Gary Michael Heidnik

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Gary Michael Heidnik (born November 22, 1943 in Eastlake , Ohio , USA ; † July 6, 1999 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania ) was an American serial killer .

Life

Early life

Gary Heidnik was born the eldest of two sons to Michael and Ellen Heidnik in Eastlake, a suburb of Cleveland , Ohio . In November 1945, his father divorced his mother's alcohol addiction , so that Gary and his brother Terry Heidnik, 18 months younger than him, lived first with their mother and then with their father and his new wife. The father humiliated Gary, who was bedwetting , by hanging urine-stained bedding in front of his window. At school he was frequently bullied by his classmates for having a deformed head after falling from a tree in his childhood.

With an IQ of 148, Heidnik is considered highly intelligent. One of the things that interested and fascinated him was the military. The father supported this, and Gary enrolled in the Staunton Military Academy , Virginia . But after almost two years he left without a degree. After another time in high school , he left there and went to the US Army . His superiors described him as excellent. He then applied to the military police, but was turned down. After basic training, he received medical training at Fort Sam Houston ( Texas ). He was later transferred to a military hospital of the 46th Army in Landstuhl in West Germany , where he passed the General Educational Development Test (GED).

At the end of August 1962, Heidnik complained of headaches, vomiting, dizziness and blurred vision. The doctors diagnosed him with gastroenteritis and a severe mental disorder and prescribed him trifluoperazine . In October 1962, he was sent back to a Pennsylvania military hospital where he was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder. In December 1962, he left the army honorably and entitled to a full disability pension. Shortly after his release, he got a job as a nurse at the University Hospital in Pennsylvania. Heidnik also enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania , where he took several subjects, but exmatriculated again after one semester . He worked as a psychiatric nurse for the United States War Veterans Department in Coatesville. Heidnik was dismissed because of a lack of willingness and rough handling.

His mother committed suicide using poison in 1970 . Heidnik then tried several times to kill himself, just like his brother Terry, and was admitted to psychiatric clinics just as often.

In 1971 he founded a church he called the United Church of the Ministers of God , which at the time had five followers. By 1975 he managed to multiply a start-up capital of $ 1,500 within several years through speculation to over $ 500,000.

Criminal activity

In 1976, Heidnik first came into conflict with the law because of a shooting and carrying an unregistered weapon.

On May 7, 1978, he took the sister of his friend Anjeanette Davidson from a mental hospital in Harrisburg . When the authorities drove to the Heidniks' house, they found the woman neglected and abandoned in the basement of the house. They found that the woman had been raped. Gary Heidnik was arrested, sentenced by a jury to three to seven years in prison in November 1978 and, after an appeal hearing, was admitted to a mental institution for three years.

In 1983 he was released under supervision. In January 1986, after a sex orgy, he wanted to kill his then wife Betty, a Filipino woman whom he had married in 1985. She fled to a women's shelter and reported her husband. The lawsuit, which opened in March 1986, was closed because the plaintiff failed to appear in court for fear of Gary Heidnik.

Series of murders

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On November 26, 1986, Heidnik was driving his Cadillac through the streets of Philadelphia and met the 25-year-old prostitute Josephina Rivera, whom he offered $ 50 for sex and invited her to his house. Here he raped the woman, choked her into unconsciousness and tied her to the bed. He later dragged Rivera into the basement of his house where he had dug a small pit. Here it was pressed in and the opening was closed with boards and sandbags were weighted down.

Less than a week later, at the beginning of December 1986, another woman was locked in the "cellar of death" - 25-year-old Sandra Lindsay, the friend of an errand boy in Heidnik's church. The daily horror in women's lives consisted of rape, humiliation and lean food. At Christmas 1986, 19-year-old Lisa Thomas became the third victim. On January 18, 1987, 18 year old Jacqueline Askins was abducted and taken there. Heidnik lured everyone into his house with false promises.

The women had to give Heidnik their will. If they resisted, they were punished with electric shocks, beatings, or torture. Heidnik's plan was to kidnap at least ten women and father as many children with them as possible.

Sandra Lindsay died at the end of February 1987 after hanging on a beam modeled on the Christian cross for several days. Her body was dismembered in the bathtub of the house.

In early March, Heidnik kidnapped 23-year-old Deborah Dudley. But her resistance and disgust for Heidnik was so great that he murdered her on March 19, 1987 by placing her in a water basin, chaining her and running electricity through her body. After three days in the freezer of Heidnik and Josephina Rivera, her body was loaded into the killer’s car on March 22, 1987 and driven to Wharton State Forest near Camden , New Jersey . On the drive home to Philadelphia, they took the hitchhiker Agnes Adams, who was the fourth victim locked in the basement.

Two days later, on March 24, 1987, after four months of imprisonment, Josephina Rivera managed to escape by convincing Heidnik to see her family while he was waiting for her at a gas station. She took her only chance and called the police over a public phone. They arrested Heidnik right at the gas station. In the musty basement of Gary Heidnik's property, three emaciated, half-naked women were found chained to pipes and forced to crawl into a hole in the ground to sleep. Sandra Lindsay's body parts were recovered in a nearby canal. The only thing that had noticed the neighbors was the loud music that came out of Heidnik's house every day.

process

On April 23, 1987, the first hearing in the district court took place. The prosecution was represented by Deputy District Attorney Charles Gallagher, and Heidnik's attorney Charles Peruto represented the defense. The bail was set at $ 4 million, an amount no one in Heidnik's neighborhood could raise.

It took over a year before the trial against Heidnik could be opened on June 20, 1988. Judge Lynne Abraham presided over the court.

While Prosecutor Gallagher sought to portray Heidnik as a beast, the defense focused on portraying Gary Heidnik as a victim. Psychiatrist Clancy McKenzie, who spoke to Heidnik for over 100 hours while he was in custody, and another psychiatrist, Jack Apsche, concluded that Heidnik simply did not know the difference between right and wrong. Heidnik was also a victim of his military service in the 1960s. Here, according to the defense, experiments with drugs, especially LSD , were carried out on Heidnik .

The prosecution called Robert Kirkpatrick, the broker at whom the killer had speculated, to the witness stand . Kirkpatrick stated that Heidnik was an intelligent man and that he knew exactly what he was doing. It was not for nothing that he was able to multiply his small starting capital to half a million dollars.

On June 30, 1988, after ten days of negotiations, the jury withdrew and, after 16 hours of deliberation, reached the verdict on July 1, 1988. Heidnik was found guilty of murder in both the Deborah Dudley and Sandra Lindsay cases. Other convictions: kidnapping six times, rape five times, aggravated assault four times, and once practicing abnormal intercourse .

On July 3, 1988 Judge Abraham pronounced the sentence: death penalty by injection of poison. In addition, Heidnik received a prison sentence of 300 years.

death

Gary Heidnik was transferred to Philadelphia County Jail. Here he made several unsuccessful attempts to kill himself. He submitted appeals for clemency to both Governor Robert Patrick Casey, Sr. and his successor in office, Tom Ridge , but they were denied. Heidnik last submitted such a request to the Supreme Court in March 1997 . When a pardon was refused again, Heidnik accepted his fate.

Initially, Heidnik's execution should have taken place on April 15, 1997, but his 19-year-old daughter intervened and obtained that the execution was suspended. She referred to her father's mental health, which was not the best.

On July 6, 1999, the "Marshall Street Mad," as he was often called in the press, was executed by lethal injection at the State Correctional Institution - Rockview and pronounced dead at 10:29 pm. Nobody claimed Heidnik's body.

Additional Information

The three victims, Jacqueline Askins, Agnes Adams and Lisa Thomas, are all three almost deaf because Heidnik's torture consisted of tormenting them with a screwdriver. The nearly $ 500,000 that Heidnik had earned through his stock market transactions were divided among the women as compensation for damages. They also receive financial support from the Peace Corps and the Internal Revenue Service .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Steven Morris: Gary Heidnik and his cellar of death. ( Memento of July 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) New Criminologist . September 14, 2007. Retrieved May 29, 2009.
  2. ↑ Lindsey Gruson: Strange Portrait of Torture Suspect. The New York Times . March 3, 1987. Retrieved February 9, 2007.
  3. ↑ Patrick Bellamy: Gary Heidnik: To Hell and Back. TruTV Crime Library.
  4. ↑ a b Ken Englade: Cellar of Horror . St. Martin's Press, NY, 1988.

literature

personal data
SURNAME Heidnik, Gary Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heidnik, Gary
BRIEF DESCRIPTION american killer
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Eastlake , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1999
Place of death Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania