RedHanded - Episode 114 - “Bishop” Gary Heidnik: The Real-Life Buffalo Bill

Episode Date: October 3, 2019

Between 1986 and 1987 in Pennsylvania, self-appointed “Bishop” Gary Heidnik abducted six women and held them prisoner in a pit that he’d dug into the floor of his basement. The brutal torture that these women suffered at Heidnik’s hands is incomprehensible - especially when you consider that the entire time Heidnik was running his own church just meters above where these women were trapped. This month’s $10+ bonus Patreon episode is out Monday 7 October - on The Colt Incest Clan. www.patreon.com/RedHanded   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti.

I'm Hannah. And welcome to Red Handed. Sorry, I was mid-yawn there. That sounded a bit weird, like I was at the bottom of a sea. The bottom of a pit in a basement, maybe. Maybe. Spoilers. No, I feel really ill, you know.

We're just saying it's raining outside, it's quite muggy still, I've got a very sore throat. Those post-tour vibes. Thank you to everybody who came out. We are now finished. This is our first episode back after after the tour so that's why there was no buy your tickets at the top of the show this week we did it it's done first headline uk tour is over thank you so much for everybody who came out we had a really really great time honestly we can't say how amazing it was and um hannah and i gonna to do a little mini bonus episode for patrons later this month at some point.

All about the tour. So if you want to listen. Oh, are we? Get on Patreon. Maybe. News to me. It'll be another Car Chronicles. Car Chronicles, fine.

Oh, yeah. We'll talk about it in the car when we go on holiday to Crete. Today's episode is not going to get a whole lot easier because it's pretty bloody rough. It's rough because it's October. It is October. It's Halloween month. And we are doing what we did last year, which is for the whole of October, we just find the worst shit and some of the most confusing shit actually this year, taking a slightly different tact. But yeah, so that's what we're doing for October. We are finding some of the most gruesome cases and also some of the most mysterious

in our run-up to our Halloween two-parter Halloween specials. You can just hear their mouths watering. It's going to be very exciting. Get ready. Strap yourselves in. Because we are heading into the terrifying basement of Gary Heidnik this week. I don't know how well-known Gary is.

I feel like I knew about him because I used to watch obsessively criminal minds ages ago, and they talked about him in one episode. But I don't know how well known he is. I don't think it's that well known. I think the sort of folklore around it is quite well known. But I don't think a lot of people know that it was like specifically one guy. That's true. Because Gary Heidnik was the man who along with Ed Gein, inspired the character of Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs, because it was Ed Gein who gave Bill his skin wearing vibes. But it was Gary who very much was the menacing architect for the pit in which Bill's victims languished. So Gary Heidnik, he is quite the subject because he did it all, really. He

started his own church, he abducted multiple women, he kept them prisoner in his own home and tortured them in ways that, as we said, make this a rough as fuck episode. So you've been warned, absolutely no eating, no playing this around your small children and definitely no complaining if it gives you nightmares. Okay, ready? So our story today begins in the East Lake suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. And a quick note on Cleveland, because I thought this was quite interesting when we were doing the research. It seems to be absolutely the capital of serial killers in the US. And the US obviously being the country with the most reported serial killers worldwide. Well, Cleveland really is something special then, isn't it? It's weird because it does appear that Cleveland has the strongest link of any city that I could find.

Which is strange because, no offence, Cleveland, but I don't think about it ever. No, I don't think about it. I was there once and I didn't even think about it then. I don't mean that in a horrible way. I just mean that it's a city, as foreigners, that we don't really think about that much when we think about the state. Cleveland Cavaliers. That's it, right? What else they got? I don't know. Hey, LeBron. Hey, LeBron. It does seem to be the city that has the strongest link or connection with the most serial killers or the most killers, we should say. And that means either in terms of like where the killer was actually born or where they did their killing. You've obviously got today's subject, Gary Heidnik, but you've

also got Robert Bardella, the Kansas City butcher. You've got Jeffrey Dahmer, Ariel Castro, the Cleveland Torso murderer. And there are like, honestly, tons and tons more. Why are there so many? I don't understand. It feels like very disproportionately high, but I couldn't really find any answers. I don't know either. But like the state with the highest murder rate is Louisiana, and I never would have thought that. I thought it was Alaska. Louisiana by a long shot. Well, there you go. So let's have a look at this particular

weirdo, Gary Heidnik. He was born in Cleveland in 1943 and of course he had a typically abusive and troubled childhood like most serial killers that we come across. His mother, who was called Ellen Vandervoort, was a part-time beautician and a full-time alcoholic.

And his father, Michael Heidnik, was also an alcoholic and a bit of a bully. He would beat young Gary with a wooden toy aeroplane whenever Gary wet the bed. And if you want to keep your kids wetting the bed, then that is the perfect tactic. When Gary was just three, his parents divorced, and Gary and his younger brother, Terry, moved away with their mum. But things didn't work out. And when Gary was eight, he and his brother returned to Eastlake to live with their dad.

It's not exactly clear why they were sent back to Michael. We obviously know that Ellen was struggling with alcohol abuse problems. But on top of that, there's something else that we found that is so typical of serial killer childhoods that at this point is practically a cliche. As a child, when he was living with his mum, Gary had fallen 20 feet from a tree and seriously injured his head.

And apparently that injury was so bad, just like Fred West, it left Gary's head permanently misshapen. Just like mine. I've got a massively misshapen. Just like mine. I've got a massively misshapen head. If my hair ever falls out, I'm fucked. Honestly, it's like flat at the back, like a dinosaur. It's a good thing you've got so much hair then. Well, exactly. Next time I see you, I'll show you. Oh, I'm excited. You can just feel it. It's like, it's like just flat,

like it's like a square. Is it quite comfortable when you lie down though? I don't think so, because I've got quite broad shoulders and I always sleep on my side. So like, I'm always just like, like my shoulder and my ear. Yeah, let me touch it next time. I never noticed. Okay. When you come to my birthday on Saturday, I'll just let you touch my head for like 10 minutes. You know after I do, everyone will. So it's a can of worms you're opening there. So after he falls out of this tree, it's so misshapen. And apparently the misshapen is so obvious that the other kids started calling him football head.

Hey Arnold! Oh my god, exactly. Just a tiny little hat. Imagine if we find out that Hey Arnold was inspired by Gary Heidnik as well as Buffalo Bill. Beat it football head! But according to his father, after this injury, Gary Heidnik became incredibly violent. And apparently his personality totally changed. Again, classic.

We see this quite a lot after a serious head injury with children who go on to become troubled serial killers. It's weird. And once I did have quite a severe head injury. And the doctor told my friend who was looking after me, if her personality changes, you need to bring her back immediately. Thankful to say that didn't happen. So everything's all good. Once I hit my head at the party and I had to go to hospital. It was very embarrassing.

And I remember being in the ambulance and being like, oh, I'm in an ambulance. Someone must be in trouble. Oh, wait, it's me. And then I don't remember this, but apparently in the ambulance, they play the radio, which I didn't know. And they also ask't remember this, but apparently in the ambulance, they play the radio, which I didn't know. And they also ask you which hospital you would like to go to, which is very polite. But apparently Adele was playing on the radio when I'm lying in the back

of this ambulance. And I was talking like I knew Adele, like she was a personal friend. And the paramedic was like, if she can't differentiate between celebrities and people she actually knows, we might have a serious problem. Wow. Wow. But I was fine. I was look at you nights out with hannah mcguire there's another podcast right there where we just follow you around with an audio boom just falling downstairs yeah no the thing is with this like after gary has this injury and his personality changes so severely and um you know he becomes more violent maybe after the incident gary was too much for his mum to handle. And that's why she sends him back to his dad, perhaps. But whatever the reason that the boys were sent back, they absolutely hated living with their violent father. Michael Heidnik claims that he never was abusive to his children. And he states that the boys were raised in a, quote,

normal household. But Terry Heidnik, who's Gary's brother, said in an interview that he gave with the Philadelphia Inquirer, quote, it got to the point where we'd be afraid to even pick anything up because he'd beat us if we dropped something. He once beat me so hard that I lost consciousness. So both the kids are saying this, but Michael like no I never beat them. I think we know who we should believe. And by age 11 Gary, poor Gary at this point probably we can call him, was still a persistent bedwetter and he was constantly ridiculed by his dad for this who would hang up his dirty sheets so that everyone in the neighborhood could see what his son had done again not a helpful tactic would you be able to see would you or would you just be like oh he's hanging out some washing

that like has some water on it like that seems like if it was shit i could get that i feel like it's probably irrelevant whether the neighbors could tell or not it's the fact that he's telling his son i'm doing this so that everyone right it's just the humiliation isn't it but no good point you're not like you're gonna have to chuck some fucking sunny d on it and hang it out for I'm doing this so that everyone will know. It's just the humiliation, isn't it? But no, good point. You're not like, you're going to have to chuck some fucking Sunny D on it and hang it out for people to make that assumption. God, I haven't had Sunny D in years. What happened to that? Did I just go away?

I wasn't allowed it. Oh, were you not? No, or Robina. Oh, I hate Robina. You didn't miss that there. But Sunny D was quite delicious. Shut up. Robina's the fucking best.

I hate blackcurrant flavor things, though. It's not my jam. Oh, that's true. I'm so desperately trying to come up with a blackcurrant joke i know i thought about it and then i thought i'm too ill and tired let's just move on um it wasn't apparently just the sheets because uh terry gary's little brother claimed that when michael was particularly angry he wouldn't stop with that because he would hang gary of the window by his ankles. So it does seem from Terry and Gary's testimony or stories later that the abuse was rife and constant. After a few

years of living through this abuse Terry and Gary were sent back to live with their mother Ellen but it seemed that no one really knew what to do with Gary. So when he was 14 he was sent to Staunton Military Academy. I know this is a really like, it's quite can be quite a traumatic thing for a kid to be sent off to military school. But it always just makes me think of Malcolm in the Middle's big brother, Francis, who's really sexy. Did you think he was sexy? Oh my god, everyone in the Western world thought he was sexy, Susie. No, let me Google this. No. It was the 90s. Give me a break. I refuse to absolutely not anyway sorry sexy or not

he was sent off to military school and there he was found to have an iq between 130 and 148 which is very much in the outstanding range so now that he was in an environment where he could put his brain to work and he was away from his abusive father gary flourished for a while at least he trained as an army medic and was eventually moved to Germany, where he served at the 46th Army Surgical Hospital. This was probably the best time in Gary's life. Everything was going really well. He was responding well to the structure and the discipline that the army provided,

and he finally had a sense of purpose. But then, things took a turn. Gary started to struggle with nausea, headaches, blurred vision and dizziness. And when he saw a doctor, Gary was diagnosed with gastroenteritis. But the doctor also noted that he was exhibiting symptoms of mental illness. So he was prescribed the antipsychotic, Stelazine. Then he was transferred to a military hospital in Philadelphia where he was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder and honorably discharged from the military service with a full disability pension.

Gary after this tried to stay in the medical field. He even worked for a while at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Coatesville in Pennsylvania but eventually he lost his job there for unprofessional behavior towards the patients. After this things got even worse for Gary and I kind of feel like the whole theme of this episode can be summed up with, and then things got worse. And that's what happens to Gary. Because life at this point seemed pretty hopeless for him. Between 1962 and his eventual arrest in 1987, he made several attempts to kill himself and he was hospitalized roughly around 22 times. It seems clear that from a young

age Gary was dealing with some kind of mental illness, most likely schizophrenia and severe bouts of depression. We talk about schizophrenia a lot so let's take a quick moment to clarify what we're talking about. We are absolutely of course by no means mental health experts but we think gaining an understanding of such conditions is important, especially with cases like this. So when someone has schizophrenia, they can have apparently positive and negative symptoms. Now positive symptoms don't mean like good things. It means that we're adding something to a person's behavior or experience.

For example, they may start hearing, feeling or seeing things that aren't really there. These are of course hallucinations. Then there are the delusions and this is the paranoia part of schizophrenia. So people suffering with delusions may become convinced that people like the government, for example, are watching them. Or delusions can, of course, as we know, be religious in nature. And these are apparently the two most common types of delusion that people with schizophrenia can suffer from. Negative symptoms are when something that was there in a person goes away. So it's like a blunted effect, like a lack of emotion or a dulling in the range and intensity of emotions

in general. If this was apparent in Gary Heidnik, it would explain why the army diagnosed him with schizoid personality disorder. We're talking about what schizophrenia is because firstly, it does seem like Gary had it. But it's also crucial to point out that what we're not saying is that people with schizophrenia are dangerous. It's probably the most demonised mental illness that there is. But in reality, people with untreated schizophrenia are quite likely to spend their lives quite scared. And statistically, you're much more likely to be a victim of a violent, quote unquote, normal person that doesn't have schizophrenia. And also much more likely to be murdered by someone you know.

And there are also some people who will still say now that Gary Heidnik was faking his mental illness all along to try and get away with his crimes. But given that his brother Terry was also diagnosed with schizophrenia later in life, it does seem that mental illness ran in Heidnik's family. And in terms of like mental illnesses that are like seen to be possibly hereditary schizophrenia and bipolar are two of those which is why i can't donate my eggs they don't want them too much crazy in the tree apparently i'll take them oh god you don't want them oh god i thought about lying just be like oh blonde blue

eyes like head girl astronaut yeah but they don't want my blood if it makes you feel better they're like no they sent me a letter because i used to give blood regularly they sent me a letter to my house saying please stop coming to give blood we don't want your blood and apparently it's because i'm ab positive so i'm like the second rarest type of blood but we're the only blood group that can only take like my blood can only go to another person with ab positive but because it's so rare in the population it's like pointless and apparently male ab positive blood they can do something with the plasma frozen plasma something someone is already yelling at me but um with female ab positive blood they can't even do that so they were like please stop taking

up beds don't come anymore we don't want it we don't want your special blood outrageous that does make me feel a bit better. Right, sorry, back to the serious business. So we're talking about hereditary mental illness conditions. So we've got one example. Ellen, Gary's mum, also struggled with her drinking problem and depression for her entire life. And on Mother's Day 1970, she killed herself.

She drank mercuric chloride and was found dead in the basement. The year after his mother killed herself in October 1971, Gary Heidnik was driving to California from Philadelphia when God spoke to him, allegedly. Gary said that God told him that he needed to start his own church and go on to have as many children as he possibly could. So naturally, at the age of just 28, Gary Heidnik started his own church in his house. And he called it the United Church of the Ministries of God. Good name, good name. And I do feel like obviously people give us a hard time for like scoffing at religion sometimes, but I'm just like, this fucking proves the point. I don't have any issue with people's like personal relationships

with like God or spirituality it's organized religion because it is man-made he has just picked up a bible and decided that he's going to start his own church and do whatever the fuck he wants like this is my problem with it oh fully yeah I mean fine like have your own faith your own spirituality your own beliefs my problem is um is you don't really know where that money's going that, that too. And that is a big theme in today's episode. So the front garden of this house, just picture the scene, because I've seen pictures,

I will post them on social media. The front garden is a complete mess. Gary Heidnik lived at this point in this house where the garden is just like full of boats and cars and like bits of rubbish. And he's just like, it's just really weird. But inside, it was a church boats how big is it is Pennsylvania near the sea I don't know maybe the thing with Gary is don't let

the outside of the house fool you because he was very organized indeed when he started this church he wrote up a charter and he named himself Bishop because obviously he would, and then he even secured the proper IRS status to ensure his tax-exempt status as a new religion. Oh, le classique. Did you see that incredible Ricky Gervais tweet that's from quite a few years ago, I think, and he says that, oh, gay marriage isn't a privilege, a privilege would be not paying taxes like churches don't.

Oh, and apparently I read something else. I don't know if this is true, but I'm sure I'll find out the second this comes out. I read today that the Pope can appoint secret cardinals and he doesn't even have to tell the person if they're a cardinal or not. And if he appoints a secret cardinal and doesn't tell anyone before he dies, that person no longer is a cardinal. And someone had tweeted underneath it be like, okay, so there's one person on earth that can prove I longer is a cardinal and someone had tweeted underneath it be like okay

so that there's one person on earth that can prove i'm not a cardinal oh my god this is save it all mate save it all i'm like convinced hannah needs to start a podcast called helen hot takes with hannah mcguire and it's just all of her hot takes on religion i'm just gonna go through half a book of the bible every week and then interview my family priest. People are here for it. Father Neil, they're here for it. Father Neil needs to be a star. He's got it in him. He always has. And this is your chance.

And this is your chance. In some parish down in Hackney, my mum texted me about it the other day. I haven't gone in yet. I'm too scared. I feel like I might burst into flames. Oh God. Okay, good.

I can, we got the usual, we got the quota in of religious hot takes. We need to get on it though because Father Neil's really old. Okay. You get cracking with that then. Okay, well. You don't believe in ghosts?

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This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. See, Hannah mentioned earlier that there is and was some sort of like confusion controversy about whether Gary Heidnik was really sick so whether he was really suffering with delusions or whether he just sort of lies about them later it's complicated I think that he does have schizophrenia or he did have schizophrenia I think that he pretends to be insane later and that's the difference are schizoid personality disorder and schizophrenia the same thing or like related? No that's a good question and a good point and the reason that we said like I can understand why if only the negative symptoms were showing at that point why he was

diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder because the positive symptoms which is like the delusions and the hallucinations you could keep those quiet but the negative symptoms will obviously be seen because your right emotions are dulled and things like that. Gizoid personality disorder from what I can understand again not a mental health professional just a reader and YouTube watcher is that it is basically when somebody has this sort of personality disorder they have like almost no real interest in anything like it's a very dulled affect very low interest levels high level of apathy towards things really not interested in sort of socializing and no desire to either it's

kind of like how being asexual is but imagine like that for your entire life and everything okay that makes sense that's what it sort of comes across as and the reason that i don't think that gary heidnik has schizoid personality personality disorders because he definitely doesn't shy away from having relationships with people around him. He's no introverted, like person with no interest or a high level of apathy. That's definitely not him. And let's say that he was suffering with schizophrenia. These kind of religious delusions that he talks about, you know, hearing God speak to him, telling him that he needs to have children. We know, like we said, that this is one of the most common types of delusions that we see in people who have schizophrenia. But some people are convinced that this whole church business just started out as a tax dodge and not actually because he had,

you know, heard God speak to him. I think maybe this could be true and maybe it started off as that way and then it just ended up being a way in which he could control, abuse and have total power over vulnerable people. And there is evidence for this because Gary Heidnik, he invested the money really well. He started off this whole church, this whole thing on a really small investment of just like $1,500. But he eventually aggregated over half a million dollars from that investment. Right. Fuck the podcast. We're starting a church. Exactly. Savvy. Kanye's doing it. Kanye's all over it.

Everyone's all over it. Can we just make red-handed a church and stop paying taxes? Though I'm also like, pay your taxes, everybody. I'm not here. It's very conflicting. There is nothing like running your own business to get rid of your socialism. That is what I have learned in 2019. When we sit and look at that spreadsheet, suddenly I feel like maybe we don't need hospitals or schools. Well, I said to my mum, I was like, I'm going to have to start going to the doctor all the time because I don't have kids.

What else am I doing? Got to get your money's worth. Well, yeah, exactly. Started to go to the doctor every week. It's just all those oldos and those sickos that are making the most of it. Oldos and the sickos. Oh my God.

But anyway, Gary Heidnik, with his tax dodging expertise, all this money he's making from this church he used this money that he made from the church investments to buy himself a couple of cadillacs and even a rolls royce so he was doing pretty well for himself but to be fair to him that is exactly what jesus would have wanted that's what he told him that's what he told him reached out to me he was like have loads of kids con a load of people get loads of money get tax exempt status and then buy yourself a rolls royce you deserve it and the church coffers were not the only thing that grew

heidnik started it all off with just five loyal followers but soon he had attracted a group of people who came every sunday to listen to him talk all things bible, with, of course, his unique twist. And according to the neighbours, the church really did have a lot of people attending services who were devoted followers of Heidnik and his teachings. But the majority of them were incredibly vulnerable, and most had some form of mental disability. And interestingly, all of the attendees were black. Gary Heidnik is not. Gary Heidnik is not black. He is very much a white, white man. I

think it's like maybe the area he lives in. And I think he goes out and targets people of color. And we'll talk about why. We're not just going to sort of leave it there. We will come back to this. So at this stage, if we believe that Gary Heidnik was genuinely having religious delusions, he figured that he had better get cracking with fathering all of those kids that god wanted from him and of course he went after young vulnerable women who attended his church first there was gail lincow and she got pregnant by gary heidnick and had a son that they named gary junior but gail had some mental disabilities and she was incredibly vulnerable she wasn't able to care for gary junior so the baby was placed into foster care heidnik, now having lost hold of one baby, tried again and got another young black woman who attended his church pregnant.

Her name was Ajinette Davidson. She was illiterate and just like Gail, mentally disabled. Their daughter Maxine was born on the 16th of March 1978. And again, Maxine, just like Gary Jr., was immediately taken into foster care. That very same year, perhaps in response to the rage and lack of control he would have felt at having both of his children taken into care, Heidnik committed his first known attack on a woman. And Jeanette, like we said, had mental disabilities, but she had a sister, Alberta, who was even more severely disabled.

Alberta lived in an institution called the Sellingsgrove Centre near Harrisburg. Gary and Jeanette went to Sellingsgrove one day and signed Alberta out for the day. Heidnik then took her home and locked her in his basement. Over the next 10 days, Gary Heidnik tortured and raped and sodomised Alberta. Alberta was 34 years old, but psychiatrists placed her mentally at around age 5. And she had lived in that institution from age 14. So the minute she's taken out, she has no idea what's going on. Of course, she would have just trusted whoever she was with.

And also her sister is there. And this is Gary Heidnik all over. He craves total control. And to achieve this, he goes after the most vulnerable people that he can find. When authorities finally found Alberta, she was filthy, broken, and terrified, hiding in a coal bin in Gary Heidnik's basement. When she was taken back to hospital, it became obvious what Heidnik had done to her. So he was arrested and charged with kidnapping, rape, false imprisonment, involuntary deviant sexual intercoursecourse and interfering with the custody of a committed person. Because remember, he'd signed Alberta out on a day pass and obviously held her for 10 days.

But unbelievably, this conviction was overturned at appeal and Heidnik only served three years in a mental institution and was released in April 1983. A psychiatrist who conducted a psychological evaluation of Heidnik when he stood trial for this attack had this to say. Here we go. This is a quote. He appears to be an extremely insecure and confused individual. He has a longstanding mental illness and he's also psychosexually immature. He appears to be easily threatened by women who he would consider to be equal to him, either intellectually or emotionally. Heidnik is manipulative and lacking in judgment. In my opinion, he's not only a danger to himself,

but perhaps a greater danger to others in the community, especially those who he perceives as being weak. Unfortunately, it seems to be that he will not significantly change his aberrant behavior pattern in the near future, and that psychiatrist was quite evidently right. Now, obviously, we are not saying just throw away the key when someone is convicted of any crime, but it didn't really ever seem like Gary Heidnik was committed to his recovery

or ever showed any remorse or ever showed any desire to change while he was incarcerated. Throughout the final two years of his sentence that he served, Gary Heidnik did not utter one single word. One day, he passed a note to a guard that said, Satan had shoved a cookie down his throat and so he couldn't speak. Is the devil handing out snacks? Only if he shoves them down your throat. Right. Okay. Just checking. Just checking. And it'd probably be something really horrible like an after eight. Probably. I don't know. What is wrong with you? No Ribena, no after

eights. The chocolate mint thing. Have you ever played the game where you have to get them down your face? That's a good game. No, I haven't. Oh, it's where you stick an after eight on your head and you have to get it into your mouth without using your hands? I think I've watched people play. I haven't partaken. I'll bring some to your birthday.

We'll play on Friday. Please don't. I'll be wearing makeup. Again, we don't know if he's making it up, if he's just doing it. I don't really know why he would. Either way, I don't know. Maybe to make himself seem insane, but he's already in a psychiatric hospital. He already sort of got found insane. So like, I don't know. Anyway, the other thing that Gary does while he's in this hospital for his like pathetic three year sentence was that he tried to kill himself with drug overdoses. And he would do things like chew

and swallow pieces of light bulb glass derren brown does that oh does he he's quite the character i don't know what i think of derren brown i'm scared of him i listened to his desert island discs and uh at uni he used to like go and go off into the mountains and like wear a cloak and read nietzsche under the stars or something like i think i don't i think he certainly was a huge wanker at university and I'm not sure if he's grown out of it you can definitely tell he was a huge wanker wow maybe he thought he was Alistair Crowley what's he doing maybe he came to a show that I was doing once because Andrew Scott in it was in it and there they were mates and he came with a suitcase and

the security guy on the door had no idea who he was so he asked to search his suitcase and it was just full of all of these like magic tricks so funny that is so sinister look on his face being like are you really gonna make me open this bag in front of all of these people oh my god it's like you'd have to google himself and just hold the phone next to his face yeah exactly wow the thing is when people are behaving like that when gary is like you know refusing to speak because he says satan shoved a cookie down his throat he's like fucking munching on light bulb glass what about that behavior was it do you think that made them feel like oh he's ready to be let out now he's fine he seems fine oh they just thought he was darren brown it's like i'll just take the show on the road kiddo maybe but they

did let gary out and once he was out gary decided that he wasn't going to get caught again. And the year after his release, Gary bought himself the now infamous house, 3520 North Marshall Street. Again, this is now like an upgrade of a house. He's managed to do this because the church is doing so well and making so much money that he can buy himself so much of a better house than he was living in originally. And obviously, with this new upgrade, it was prime time to continue the church dream. So now that he had a much more respectable base to run his church out of,

Gary Heidnik decided that it was time to try again with the whole baby-making thing. His first two kids were gone, and I think that he potentially realised that just getting women he met at church pregnant, especially women who were so vulnerable, wasn't the best way to go about building this giant family that God had told him he needed and that he was planning he needed a wife and heidnik decided that he

specifically needed an asian wife he felt that an asian woman would know her place and follow his orders better and you do see that don't you like people who go to vietnam looking for a real woman oh yeah yeah yeah and they talk about it very openly they're just like the culture is very different here she'll just know her place her role know, she's been brought up since childhood to just care for a man. I'm like, I mean, I guess you're right. You probably are right, you big pervert. Not this Asian woman, though. I'm terrible. Send her back. Put her back in the envelope. No, I'm not allowed to go back. That's the point. Don't send her back point keep her there so gary began a pen pal love affair with a woman called betty disto as she lived in the philippines and the two had met

through a matchmaking service betty was just 22 and she didn't know anything about heidnik apart from what he put in his letters but he's a genius after all so i'm sure he could come across as a very convincing person betty eventually moved to the us and married gary on the 3rd of october 1985 which is the day that this episode comes out coincidence i don't think so unfortunately well fortunately probably i'm gonna say fortunately it was quite a short marriage but by in the uh in the time that they were married it was quite unhappy just a week after they got married betty came home one day to find Heidnik in bed with three women. And he tried to convince her that that was normal in the US. She obviously doesn't believe him.

Betty at this point is already like, shit, this is crazy. And Betty claims that while they were together, Heidnik was incredibly abusive. She says that he raped her, he forced her to watch him having sex with other women, mainly sex workers, and that he would beat her regularly, even when she was pregnant with his child. Betty was trapped. She had left her home country to marry this man, and now she found herself stuck in a dark and abusive marriage. So, Betty turned to the Filipino community in the area, and they convinced her to leave Heidnik, which, with their help, she managed. And the two divorced in 1986 and Betty returned to the Philippines pregnant with their son, Jesse John Heidnik.

She doesn't even tell Gary Heidnik that she's pregnant. She just fucking gets out of there, gets back to the Philippines. Good for you, Betty. I know. And he only finds out when she writes him a letter and is like, you've got a son now, you'll never see him, but I want child support.

Good. Good for her. Fuck yes. And she did actually try to take Gary Heidnik to court. She did file complaints against him for abuse and spousal rape. But after she fled the country and didn't show up in court, the charges were dropped. And so after this failed marriage, it was in 1986 that Gary, I think, came to the conclusion that, okay, I can't get vulnerable women at church pregnant and hope to keep hold of the kids. I can't get vulnerable women at church pregnant and hope to keep hold of the kids. I can't abduct women who I know because I'll get caught and I clearly

can't make marriage work. So I think he realised at this point that if he was going to have what he truly wanted, which was this enormous family, he was going to have to find another way to create it. So in 1986, Gary Heidnik took his first prisoner to his basement from hell. In November of 1986, Heidnik abducted Josefina Rivera. 25-year-old Josefina was a sex worker. Heidnik approached her and offered her $20 to come back to his house. Josefina didn't usually do this, but she was so desperate that she agreed. And when they got back to his, Heidnik and Josefina had sex.

But as she got up to get dressed, Heidnik grabbed Josefina had sex. But as she got up to get dressed, Heidnik grabbed Josefina and started to choke her. Then he dragged her into his basement, chained her up and sealed the bolts of the shackles with superglue. The whole time, Josefina was obviously screaming and Heidnik wanted to shut her up. So he beat her with a stick until she was quiet. And then he threw Josefina into a pit he had dug into the floor of his basement. Then he boarded it up and trapped her in. Within days, Gary Heidnik had abducted another woman. This time it was 24-year-old Sandra Lindsay. Yet again, Sandra was mentally disabled and incredibly vulnerable. She had been walking to the shops when Heidnik had grabbed her. He brought her home and just like with Josefina, he dragged her into the basement and chained her up. Over the next few weeks, Heidnik forced the

women to take it in turns to watch the other be raped by him. And then on the 22nd of December, Heidnik abducted another woman. This time, it was Lisa Thomas, who was just 19 and a single mother. On New Year's Day 1987, Heidnik added another soul to the basement, Deborah Dudley. Deborah, just like Sandra, was mentally disabled and a young woman. And then finally, on the 18th of January 1987, Heidnik took his fifth and final victim, 18-year-old Jacqueline Askins. So now Gary Heidnik had a total of five women down in his basement. They were all young, they were all black and they were all vulnerable in some way. As Heidnik added woman after woman to his sick little basement harem, he kept making the hole in the basement a little bit bigger each time. But it was still absolutely

tiny and these poor women were forced to live sealed up in this dark pit. He's so obsessed with control. He doesn't even just leave them in the basement chained up he puts them in the basement chains them up and shoves them in this pit and puts a cover over and seals them in he's so intense so according to gary heidnik at this point his plan was to systematically rape all of his victims and force them to carry his children it was foolproof as far as he was concerned here were a group of women that had no connection to him, so it would be harder to find them and link it to him. And he had also, as we said, gone after all black women, some of whom were also sex workers. So of course, they were, as we've talked about on this show multiple times, the less dead. How hard were authorities at the time really going to bother looking for them? And some people theorize that Heidnik's victim selection,

you know, going after specifically young black women, was influenced by either one or both of his parents. Some say maybe it was because Ellen, his mom, had married three more times before she killed herself and that her last two husbands had been black. So they say that maybe Gary was more used to being around people of color because this was when he was living with his mom. I don't know. Some also say that maybe he picked black women because his dad was a massive and open racist and he also spent a lot of time growing

up around him. Who knows? What we do know is that Gary Heidnik definitely had a sexual preference for black women and he was a racist. And the whole like, I'm not a racist because I have a black friend. That's why this doesn't work. You can have friends, partners, whatever you want with people who are of colour and still be a fucking racist. Because if you think you're better than them, you can still fancy someone and want to sleep with them and still think you're better than them. And that's exactly what Gary Heidnik thought. So I think that there are multiple reasons for his victim choice. He was sexually attracted to black women, he thought that he was better than them, so it helped him with his massive inferiority complex, and it probably also helped that the police wouldn't have made missing black women, especially missing black sex workers,

their top priority. But even though abducting loads of women was all part of his master plan, with so many women to now control, things got a lot harder than Gary Heidnik had anticipated. He was going to have to master some serious control techniques, and fast, because the women, despite being chained up and locked away in that pit, weren't being quiet, and the houses in the area were super close together. So to drown out the noise of women screaming, Heidnik would always have the radio in the basement blaring on full volume.

And yes, that was to disguise the sounds of them shouting for help, but it also served as another form of torture for these poor women. So now, these women are constantly being raped and tortured and starved and beaten. And Heidnik was also very adept at manipulating the women and playing them off each other. He would force them to rat each other out. If one woman didn't have something to report about the others when he questioned her, he would punish her. The situation really did turn into a mass Stockholm Syndrome scenario.

These women were locked up in a tiny pit with no light, no food, nothing. But if they showed Heidnik affection and made him feel good, he would reward them. So as time went on, when Gary Heidnik would come down into the basement and open up that pit, he would be met with a group of women desperately trying to please him rather than fighting him or trying to escape. Of all of the women, Gary Heidnik's first victim is the one who's talked about the most. And this is obviously Josefina Rivera. Some people say that Josefina was his accomplice, but what she says about the whole situation is, in my opinion, almost like a perfect description of Stockholm Syndrome.

This is a quote from an interview that Josefina gave as one of Heidnik's survivors. Quote, any time that you're cut off from the world outside, whoever's holding you captive, you're going to grow to like him regardless, because he's your only contact to things that are outside. He's your only source of survival. And because Josefina was probably the most intelligent and street smart of his abductees, she was able to convince Heidnik to give her special treatment. And he actually ended up putting her in charge of the basement when he wasn't around. And if she did what he said, he'd bring her hot chocolate and hot dogs. A fucking godsend for Josefina, considering that the women at this point were being fed dog food.

And he even started to let Josefina sleep outside of the pit and just in the basement. But Heidnik made it very clear to her. If she disobeyed him, she would lose all of her privileges and pay the price. I think I'm with you on this. I don't think for a second that Josefina Rivera was on Heidnik's side or that she was his willing accomplice. I think that she was just doing what she needed to survive in a terrible ordeal. And if you are in that sort of stripped back situation where you have absolutely nothing,

any sort of like grain of hope, you're going to do it. And I think that obviously you never know what you're going to do until you're in that situation. But I think it's most likely, it's very easy to say that you would be this incredibly noble person and stick with the pack but it's not very likely I don't know definitely not and the women as we do go on to talk about who do fight him and resist him they are the women who wouldn't have sort of been capable to maybe think about the situation and how to try and survive it because they were sort of a bit more vulnerable and they were the two more

severely sort of mentally disabled women that he had picked up. Whereas Josefina, she obviously didn't feel good about it, but I think she knew this is the only way I survive. This is the only way I live through this. After months of rape and torture and starvation, Gary Heidnik finally killed one of his captives on the 7th of February 1987. Sandra Lindsay may have been vulnerable, but she was very fiery. She would not play along with Gary like the others did in order to survive. She fought back tooth and nail every time he came near her. And by the 7th of February, Sandra had been hung up by her handcuffed wrists from an overhead beam for days. She had a raging fever and she was vomiting and retching continuously.

Sandra had been refusing to eat and this was her punishment. The day that Gary finally uncuffed Sandra he forced her to stand but she collapsed and this enraged Gary and he kicked her already weak body into the pit. Soon after Sandra died. When Gary realised that she was dead he pulled her out and carried her upstairs not knowing what to do with her body. And I don't think he'd actually ever thought about body disposal before because gary doesn't really want to kill these women he does want to keep them alive and i think that's what separates him from someone like a david parker ray he didn't always get it right but david parker ray was a lot more um he knew a lot more about how far you could push a person before they die absolutely with david parker ray it was much more like systematized he

knew he had like engineered the whole process i think he knew how to push people and give them recovery time Gary just forces everybody into this pit every night and forces them down there like he it sounds horrible but he doesn't allow them to sort of stay strong and survive the torture that he puts them through he's got Sandra Lindsay's body he doesn't really I think know what he's doing with it at this point but he dragged her up to his own kitchen and right there and and then, he cut Sandra's body up. He cut up as much of her as he could with a power saw. And then ground up some of her remains. He then placed her remaining body parts in the freezer.

Heidnik then cooked some of Sandra's remains. And apparently the smell was so unbearable from this, that neighbours actually called the police. How bad does the smell have to be for you to call the police? bad i think it is an upgrade but it's still not like a fucking great neighborhood like it's just normal now the authorities came to heidnik's house and he was able to get them to go away by just telling them that he'd been making a roast and he'd fallen asleep and it had burnt okay and they believed him and they just went away i think burnt roast dinner and human flesh probably smell quite different.

You would think so, wouldn't you? And you'd think that the police officers who were there would be like, hmm, this doesn't really smell like you've burnt a roast dinner. It smells like death. It smells like dead bodies. But no, they leave. And after the police left, Gary Heidnik fed those ground up remains to his dogs. And then he fed what was left to the other women in the

basement, mixed into their usual dog food diet. And it's important to note at this point that some sources do refute this account and say that Gary Heidnik just made it up. Along with his story about hearing God speak to him, etc. They say that he made this up in order to support his insanity defence at trial. People always say that about cannibal up in order to support his insanity defense at trial people always say that about cannibalism though because you can't prove it unless it's directly after the fact and even then it's difficult to do like it's something that like unless you catch someone physically with a foot hanging out of their mouth you can't prove it you maybe you could prove that you cooked them maybe but actually eating them unless you saw them do it is very difficult to

prove this is the thing so he admits to it but but there are people who say, no, he's just lying. After this incident, Heidnik became incredibly paranoid. He was particularly stressed by the fact that the women in the basement could hear whenever he left the house, and he was convinced that they were planning an escape. So he decided that he needed to make it so that they couldn't hear him. So he went down to the basement, bound and secured each of their heads with duct tape, and then he drove a screwdriver into their ears. By this point, he trusted Josefina because she had convinced him that she could be trusted. So she was spared.

But even after the screwdrivers in the ears torture, Deborah Dudley was not going to play along. And after that, Gary Heidnik became convinced that she was the ringleader who was plotting this escape. And so as far as he was concerned, she needed to be stamped out. So Gary dragged Deborah upstairs and into the kitchen. Here, Heidnik had been busy with Sandra's remains. And he now forced a terrified Deborah to look at Sandra's decapitated head boiling in a pot and her ribs as they sat in a roasting pan. This of course horrified Deborah and for a few days she was quiet but her submissive behavior didn't last long and Heidnik realized that he was going to have to go back to physical

torture so he came up with a new method. He stripped an electrical cord down to the wire and then used it to electrify the women by touching the wire onto their metal shackles. But this still didn't feel like enough for Heidnik. The women needed to be punished more. And I think it's safe to say that he's obviously a sadist. He's getting off on the total control and pain and degradation of these women. It's not just about keeping them in line. He loves it.

No, he absolutely loves it. Like, if he just wanted to, like, keep them down there down there and rape them like he would just leave them shackled up he doesn't need to keep shocking them with electric wires and showing them the heads of the other ones he absolutely is getting off on it for sure on the 18th of march gary found a way to step things up all together he forced the women well all the women except joseina, into the pit and then he filled it up with water. Then he placed a wire in the water and the women screamed as they all received painful jolts of electricity. The wire swung in the water and it touched Deborah Dudley's chain and she was killed. After he realised Deborah was dead, Heidnik made Rivera sign a document saying that she had helped to kill Deborah.

How does he think that's going to help him? I don't know. And he even makes Jacqueline Askins, who's one of the other, like the 18-year-old victim, to sign it as a witness. Who the fuck does he think is going to give a shit about that bit of paperwork? But you can understand at this point, because obviously Deborah dies and Sandra dies, but the other women they do live when you're being tortured in that pit and Josefina Rivera is just kind of standing on the side not being tortured she didn't have

her ears poked with the screwdrivers that they would come out and be like she's his fucking accomplice but at the same time like what's she gonna do be like no put me in the pit too like yeah no I don't want to be the favorite actually please put the screwdriver in my ear exactly so after this contract signing gary forced josefina to go with him wherever he went and then he forced josefina to go with him to hide deborah's body in the new jersey pine barrens and even if you still have your doubts about whether josefina was an accomplice or not whatever her reasons were for doing what she did in the pit it was ultimately josefina who saved all of the remaining women. Because the thing is, Gary Heidnik was overconfident. He was arrogant. He had chosen

these women because he thought that they were lesser than him. They were his inferiors and he was sure that he was in total control. As time went on, Josefina had played her part perfectly and Gary Heidnik even started using her as bait to help him catch more women. He'd let her go with him on abduction runs to help him lure these women into his home. And Josefina bided her time. On March 24th, 1987, after she helped Heidnik abduct another victim, she managed to convince him to let her go just for a few minutes so that she could go and see her family. She told him to wait at a petrol station.

And she told him that she wouldn't be long. She just wanted to tell them that she was okay and Gary Heidnik agreed. Josefina walked calmly around the corner to where she knew Heidnik wouldn't be able to see her and then she rushed over to the nearest payphone and called 911. Within minutes the police had arrived and Heidnik was arrested right there and then at the petrol station. Josefina then led the police to the 3520 North Marshall Street house. And finally, four months after it had all started, the women were finally free. When he was arrested, Gary Heidnik had probably the most hilariously ridiculous and unbelievable excuse of all time.

Heidnik claimed that all the women in his basement were already in his house when he moved in. They came with the property, apparently. You know, semi-detached. Not furnished, but... A half-ground pool. Five women in the basement. Five black women in the basement.

Go nuts. What? Jesus. Fuck off. Oh, I didn't even know they were there until I went down to put some money on the electric. He just thinks that he can trick everybody because he's so smart.

It's unbelievable. And at trial, Gary Heidnik continued with the excuses because he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. But the judge made it clear to the jury that a mental illness like schizophrenia in itself does not mean someone is legally insane. That was something for the defense to prove. Now, we covered this idea pretty extensively in the Andrea Yates episode. So if you haven't listened to that, go back and listen to it. But basically, to summarize, insanity is a legal term, not a psychiatric one. Having schizophrenia does not mean that you are insane, it just means that you have a mental illness. Insanity means whether you knew the difference between right and wrong when you

committed the crime, and what was your intent. Heidnik's crimes were sophisticated. He may have gone after incredibly easy victims in the sense that they were highly vulnerable, but he kept them in his home and he kept them alive for months. It's an incredibly high risk crime and he got away with it for ages. He only got caught because of Josefina. He didn't get caught because he necessarily slipped up in any other way. And also you have to remember, he was very logical and smart with how he accumulated money and how he invested it. It's very hard to be like, oh, he went from $1,500 to half a million dollars and he was able to figure out a way to do that. But you know, he's just insane. He doesn't

know what he's doing. Yeah, he certainly can't be held accountable for his actions. And it was double difficult for Heidnik's defence team, as I'm sure you can all imagine, and they didn't manage it. The jury found Gary Heidnik guilty of murder in the first degree, and in July 1988, Gary Heidnik was sentenced to death. And when the sentence was passed, Heidnik sat in the dock and cried like a baby. He tried to kill himself the following January, but survived. And there was, of course, of many of many many appeals bizarrely I thought led mainly by his wife Betty the one who'd fled back to the Philippines and his daughter Maxine Davidson. They tried to get him off death row in 1997 by filing a motion that he had paranoid schizophrenia and that meant that he wasn't in control of his actions when he did what he did. This appeal was

rejected by the courts and we don't agree with the death penalty but I do sort of feel like this appeal in a purely legal sense they were right to deny it I think. I don't really think that Gary Heidnik was insane, not for one moment. The courts agreed and finally on July the 6th 1999 Gary Heidnik was executed by lethal injection and at the time of this recording he was the very last person to have been executed in the state of Pennsylvania. That is the story of Gary Heidnik. Yeah, for your first serving of Halloween, a truly horrible, vile specimen of a human being. Absolutely. I mean, it doesn't get more Halloween-y than that. Thanks, guys, for listening.

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See you next week for more Halloween goodness. Absolutely. Bye. Bye. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs,

a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mom's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus.

In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me, and it's taken me to a place

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