Alerted by a frantic 911 call from a woman named Josefina Rivera--who claimed that she had been held captive for months in Heidnik's cellar--the cops entered the suspect's rundown home in North Philadelphia and found a scene that might have been dreamed up by the Marquis de Sade. In the dank and squalid basement, two naked women were shackled to pipes. Another sat quaking in a fetid pit that had been dug in the earthen floor. All three had been beaten, starved, tortured, raped.
Eventually, authorities would learn that Heidnik had abducted and imprisoned a total of six young women. Josefina Rivera had been lucky enough to escape. Two others had died. Heidnik had killed one by forcing her into the pit, filling it with water, then electrocuting her with a live wire. The other victim had perished after Heidnik left her dangling by the wrists for a week. He had dismembered her body, ground up some of her flesh in a food processor, and mixed it with dog food. Then he had forced the other captives to devour this unspeakable mush. Searching Heidnik's house, police discovered a charred human rib in the oven and a forearm in the freezer. Not surprisingly, Heidnik turned out to be a former mental patient and convicted sex offender with a history of preying on mentally retarded black women. In spite of his flagrant psychopathology, he was something of a financial whiz, who had parlayed a modest investment into a half-million dollar fortune. As one pundit put it, Heidnik was an expert in "stocks and bondage." He owned several expensive cars, including a Rolls-Royce. He had managed to avoid paying taxes on his income by founding his own church and appointing himself bishop.
Aspiring to the role of Old Testament patriarch, he had begun kidnapping women in late 1986, intending to assemble a personal harem of ten women who would provide him with a whole tribe of offspring. "We'll be just one big happy family," Heidnik told his captives, even as he was busily shoving screwdrivers into their ears, raping each one in turn while the others were forced to watch, and making them into unwitting cannibals.
At his arraignment, Heidnik offered a novel defense, claiming that the women were already there when he first moved into the house. For some odd reason, the judge failed to believe him. Imagine that. He was convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to execution. For 11 long years Heidnik sat on death row. During these years, he attempted suicide several times. Finally, on July 6, 1999, Gary Heidnik was executed by lethal injection. No members of his family had made arrangements to claim his body.
