Gary Michael Heidnik: biography of this serial killer

Gary Michael Heidnik, known as "the baby planter" He was an American murderer and rapist, known for his terrible forms of mistreatment and sexual abuse of the women he had kidnapped in the 1980s.

We'll see now a biography of Gary Michael Heidnik, and how he committed he carried out the heinous crimes of him.

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Gary Michael Heidnik Biography

The life of this sexual criminal is that of a psychopath, who rather than enjoy murder, preferred to delight in the suffering of his victims, feeding on his fear and anxiety. We are going to see his personal life, how his childhood was raw and probably influenced his adulthood to do what he did.

Childhood

Gary Michael Heidnik was born on November 22, 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio., being the son of Michael and Ellen Heidnik, who later had another son, Terry. Gary Heidnik did not have an easy childhood. His parents divorced in 1946, when he was barely three years old. Gary and his brother were in the care of his mother for four years, but then moved in with his father, who had remarried.

In the parental home where Heidnik, as he later claimed, he was physically and emotionally abused by his father. The cause of this was that little Gary wet the bed and his father, to correct the problem while he felt pleasure while destroying psychologically to his son, humiliated him by forcing him to hang the urinated sheets on the window of his room, so that the neighbors would know what had passed.

The school was not a good place for Heidnik either. Despite having good grades, he was not good at interacting with others, and he avoided establishing eye contact with his classmates, since he was the object of their teasing. As a child he had suffered an accident that had deformed his head, and the children, in his cruelty, constantly reminded him by means of comparisons.

But despite his cranial deformity, his brain was intact, at least as far as cognitive abilities were concerned. His intelligence was not below average, quite the contrary. His IQ was 148, meaning technically he was gifted..

military life

On the recommendation of his father, at the age of 14 Gary Heidnik he enrolled in the Staunton Military Academy, in the state of Virginia, where he stayed for two years, and he left her before graduating from it. He would later return to public education, to re-enlist in a military institution, in this case the United States Army at 17 years of age, serving for his country for 13 months.

He showed good skills in training, and his sergeant rated him as an excellent military student. After this military training, Heidnik would apply for different specialized positions, but he was rejected from them. Then, he managed to be transferred to San Antonio, Texas, where he would receive military medical training.

In any case, he did not stay long in the Texan state, being transferred abroad, to Germany. Occidental, at the US Army 46th Mobile Surgical Hospital in the city of Landstuhl.

In August 1962 Heidnik began to feel serious discomfort: nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, and headaches. The neurologist at the hospital diagnosed Gary Heidnik with gastroenteritis, but also he detected symptoms typical of a mental disorder, with which he prescribed trifluoperazine (antipsychotic).

In October of that same year he would be transferred to the military hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he would receive a diagnosis: Schizoid personality Disorder. As a result, he was discharged from the US Army with honors.

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Return to the United States

After being diagnosed with the alleged schizoid personality disorder and stop being part of the US Army, Heidnik would study at the University of Pennsylvania, although it only lasted a semester. He worked as a psychiatric nurse at a Veterans Administration Hospital in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, but he ended up getting fired due to his bad behavior with patients.

From August 1962 until his arrest in March 1987, Heidnik He went from psychiatric psychiatric to psychiatric, because he attempted suicide up to 13 times. Suicidal tendencies ran in his family, since his mother Ellen, who had been Diagnosed with bone cancer and an alcoholic, she ended her life by drinking bichloride of mercury, a compound very toxic. His brother Gary also attempted suicide on several occasions.

In October 1971 Gary Heidnik joined the United Church of God, and in 1975 he opened an account for the church, into which he deposited $1,500. Over time, investing in the stock market, Heidnik managed to amass a total of $500,000 for the church, and by the mid-1980s, the United Church of God would be prosperous and wealthy.

First abuse of women

Gary Michael Heidnik he met his wife through a marriage agency, with which she would contact her future spouse by postal correspondence. Her name was Betty Disto, a Filipino citizen who had arrived in the United States in September 1985 and on October 3 of that same year she would marry Heidnik in Maryland.

But the marriage did not last long, as Betty had the traumatic experience of finding her husband with three women in bed. Throughout the brief marriage, Heidnik forced his wife to watch him sleep with other women. He took great satisfaction in hurting her wife's feelings and sexually abusing her..

Fortunately for Betty Disto, the Filipino community in Philadelphia managed to get her out of such a catastrophic, exhausting and abusive marriage, doing so in January 1986. But despite the bad relationship, Betty became pregnant by Heidnik, giving birth to a son, named Jesse John Disto. Heidnik found out that he was a father when his ex-wife sued him for child support for her child.

But this would not be Gary's only child, obtained through sexual abuse. Later he would have another with Gail Lincow, whom he would call Gary Jr. The boy was placed in foster care shortly after birth. Then he would have a third child with another woman, in this case Anjeanette Davidson, an illiterate woman with an intellectual disability. The daughter of this relationship would be Maxine Davidson, born on March 16, 1978, and also taken to a foster home.

Shortly after Maxine's birth, Heidnik he was arrested for kidnapping and raping Anjeanette's sister, Alberta, who had lived in an institution for people with intellectual disabilities in Penn Township.

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first offenses

But if Gary Michael Heidnik is known for something, better known as "the baby planter" it is for his long criminal life, which dates back to the 1970s. In 1976 Heidnik would commit one of his first crimes, nothing serious compared to what would come later. He assaulted the tenant of a house that he had offered to rent, shooting him in the face, with a weapon for which he did not have a license.

But it would be two years later that he would be taken to jail for the first time, although not the last. In 1978 Heidnik removed the sister of his then girlfriend Anjeanette Davidson from an institution for people with intellectual disabilities. Gary Michael Heidnik didn't do this as a nice detail to his beloved. Heidnik had a strong predilection for dark-skinned, intellectually disabled women, preferably African-American.

The sister, Alberta, was taken into a storage room in Heidnik's basement, and locked there. Once the police learned of the fact, Alberta was taken from there and taken to the mental institution, in where she would undergo a physical examination to find out if she had been mistreated, and, indeed, she had been the one case. Heidnik had raped and sodomized her, as well as giving her gonorrhea.

It was for this reason that Heidnik was arrested and charged with kidnapping, rape, deprivation of liberty and taking advantage of a person with a disability, and spent three years in state-supervised mental institutions.

He begins his career as a serial rapist

In 1986, after being abandoned by his ex-wife Betty Disto, Heidnik would be arrested again and accused of assault, as well as rape and deviant sexual behavior. But this would only be the beginning of his career as a serial killer. Between the years 1986 and 1987 he would commit his chain of murders and rapes followed.

On November 25, 1986, Heidnik kidnapped a woman named Josefina Rivera and, in January of the following year, the total number of women who would have had the bad luck of falling into the hands of Gary Michael would already be four Heidnik. He kept them in a pit in his basement in North Philadelphia. All the kidnapped women were black, and they were raped, beaten and tortured..

It is not known if he did it because he wanted to enjoy the experience of taking someone's life or due to simple carelessness, like someone who forgets to water the plants, or if he really was a mistake, but one of the women, Sandra Lindsay, died from starvation, torture, and from not having received treatment for high fevers that she suffered during her retention.

Given this, Heidnik decided to dismember the corpse, but he had problems with his arms and legs, so he put them in the freezer, keeping them labeled "dog food." He baked the ribs in the oven, and boiled Sandra Lindsay's head in a pot like who boils potatoes. The neighbors complained about the bad smell, and called the police, having no suspicion of the atrocities that were being committed in the house.

However, upon going to Heidnik's home, far from exploring the house and trying to find out where the smell was coming from, the policemen were satisfied with Heidnik's explanation: "I was making a barbecue, I fell asleep and I lost my Burned"

Heidnik is believed to have removed Lindsay's meat and mixed it with dog food, then fed it to the other girls.. However, Heidnik's defense attorney, Chuck Peruto, during the later trials, said that no evidence was found for these claims.

Heidnik had a penchant for electric shock. At one point during the kidnapping, he forced three of his prisoners to stand together in a pit, chained and wired around his body. Heidnik ordered Josefina Rivera and another woman to fill the hole with water, forcing Rivera to apply electricity on the chains of the woman who was in him.

The girl, who had been kidnapped a week after Lisa Thomas, on January 2, 1987, would end up passing away, and Gary Michael Heidnik placed Dudley's body in the Pine Barrens, New Sweater.

carelessness and detention

On January 18, 1987, Heidnik kidnapped Jacqueline Askins to replace the recently deceased Deborah, she being the youngest of the total of six victims of hers, at only 18 years old. When Askins was interviewed in 2018, the 30th anniversary of her kidnapping, she indicated that Heidnik he gagged his victims with duct tape and penetrated their ears with a screwdriver.

On March 23, 1987, Heidnik and his forcibly accomplice, Rivera, kidnapped Agnes Adams. The next day, Rivera managed to convince her kidnapper to temporarily let her go to see her family. Surprisingly, Heidnik believed her and "released" her, but Rivera was no fool. In fact, he had been infatuating his kidnapper for some time in order to manipulate him and release both herself and her other cellmates.

Heidnik took her to a gas station and waited for her there. She walked away and managed to call 911. The police, hearing that the woman had to be chained from the clang that was heard through the phone, went to the gas station and arrested Heidnik. Then they went to her house, discovering the tremendous scene: three women in the basement, one released on the street, and two corpses, one in the fridge and the other buried.

Heidnik's best friend Cyril "Tony" Brown was also arrested, though he was released after posting $50,000 bail and testifying against Heidnik. Brown confessed to witnessing Sandra Lindsay's death and how Heidnik dismembered her. Shortly after her arrest, Gary Michael Heidnik tried to end his life by hanging himself in her cell, to no avail.

The judgments

Gary Michael Heidnik he tried to make the jury believe that the women in his basement were already there when he moved into that house. During the trial, Heidnik was defended by Charles Peruto, who tried to show that his client was legally insane, not aware of what he was doing.

This defense thesis was thrown out by the prosecution, led by Charles F. Gallagher III. Among the proofs of this was used the fact that, while in the United Church of God, he amassed a total of $550,000 in the bank through betting, something an insane person would hardly would achieve.

Also used as a witness was his tax adviser, Robert Kirkpatrick, who had previously advised him on financial matters. Kirkpatrick assured that his former client was astute, aware of his economic decisions.

In the wake of all this, Gary Michael Heidnik was sentenced to two first-degree murder convictions on July 1, 1988, and sentenced to death, being incarcerated in the Pittsburgh State Correctional Facility. In January of the following year he would attempt suicide with an overdose of thorazine (chlorpromazine), without success.

Gary Michael Heidnik was executed on July 6, 1999 at Rockview Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania. His body was cremated. Heidnik has been the last person to be executed in the state of Pennsylvania.

Psychological profile of this criminal

Despite the fact that in his youth he was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder, with the passage of time the possibility began to be considered that Gary Michael Heidnik had faked his symptoms to get compensation, and thus earn money without working.

However, and given the twisted nature of his crimes, it is difficult to believe that he did not have a mental disorder that made him behave in such an inhuman way with his victims. Despite having had depression, several suicide attempts, tics and manias, the psychologists and psychiatrists who interviewed him during his trial they couldn't relate these symptoms to his twisted mind and ability to inflict damage on others people.