Gary M. Heidnik: The Real-Life "Buffalo Bill"

Josefina Rivera, Agnes Adams, Sandra Lindsay, Jacqueline Askins, Deborah Dudley, Lisa Thomas

On March 24, 1987, Philadelphia police received a call from a young woman named Josefina Rivera. Rivera claimed that she had been held captive in a cellar for several months and her captor was sitting just a block away at a gas station. When officers arrived to question Rivera they noticed what appeared to be chain marks on her legs and proceeded to arrest the man responsible, Gary M. Heidnik. Heidnik's arrest would unveil a real-life horror story, one of the most gruesome crimes in the history of Philadelphia.

Gary Michael Heidnik was born on November 22, 1943, in Eastlake, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. His parents, Michael and Ellen divorced three years later. When his father remarried in 1950, Michael and his younger brother Terry went to live with Michael Heidnik and his new wife. After Heidnik's arrest, he claimed that his father was abusive. Whenever young Gary would wet the bed, Michael would make him hang the stained sheets out the window for the whole neighborhood to see. Michael Heidnik denied these claims.

It seems that Gary didn't have an easy time at school either. He was often teased by classmates about his misshapen head, which he and Terry said was caused by falling out of a tree. When anybody did try to talk to him in a friendly manner, Gary would yell at them and tell them they weren't worthy enough to speak to him. Despite these issues, Gary Heidnik excelled in his studies and testing showed that he had an IQ of 148. At age 14, Heidnik enrolled in the Staunton Military Academy but dropped out before graduation. After attending public school for a short period of time, he left school for good and joined the army when he was 17.

Although Heidnik received excellent marks from his drill instructor during basic training, he was turned down for several specialist positions, including the military police. He was finally sent to San Antonio, Texas, to train as a medic and then was stationed at the 46th Army Surgical Hospital in Landstuhl, West Germany. Shortly after his arrival, he earned his GED. In August 1962, Heidnik started suffering from severe headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, and nausea. A neurologist diagnosed him with gastroenteritis and noted that he showed signs of mental illness. After being transferred, in October 1962, to a military hospital in Philadelphia, he was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder and honorably discharged.

Heidnik started working as a licensed practical nurse and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. He dropped out after only one semester and went to work as a psychiatric nurse in the Veterans Administration hospital in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. He was soon fired for poor attendance and being rude to patients. In 1970, his mother Ellen committed suicide after battling both alcoholism and bone cancer. His brother Terry had been in and out of mental hospitals after multiple suicide attempts. Gary himself had also attempted suicide at least 13 times before his imminent arrest in 1987.

In October 1971, Gary Heidnik started a church, United Church of the Ministers of God, and invested $1,500 in the church's name with Merrill Lynch. This initial deposit grew to over $500,000. By the time of Heidnik's 1987 arrest, the church was very wealthy.

In 1983, Heidnik met a Filipino woman named Betty Disto through a matchmaking service. The two married on October 3, 1985, shortly after Disto's arrival to the United States, but it wasn't long before their marriage started to go downhill. Disto found Heidnik in bed with three women and Heidnik forced her to watch this encounter and subsequent sexual encounters. Disto says that she was also raped and beaten by Heidnik and in January 1986, with the support of the Philadelphia Filipino community, she left him. Disto was pregnant at the time, although Heidnik did not know this until she requested child support payments in 1987 for their son, Jesse John Disto.

Jesse John Disto was not the first child to be fathered by Gary Heidnik. He had a son, Gary Jr., by a woman named Gail Lincow. Gary Jr. was placed in foster care shortly after his birth. In 1978, an illiterate and mentally disabled woman named Anjeanette Davidson gave birth to Gary's daughter, Maxine. This child was also placed in foster care and shortly after Gary Heidnik was arrested for the kidnapping and rape of Alberta Davidson, Anjenette's sister. He had signed the young woman out of the mental institution where she had been hospitalized and imprisoned her in the basement of his house. At trial, he was found guilty of kidnapping, rape, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, and interfering with the custody of a committed person, but his original sentence was overturned on appeal. He would only serve three years in a mental institution until his release in April 1983 under the supervision of a state-sanctioned mental health program.

On November 25, 1986, Heidnik abducted Josefina Rivera, the brave young woman who would eventually be responsible for his arrest. Heidnik had decided to create his own harem after Betty Disto refused to put up with any more of his abuse and left him. In addition to Rivera, he abducted five other women before his capture by police. One of his victims, Sandra Lindsay, died of starvation, torture, and untreated illness. Heidnik dismembered her body, placing her arms and legs in the freezer and marking them as "dog food". He then cooked her ribs in his oven and boiled her head in a pot. According to several sources, he ground up Lindsay's flesh, mixed it with dog food, and fed the mixture to his other victims. His lawyer would dispute these claims during his trial, stating that there was no evidence that any of Heidnik's kitchen tools were used for this gruesome process.

Another of Heidnik's captives, Deborah Dudley, died after being placed in a pit of water that Heidnik had dropped a stripped extension cord into. Electric shock was one of Heidnik's favorite forms of torture. According to Jacqueline Askins, who was only 18 when she was abducted by Heidnik, he also liked to stab his victims in the ears with a screwdriver. On March 23, 1987, Heidnik forced Josefina Rivera to help him abduct Agnes Adams. The next day, he drove Rivera to a gas station after she convinced him to let her visit her family. He told Rivera that he would wait for her there and it was then that she took the opportunity to call the police. After Heidnik's arrest, police also apprehended his best friend, Cyril "Tony" Brown, who agreed to testify against Heidnik. Brown admitted to helping Heidnik dismember Sandra Lindsay's body. Heidnik attempted suicide by hanging shortly after his arrest.

During the arraignment of Gary Heidnik, he tried to claim that the women were already in the house when he moved in. At trial, his lawyer, A. Charles Peruto Jr. argued that he was legally insane. The prosecution refuted this argument by presenting Heidnik as an astute investor who had amassed a fortune in investments and rental properties. On July 1, 1988, Heidnik was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. After several appeals, including a stay of execution request filed by his daughter Maxine and ex-wife Betty, Gary Heidnik was executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999. He was responsible for the kidnapping, rape, and torture of six African-American women: Josefina Rivera, Sandra Lindsay, Lisa Thomas, Deborah Dudley, Jacqueline Askins, and Agnes Adams, as well as the murders of Lindsay and Dudley. His earlier victims, Alberta Davidson and Betty Disto, can also not be forgotten.

As for pop culture influences, when Thomas Harris was writing Silence of the Lambs, Gary Heidnik and his basement pit served as one of the inspirations for the serial killer known as "Buffalo Bill." Josefina Rivera wrote a book about the horrors she faced while held captive by Heidnik called Cellar Girl.

Related Reading:

Inside the House of Heidnik: An Oral History


A Family Reunion Like No Other


Gary Heidnik's House of Horrors, 30 years later