The Serial Killer Files (35 page)

Once the boy was dead, Gacy buried the remains in the crawl space. Twenty-nine decomposed corpses were recovered from the muck beneath his house. Eventually, Gacy ran out of room in the crawl space and began dumping bodies in a nearby river.

Gacy tried to convince the court that he suffered from a split personality and should not be punished for his crimes since they were committed by an evil alter ego named “Jack.” The jury did not accept his insanity plea and, in March 1980, sentenced him to death.

Fourteen years passed before the sentence was carried out. During that time, he turned out scores of grotesquely cheery paintings—many of circus clowns and Disney characters. These became coveted collectibles among connoisseurs of such things. He also took pride in his sinister celebrity, bragging that he had been the subject of “eleven hardback books, thirty-one paperbacks, two screenplays, one movie, one off-Broadway play, five songs, and over 5,000 articles.”

Just after midnight on May 10, 1994, he was executed by lethal injection. His last words were: “Kiss my ass.”

1943–1999

Vincent Nelson hadn’t seen his girlfriend, Josefina Rivera, since Thanksgiving Day 1987, when she’d stormed out of his apartment after a bitter fight. So he was amazed when she suddenly showed up at his front door four months later, close to midnight on March 24. But it wasn’t just her unexpected reappearance that stunned him. It was Josephine’s physical condition. She looked like hell; as haggard and ghastly as a concentration camp victim.

Most shocking of all was the incredible story that Josefina had to tell. Barely keeping her hysteria under control, she poured out an unbelievable tale of horror to Nelson—how she and several other women had been kept chained in a basement by a madman who had subjected them to four months of rape, beatings, and torture. And there was even worse. Two of the girls had died. The madman—whose name was Gary Heidnik—had chopped up the body of the first murder victim and forced Josefina and the other captives to eat the dead woman’s flesh.

In short, Josefina Rivera looked like hell for a good reason. She had been living there for the past four months.

Nelson’s first impulse was to go after Heidnik himself but, after reconsidering, he called 911 instead. At first, the cops were dubious. But their skepticism gave way to horror after they obtained a search warrant and broke into Heidnik’s North Philadelphia slum house early the next morning. Josefina Rivera had been telling the truth. Gary Heidnik’s basement was a torture dungeon. Inside the dank, filthy cellar, the cops found two half-naked black women chained to the pipes. A third, completely naked, was imprisoned in a shallow, plank-covered pit.

Upstairs, they found grisly support for Rivera’s most incredible accusation. Carefully stored inside Heidnik’s kitchen freezer was a woman’s chopped-off forearm, while a roasting pan inside the oven contained a charred human rib bone. Rivera’s claim was evidently true: Gary Heidnik had force-fed human flesh to his captives. He had turned them into cannibals.

By then, Heidnik was under arrest. Across the country, headlines blared the news about the

“Philadelphia Torture Dungeon” and “Heidnik’s House of Horrors.” Staggered by the story, Americans shook their heads and asked themselves one question: What kind of creature could commit such atrocities?

Gary Heidnik had been born with real potential. He possessed a superior, 130-point IQ and the kind of stock market savvy that makes for Wall Street success. But Heidnik was not destined for a career on Wall Street. His parents made sure of that.

His father was a savage disciplinarian—the kind of man who dealt with his son’s bed-wetting problem by hanging the stained bedsheets out the front window for the whole world to see. His mother was a drunkard who left the family when Gary was two. She ultimately committed suicide.

By the time Heidnik entered the army in 1962, he was beginning to manifest the severe psychological problems that would afflict him for the rest of his life. Between the time the army discharged him for mental disability in 1963 and the day of his arrest nearly a quarter century later, Heidnik would be in and out of psychiatric institutions twenty-one times. He also made more than a dozen suicide attempts through hanging, drug overdose, and reckless driving. One time, he smashed up a lightbulb and forced himself to swallow the pulverized glass.

During more lucid periods, Heidnik applied himself to a variety of pursuits. He trained as a practical nurse. With the savings from his army pension, he purchased a run-down three-story house and became a landlord. He also found Jesus. In 1971, he incorporated the United Church of the Ministers of God, elected himself bishop, and attracted a handful of followers, who contributed $1,500 to the operation.

Heidnik invested the funds in the stock market and, within ten years, built up a half-million-dollar portfolio.

Heidnik’s sexual tastes ran to mentally retarded black women. One of his many girlfriends bore him a daughter in 1978. In May of that year, Heidnik and his girlfriend drove up to a mental institution in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where the woman’s sister, Alberta—a thirty-four-year-old with the IQ of a toddler—had resided for the past twenty years. Heidnik and his girlfriend got permission to take Alberta for a day’s outing. When they failed to bring her back, the cops were alerted. They found Alberta cowering in Heidnik’s basement. Medical tests revealed that she had been raped and sodomized, her throat infected with gonorrhea from forced oral sex.

Heidnik was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to three to seven years in the penitentiary. He ended up serving only four years of the time, most of it in various mental institutions. One day, halfway through his sentence, Heidnik scribbled a message and passed it along to his guards. He couldn’t talk anymore, the message read, because the devil had shoved a cookie down his throat. For the next two and a half years, Gary Heidnik was a mute.

Following his discharge, he married a Filipino mail-order bride who bore him a son. She abandoned him after tiring of being forced to watch him have sex with assorted black prostitutes. Shortly after her departure, Heidnik became obsessed with a plan to create a baby factory in the basement of his house.

His intention was to kidnap, imprison, and impregnate ten women. Josefina Rivera, a twenty-six-year-old part-time prostitute, became the first. Heidnik picked her up on Thanksgiving Day and took her to his apartment. When they finished having sex, he performed the “Heidnik Maneuver” on her, throttling her into submission. Then he forced her down to the basement and chained her to a pipe.

Two days later, he added another victim to his horror harem—a mildly retarded African-American acquaintance named Sandra Lindsay. The women were subjected to torture, beatings, and daily rape.

Their diet consisted of bread and oatmeal, with an occasional dog biscuit treat. Before long, other victims followed—five women in all.

Heidnik’s punishments became more insane. He subjected them to electrical shocks and shoved screwdrivers into their ears. When Sandra Lindsay died after dangling by her wrists from a pipe for a week, Heidnik dragged her body upstairs, dismembered it with a power saw, cooked her head in a saucepan, roasted her rib cage in the oven, and ground up her flesh in a food processor.

Then he mixed the ground meat with dog food and fed it to the surviving captives.

When twenty-three-year-old Deborah Dudley started giving him trouble, Heidnik decided to treat her to some electric shock therapy. He threw her in a water-filled pit and stuck a live electric wire in after her.

The wire touched her chains and killed her. Heidnik stored her body in his freezer for a few days, then

drove it out to Wharton State Forest in New Jersey and dumped it in the woods.

Two days later, Rivera managed to escape and made a beeline for her boyfriend’s apartment.

On July 1, 1988, Gary Heidnik was found guilty on eighteen counts, including two of first-degree murder. When his father was informed that his son had been sentenced to die, the old man replied, “I’m not interested.” After the usual delays, Heidnik was executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999.

1960–1994

Perhaps the horror could have been avoided. Certainly, warning signs appeared along the way—signs that there was something wrong with Jeffrey Dahmer. Something very wrong.

But then, millions of people suffer from emotional disturbances during their early years, and they do not grow up to be like Jeffrey Dahmer. They do not grow up to be monsters.

He was born in Milwaukee but raised in Bath, Ohio—a comfortable middle-class community. His parents detested each other and were—as Dahmer later recalled—“constantly at each other’s throats.”

Their endless squabbling left them little time for their eldest son. Friendless and neglected, Dahmer retreated deeper and deeper into his own little world of fantasy.

Jeffrey Dahmer comic book

(Courtesy of Hart D. Fisher)

He took up a unique hobby: killing small animals, skinning them, and scraping off their meat with acid.

In a backyard shed, he displayed his collection of squirrel and chipmunk skeletons. He also created his own, private pet cemetery at the side of his house. Sometimes, however, he didn’t bury the bodies.

Sometimes, he staked them into trees.

Starved for attention, he resorted to desperate acts. Though he did well in high school, his behavior was often bizarre. He would emit sheeplike bleats during class and collapse in the hallways in mock-epileptic fits. When the high school honor roll society assembled for its yearbook portrait, Dahmer sneaked into the picture. The prank was not discovered until the photograph was developed. The editor was so outraged that he took a Magic Marker and blotted out Dahmer’s face. In the published picture, Dahmer stands surrounded by other students, his features veiled in blackness.

It was an appropriate image. By that time, a deadly darkness had already begun to envelop Dahmer’s life. He had started to drink heavily. His fantasies of torture, mutilation, and death had become even more intense—more obsessive.

One day in 1975, several neighborhood boys, strolling through the woods behind the Dahmer house, came upon a shocking sight—a decapitated dog’s head impaled on a stick. Nearby, they found its skinned and gutted body nailed to a tree.

In 1978, during Dahmer’s senior year, his parents’ poisonous marriage finally came to an end. The couple split up, going their separate ways. Dahmer was left alone in the house with nothing but his increasingly deranged fantasies.

A few weeks after his mother abandoned him, he picked up a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker named Steven Hicks and invited him home. The two shared some beers, chatted, had sex. When Hicks announced that he had to be moving on, Dahmer smashed him in the back of the skull with a barbell and strangled him.

Then he dragged the body into the crawl space under the house, dismembered it, and stored the pieces in plastic bags. Later, he buried the bones—only to dig them up, pulverize them with a sledgehammer, and scatter the fragments in a wooded ravine behind the house.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s career of carnage had begun. He was eighteen years old.

He tried college for a while, but dropped out of the Ohio State University after only a few months and enlisted in the army. To his buddies, he seemed like a “regular guy” until he began to drink. Then a very different Jeffrey Dahmer emerged: moody, aggressive, defiant. Though he had enlisted for six years, the army discharged him after two.

He went to live with his grandmother in West Allis, near Milwaukee, getting a job in a blood bank. In 1985, he went to work at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company as a general laborer. That same year, something else happened to Jeffrey Dahmer. Something far more significant—and far more appalling.

His terrifying pathology, dormant for nearly six years, came raging back to life.

He began hanging out at a local gay bar. One night, he and a pickup took a room at the Ambassador Hotel. The two men got drunk, had sex, passed out. When Dahmer awoke the next morning, the other man was dead, blood dripping from his mouth. Dahmer went to a nearby shopping mall and purchased a suitcase, which he took back to the hotel room. After stuffing the corpse inside, he called a cab and transported the body back to his grandmother’s house, where he dismembered and disposed of it.

A year later, Dahmer killed his next victim: another gay man he had picked up at the club and taken to his grandmother’s house. Dahmer kept the victim’s skull as a ghoulish souvenir after scraping it clean of flesh. Another victim followed soon afterward.

Dahmer had several brushes with the law during the next few years. In 1986, he was arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior after urinating in front of some children. Two years later, he lured a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy to his apartment in Milwaukee, drugged him with a sedated drink, and fondled him. Arrested on a charge of second-degree sexual assault and enticement of a child for immoral purposes, he spent ten months in jail before being released in March 1990.

During the next year, Dahmer butchered three more men. At some point, neighbors noticed a putrid odor leaking from his apartment. But when they knocked on Dahmer’s door to complain, he explained that his freezer had broken and the meat gone rotten. His apologetic manner was so convincing that the neighbors bought the story.

In May 1991, he came even closer to being caught. Shortly after midnight on the twenty-seventh, two women spotted Dahmer chasing a naked and bleeding teenage boy down an alley. The cops were called.

But when they arrived to question Dahmer, his powers of persuasion saved his skin once again. He managed to convince the cops that he and the boy were gay lovers engaged in a harmless spat. The police left the dazed fourteen-year-old boy in Dahmer’s clutches.

Later, the teenager’s butchered remains were found amid the other human debris in Jeffrey Dahmer’s charnel house.

During the next two months, Dahmer claimed five more victims. Then, on a muggy night in late July 1991, two Milwaukee patrolmen saw a dazed man stumbling toward them, a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist. Flagging down their squad car, he gestured wildly toward Dahmer’s apartment building and stammered out a tale of attempted murder. The police went to investigate. What they found left them reeling with disbelief. They found Jeffrey Dahmer’s chamber of horrors.