Gary's goal in life was collecting ten sex-slaves and fathering as many children as he could before dying. Not the poster boy for the city of brotherly love, he spent most of his life in and out of mental institutions. Honorably discharged from the army in 1962, Gary dutifully collected his army pension which he proceeded to invest in the stock market. Surprisingly he proved to be a financial wiz and amassed a small fortune out of his stock portfolio. Unfortunately, nothing else in his life had such positive results.
His father, not the nicest man in the world, would lock him outdoors in urine-stained underwear for wetting the bed. His alcoholic mother drank so much she forced he children to steal money to buy more cheap wine and whiskey. She eventually killed herself to escape her own mental illness. According to Heidnik's brother, Terry, on the night Ellen finally succeeded at suicide, she phoned her husband at a bar to tell him she'd overdosed on medicine. His father, Terry said, stayed at the bar to have another drink.
In 1971 Gary formed the "United Church of the Ministries of God" of which he was an ordained minister. The church served as a tax shelter as well as a way to meet black retarded women form a local institute which he enjoyed sexually. Curiously, he hated black and spewed out racist diatribes to anyone who cared to listen about the impending race war.
On May 17, 1978 Gary was arrested after the mentally retarded sister of his girlfriend was found chained in his basement. That proved just to be a forewarning of his future behavior. By 1986, Gary fully committed himself to deviant behavior and started enacting his sex-slavery plan. He procured his first sex-slave, a part-time prostitute, on Thanksgiving Day. He kept the hapless woman in a pit in his basement and fed her only bread, water and dog food. Soon three more prisoners were added to the harem. By February, 1987, one of the sex-slaves starved to death after hanging from the rafters for several days. The new recruit he procured proved not to be submissive enough and was promptly killed by Gary by hooking her to electrodes and forcing her to stand in a pit full of water.
Gary proceeded to dismember the two dead girls and stashing bits and pieces of them all over his household. He also grounded pieces of their flesh, mixed it with dog food and fed it to the other captives. On March 22, 1987, one of the captives escaped and told authorities about Gary's torture chamber. At first no one believed her until she led authorities to the site. Police we horrified by the conditions in which they found the other girls as well as the ample evidence of Gary's culinary delights.
During his trial, his defense attorney tried to blame his psychosis on LSD experiments allegedly performed on him by the military during his tour of duty in the 60's. The jury did not buy it and on July 3, 1987, condemned Gary to death. On December 31, 1988 Gary overdosed on Thorazine and fell into a comma from which he later recuperated. The latest report on Gary puts him on his way to be executed by lethal injection at the Rockview State Prison in Bellefonte. Much to his chagrin his April 15, 1997 appointment with death was -- after a week-long barrage of suits and counter suits -- temporally barred by U.S. District Judge Franklin S. Van Antwerpen, pending a hearing to determine his mental competency.
At the hearing three psychiatrists retained by death penalty opponents said Heidnik was incapable of understanding the proceedings. "If there's an Olympics for mental illness, Mr. Heidnik would have won a gold medal," Dr. Lawson Bernstein said. A true martyr, Gary wants to be lethally injected, "I want you to execute an innocent man so there will be no more capital punishment. When you knowingly execute an innocent man, that's the end of capital punishment in this country." Court psychiatrist John O'Brien said Heidnik's grandiosely noble logic is a way of coping with impending death. "He is recasting his situation to appear in the best possible light," said O'Brien, noting that Gary was being interactive, pleasant and funny.
Proving that sadistic torturers have rights too, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lower court wrongly denied Maxine Davidson White's request to intervene in the case of her father, Gary Heidnik, and, in effect, ordered U.S. District Judge Franklin S. Van Antwerpen to issue an indefinite stay for his execution.
On June 25, 1999, the state Supreme Court granted Gary Heidnik's request to be put to death, ruling that Heidnik's daughter had no right to try to block the execution on his behalf. In a unanimous decision the court ruled that Heidnik was mentally competent and could make his own decisions regarding an appeal, denying "standing" to his daughter, Maxine Davidson White, a Temple University student.
Heidnik's lawyer said his client "really wants to die" because if not he would be subject to beatings if he were to be removed from solitary confinement, where he is housed because of the death warrant, and returned to the general inmate population.
Heidnik, 55, is incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh. Michael Lukens, a Corrections Department spokesman, said Heidnik, who claimed to be mute because the devil had placed a cookie in his throat, expressed no change of heart to prison officials about being executed. "He's under no obligation through the legal process to tell us anything," Lukens said, "but he's given us no indication he intends to change his mind."
Finally, on July 7, 1999, Heidnik was put to death by lethal injection by the Commonwealth of Pensylvannia. Media witnesses said one witness associated with the victims exclaimed, "Thank you Jesus" and mumbled obscenities just before Heidnik was pronounced dead by Centre County Coroner Scott Sayers. The killer's final meal consisted of black coffee and two slices of cheese pizza. Heidnik spent the hours before his death either resting or pacing in his cell. He was visited by his daughter who later did not witness the execution. His only request on the last day of his life was for a radio to be played outside his cell and that it be tuned to country music.
After his death Governor Tom Ridge issued the following statement: "Twelve years ago, Gary Heidnik kidnapped six women. For four months, he imprisoned them in chains, in the filth and stench of a hole dug under his home. He raped and tortured those poor women, in ways that are too depraved and brutal to describe. He killed two of them, Sandra Lindsay and Deborah Dudley.
"So horrible were his deeds, a jury of twelve Pennsylvanians determined unanimously that he must forfeit his life. Tonight, he paid that price. In doing so, he suffered far less than the women he tortured and killed. Our thoughts and prayers tonight are with them."