Gary Heidnik

What the record shows

Gary Michael Heidnik was a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, man who from November 1986 to March 1987 abducted six women and held them chained in the basement of his house on North Marshall Street, where two of them died. A Philadelphia jury convicted him on July 1, 1988, of two counts of first-degree murder plus kidnapping, rape, aggravated assault and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse counts, and he was sentenced to death. According to the federal opinion in White v. Horn (E.D. Pa. 1999), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the death sentences in Commonwealth v. Heidnik, 526 Pa. 458 (1991). Heidnik was executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999, and remains the last person put to death by Pennsylvania.

The captives, all Black women, were Josefina Rivera, Sandra Lindsay, Lisa Thomas, Deborah Dudley, Jacqueline Askins and Agnes Adams, as named in CNN reporting carried by CBS News and in a Philadelphia magazine oral history. Rivera, taken first, said Heidnik picked her up on November 25, 1986. Lindsay, who her sister told CNN was intellectually disabled, disappeared the day after Thanksgiving 1986. Thomas was taken shortly before Christmas, Dudley around New Year's Day 1987 and Askins in January 1987. Survivors said the women were chained, kept in a pit dug in the basement floor, starved, beaten and raped.

Lindsay died in February 1987 after being left suspended by her wrists; the prosecutor and defense lawyer both described her death to Philadelphia magazine as suffocation. Heidnik dismembered her body; remains were later found in the house. Dudley died in March 1987 when Heidnik ran an electric current to her chains while she lay in the water-filled pit, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian's account of the Supreme Court record; her body was left in a New Jersey state forest.

The case came to light on March 24, 1987. Heidnik took Rivera out that night to help him pick up Agnes Adams, then let her leave briefly; she called police and said she had been held for four months and that other women remained in the basement. Officers stopped Heidnik's car near 6th and Girard, Rivera identified him, and police entering the house found two women chained in the basement, a third in the pit and human remains in the kitchen. Heidnik was arrested that night.

At trial before Judge Lynne Abraham, defense lawyer A. Charles Peruto Jr. argued insanity; prosecutor Charles Gallagher countered with evidence that Heidnik had grown a $1,500 brokerage deposit into a portfolio worth more than $500,000. The jury rejected the defense and on July 1, 1988, convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, six of kidnapping, five of rape, four of aggravated assault and two of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, as summarized by Wikipedia and the Daily Pennsylvanian. UPI reported two death sentences plus a cumulative 150 to 300 years; White v. Horn gives the sentencing date as March 2, 1989.

Heidnik never challenged his sentence and asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to skip its mandatory review, which the court said the law did not permit. In March 1991 the court, in an opinion by Justice Rolf Larsen, found the evidence sufficient and the death sentences not disproportionate. In April 1997 he came within hours of execution before an anti-death-penalty group and his daughter, Maxine Davidson White, won stays over his competency. A state judge found him competent, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld that finding on August 19, 1998, and in June 1999 it held that White lacked next-friend standing. On July 3, 1999, the federal district court denied her petition for a stay. He was executed at the State Correctional Institution at Rockview in Bellefonte on July 6, 1999.

Heidnik was born on November 22, 1943, in Eastlake, Ohio. According to Wikipedia, he enlisted in the Army at 17, trained as a medic, and was discharged in 1962 after a diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder. In 1971 he incorporated a church and later posed as a bishop, holding services at his home for a congregation largely of people with intellectual disabilities. In 1978 he was convicted of kidnapping and rape after taking a woman from a state hospital on day leave; he was released in April 1983.