Obsession (50 page)

Less than a week later, Heidnik secured his second captive, a mildly retarded, twenty-five-year-old black woman named Sandra Lindsay, whom he knew through Cyril Brown, a retarded black man Gary had befriended in the neighborhood and whom he used for odd jobs. And just before Christmas, he picked up a nineteen-year-old named Lisa Thomas, who agreed to go with him to McDonald’s and then to Sears, where he said he would buy her new clothes. She joined the other two in the cellar.

On New Year’s Day of 1987, Heidnik picked up twenty-three-year-old Deborah Johnson Dudley, another black woman. She turned out to be the most troublesome of all, constantly defying him and challenging his authority to imprison and rape her and the others. Consequently, as Gary dispassionately concluded,
she needed even more punishment than the others. She was frequently beaten and either confined to the pit in the floor with a weighted cover on top, or suspended from a ceiling beam by her handcuffed wrist. When the others got out of line, they were given similar punishment. The rapes continued, and Gary checked regularly to see if any of the women showed any signs of pregnancy, indicating an initial success for his baby factory.

Occasionally, someone would come to the door looking for one of his captives. Of course, he would claim that he had not seen them, but just to make sure that their screams couldn’t be heard, he took to leaving a radio blaring all the time. The captive women had to get used to the constant noise in addition to their rape, torture, and virtual starvation. Dog food had become a staple of their diet. Heidnik would also play them off against each other, demanding that one rat on the others so they could be punished. If the woman being asked had nothing negative to say, she herself would be punished.

An interesting sideline occurred during this period. Betty demanded support payments from Gary and took him to court. Like Bundy, Heidnik had enough confidence in his superiority and abilities to beat the system that he acted as his own lawyer, thoroughly ticking off family court judge Stephen E. Levin Jr. with his obfuscation of his financial resources, which were mostly hidden within the church.

On January 18, 1987, Heidnik picked up a young but streetwise prostitute, eighteen-year-old Jacqueline Askins. When he got her home, he followed his by now standard practice of dragging her down to the cellar and chaining her up. To impress on her what she could expect if she didn’t cooperate, he whipped her across the buttocks with a plastic rod, then chained her ankles before going back upstairs.

Gary Heidnik became a murderer on February 7. Sandra Lindsay had been hung up by her handcuffed wrist from the overhead beam for several days as punishment for various perceived misbehaviors. She had been retching and feverish, but Gary thought it was all because she refused to eat. And since he was convinced she was pregnant with his child (she wasn’t), she was simply being rebellious in not eating, meaning that the punishment had to continue. With the discipline of the others to think about, he could not afford to lose this battle of wills with her.

He uncuffed her and ordered her to stand. When she collapsed at his feet, he decided she was faking, so he kicked her into the pit. When he came back a few minutes later and dragged her back out again, she had no pulse. At that point, he acknowledged she was dead, so he hoisted her over his shoulder and carried her upstairs to figure out what to do with the body. He ended up cutting up as much as he could with a power saw, grinding it up to feed both to his dogs and his remaining captives, and placing the remaining parts in a freezer. When a rookie cop came to the door after neighbors began complaining of a horrible stench, Heidnik admitted he had burned his dinner and wasn’t a very good cook. This was apparently sufficient explanation for the officer.

Heidnik didn’t like the fact that the women could hear him walking around upstairs. If they always knew when he was in or out, it would be easier for them to plan an escape. The easiest way around that, he decided, would be if they couldn’t hear him. So, after binding each one and securing her head with duct tape, he drove a screwdriver into their ears to damage their eardrums. By this time, he felt Josephina Rivera was a little more trustworthy than the others, and she was spared this particular torture.

But Deborah Dudley continued to be a problem.
Gary was sure she was leading the others in planning rebellion against him. In an effort to scare her into submission, he dragged her upstairs and showed her Sandra Lindsay’s head in a pot and her ribs in a roasting pan. That worked for a few days, but then she was back to her old ways and Gary realized there was no substitute for physical punishment.

Only this time he’d come up with a new method in addition to the frequent beatings. He found he could produce a painful electric shock with an ordinary electrical cord whose end he had stripped down to bare wire. All he had to do was plug it into a wall socket and touch the other end to one of the women’s metal chains. On March 18, he came up with a refinement of the technique. Having decided that the women other than Rivera needed severe punishment, he forced them into the pit and had her fill it with water from a hose. He then placed the wire in the water and plugged it in. The women screamed in pain. The wire managed to touch Dudley’s chain directly. She was electrocuted.

Heidnik didn’t show any remorse, but he knew he had a problem. He wrote out a confession for himself and Rivera and forced her to sign it. This was his insurance policy. If she ever ratted on him, he figured, she would implicate herself at the same time. And he told her, “If I ever get caught, I’m going to act crazy…. I’ve learned so I can keep getting my government checks.”

After leaving Dudley’s body in the freezer for two days, he and Rivera dumped it in the woods in Wharton State Forest, near Camden, New Jersey. Realizing he could trust his first captive, he began giving her more freedom, even taking her out to eat in the local fast-food restaurants he favored. During one of these outings with her, he picked up another prostitute whom Rivera knew, named Agnes Adams. She became the newest member of the harem.

The next day, Rivera convinced Heidnik she needed to go see her family and tell them she was all right. He finally agreed, warning her he would kill the others if she tried to run away from him. Like Ted Bundy at his most grandiose, at the end of his career Heidnik had gotten sloppy and careless.

Rivera, in fact, went straight to her former boyfriend, Vincent Nelson, who couldn’t believe how emaciated she looked. Nor could he fathom the incredible tale she related of rape, torture, and captivity. At first he was going to go over to North Marshall Street, and if her story turned out to be true, he’d take care of Heidnik himself. On the way over, though, he decided to call the police.

Within minutes, Officers David Savidge and John Cannon arrived at the house. They couldn’t believe what their own eyes were telling them. As soon as they had freed the captives and secured the scene, they went after Heidnik, whom they found a couple of blocks away. Heidnik figured they were after him for child support, but when he saw their guns drawn on him, he realized the situation was somewhat more serious.

In prison, Heidnik tried to hang himself in a shower stall, but guards got to him in time. This may seem to be one more example of how “crazy” he was, but it is actually rational behavior within its context. I have often seen sexual predators, suddenly no longer in control and facing the prospect of fellow prisoners doing unto them what they have already done unto others, attempt to take their own lives.

Heidnik’s attorney of choice, A. Charles Peruto Jr., was smart enough to know an innocent verdict wasn’t in the cards—not with several eyewitness captives, rotting bodies, and other physical evidence. And the media was already going crazy with the sex slaves kept in the cellar dungeon by the evil genius and self-appointed minister of God The only question was whether he could get a
jury to go for an insanity or diminished-capacity plea, which would avoid the electric chair.

My unit was called in to consult with the prosecution team on strategies and how to get around a possible insanity plea. I went up to Philadelphia with Ron Walker. Ron, currently a squad supervisor in the Denver Field Office, was one of the two agents I’d taken with me to Seattle for the Green River case.

There was no question in my mind that Heidnik suffered from a mental illness—a rather severe one by my reckoning. But unlike the cases of Richard Trenton Chase or Edward Gein, I saw no evidence that he was delusional. His motives might not be fathomable to the rest of us, but clearly, he could appreciate the distinction between right and wrong and he was not
compelled
to abduct, rape, and torture women. In fact, both his planning of the abductions and the measures he took—loud radio music, blackout curtains, heavy cinderblock walls—show planning and organization rather than spontaneous, “crazy” behavior. He chose to do what he did because he wanted to.

Again, we can turn to Stanton Samenow for perspective: “You could say of a person who kills a bunch of people and cuts up the bodies and cannibalizes them, ‘Well, that isn’t normal.’ That’s true, but then you have to say, was there a mind that was purposeful? Was there a mind that was planning? Was there a mind that was in control? Was there a mind that knew the difference between right and wrong? And the answer to all would be yes.

“Sometimes people are so horrified by the crime that they say, ‘He’s got to be sick.’ Well, it’s
sickening
, but the act is not the product of a mind that is diseased. These people know right from wrong. In fact, they know the laws better than many regular people. But they have this uncanny capacity—almost like the way you could shut off an electric light switch—to shut off [the awareness]
just long enough to do what they want to do, with the certainty they’re going to get away with it this time, yet retain enough fear so that they’re looking over their shoulders for the police. Crime is the oxygen of then-lives. One man said to me, ‘If you take away my crime, you take away my world.’”

During the entire time he was performing these depraved acts, Gary Heidnik was building his tidy nest egg with Merrill Lynch. When, during the trial, broker Robert Kirkpatrick took the stand, it became clear that Heidnik was a smart and shrewd investor. I know some psychiatrists will tell you that an individual can be rational and functioning in one area and out to lunch in another, but I think this rings pretty hollow. Gary Heidnik was okay with money—he just had this bund spot about kidnapping and torturing women? Sorry, I don’t buy it.

I would go so far as to say that when you compare him with someone like Bundy, Heidnik’s crimes were more sophisticated and more difficult to get away with, requiring greater skill and planning. Like John Wayne Gacy in Chicago, this guy was killing right in his own house. And unlike Gacy, he was keeping captives alive and still going about his “normal” business. This is not easy to accomplish, and I don’t believe a strictly insane man could pull it off for long.

During the trial, Judge Lynne Abraham made clear to the jury that a mental illness, in and of itself, does not mean someone is legally insane. That is something the defense must prove.

And as far as the jury was concerned, it did not. They returned with a verdict of murder in the first degree. During the subsequent penalty phase, they decided unanimously that Gary Heidnik should pay for his crimes with his life.

In the early 1990s, my FBI colleague Jud Ray and I interviewed Heidnik in prison as part of a CBS
60
Minutes
program. I told the camera crew that, based on my experience, we were going to have to go through about five or six hours of bullshit before we could get down to the material that might mean something. Jud and I would first have to prove to Heidnik that he couldn’t snow us.

He was very cordial, but there was a strange, strange look in his eyes. He was isolated from other prisoners because of what they might do to him. There had already been several attacks, which I’m sure only encouraged Heidnik’s already well-developed paranoia. At first he denied everything, saying he’d even been testing electric wires in the toilet bowl of his cell to prove you couldn’t kill anyone the way the prosecution said he’d killed Deborah Dudley.

Jud said to him, “You weren’t mistreating these women?”

No, Heidnik insisted. They’d had birthday and Christmas parties down there, he’d brought them gifts and Chinese food and other delicacies. He’d even had a radio down there for them.

Jud reminded him it was to mask their screams. Gary denied it. He couldn’t deny having these women in the basement, but he denied mistreating them. When we got him to admit some of the beatings, it was as if he had to punish these women for their own good, as you might slap a child who runs out into traffic. He described his plan for populating the world with little Garys. It was screwy as hell, but he was very articulate about it.

Jud and I glanced at each other. It was time to step up our attack. I leaned in close to Gary and said, “There’s a problem in your background. Tell me about your relationship with your mother.”

At that point Heidnik went nuts. The camera crew looked as if they were about to run out of the room in shock and surprise. Correspondent Leslie Stahl and
the producer, watching on monitors from another room, couldn’t believe it.

I kept pushing him. He stood up rigidly as if he wanted to leave, the microphone pulling on his shirt. I described the research we’d done that suggested that with most offenders like him, there’d been an abuse problem or other tragedy involving the mother.

He started crying, sobbing like a baby. My own theory is that as long as the mother is alive, there is always that sub- or semiconscious hope that the mother will accept and/or love the offender one day. That is why so many of them, such as Ed Kemper, strike out at other women as surrogates rather than the one who they feel is responsible for their pain. But when the woman dies, then the hope is over. In a peculiar way, when Kemper finally got up the courage to kill his own mother, he lost all hope; he had nothing left to live for. Perhaps that’s why he turned himself in. By the same token, for all his weirdness, Heidnik didn’t get into any irreversible trouble until after his mother committed suicide. In fact, it was the next year that he founded his church.