Gary Heidnik Victims

Case background and investigation

Between late November 1986 and March 1987, Gary Heidnik abducted six women and imprisoned them in the basement of his house at 3520 North Marshall Street in North Philadelphia. CNN and other outlets identify the women as Josefina Rivera, Sandra Lindsay, Lisa Thomas, Deborah Dudley, Jacqueline Askins and Agnes Adams. All six were Black. Two of them, Lindsay and Dudley, died in captivity.

Rivera, the first to be taken, said in an oral history published by Philadelphia magazine that Heidnik picked her up on the night of November 25, 1986. Lindsay's sister, Tracey Lomax, told CNN that Lindsay, who had an intellectual disability and knew Heidnik from gatherings at his home, went out to a store the day after Thanksgiving 1986 and did not return; her family repeatedly pressed Heidnik and the police about her whereabouts. Thomas was brought to the basement shortly before Christmas, Dudley around New Year's Day and Askins on January 18, 1987, according to Rivera's account.

Survivors testified that the women were chained, kept in a pit dug in the basement floor, starved, beaten and raped. According to 6abc and Wikipedia's summary of the trial evidence, Lindsay died in February 1987 after being left shackled by the wrist to an overhead beam; authorities attributed her death to a combination of starvation and mistreatment. Heidnik dismembered her body. Dudley died in March 1987 when Heidnik applied a live electrical wire to the chains of captives standing in the water-filled pit. Her body was left in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

Agnes Adams was abducted in late March 1987. The next day Rivera, who had gained a degree of Heidnik's trust, persuaded him to let her out briefly and went to the police. Officers detained Heidnik on March 24, 1987, and freed the remaining women from the basement. Parts of Lindsay's remains were found in the house.

At trial in 1988, defense attorney Charles Peruto Jr. argued that Heidnik was legally insane. The prosecution, led by Charles Gallagher, countered with evidence of planning and of Heidnik's successful management of a large investment account. On July 1, 1988, a jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder along with kidnapping, rape, aggravated assault and related charges, and he was sentenced to death.

Heidnik declined to pursue appeals. Lawyers acting for his daughter argued in federal court that he was not mentally competent to be executed, but the courts did not block the sentence, the Associated Press reported. He was executed by lethal injection at the state prison at Rockview on July 6, 1999, and remains the last person executed in Pennsylvania. CNN and 6abc note that the fictional killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs was partly based on him.