Obsession (49 page)

After considering the matter for a moment, Bundy declined, commenting, “I’m the most cold-blooded son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.” He wasn’t far off on that one.

There was some pretty compelling evidence, including bite marks on the buttocks of one of the Chi Omega victims that matched up perfectly with Bundy’s dental impression. For the trial, Bundy, the failed law student, insisted on acting as his own attorney, as he’d been preparing to be in Colorado before his escape. He was “assisted” by Michael Minerva, a talented and well-thought-of public defender.

Back in form in the courtroom, Bundy was full of charm, and attracted an ever-increasing following of groupies for the widely covered trial. This is not an uncommon phenomenon, akin to the women who fall in love with convicted murderers in prison. But I never fail to be amazed by it, and I never fail to be disgusted by it.

At one point in the trial, the ever-manipulative Bundy indicated he was ready to confess to the Chi Omega and Kimberly Leach murders if he was spared the death penalty. But the ever-arrogant Bundy got into a disagreement with Minerva and moved to have
him dismissed. The prosecution, now not wanting to take a chance on an appeal of a confession entered without counsel acceptable to the defendant, stopped bargaining.

With that, Bundy made the final choice that sealed his ultimate fate. On July 23, 1979, after six hours of deliberation, the jury founRobert Bundy guilty of murder in the first degree for the deaths of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy in the Chi Omega house. Judge Edward Court sentenced him to death by electrocution. The following year, Bundy was convicted of the murder of Kimberly Leach and again sentenced to death. During that trial, he even managed to marry his current girlfriend, Carole Ann Boone, who eventually bore him a daughter while he was in prison.

On death row of the Florida State Penitentiary at Starke, Bundy became something of a celebrity. Everyone wanted to “study” him, to see how such a handsome and intelligent young man could also be such a depraved killer. In this he resembled Tom Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant and evil killer psychiatrist whom the intellectuals wrote to and wanted to interview. Toward the end, as his appeals ran out over the years, Bundy began trying to barter information about unknown bodies and unsolved cases for more time.

Among those Bundy agreed to meet with was my Investigative Support Unit colleague Special Agent Bill Hagmaier. Bundy described for Bill his MO and what was going through his mind. As we’d suspected, the sex, even the murder, was incidental to the thrill of the hunt and the power of life or death over these innocent women. He even confirmed that when he had abducted Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish, back in Washington State, he had kept them alive as long as he felt he could and actually
made one watch as he killed the other. This could be considered classic behavior for a depraved sexual sadist.

As is also typical for such types, Bundy’s only sadness and remorse was for himself and for the fact that, despite all his manipulation and legal wrangling, he would apparently die for his sins. He begged for some intervention from both Bill Hagmaier and Bob Keppel, Ph.D., a well-respected criminal investigator from Washington with whom I had worked on the Green River murders. Desperate to buy time, Bundy had offered to work with Bob to help solve those crimes. Bill Hagmaier was with Bundy until the day before his execution.

Bundy had explained to Bill the simple though inexplicable fact that he killed beautiful young women because he wanted to; because he enjoyed it and it gave him satisfaction.

As someone who has spent a good part of his career trying to hunt down the Ted Bundys of the world, I can’t say that I enjoyed the fact that he went to hell aided by two thousand volts from the Starke electric chair. But I would have to confess a certain satisfaction. Despite his incarceration for more than ten years, when, on the morning of January 24, 1989, I learned that Bundy had been executed, it was the first time I rested easy that he would never kill again.

Two things are particularly noteworthy about Gary Michael Heidnik’s formative years, growing up in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Eastlake in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

First, they were extremely dysfunctional. His father, Michael Heidnik, a tool and die maker, was cold and both physically and emotionally abusive, to Gary and his brother Terry, born less than two years later. When he wet his bed, Gary recalled as an adult, his
father would hang the sheets out the window so the world would know of his crime. Gary claimed that when Michael felt Gary needed serious punishment, he would hang
him
out the window by his ankles, dangling him twenty feet above the pavement. Gary’s mother, Ellen, a beautician by training and an alcoholic by avocation, divorced Michael in 1946, when Gary was just a little over two and Terry still a baby, for what she termed “gross neglect of duty.” She would marry three more times before committing suicide in 1970. Her last two husbands were black, which, coupled with his hatred of his father, may partially explain why Gary felt more comfortable around blacks than whites as an adult. After the split, Gary and Terry went to live with their mother, but within a few years, her chronic alcoholism had sent them back to their hated father.

The other noteworthy aspect of Heidnik’s youth was his twin preoccupations with the military and with business. He loved being a Boy Scout and wearing a uniform, and he dreamed of going to West Point and a career as an Army officer. He also dreamed of being a millionaire businessman, and he avidly followed the financial section of the newspaper.

Gary was very bright. Ed Gein had an IQ of 99, just about normal. Ted Bundy, generally considered pretty slick and sophisticated by serial killer standards, was listed at 120. Gary Heidnik’s IQ was 130, and on one test administered when he was an adult, he scored a remarkable 148! He did well at Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, but dropped out at the end of his junior year. He came back to Cleveland for a try at finishing school there, but lost interest after a month and joined the Army. This was 1961, and he wasn’t sorry to be leaving.

He was trained as a medical corpsman at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, before being shipped out to West
Germany. The abrupt transfer meant he couldn’t collect on about $5,000 he’d loaned out to other soldiers at high interest rates, the beginning of his career in finance. He was never that careless with money again. When he got to Germany, Gary took the high school equivalency test and scored in the ninety-sixth percentile.

But he was also having both physical and emotional problems. He had headaches, dizzy spells, blurred vision, nausea. He also complained of hallucinations. Within months, he was back in a military hospital in Pennsylvania. In January 1963, he was diagnosed as having a schizoid personality disorder and was honorably discharged. His original 10 percent disability rating was ultimately raised to 100 percent, meaning he would receive a comfortable monthly pension for the rest of his life.

He enrolled in a practical nursing course in Philadelphia, graduating a year later and embarking on an internship at Philadelphia General Hospital. He’d put away enough money from his pension to buy a three-story house on Cedar Avenue near the University of Pennsylvania, and with typical thrift, he took one floor for himself and rented out the other two. But with all this, Heidnik’s life was also taking a more disturbing turn.

For one thing, he was in and out of mental institutions. There was never any clear diagnosis of his problem, although the terms
schizoid
and
schizophrenic
kept cropping up. He was given various medications, including the antipsychotics Thorazine and Stelazine. He also socialized almost exclusively with retarded or mentally handicapped women, usually black or Hispanic, whom he would “pick up” at various institutions and homes, most notably the Elwyn Institute for the retarded. Under the guise of signing them out for
a day’s outing, Heidnik would generally bring them back to his house for sex.

In 1971, after driving cross-country to California on a momentary whim, Gary claimed to have been given a divine message, whereupon he returned to Philadelphia and established the United Church of the Ministries of God in his house, whose front yard also became a dumping ground for boats and cars in serious need of repair. He wrote up a charter, proclaimed himself “bishop,” and secured proper IRS status. He drew his small but loyal congregation from retarded people from Elwyn and derelicts in his neighborhood. He stayed in that house until he got into a disagreement with his tenants in the fall of 1976, whereupon he barricaded himself in his basement with a rifle and handgun, and when one tenant tried to climb through the window to get to him, Gary shot at him, inflicting a superficial face wound. Aggravated assault charges were dismissed, but Gary had had enough. He sold the place, moved out, and bought another house in North Philadelphia. When the new owners of the Cedar Avenue house started looking around, they found not only mounds of trash and a sizable collection of bondage pornography, they also discovered a three-foot-deep hole dug through the concrete in the basement.

Gary opened an investment account in the church’s name with Merrill Lynch. It was essentially a tax dodge, since the church was him. Over the years, he put about $35,000 into this account. By the time he was arrested for murder early in 1987, the account was valued at more than $577,000. With some of the proceeds of his shrewd investing, the “church” bought a couple of gaudy Cadillacs and a Rolls-Royce. He took in an illiterate retarded woman, Anjeanette Davidson, and together they had a baby girl in March of 1978, but the baby ended up in a foster home.

The following May, Gary and Anjeanette drove to the Selinsgrove Center near Harrisburg, to visit her much more severely retarded thirty-four-year-old sister, Alberta, who had lived there since she was fourteen. They were only to keep her out for the day, but they brought her back to the Marshall Street house where they kept her, denying vehemently that they had her, until authorities armed with a search warrant found her cowering in a storage room in the basement. Heidnik was arrested and charged with rape, kidnapping, endangerment, and unlawful restraint, among other charges.

The psychiatric report given Judge Charles P. Mirarchi Jr. (Heidnik waived a jury trial) was a pretty good summary of his mental status:

“He appears to be an extremely insecure and confused individual. Records indicate he is suffering from a major mental illness, which apparently has been of long standing. He is also psychosexually immature. He appears to be easily threatened by women whom he would consider to be equal to him either intellectually or emotionally. [He] cannot tolerate criticism. Gary needs constant acceptance and self-assurance that he is an intellectual, worthwhile human being.”

The judge found Heidnik guilty and received some even more insightful and prescient evaluation in a presentencing report written by court-appointed investigator Joseph A. Tobin:

“Heidnik appears to be manipulative, and he is certainly lacking in judgment. He impresses me as one who sees himself as superior to others, although apparently he must involve himself with those distinctly inferior to himself to reinforce this…. It is my opinion … that he is not only a danger to himself, but perhaps a greater danger to others in the community, especially those who he perceives as being weak and dependent. Unfortunately, it seems to me that he will
not significantly change his aberrant behavior pattern in the near future.”

Judge Mirarchi took this report to heart and did the best he could—four to seven years in the state penitentiary. Heidnik served four years and four months, with three intervals of mental hospitalization for suicide attempts (drug overdose, carbon monoxide poisoning, chewing up and swallowing pieces of a light bulb) before being paroled in April 1983. The following year, he bought another house, this one at 3520 North Marshall Street.

The new house was rather impressive by the standards of the neighborhood, the only single-family stand-alone on a street of row houses. It would make a fine setting for his church. He had no particular girlfriend during this time, though he did have a brief relationship with a white woman in the neighborhood, who bore a son he used to refer to as Little Gary.

The next year, Gary decided to get married and was taken with the idea of having an Asian bride, since he had decided that Asian women knew their place with their husbands. So he essentially mail-ordered one from a service in the Philippines. He married pretty, twenty-two-year-old Betty Disto on October 3, 1985, in Elkton, Maryland, just days after she’d gotten off the plane from Manila.

After a week of wedded bliss, Betty came home one day to find Gary in bed naked with three black women. He tried to explain to the naive and morally straight Betty that this was how things were done in America. But Betty wasn’t that naive. Though she stayed with him awhile, under threat of death if she left, she eventually got up the nerve to leave after making contact with other members of the Filipino community. Gary was charged with assault and spousal rape, but when Betty failed to show up at a preliminary hearing, the charges were dropped. The
following September, Betty bore Gary’s son, whom she named Jesse John. She sent Gary a postcard telling him.

By this point, Heidnik was no longer content merely being bishop of his own church. He also wanted to be master of his own harem. He thought ten wives and ten children would be a good start. On Thanksgiving Day, 1986, Gary began implementing his plan. When part-time prostitute Josephina Rivera, an attractive twenty-six-year-old woman who was half-black and half Puerto Rican, agreed to come home with him for $20, he brought her to his bedroom, choked her unconscious, and confined her to his basement, naked and chained.

The key feature of this basement was a pit Gary had dug in the floor, similar to the one in the Cedar Street house, but wider and deeper—large enough, in fact, for several people to fit in. And there he kept her in the cold and filth. He raped her vaginally and anally daily, fed her poorly, and beat her with a wooden stick to maintain discipline.