiled. While she visited her girlfriend he waited in the car. When she came out he offered to take her to dinner and she agreed. He took her to TGI Friday’s, where they had hamburgers and talked about his taking her to the beach the next day. Trusting and idealistic, Lisa projected an aura of innocent vulnerability that was placed under surveillance by the driver of the white Cadillac.

When Lisa said she was on welfare and didn’t have money to buy clothes to go to the beach, he offered to take her to Sears so she could buy what she wanted on his credit card. At Sears, she was like a kid in a candy store. She bought blue jeans, blouses, a cashmere sweater and a firm-fitting bathing suit that indicated her curves without blatantly advertising them. Afterwards, they went back to his house on North Marshall Street, drank wine, and watched a VCR sex-flick. When the wine kicked in, Lisa fell asleep.

When she jolted awake, Lisa was surprised to discovered that he had undressed her while she was asleep and his black crocodile eyes were exploring her nudity. He carried her to his bedroom where they had consensual sex. When Lisa didn’t come home her mother called the police. The detectives instantly saw that Lisa’s disappearance fit perfectly into the rash of disappearances that had been plaguing the city for two months. Public-spirited individuals joined forces with the proper authorities and the search for the missing teenager went into overdrive.

Day after exhausting day, night after exhausting night, a posse of full-blown proportions scrutinized the huge cosmopolitan metropolis while master strategists flashed a bulletin about a suspected serial killer statewide through the National Crime Information Center. They made phone calls, talked to hundreds of people, and circulated flyers with Lisa’s picture and description. But there was no Sherlock Holmes to save the day. On New Year’s Day the man in the white Cadillac went searching for additional prey. Fate contrived that his victim should be Deborah “Debbie” Johnson Dudley, a pleasing black girl with luminously intense dark eyes that burned with a steady flame. She also had the temper of a wildcat. If Debbie was abducted, her friends knew, she didn’t go easy.

As the sun rose on January 2nd, two and three-man teams of volunteers and Twenty-sixth District police were searching the lengthening shadows for the 23-year-old woman. By the third day, a larger group combed the city for Debbie as a helicopter swooped low keeping radio contact with searchers on the ground. After an unsuccessful six day search they abjured the hunt. The police art department made illustrations of Debbie from a family photograph and distributed them to local newspapers.

Whoom! Just like that! Jacquelyn Askins, a fragile, vulnerable eighteen-year-old black prostitute with the mind of a ten-year-old, disappeared from the streets and was never seen around town again. Jacquelyn regularly hung out in front of a roach-trap hotel on the main artery praying that some horny duck would come along and offer her five or ten bucks for a quickie in a parking lot. That’s where she was when the man with the beautiful watch and nice manners picked her up in his peacock blue Dodge van and drove her to his home on North Marshall Street. Once in the house, he dragged her to the cellar, stripped her naked, and whipped her bare buttocks with a plastic staff. This was done to impress upon her that she was his sex slave. “You’ll do as you are told, or you’ll get more of the same,” he told her.

The horrified girl looked around at his torture chamber. Chained to a beam in the basement, in complete captivity, were Josefina Rivera, Sandra Lindsay, and Lisa Thomas. Now his harem had been joined by Jacqueline Askins. They were allowed to wear panties, but no blouse or bra. She would come to know that Rivera was his fuel of choice. Their kidnapper wasn’t merely a psychopath, but a living textbook of perverted crime: a sex maniac and rapist who made them have sex with him on a daily basis, and derived sexual satisfaction from watching them have sex with one another. Sometimes he performed acts of perversion with all of them at once.

As for hygiene, in one corner was a potapottie, with no privacy. He provided tampons for that-time-of-the-month. He refused to let them bathe, nor did he bathe himself, and it was a rare day when one or more of his harem weren’t subjected to torture, rape, beatings or given the electric shock treatment for disobeying orders.

Two hounds shared the “horror chamber” with them. “Bear” was a large part-lab and Flaky was part collie. The girls were forced to eat chicken or liver flavored dog food right along with the dogs. If they refused, a screwdriver was jammed into their ears, or they were whipped until their bare buttocks bled. Dog food became a customary part of their evening meals. For snacks, he provided dog biscuits.

In his reflective moments, their “master” regaled his captives with his plans for collecting ten prisoners and fathering as man children as possible. They spent hours in the damp and dim “dungeon” picking names for their future children. His appetite for sex never waned and he tried to father a child with one, or sometimes all of them, on a daily basis. At one time, when Rivera and Lindsay missed their periods, he thought they were pregnant. He celebrated by bringing home Chinese Food for everybody. When he discovered they were false alarms, he had the other women dole out punishment on the two girls and if he thought they weren’t administering the stinging beatings vigorously enough, he reversed their roles. He played his captives off against one another, encouraging them to inform on acts of noncompliance.

In February 1987, the barbarous treatment and dog food diet took its toll on Sandra Lindsay and she died chained to the rafters. Rivera was forced to help him cart the body upstairs and place it in the bath tub where it was cut to pieces with a chain saw. He mixed her flesh with dog food and fed it to Bear, Flaky and his captives. The rest he kept in plastic bags in the freezer.

The surviving girls shuddered when they saw Bear in a corner of the basement gnawing on what looked like.... a leg bone. Sandra’s head, hands, feet and ribs presented a problem to get rid of. Finally he cooked them in the oven. The aroma aroused curious ado among his neighbors, who called the cops.

When the cops came knocking, he told them that he had simply overcooked a roast, and they left. But the smell of the cooked corpse on his body was so prevalent that the women vomited when he came near them. He took a bath under their urging.

Shortly after that, Deborah Dudley, who constantly disobeyed orders and refused to be a cooperative “sex slave,” was placed in a tub of water and electrocuted with wires connected to her chains. On March 22, “under the threat of death,” Rivera accompanied him on the long drive to Whaton State Forest, outside of Camden, New Jersey, where Dudley’s decomposing body was discarded deep in the woods to be feasted upon by wild animals. On March 24 Rivera made her break. She escaped from the cellar and unfolded her unbelievable story to a detective who answered the phone at the Twenty-fifth District stationhouse. After obtaining a search warrant, Sergeant Frank McCloskey, Officer David Savidge, Homicide Lieutenant Jimmy Hansen and a group of specialized task force deputies busted through the door and went directly to the foul-smelling pit in the cellar. There, cuddled in a corner, shaking like abandoned puppies, and connected together by heavy chains, they found Lisa Thomas and Jacquelyn Askins, naked and nearly dead.

The stench of death was strong -- very strong - and when police went searching for the source they retrieved bits of flesh from the cellar drains. Further investigation uncovered the packaged remains of Sandra Lindsay in the freezer. By the time the morning edition rolled off the press Gary Heidnik had been identified as a degenerate of the worst kind and was being held in lieu of $4 million bond.

It was the signal for even more alarming revelations. Angry headlines awakened people throughout the city as newspapers went berserk in telling the story of beatings and bizarre sex. Editors clamored to beat one another with a profile complied from voir dire questioning of Heidnik’s neighbors and police reports.

When Gary Heidnik was yet out of diapers his parents split the sheets. When he was four, his alcoholic mother, unable to take care of Gary and his brother, packed them off to live with their father, also a drunkard. In October 1961, Gary quit school and joined the army. He received medical training at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

Stationed in West Germany during the summer of 1962, he was acting strangely, so his commander had him shipped back to the States in October. A psychiatrist studying his case diagnosed him as mentally disordered and committed him to a Pennsylvania institute for three months as having a borderline condition that “often precedes breakdown to full schizophrenia.” He was honorably discharged from the service with a monthly government pension of $1,355. His Social Security check amounted to some $400 a month. The terrible pattern of his life formed over the next twenty-five years and he went through the revolving doors of several mental institutions: Honesdale, Morristown and Coatesville. If doctors were looking for a miraculous transformation in the man, there were none.

He signed up for a practical nursing course in February 1964, and 12 months later received his internship at Philadelphia General Hospital. He hoarded his money seldom going out and eating sparingly. By 1967 he had saved enough to purchase a three-story house in Philadelphia, saving one floor for himself and renting the other two out.

His world outside revolved around the Elwyn Institute for the retarded, lending aid to mostly black or Hispanic female inmates who were gullible and starved for affection. To the emaciated, and fundamentally weak females he became a father-substitute and they usually ended up in his house for sex.

Gary Heidnik in Custody

Heidnik formed the “United Church of the Ministries of God,” in the winter of 1971, acquiring his eight-member congregation from the underprivileged at Elwyn Institute. When the neighbors filed complaints of a suspicious nature the police began asking pesky questions. He sold his place and moved on. The new owner found heaps of pornographic magazines, trash and garbage strewn throughout the house, and boxes of battery operated dildos and other sex toys that arouse women.

In 1977, Heidnik invested $35,000 in the Merrill Lynch stock market. His investment proved fruitful enough so that within ten years he had acquired a fortune of a half-million dollars. He purchased a fleet of luxury cars including a Rolls Royce, a Lincoln Continental and bottle-blue customized van. He was able to dodge the tax issue under the mien of a “bishop” in his phony “United Church of the Ministers of God.”

His Cadillac was his pride and joy and he spared no expense in buying the extra goodies: continental kit, gold kit, custom wheels, custom grill, and the most expensive tires. He got what he could for his trade in, an old Caddy, and paid the difference in cash, $12,240 out-the-door.

In March 1978, he took into his house a backward homeless girl who bore him a daughter. During this time he brought in other women off the streets to have sex with him, including his girlfriend’s sister. They drove up to Harrisburg to take her out to dinner on a 12-hour pass. Instead, he took the 34-year-old woman with the IQ of a baby, to his cellar where he made her his sex slave while her sister watched. When the girl failed to return to the institution, the police came and took her back. Gary was arrested on June 6 and charged with kidnapping, rape, deviate sexual intercourse with the handle of a hammer, unlawful restraint, and interfering with the custody of a illiterate and committed person.

Convicted, he was sentenced to three to seven years in prison. Four years later he was back on the streets, after three attempted suicides in prison. His closest brush with death came after he swallowed a light bulb. In April 1984, Heidnik bought his “House of Horrors” on Marshall Street in Philly and hung out a shingle announcing his “church of God.” In October, 1985, Heidnik did the unthinkable. He put an ad in the newspaper advertising for a wife.

The ad caught the eye of a refreshingly beautiful goo-goo eyed Filipina named Betty Disto and the two began corresponding almost immediately. She was a twenty-two-year-old Oriental beauty, vivacious and naive . After two years of “snookums” and “petkins” notes back and fourth, he proposed. Over the objections of her parents she boarded a plane on September 29, 1985, and he was waiting at the Philadelphia Airport when the plane landed. On October 3, Heidnik and Betty drove to Elkton, Maryland married at a “quickie” ceremony, then drove directly back to North Marshall Street. Her happiness however, was short-lived. They were married less than a month when she came home and found him in bed with three black women. He wanted her to join them, instead, she fled the house in tears and wound up at a battered woman’s home, complaining that evil had penetrated their sacred home.

The macabre details of their marriage didn’t come out until after she had him arrested on charges of spousal rape, indecent assault, and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. She claimed he would bring home retarded women from Elwyn or harlots he picked up on the streets and make her watch him have sex with them. Once, when she refused to cook for him and his “whores” he made her stand in a corner for eight hours. Another time, he punched and kicked her and forced her to have rectal intercourse while the other girls watched and waited their turn.

The criminal charges were dropped when Betty failed to show up in court. He didn’t know it then, but she was pregnant with his son. Betty was hassling him for his $135 a week support payments but Heidnik had more crucial things on his mind. The crime he was being accused of was so downright repulsive that even well-known and respected Philadelphia lawyer Charles Peruto, whom he chose to defend him, didn’t want anything to do with it. Peruto’s fee for a capital case was $10,000. When Heidnik approached him, Peruto told him, “My fee is $100,000,” hoping he would back off. But Heidnik fooled him, “Fine with me,” he said.

At Heidnik’s preliminary hearing in Room 675 in City Hall, before Municipal Court Judge Charles Margiotti, Lisa Thomas’ testimony exploded with shattering effect. She testified how she was picked up by Heidnik and forced to perform oral-genital sex in front of the other captives as his sex slave.

Josefina Rivera told the horror-struck courtroom that when Heidnik came downstairs and found Sandra Lindsay dead, he uncuffed her and kicked her into a hole. She said Thomas, Dudley and Askins were put into a hole in the basement floor and she was forced to take a garden hose and fill it with water. Afterwards, Rivera said, she was ordered to toss a live extension cord into the water, thus killing Dudley. Then Heidnik forced her to write a “confession” admitting she killed Dudley. She said at no time did she consider disobeying his orders.

But Thomas said as time went by, Rivera increasingly began to enjoy the grotesque ill-treatments she was ordered to carry out against the others. Thomas called her “the boss of the basement” and said she beat the bare buttocks of the others with a stick “even when Heidnik wasn’t present. She told the court that it was Rivera who suggested the electric shock punishment.

Askins corroborated Thomas’ story. She said Rivera tipped off Heidnik that they were planning to jump him when he came into the cellar with their dog-food dinner. She said Rivera was rewarded with a night out with Heidnik at a fancy restaurant and when she came back she bragged about their time together.

A jury would later decide that there was no austere selfishness on Rivera’s part. Under the circumstances, there was not much else she could do if she wanted to survive. All three captives testified that Heidnik wanted to get them pregnant so that he would have a bunch of kids playing in the basement.

Dr. Paul Hoyer’s testimony whipped through the courtroom like a crack of lightening after a raging thunderstorm. He said he located several bagged parcels of white meat in the freezer compartment of Heidnik’s refrigerator. When he opened the first bag he saw what appeared to be a human part of an upper arm. In sum:

“...there were two forearms, one upper arm, two knees, and two segments of thigh. Each of these pieces had, ah, ..the bone end had been cut apparently with a saw. And the skin and muscle, soft tissue, was clinging to the bone.”

He said there was body parts in the oven that had been dressed up like roasts and assorted chops. While awaiting trial, on April 6, Heidnik tried to hang himself in his jail cell.

Gruesome, pathetic details of the killings, well-publicized in Philadelphia, would present his client from receiving a fair trial, Peruto told Judge Lynne Abraham, while submitting a change of venire request. The judge agreed and set the new voir for June 13, three hundred miles down the pike in Pittsburgh.

The job of selecting an unbiased panel among Allegheny County inhabitants ended with six females and six males -- all white. On June 20, 1988, Prosecutor Charles Gallagher and Defense attorney Chuck Peruto went after one another like two heavyweights at the clang of the bell. Room 315 of the old Allegheny County Courthouse, shook to its very foundations as aghast spectators learned the specifics of the case for the first time. When Gallagher unmasked Heidnik for the lunatic that he was, Piittsburghers couldn’t believe their ears.

Among the spectators was Betty Heidnik, Gary’s mail-order bride, who brought her 10-year-old son because he wanted to see what his father looked like. He couldn’t understand why they wanted to kill his daddy. Jurors sat as pale as cottage cheese as Gallagher painted a picture of a madman who piled his victims with food and sex, assaulted them, choked them, handcuffed them, dragged them into the basement, where he put muffler clamps on their ankles, then tortured them. He told how the defendant repeatedly had sex with his “slaves,” and forced them to perform fellatio on him as the others watched. The entire courtroom sat transfixed as he explained how Heidnik dismembered Sandra, cooked her head, feet and hands, and fed her to the others.

In an effort to blitzkrieg Peruto’s insanity plea before it began, Gallagher said, “The evidence will show that from the eve of Thanksgiving 1986 up through March 25, 1987, the defendant committed repeated sadistic and malicious acts and he did them in a methodical and systematic way, and he concealed them in a methodical and systematic way. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew it was wrong. He took advantage of underprivileged people.”

When it came Peruto’s turn, he told the court he had to be honest. His client was guilty of everything outlined by the prosecution in his opening statement. Except for one thing. He never intentionally killed anyone. The deaths of the two women were an accident. Besides, he said, “Any person who puts dog food and human remains in a food processor and calls it a gourmet meal and feeds it to others is out to lunch.”

Before dismissing the jury for deliberations on June 29, 1988, Judge Abraham walked over to the chalk board and scratched, PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE. “Sometimes I have to spell words for you that you’ve never heard before,” she said. Then she outlined the degrees of first-degree murder, second-degree murder and third-degree murder. After lunch, the jury deliberated. On July 2, the Saturday morning Inquirer bantered in thick black headlines, HEIDNIK IS CONVICTED OF MURDER!

On July 3, he was sentenced to death. I’ll make a prediction, Peruto told reporters. “I predict Gary Heidnik’s going to kill himself. I predict he’ll be dead before the first book hits the stands.”

That prediction came within a hairsbreadth of coming true. A guard found him unconscious on New Year’s morning, January 1, 1989. He had taken an overdose of Thorazine and anti-psychotic drug. Fast-acting doctors saved him for the executioner.

Years of legal balderdash kept Gary Heidnik alive on death row, but on Wednesday, July 7, 1999, at age 55, he was put to death by lethal injection in the Graterford Prison at Rockview. His $550,000 stock market fortune went to his victims, taxes and his lawyer, through a bankruptcy court.

 


Gary Heidnik and his Bible