The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (40 page)

ial killer.

Some of the hospital victims, he later admitted, were chosen “by magic,” with Harvey chanting over stolen locks of hair or fingernail clippings, arranged on a
HAYDON, Mark

See SNOWTOWN

makeshift altar at his home. Outside of work, he sometimes practiced on his live-in lover, one Carl Hoeweler, poisoning Hoeweler after an argument, then nursing
HEIDNIK, Gary Michael

him back to health. Carl’s parents were also poisoned, Gary Heidnik was two years old when his parents the father surviving, while Hoeweler’s mother died.

divorced, his mother charging her husband with “gross On March 7, 1987, patient John Powell’s death was neglect of duty.” Two years later, her chronic alco-ruled a homicide, autopsy results detecting lethal doses holism forced her to send Gary and a younger brother of cyanide in his system. Donald Harvey was arrested in back to live with their father, the unstable pattern of April, charged with one count of aggravated murder, Heidnik’s life already well established. Dropping out of and held under $200,000 bond when he filed a plea of high school in October 1961, he joined the army a not guilty by reason of insanity. By August 11, he had month later and received medical training at Fort Sam confessed a total of 33 slayings, and bond was revoked Houston, in Texas. Heidnik was posted to a military two days later, with new charges filed.

hospital in West Germany during May 1962, but he
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HEIDNIK, Gary Michael

Gary Heidnik arrives for trial. (Wide World API) was back in the States by October, committed to a house for sex, but if anyone objected, their complaints Pennsylvania sanitarium for three months of psychiatric fell through the cracks and were ignored.

therapy. Honorably discharged from the military with a In 1971 Heidnik established the “United Church of the 100-percent disability rating, his records permanently Ministries of God,” drawing his eight-member congrega-sealed and classified, he received a monthly pension of tion from the Elwyn Institute’s clientele. His front yard $1,355 from the government for his trouble.

became the repository for a derelict boat and four junk Over the next quarter-century, Heidnik was fre-cars, but Gary dismissed the complaints of his neighbors quently committed to mental institutions at Morris-with airy disdain. He preyed on black women for sex but town, Coatesville, and Honesdale, Pennsylvania, despised their race otherwise, frequently lecturing friends sometimes remaining for months at a time. He seemed on the imminence of an American “race war.”

to profit little from the therapy, professing ignorance In autumn 1976, Heidnik barricaded himself in the about the details of his own condition. “They haven’t basement of his home, armed with a rifle and handgun, given me a technical name,” he told a judge in 1978, daring his disgruntled tenants to deliver their com-

“but it’s some kind of schizophrenia.”

plaints in person. One tried to climb through a window In February 1964, Heidnik signed up for a practical and Gary shot him in the face, inflicting a superficial nursing program in Philadelphia, successfully complet-wound. Charges of aggravated assault were later dising 12 months of training and a six-month internship at missed, and Heidnik soon moved away, selling his Philadelphia General Hospital. By 1967 he had banked house to a university professor. The new owner turned enough money from his job and government pension to up collections of pornographic magazines, heaps of rot-purchase a three-story house, occupying one floor him-ting garbage, and scores of spent .22-caliber cartridges self while he rented the others to tenants. On the side, he in the attic. Downstairs, in the cellar, he found an 18-began hanging around the Elwyn Institute for the inch hole in the concrete floor, with the soil underneath retarded, treating female inmates—usually African-excavated to a depth of three feet.

American or Hispanic—to picnics, movies, and shop-In 1977 Heidnik invested $35,000 in the stock mar-ping trips. The “dates” normally wound up at Heidnik’s ket, building his fortune up to a half-million dollars
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HEIDNIK, Gary Michael

over the next decade. He purchased a fleet of luxury 1984, Heidnik purchased his last house, on North Mar-cars—including a Rolls Royce, a Cadillac, a Lincoln shall Street in Philadelphia, and put up a sign announc-Continental, and a customized van—dodging legitimate ing the new location of his one-man “church.” Around taxes in the guise of a “bishop” in his nonexistent the same time, he befriended Cyril Brown, a retarded

“church.” He shared his home with an illiterate black man employed by Heidnik as a part-time handy retarded woman, and she bore him a daughter in man and general “gofer.”

March 1978, the child later turning up in a foster home.

In October 1985, Heidnik married a 22-year-old Fil-On May 7 of that year, Heidnik and his girlfriend drove ipina woman, with whom he had corresponded for the to a mental institution in Harrisburg, picking up her sis-past two years. Almost at once, he began bringing other ter for a day’s outing. At age 34, their new companion women home for sexual liaisons, prompting his wife to had the IQ of a three-year-old, and she had been institu-flee their home in January 1986. She wound up in a tionalized for the past 20 years. Authorities found her shelter for battered women, complaining that Gary fre-in Heidnik’s filthy basement on May 17, returning her quently raped and assaulted her. Police booked Heidnik to the home, and Gary was arrested on June 6, charged on charges of spousal rape, indecent assault, and simple with rape, kidnapping, deviate sexual intercourse, assault, while the courts handed down an injunction endangering, unlawful restraint, and interfering with barring any form of harassment against his wife. Crimi-the custody of a committed person.

nal charges were dropped in March when the com-Hospitalized himself in August 1978, Heidnik was plainant failed to appear in court, but her affidavits convicted at trial three months later, drawing a sentence remain, including descriptions of Heidnik performing of three to seven years in prison. He served four years with three female partners at once.

and four months of the time, dispatched to mental instiOn Thanksgiving Day 1985, 26-year-old Josephina tutions on three occasions after suicide attempts—via Rivera left her boyfriend’s apartment following a birth-pills, carbon monoxide, and by chewing a lightbulb—

day celebration, bound to do some shopping. A part-before he was paroled in April 1983. In December time prostitute, she readily accepted Heidnik’s offer of $20 for sex and accompanied him to his house, where he choked her unconscious and shackled her to the bed.

Later, she was transferred to the basement, dumped in a pit with a weighted board covering the hole. In captivity, Rivera was raped daily by Heidnik, surviving on a diet of bread and water, with an occasional “treat” in the form of dog food or biscuits.

In early December, Heidnik bagged his second captive in Sandra Lindsey, a 25-year-old retarded friend of Cyril Brown. Chained to a beam in the basement, she was subjected to a regimen of torture, rape, and rancid food, Heidnik dividing his time between the two prisoners. Lisa Thomas, 19, was abducted at Christmas, with 18-year-old Jacqueline Askins joining the harem in January 1986. Heidnik began playing the women off against each other, encouraging them to inform on acts of disobedience. Punishments included beatings and electric shocks, with the occasional refinement of a screwdriver jammed into a victim’s ears. In his reflective moments, Heidnik regaled them with plans for collecting 10 prisoners and fathering as many children as possible before he died.

In February 1987, Sandra Lindsay died after several days of hanging in chains from the rafters. Heidnik and Rivera, who acted under coercion, bore the corpse upstairs, where it was placed in a tub and dismembered with a power saw. Lindsay’s replacement was 23-year-old Deborah Dudley, kidnapped in March, but she Police search for evidence outside Gary Heidnik’s proved uncooperative and Heidnik killed her on March Philadelphia house. (Wide World API)

19, hooking electrical wires to her chains as she stood
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HEIRENS, William George

in a pit filled with water. Dudley spent two days in the weathered the Great Depression without serious diffi-freezer before Heidnik and Josephina Rivera drove to culty, and if Heirens had any problems, they came from the Wharton State Forest, near Camden, New Jersey, within. His adolescent sexual repression evolved from dumping her corpse in the woods on March 22.

parental advice that “All sex is dirty. If you touch any-Two days later, Rivera escaped from the basement one, you get a disease.” In place of normal outlets, prison, seeking refuge at her boyfriend’s home. He Heirens found release through firesetting and fetish bur-called police, and raiders swept through Heidnik’s glaries, reaching orgasm when he invaded homes to house on March 25, finding bedroom walls papered steal women’s underwear.

with currency, the kitchen decorated with pennies, and In 1942, at age 13, Heirens was arrested for carrying Susan Lindsay’s chopped-up remains stored in a freezer a loaded pistol to the parochial school he attended. His nearby. The basement was a bona fide chamber of hor-parents were stunned when police came calling, turning rors, with three malnourished women chained to the up a rifle and three more pistols behind the refrigerator plumbing, nude from the waist down. Foul-smelling and four more weapons hidden on the roof. In custody, pits in the floor had served as their sleeping quarters.

he confessed 11 burglaries and six acts of ARSON, but Neighbors belatedly recalled a persistent odor of burn-his youth and family background saved him from seri-ing flesh emanating from Heidnik’s abode. Human ous punishment. Packed off to the Gibault School for remains were retrieved from the drains, and searchers Boys at Terre Haute, Indiana, he was released to his made the drive to New Jersey that afternoon recovering parents 11 months later. Back home in Chicago, he Deborah Dudley’s corpse.

resumed his old pattern of night-prowling thefts.

Held in lieu of a $4 million bond, Heidnik was hos-According to transcripts of psychiatric interviews, pitalized in April after trying to hang himself in a jail Heirens not only stole women’s garments, but some-shower stall. Defense attorneys sought to prove their times wore them in private while leafing through a client insane, suggesting that he had been used for mili-scrapbook filled with photographs of ranking German tary LSD experiments during the 1960s, but jurors Nazis. A second burglary arrest earned him an 18-rejected the argument, convicting Heidnik of double month reformatory sentence, but he still managed to murder on July 1, 1988. Other charges included six enroll as a sophomore at the University of Chicago in counts of kidnapping, five counts of rape, four counts 1945 after passing a special entrance exam. At the same of aggravated assaults, and one count of deviate sexual time, he continued his career of fetish burglaries.

intercourse. On July 3 the defendant was sentenced to On June 5, 1945, Heirens was looting the Chicago die by lethal injection, with superfluous prison time apartment of 43-year-old Josephine Ross when his vic-totaling 150 to 300 years.

tim awoke and caught him in the act. Attacking ruth-Six months later, on December 31, Heidnik

lessly, he cut her throat and stabbed her several times, attempted suicide once again, swallowing an overdose relenting at the sight of blood and trying hopelessly to of Thorazine in his prison cell. A guard found him bind her neck with bandages. That done, he spent two comatose on New Year’s Day, but Gary soon recovered hours at the scene, wandering aimlessly from room to and returned to death row. The Pennsylvania Supreme room as he experienced multiple orgasms.