Eat Thy Neighbour (27 page)

But Hadden Clark made still more confessions to his pal Jesus. Over the years, he said, he had killed upwards of twenty women, sometimes eating them in the hope that if he consumed enough female flesh he would eventually become a woman himself. Outrageous as the claims sounded, he had led authorities to
Michele’s grave, so maybe there really were more. Between January and April 2000 Hadden, prison guards and Jesus – who was allowed to go along because he was the only person who could control Clark when he was seized by one of his psychotic episodes – scoured sites in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania looking for more bodies. To help keep Hadden calm and help him remember, he was provided with women’s clothes for the outings. To date, no further bodies have been discovered.

Sixteen

Stocks and Bondage: Gary Heidnik (1986–7)

S
ince the late eighteenth century, when Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, served briefly as the capital of the United States, it has been known as the ‘City of Brotherly Love’. But, for at least one man who lived there in the late twentieth century, love had no place in his overall scheme of things.

A few people begin life with all possible advantages. Tragically, far more start out with no advantages at all, and such was the case with Gary Heidnik. Gary was born in November 1943 to severely alcoholic parents, Michael and Ellen Heidnik, of Eastlake, Ohio. A second son, Terry, was born eighteen months later and shortly thereafter Michael and Ellen divorced. The boys went with their mother, but by the time Gary was four Ellen’s condition had deteriorated too far for her to care for her sons and they moved in with their father and his new wife, both of whom were violent and abusive to each other and to the children.

Although Gary was a bright child his fractured home life left him too emotionally damaged to do well at school. Withdrawing from society, he obsessed on two goals: making money and a career in the military. Undoubtedly he saw both of these aims as means of obtaining the stability so lacking in his life. If he did nothing else for his son, Michael Heidnik managed to get Gary into the Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, a good first step in becoming a career army officer. Although Gary got
good grades at Staunton, he decided to drop out after two years and returned to live with his father. Gary tried two different high schools but finally dropped out altogether in 1961, at the age of eighteen, and joined the army.

His army aptitude tests showed that he had an above-average IQ of 130, and Gary was allowed to apply for specialist training as a medic. After completing medical training he was stationed at a field hospital in West Germany where he finally seemed to be getting his life on track. But during the summer of 1962, Heidnik began acting strangely, complaining of headaches, dizziness and disorientation. In August he was admitted to sickbay where a neurologist suggested that he be shipped back to the USA for further tests. There, a psychiatrist diagnosed him as having a borderline psychotic condition that ‘often precedes breakdown to full schizophrenia’. Gary was discharged from the army with a full military disability pension and social security benefits, and committed to a Pennsylvania mental hospital for three months’ observation. From there he was released with a diagnosis of ‘personality disorder’ and placed on tranquillisers.

By the beginning of 1964 Heidnik felt well enough to enrol for training as a practical nurse. A year later he had graduated and taken an internship at Philadelphia General Hospital. In his spare time, Gary enrolled as a part-time student at the University of Pennsylvania and eventually took a nursing job at the university hospital. As had happened so often before, things started out well, but his job performance declined and he was fired. He then enrolled at the local Veterans’ Administration Hospital for training as a psychiatric nurse but was expelled because of attitude problems. Finally, Gary took a job at the Elwyn Institute, a training facility for mentally and physically handicapped people.

For a while, Gary seemed to do well at Elwyn. He got along well with staff and students, though some might have said he got on a little too well with the African-American and Hispanic
women who attended classes there. But he worked hard, saved his money and by combining his pay with his government and Social Security pensions bought a large house in a ghetto neighbourhood where he rented out two apartments and lived in the third.

Still, Gary was forced to take occasional leaves of absence from work for trips to psychiatric hospitals. When he got word in 1970 that his mother had committed suicide, he had another breakdown and was institutionalised yet again. While under care he attempted suicide and retreated into a near catatonic state, only communicating with the staff by writing notes or through a series of signals he devised, including rolling up one trouser leg when he did not want to be disturbed. His personal habits also began to deteriorate and he had to be forcibly bathed by the staff. On his release, Gary decided that what he needed was a complete change, so he went to California.

California is the kind of place where strange things can happen to even the most normal people, and for Gary Heidnik its impact was profound. At some point in 1971, he decided to establish his own church, calling it the ‘United Churches of the Ministries of God’. On his return to Philadelphia he duly registered the church, installed himself as ‘Bishop’ and gathered a flock of five followers including his brother Terry – who had also developed a pattern of mental and emotional problems – and at least one of the students from Elwyn, a black girl with whom he had developed a relationship. Eventually, the church picked up three additional members, again, entirely from Elwyn. Many bogus preachers use their position to milk cash out of their trusting followers, but Gary’s congregation had no money. For him it was not cash, but power over his flock that was the attraction. Money, however, was one of the few things that had always interested Gary, and under US tax law churches pay no income tax. The opportunity was too good to pass up. Gary may have been crazy, but he was neither stupid nor lacking in cunning.

In 1975 he opened an account with investment brokers Merrill Lynch in the name of his church. Over the next dozen years his initial investment would grow from $1,500 to well over half a million. With his newfound riches Gary indulged himself by purchasing a fleet of luxury cars. There was a Rolls-Royce, a peacock blue van, a Lincoln Continental and a silver-white Cadillac Coupe DeVille with gold trim, custom wheels and a GMH monogram on the front doors. The ‘Caddy’ was Gary’s pride and joy, the symbol of his success.

Despite the apparent stability in Heidnik’s life, there were more disturbing undercurrents. His relationships with the female members of his little congregation, and other mentally handicapped students at Elwyn, should have sounded alarm bells somewhere. His liaisons all followed the same pattern: the women were all African-American, they were all underprivileged and they were all mentally handicapped to some extent. In short, they were easy victims for the manipulative Heidnik.

One of these was a young woman named Dorothy who was more seriously retarded than most of the others, and Heidnik took merciless advantage of her. Neighbours often complained to the police when his usual bad treatment of Dorothy turned into outright beatings. The complainants said they had reason to believe he often kept the girl locked up. The police cautioned Heidnik, but there was little more they could do unless Dorothy herself brought formal charges. A year and a half after the affair with Dorothy began, Heidnik persuaded her they should sign her sister, 34-year-old Anjeanette, also severely retarded, out of the institutional home in nearby Harrisburg, where she lived. Together, they got her out on a twelve-hour pass and drove back to Philadelphia. With no intention of returning her to the home, Heidnik proceeded to lock Anjeanette in an empty basement room where he systematically abused her both sexually and physically. When the hospital notified police of what had happened, they went to Heidnik’s house and removed her by
force. The medical examination showed that Anjeanette had been raped, sodomised, beaten and infected with gonorrhoea vaginally, anally and orally. On 6 June 1978, Gary Heidnik was arrested and charged with kidnap, rape, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, involuntary deviant sexual intercourse and interfering with the custody of a committed person.

When Heidnik’s case came to trial in November, a court-appointed psychiatrist stated that he found the accused ‘manipulative and psycho-sexually immature’. Found guilty, Heidnik was sentenced to three to seven years in prison, but on appeal the sentence was overturned and he was transferred to a series of mental institutions where he spent the next three years trying to kill himself. The closest he came was the occasion when he ate a light bulb. Within four years of his arrest Gary Heidnik was back on the streets on condition that he remain under psychiatric care. Obviously, he didn’t.

During his incarceration, Dorothy had disappeared without trace, and although police tried to link Heidnik with her disappearance, there was no evidence with which to work, so Gary blithely went back to his old habits. Not surprisingly, relations with his neighbours rapidly deteriorated; in late 1983 Heidnik sold his house, and in April of the next year bought a new one at 3520 North Marshall Street in the ghettoised Philadelphia suburb of Franklinville. To decorate the interior of the dilapidated house, Heidnik chose to display his wealth in an even more obvious way than with expensive cars. On the kitchen walls he glued coins and the upstairs hallway was papered with $1, $5 and $10 bills. But still life was incomplete; Gary was without a woman that he could control.

For his next foray into the world of human relations Heidnik went through a matchmaking service specialising in introducing oriental women to western men. After a two-year correspondence – throughout which he claimed to be a minister – Heidnik invited 22-year-old Philippine beauty Betty Disto to
come to Philadelphia. Over the strenuous objections of her parents she agreed. On 3 October 1985 – four days after Betty’s arrival in the USA – the two drove across the Pennsylvania border to Maryland where they were married. No more than two weeks later Betty returned home from a shopping trip to find Gary in bed with three black women. Understandably, Betty demanded Gary send her home, but he refused, saying it was his house, he was boss and having multiple sex partners was part of his life. If Betty would not join them, she could just watch while they had sex. When she complained he beat her. On one occasion he kicked her senseless and raped her anally while the other girls watched. Finally, after more than a year of abuse and frustration, Betty left, charging her husband with spousal rape, indecent assault and involuntary deviant sexual intercourse.

Two weeks later Gary Heidnik was arrested for wife abuse and only by a stroke of sheer luck the parole from his last imprisonment for abusing a woman had run out the day before. He only escaped being returned to prison because Betty failed to show up for his arraignment.

It was late at night on the eve of Thanksgiving, 1986, when Gary took his Cadillac on to the streets of ‘Philly’ to see what he could pick up. Pulling up to the kerb next to a group of girls who were obviously pulling in ‘johns’, he called out to a pretty girl of mixed black and Hispanic parentage. When she approached the big, white Cadillac, she could see the driver was a powerfully built man with a neatly trimmed beard, intense blue eyes and lots of expensive jewellery. She could also tell that he hadn’t bathed in days. He smelled and his clothes were a filthy mess. Josefina Rivera always prided herself on being choosy, but the man’s car and rings indicated she could get a good fee out of this one, so she agreed to go with him.

The neighbourhood in Franklinville, and the house he drove up to, were as dirty and rundown as Gary, but the fleet of expensive cars in the fenced-in rear yard immediately caught
Josefina’s attention. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. She was wrong.

After taking her upstairs for sex, Gary pinioned her arms and dragged her through the house to the basement where he manacled her to a length of chain fastened to a pipe running across the ceiling. Weirdly, after tearing off all her clothes, he laid his head in her lap and went to sleep. When he woke up, he went to a corner of the dingy cellar, picked up a shovel and pick and walked to a large piece of plywood lying on the floor. Pushing the wood aside, he revealed a pit hacked through in the concrete. Jumping into the hole, he started shovelling out dirt, digging deeper and deeper. While he worked, Gary explained that all he had ever wanted was a big family and that he had decided the best way to achieve it was to gather a harem of ten women, keep them in the basement and get them all pregnant. When the babies arrived, they would all live together down here in the dark. To demonstrate his sincerity, he took a break from his work and raped Josefina.

Obviously terrified, his prisoner tried to keep the madman talking while she surveyed her surroundings. With the exception of an old washing machine, a pool table and a chest freezer, the room was empty. The only light seeped in through a boarded-up window. There was nothing here to help her escape and her captor was too big to fight off, especially while she was chained up.

As he worked away at his hole, Heidnik explained that he was digging a ‘punishment pit’ and that any time Josefina was bad, she would have to spend time in it. Finally satisfied with the pit, Heidnik left his captive alone in the dark. After nearly a week of being raped repeatedly and fed sporadically, Josefina managed to work one of the ankle chains loose enough for her to reach the window. Pulling the boards loose, she worked her slim body far enough through the opening to get her head and shoulders outside. Then she began screaming for help. Unfortunately,
the only person who heard her, or at least the only one who responded, was Heidnik. He pulled her violently from the window, beat her with a board, shoved her into the pit and threw the thick plywood on top of her, weighting it down with bags of dirt. To muffle her screams, he brought down a radio and turned it up full blast. Then he left to collect his next harem slave.