Every Town - North Philly, Pennsylvania: Unmasking Serial Killer Gary Heidnik - the Real-life Buffalo Bill

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

Go to https://deadboltmysterysociety.com/ and use the promo code: deadbolt20 for 20% OFF your first order!Scary Mysteries Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scary-mysteries/id1273612861?uo=4Scary Mysteries Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiE86yS_VM7qjiICqRPmwLQ?view_as=subscriberContact US: [e-mail] North Philly, Pennsylvania: Unmasking Serial Killer Gary Heidnik - the Real-life Buffalo Bill  One of the most chilling movie villains that brought terror on the wide screens is Jame Gumb, most popularly known as “Buffalo Bill,” from the 1991 award-winning psychological horror movie “The Silence of the Lambs.” Created by American writer Thomas Harris for his 1988 novel of the same title, the fictional character is a serial killer whose modus operandi is too fiendish. He relishes kidnapping overweight women, depriving them of food for weeks, killing and then skinning them dumping the victims in nearby rivers. As for the women’s skin, Buffalo Bill makes them into a “woman suit” for himself. This prods one to ask, “Is there a real Buffalo Bill who exists somewhere in the world?” The answer is partly “yes” because it turns out that Harris developed Buffalo Bill as a composite character – meaning, he based it not just on one, neither 2 nor 3, but six real-life serial killers. And one of them was Gary M. Heidnik who kidnapped, raped and tortured six women while holding them prisoner in a pit. He was finally sentenced to death, and executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999 at age 55. Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, do you have trouble sleeping? Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy Podcast. It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. Classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh, stories that are great for kids and adults alike.

So whether you have a tough time snoozing or just like a good bedtime story, fluff up the cool side of your pillow and tune into Sleepy. Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy. Find Sleepy wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Sunday. Sweet dreams. Every town has a dark side. The following is a story from one of them, but there's still many more to uncover.

Today we travel to North Philly, Pennsylvania, where we unmask serial killer Gary Hydenick, who is often referred to as the real-life Buffalo Bill. One of the most chilling movie villains that brought terror to the big screen as a character named James Gum, most popularly known as Buffalo Bill, for the 1991 Academy Award-winning psychological horror film The Silence of the Lambs. Created by American writer Thomas Harris for his 1988 novel of the same title, The Fictional Character is a serial killer whose M.O. is too fiendish. He relishes kidnapping, overweight women, depriving them of food for weeks, killing them, and then skinning their bodies, dumping the victims in nearby rivers.

As for the women's skin, Buffalo Bill makes them into a woman's suit for himself. This prods one to ask, where did this idea come from, and if there is, in fact, a real Buffalo Bill who exists somewhere in the world, where and who is he? The answer is partially yes, because it turns out that Harris developed Buffalo Bill as a componder. Pazic character, meaning he based it not just on one or two or three, but six real-life serial killers. And one of them was Gary M. Heidnick, who kidnapped, raped, and tortured six women while holding them prisoner in a pit. He was finally sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999 at the age of 55. I'm Andrew Fitzgerald and welcome to this week's episode of Everytown. Who really was Gary Hydenick,

from North Philly, Pennsylvania. Join me today, as I Amask, one of the most nefarious serial killers in America who paid with his life for the women he brutally tortured and murdered. Prior to the big wrong turn in the life of Hydenick that mostly defined him

as a devil reincarnated criminal sentenced to die, he somehow contributed something to his community. In October of 1971, at only 28 years old, he incorporated a church called the United Church of the Minister of God with five members initially.

His North Philly home served as the venue for the Sunday Church services. Four years later, he opened a $1,500 account at Merrill Lynch under his church's name. By 1986, Hydenick's followers grew, and the United Church of the Ministers of God was flourishing financially to the tune that he eventually amassed more than half a million dollars. Incidentally, it was also in 1986 that Heidnick's Dark Side was unleashed. In a span of four months, from November 26, 1986 to March 19th of 1987, one of the inspirations and the creation of iconic novel and movie villain Buffalo Bill committed crimes beyond anyone's wildest imaginations.

Perhaps, just like me, you're also wondering how a man with a cult following and tremendous wealth could ruin his life by doing horrendous criminal activities that demanded his death in the end. I believe that it's imperative that we visit Heidnick's childhood in order to fully understand its bearing on his adult life. As author Stuart Stafford has said, Adulthood is an attempt to become the antithesis of the wounded child within us. Let's rewind Hydenick's story to more than seven decades ago. He was born on November 22nd, to his parents, Michael and Ellen, and became an older brother to his sibling Terry. They lived in the East Lake suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, which is referred to as the crown jewel of Lake County.

But there was nothing to be cherished about the Heidnick family. The tie that held them together was broken when Michael and Ellen got divorced in 1946. At that time, Heidnick was only three years old, and he and his younger brother were raised in separate homes. For four years, the siblings were taken care of by their mother. They then spent the next seven years with their father and his new wife. Living with his dad was described by Hydenick as a difficult period in his life. On top of grappling with the sad realities of his parents' separation, Heidnick admitted that his father emotionally abused him.

It stemmed from Hydenick's bed wedding, which became a lifelong problem for him. His father supposedly abhorred this in human beings. humiliated his eldest son by forcing him to hang the soiled sheets by the windows of his room for all the neighbors to see. However, Michael denied these allegations after his son's arrest in 1987. Hydenick also behaved strangely in school. He refused to interact with the other students, not even looking into their eyes. In one instance, he shouted at a new female classmate who asked him about their homework and told her that she wasn't worthy enough to even talk to him.

Hydenick's reclusive behavior probably led to getting bullied about his odd-shaped head, to which the Hydenick brothers reasoned out that it was the effect of Gary falling from a tree. In contrast to his poor social skills, Heidnick excelled academically and tested with an IQ of 148, which is interpreted as being very gifted and highly advanced. Believing in his son's intellectual capacity, Michael encouraged his older son to enroll at Staunton military, Academy in Virginia. The private all-male military school was highly regarded for its academic

and military programs, but Heidnick only stayed there for a couple years and left before graduation. By the time he was 17, he'd joined the U.S. Army, where his drill sergeant commended his excellence during basic training. Then, he trained successfully as a medic in San Antonio, Texas, but soon after he was transferred to the 46th Army Surgical Hospital in Landstool, West Germany, where he finally earned his GED. When things were finally working great for Hydenick, as he excelled within the military environment, he got sick in August of 1962. His complaints of severe headache and dizziness, blurred vision, and nausea were detected by a neurologist

as signs of a mental illness. So he was then prescribed an antipsychotic drug called St. Two months later, Hydenick was confined in a military hospital in Philadelphia and was diagnosed to be suffering from schizoid personality disorder. That type of disorders characterized by emotional aloofness and solitary habits. Consequently, Hydenick was honorably discharged from military service with a full disability pension. After the doors of the U.S. Army closed an opportunity to become a licensed, practical nurse open for the intelligent but socially awkward, Heidnick. He worked as a psychiatric nurse at a Veterans Administration Hospital in Chester County, Pennsylvania,

but was soon fired due to his poor attendance and rude behavior towards the patients. Then the tables turned. Heidnick became a frequent patient in psychiatric hospitals from 1962 until his arrest in 1987 due to his serious bouts of depression. He became self-destructive and attempted to kill himself 13 times, and it seemed that clinical depression wasn't only confined in Gary Heidnick, as his brother Terry also spent time in mental institutions and had numerous suicide attempts as well.

Their mother took her life by drinking mercuric chloride in 1970 while battling bone cancer and undergoing the effects of alcoholism. There were more dark secrets in Hydenk's life that may have seriously bruised his mental and emotional well-being. So Hydenick was off to a rough start, but more harrowing episodes in his life transpired, which ultimately turned him into the diabolical monster of Marshall Street in North Philly, Pennsylvania. The breakup of his parents' marriage and his mental condition didn't deter Hydenick from finding his own bliss. Through a mail-order bride scheme, he met the only one. only woman he married, Betty Disto, from the Philippines. Owing to his antisocial behavior,

I presume that it was only through correspondence that Hydenick could establish an emotional relationship with a woman, so after two years of exchanging letters, he proposed to Disto. She traveled to America in September of 1985, and despite not knowing much of his personality, Disto married Hydenick in Maryland on October 3, 1985. But soon after, the Filipino wife found out she was trapped in a marriage made in hell. Hydenick was a philanderer who forced his wife to watch him have sex with other women. He was also accused by Disto for repeatedly beating and raping her until she left the Philippines in January of 1986 with the help of the Filipino community in Philadelphia.

Hydenick was arrested and charged with indecent assault, spousal rape, and involuntary, deviant sexual intercourse. Unknown to Hydenick, Disto was pregnant with their son, Jesse John, who was born on September 15, 1986. He only found out about his son when Disto requested for child support payments in 1987. But Hydenick was already twice a father prior to his marriage with Disto. he had a son named Gary Hydenick Jr. with a woman named Gail Linko, but the baby was put in foster care soon after his birth. On March 16, 1978, Hydenick became a father the second time around to a daughter named Maxine. The mother was Angenette Davidson, an illiterate and mentally challenged woman with an IQ of only 48.

So immediately after her birth, baby girl Maxine ended up in foster care too. Heidnick fathered three children, but he was never a father to any of them in any real sense of the word. Of the three women, he got entangled with, it was his troubled association with Davidson that Hydenick's criminal instincts surfaced and worsened through the years. It wasn't only with Angenet Davidson that he had sexual intentions. Her sister, Alberta, became Hydenick's conquest, too. Alberta lived on a day pass in a mental institution in Penn Township in Snyder County, Pennsylvania. Sometime in 1978, Hydenick signed her out on day leave and imprisoned her in a locked basement

Coleman in his house, which also doubled as his church. Alberta became the first victim who Hydenick repeatedly raped, sodomized, and tortured that left her ill with gonorrhea. After Alberta's rescue, police charge Hydenick with kidnapping, rape, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, involuntary deviant sexual intercourse, and interfering with the custody of a committed person. Unfortunately, though, an appeal overturned Hydenk's original sentence. Thus, he spent only three years of his incarceration and mental institutions and was freed in April of 1983 under the supervision of a state-sanctioned, mental health program. Three years after this revolving episode in his life, Philadelphia and the whole of America, saw the worst yet of Gary Michael Heidnick.

He wasn't filled with remorse. Instead, he was madly driven by the deadly R. Revenge. North Philly became the hotbed of his unfathomable crimes as he hunted for more victims and made sure that law enforcers were oblivious of his felonious activity. The basement of his home at 3520 North Marshall Street in North Philadelphia was turned into a tortured dungeon which became known as the House of Horrors. The pit witnessed the agonies of the six female captives at the hands of Heidnik, two of whom callously died. A common thing among them was they were all black women and mostly prostitutes. The first of Heidnick's victims was Josefina Rivera, who was a 24th.

five-year-old prostitute with three kids when she was abducted by him on November 25, 1986. She was lured into his home with a promise of money in exchange for sexual services. But as she was putting her clothes back on, Rivera recounted that Heidnick choked her, dragged her down naked into the basement, and chained her limbs. Every time she screamed for help, Rivera endured beatings from Hydenick to shut her up. Then she was thrown into the dark pit where she spent the next four months. After two agonizing days, Rivera learned of her captors' twisted plans. In her memoir, Rivera quoted Heidnick saying to her,

I want to have kids, lots of them. I got kids already, but the state keeps taking them from me. Well, I got a way now of having kids so nobody can take them away. You're just the start. You're going to have my baby down here. But not just you. I want to get ten girls down here so you can all have my kids. No one in his right mind would hatch such an atrocious plan,

but Heidnick was hell-bent on making it happen. On December 3rd, 1986, he brought home 24-year-old Sandra Lindsay, who was mentally disabled. Lindsay was likewise chained in the same fashion as Rivera's, and both women were alternately sexually abused by Hydenick. Then two days before Christmas in 1986, Hydenk gifted himself with a third victim, Lisa Thomas, a 19-year-old single mother.

He offered her a lift during a cold winter day, treated her to lunch, and brought her to his house, and the pretense of capping the day off with a glass of wine. Thomas lost consciousness, though, and when she woke up, she had been raped by Hydenick and chained like the, the other victims. Hydenick welcomed 1987 by kidnapping Deborah Dudley on January 2nd and added her to his collection

of basement captives. But the feisty and outspoken Dudley forced their kidnapper to make the women's predicament a little bit bearable to say the least by providing them with tampons in a portable toilet and allowing them to take baths. More than two weeks later, 18-year-old Jacqueline Askins fell prey to Hydeny. modus operandi and became the youngest among his ill-fated victims. With five women to fulfill his sexual desires, Hydenick should have been content, but when any of the women misbehaved, causing his plans to go awry,

Hydenick would punish them in the most inhumane ways. This led to the ghastly deaths of Lindsay and Dudley in 1987, turning Hydenk into a certified killer. When Lindsay was caught crawling out of the pit in the basement, Hydenk suspended her by her wrist from a beam. A week of torture, starvation, and untreated fever inevitably caused the death of Lindsay in February of 1987. But what Hydenick did after she had died could be deemed as a demonic act, and this is a warning, what I'm about to detail can be revolting to the senses.

Realizing his cruel punishment killed Lindsay, Hydenk brought her dead body upstairs. Using a power saw, he dismembered her, but had difficulty dealing with Lindsay's limbs. Her arms and legs ended up inside the freezer as dog food, while her ribs were oven-roasted, and her head pot boiled. When his neighbors' complaints about the foul odor drove the local police to come knocking on his door, the smart hide-nick simply told them, I'm cooking a roast, I fell asleep and burnt it. So, what to do with his dead victim's body parts?

Hydenick ground them up and mixed them with dog food and voila. He had something to feed not only his dogs, but also his remaining captives. Rivera said of this, these are things you see in a horror movie. In fact, he got the idea from a film called Eating Raoul. What about the idea of electrocuting his captives as a form of torture? In one instance, Hydenick thrusted three of his captives into the water-filled pit and applied electric current from a stripped extension cord to the chains that bound the women. On March 19th in 1987, Dudley died of electrocution,

and her body was disposed of in the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. Atkins, in a 2018 TV interview for the special report, Gary Hydenick's House of Horrors, 30 years later, revealed that their mouths were wrapped around with duct tape and their ears stabbed with a screwdriver as Hydenick savored watching them squirm painfully. Hydenick was truly sick, very sick. After losing two captives, he kidnapped 24-year-old prostitute Agnes Adams on March 23, 1987, but she was rescued the following day together with the other women,

all because of the bravery of Josefina Rivera, Hydenick's first captive. Throughout the torture, rape, and deaths around her, Rivera had resolved to save not only herself, but all of her fellow captives. Clever and audacious, she psyched up Heidnick based on his behavior patterns and befriended him despite her disgust. She did as he wished, won his trust, and became his sort of accomplice. In fact, Rivera actually helped Hydenick abducted Adams on March 23rd. and she finally executed her ploy to escape from the clutches of a deranged criminal on March 24th.

Rivera convinced Hydenick to take her to visit her family so she could say goodbye, making him believe that she'd be with him for good. So Hydenick drove her to a gas station a few blocks away from her home. Rivera then walked calmly around the corner until she was out of sight and called 911 from the nearest phone booth. The responding police officers sped to her. the gas station where Heidnick was waiting and arrested him immediately. His best friend, Cyril Tony Brown, was also detained but was released on a $50,000 bail

with an agreement to testify against Heidnick. Later, Brown admitted he was a witness to the death and mutilation of Lindsay. Following his arrest, Heidnick failed in his attempt to kill himself by hanging in his jail cell. During Hydenick's trial, his defense lawyer, Charles Peruto Jr., attempted to prove that his client was legally insane, but it was successfully rebutted by the prosecution, led by Addy Charles F. Gallagher III. The judge handling the case,

Lynn Abraham, likewise, didn't buy the insanity claim of Hydenick's camp. Thus, on July 1st, 1988, Hydenick was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. During his incarceration at the state correctional institution at Pittsburgh, Hydenick failed another suicide attempt with an overdose of prescribed Thorazine in January of 1989. After two unsuccessful tries at taking his life, Hydenick faced a full-proof way to die, an execution by lethal injection.

The fateful day took place on July 6, 1999, at State Correctional Institution, Rockview, and Center County, Pennsylvania. No relative came forward to claim Hydenick's body, so his remains were a vexed by, eventually cremated. For the past two decades, the distinction of being the last person to be executed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania belongs to kidnapper, rapist, and murderer, Gary Michael Hydenick. And that's how he'll be immortalized. This episode of the Everytown podcast is being sponsored by our friends over at the

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And for more creepy stories, make sure to check out our other podcast and YouTube channel called Scary Mysteries. Tune in next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories about every town out there. And who knows, maybe your town will be next.