EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (15 page)

As execution parties took place outside the prison, with John Wayne Gacy t-shirts and other merchandise on sale, Gacy died without remorse. His last words to a correctional officer were, ‘Kiss my ass.’

Gary M. Heidnik

She had fallen out with her boyfriend and stormed out of the house. But now what? It was rainy and cold and she really wished she had a ride. As she stared down the street into the rain, a silver and white Cadillac Coupe de Ville rolled slowly past her, splashing through the puddles at the side of the road. It stopped and the window rolled down. As she leaned in, the man in the driver’s seat asked her if she needed a lift. She thought for an instant, taking in his neatly trimmed beard and blue eyes. His watch looked expensive and the car was to die for. At the same time, however, his clothes looked cheap and dirty. The rain was not easing off and she decided he was probably alright, just a guy doing a good deed, maybe a little lonely.

He drove her to a McDonalds and bought some coffee and then suggested they drive to his house.

The next morning, Josefina Rivera awoke to the full horror of her situation. She lay on a dirty mattress in the centre of a small room. Metal clamps circling her ankles. The previous night, as he had been showing her round the house, he had jumped her from behind and started to choke her. Then he had pushed her into this room and chained her up. The last she remembered was him going to sleep, his head on her lap.

His name was Gary Heidnik and he lived at 3520 North Marshall Street in North Philadelphia. This was not the first time he had done this.

He had been as failure at school and in 1961 joined the army, serving as a medic. However, his mental instability resulted in an honorable discharge after fourteen months. ‘Schizoid personality disorder’ was how they described his condition. A few years later, his mother committed suicide.

Heidnik’s first brush with the law, in 1976, resulted from a rent dispute with a tenant of a house he owned. He fired a gun at the man, grazing his face with the bullet. Then, in 1978, he kept his girlfriend’s cognitively disabled sister prisoner in a storage cupboard in the basement of his house. He had taken her out of the hospital in which she lived and, when she was eventually discovered, they found she had been raped and odorised. He was arrested, charged with kidnapping, rape, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, involuntary deviant sexual intercourse and interfering with the custody of a committed person, receiving a custodial sentence of three to seven years. The sentence was overturned on appeal, however, and he spent three years in mental institutions, instead of prison. He came out in 1983.

He met a woman named Betty through a matrimonial service and after writing to each other for two years, they married. It was a bad marriage, however. She came home one night to find him in bed with three other women, with whom he forced her to have sex. He raped and beat her and after three months she left him. She was pregnant, however, giving birth to his son after she left him. He would never see the boy.

She went to the police and Heidnik was arrested yet again, on charges of assault, indecent assault, spousal rape and involuntary deviant sexual intercourse. He was lucky, however. Betty failed to show at the preliminary hearing and the charges were dropped.

In 1986, Heidnik hatched a plan to kidnap ten women who would have his babies. Josefina Rivera was the first. He picked her up on 26 November and took her home in his silver and white Cadillac Coup de Ville. She was impressed by his expensive jewellery and watch and by the 1971 Rolls Royce parked in his driveway. But she was puzzled by the seedy, dilapidated nature of the house, the cheap, dirty clothes he wore and the strange key he used to open his door. He told her he had fashioned it so that a part of the key remained in the lock. No one else could get in without that key.

Now, the following morning, she took in the room she found herself in. In the middle of the floor, a pit had been excavated. Heidnik returned and began to make this hole wider and deeper. To her increasing horror, he told her of his plan.

He had always wanted a large family and had already fathered four children by four different women, but no longer had contact with them. Now, he told her, he was going to kidnap ten women and get them all pregnant, so that he could have his family. He then raped her for the first of many times.

Later that morning she began to scream, hoping to alert neighbours or passers-by, but Heidnik came back and used a stick to viciously beat her. He then shoved her into the pit, covering it with wood and weighing it down.

Not long after, Heidnik removed the wood above her prison and helped her out of the pit. There was now another woman in the room and Heidnik introduced her as Sandy Lindsay. He had befriended her at the Elwyn Institute, a local hospital for the mentally and physically handicapped. She had already had an abortion when she had become pregnant with Heidnik’s baby. When he had found out, he had been enraged and offered her $1,000 to have his baby. She refused and he kidnapped her.

Sandy’s family began looking for her and he wrote a note to her mother, posting it in New York and explaining that she was going away for a while.

Josefina and Sandy remained in the room together for weeks, being fed only now and then and being raped on a regular basis. They were beaten when they screamed for help and were punished by a visit to the pit whenever they breached one of his rules. He would also suspend them for hours at a time by one arm.

Meanwhile, Sandy’s mother told the police that she thought her daughter was being held against her will by a man she knew as Gary and gave them Heidnik’s address. When an officer went to the house, he got no reply and the case was dropped.

In late December, Heidnik brought another victim into the room, nineteen-year-old Lisa. He was just under a third of the way to his ten slaves. Twenty-three-year-old Deborah Dudley arrived shortly after. She was feisty, often fought back and was savagely beaten.

Heidnik now began to use the girls against each other, appointing one to be in charge when he went out and to report any infractions to him on his return. She would then be ordered to beat the others. If no one was reported to have misbehaved, he would beat them all anyway.

Their food depended on his changeable moods. Eventually, he reduced them to a diet of tinned dog food, beating them until they ate it.

A fifth girl arrived in the middle of January – Jacqueline, a petite eighteen-year-old. She was so small, in fact, that the shackles would not fit and he had to improvise with handcuffs. It was Josefina’s birthday that day, and he surprised them with a meal of Chinese food. Josefina was rapidly turning into his favourite. He also thought – wrongly as it turned out – that she and Sandy were pregnant by him.

In early February, Sandy grew sick and after a week, she died. He dragged her upstairs and before too long the surviving girls were horrified to hear the sound of a power saw. They could only imagine what he was doing and when one of his dogs came into the room carrying a long, meaty bone, their worst imaginings were confirmed. Heidnik had ground up Sandy’s flesh and began serving it to the girls mixed with dog food. He cooked other parts of the body and kept some in his fridge. When the house began to smell very badly as a result of the rotting flesh, the neighbours complained. Heidnik, smooth as ever, told the police officer who called round, that he had merely overcooked a roast dinner.

He became increasingly paranoid that the girls were plotting against him. Therefore, to put an end to this, he hung them from a beam, took a screwdriver and gouged inside their ears in an attempt to deafen them. The pain was intense and their screams were muffled by gags he had stuffed in their mouths. He left his favourite, Josefina, alone.

One day, when Deborah had been causing her usual share of trouble, he unchained her and took her upstairs. When she returned, she was uncharacteristically cowed. He had lifted the lid on a pot on his stove, she told the others, and inside was the head of Sandy Lindsay looking up at her. He showed her Sandy’s ribcage cooking in the oven and opened the fridge to show her an arm and other parts of her body. He warned her that this is what would happen to her if she persisted in causing trouble.

He introduced new punishments, electrocuting the girls with bare wires, all except Josefina who now slept in his bed and spent time alone with him. One day, he ordered her to fill the pit with water and he threw the girls in. He then touched Deborah with the exposed wire and she writhed in agony before collapsing into the water. She was dead. He wrapped her body up and put it in his freezer.

As the weeks passed, he began to soften slightly towards the girls, letting them watch television and giving them mattresses, blankets and pillows. He also began to let Josefina accompany him on trips out of the house, on one of which they disposed of Deborah’s body. On another, they found a slave to replace Deborah, a woman called Agnes. Josefina, however, was merely waiting for her chance. On 24 March, four months after she had been captured, she persuaded him to let her visit her family, on condition that she would bring back another woman. Naturally, as soon as her boyfriend opened the door to the apartment they shared, she blurted out her story. He found it hard to believe and so did the police when they arrived. When she showed them the manacle marks on her ankles, they began to believe her.

They arrested Heidnik at a petrol station and then went to 3520 North Marshall Street where they discovered the full horror of what he had done. The girls were chained to a beam and clad in nothing more than flimsy blouses and socks. They found Agnes cowering in the pit. In the kitchen they found an industrial food processor, recently used, and an oven dish containing a human rib. When an officer opened the fridge door, he was confronted by a human forearm lying on one of the shelves.

Incredibly, when he was first arrested, Heidnik was initially released, having claimed that the women had already been at his house when he moved in. This legal tactic has since become known as the ‘Heidnik Defence’ and has been used in countless cases around the world. Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer used it, claiming that the body parts and vat of hydrochloric acid he used to dissolve the bodies of his victims were already in his apartment when he moved in. Heidnik turned out to be a wealthy man, with $550,000 in an investment account, registered in the name of the United Church of the Ministers of God, in an effort to avoid paying tax. But it proved little help to him when he was put on trial. In fact, it hindered him at one point. His smart investments served as proof, it was suggested, that he was perfectly sane. During the trial, he persistently denied the abuse of his victims, claiming, for instance, that Sandy Lindsay had been killed by the other captives because she was a lesbian.

He was found guilty on two counts of first degree murder, five of rape, six of kidnapping, four of aggravated assault and one of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. He was sentenced to death and, as he had done throughout the trial, showed not an iota of emotion as the sentence was read out, claiming at one point that he wanted to be executed because the execution of an innocent man would help the case against the use of the death penalty in America.

Eleven years later, on 6 July 1999, at 10.29 pm, he was executed by legal injection. No one came forward to claim his body.

Jeffrey Dahmer

The night of 22 July 1991 was an oppressively hot one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city. Sweat dripped from the two police officers as they sat in their patrol car around the area near Marquette University at around midnight. Suddenly, they spied a short black man wearing what looked like a pair of handcuffs. The cuffs suggested he might have escaped from police arrest, and they apprehended him. When questioned, however, Tracy Edwards started to tell them about a ‘weird dude’ who had invited him up to his apartment, put the handcuffs on him and threatened him with a knife.

It sounded to the officers like a lovers’ tiff, but they decided to investigate just the same and knocked on the door of apartment 213 in the Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street. The door was opened by a well-groomed, good-looking thirty-one-year-old man with blond hair.

The blond man seemed very calm and rational and his apartment looked reasonably tidy. However, a strange smell pervaded the place. Without any fuss, he said he would go and get the key to the handcuffs which was in the bedroom. Edwards warned the officers that the knife he had been threatened with was also in there. So one of the officers went to check, but, on his way, saw that there were photographs lying around showing dismembered bodies and skulls in a refrigerator. He shouted back to his colleague to cuff the blond man and arrest him. The blond struggled and screamed as the other cop tried to put the cuffs on him, but the officer quickly managed to subdue him.

The first officer at this point decided to have a look in the fridge and when he opened the door, he froze in horror. A pair of eyes stared out at him from a disembodied head. ‘There’s a fucking head in the refrigerator,’ he screamed.

The freezer contained a further three heads, wrapped tidily in plastic bags. In the closet in the bedroom he found a stockpot containing decomposed hands and a penis. On the shelf above were two skulls. There were male genitalia, preserved in formaldehyde and a range of chemicals – ethyl alcohol, chloroform and more formaldehyde.

There were also photographs in a filing cabinet, taken as the victims died as well as afterwards. A man’s head was shown in one, lying in the sink; another depicted a victim, cut neatly open from neck to groin; others showed victims still alive, in erotic and bondage poses.

Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee in May 1960, to Joyce and Lionel Dahmer. The family later moved to Iowa, where Lionel was working on his Ph.D at Iowa State University and then on to Akron, Ohio.

At first, Jeffrey was an ordinary, happy little boy. At the age of six, however, he had surgery for a double hernia and his father believes he was never the same again. ‘he seemed smaller, somehow more vulnerable . . . he grew more inward, sitting quietly for long periods, hardly stirring, his face oddly motionless,’ he later wrote. And it did not get better as Jeffrey grew older and became tense and extremely shy. At his trial it was revealed that, as a child, he would collect dead animals and strip the flesh from them, on one occasion mounting a dog’s head on a stake.

In his late teenage years, as others began to carve out notions of what they were going to do with their lives, Jeffrey seemed completely unmotivated. Instead of thinking about girls and a future career, he was locked into a gruesome fantasy world that featured death and dismemberment. By now he was drinking a lot and was considered a loner and alcoholic by classmates.

When Jeffrey was almost eighteen, his parents got divorced, Lionel remarrying a few months later. It was around this time that Dahmer committed his first murder, killing Steven Hicks, an eighteen-year-old hitch-hiker. He invited Hicks back to his house, and killed him by hitting him over the head with a barbell because he ‘didn't want him to leave’. He cut up his body and buried it in the woods behind his house.

Jeffrey enrolled for Ohio State University in 1978, but his drinking got in the way of his studies and he dropped out after just one semester. His father had now had enough of this strangely morose and monosyllabic son of his and gave him a stark choice, either he got a job or joined the army. There was no way he was getting a job. So, Lionel drove him to the army recruiting office in January 1979.

Again, however, Dahmer’s drinking made life impossible and, after being stationed in Germany for a couple of years, he was discharged early for drunkenness. He moved in with his grandmother back in Milwaukee and got a job.

A string of offences followed – drunkenness, disorderly conduct and then indecent exposure and, in 1989, child molesting; he was reported to have masturbated in front of two boys. He persuaded the judge that he had, in fact, just been urinating and was put on probation for a year.

His father wrote later that his son had become ‘a liar, an alcoholic, a thief, an exhibitionist, a molester of children. I could not imagine how he had become such a ruined soul...There was something missing in Jeff . . . We call it a ‘conscience’ . . . that had either died or had never been alive in the first place.’

Dahmer had, by this time, already killed his second victim, Steven Toumi, in a hotel room in September that year. He had picked him up in a gay bar and the two went to a hotel to drink and have sex. When he woke up next morning, Dahmer found Tuomi dead. He stuffed his body into a large suitcase, took it to the basement of his grandmother’s house, had sex with it and masturbated over it before dismembering it and disposing of it in the rubbish.

His third victim was fourteen-year-old Native American, Jamie Doxtator and the fourth was Richard Guerro in March 1988.

His grandmother began to object to the noise and partying in Dahmer’s room in the basement and so he moved into his own apartment in September, 1988. The next day he picked up thirteen-year-old Laotian boy called Sinthasomphone, who agreed to pose for photographs for $50. By grim coincidence, he was the older brother of a boy Dahmer would kill in 1991.

But he did not kill Sinthasomphone and, when the boy returned home, his parents realised he had been drugged. The cops picked Dahmer up on charges of sexual exploitation of a child and second-degree sexual assault. He pleaded guilty, claiming he thought the boy was older.

However, even as he awaited sentencing, he struck again, killing Anthony Sears, a handsome black model. Dahmer boiled the skull to remove the skin and painted it grey. He still had it when he was arrested.

In court, Dahmer put on the kind of manipulative performance only a psychopath can and he escaped the prison sentence being demanded by the prosecution, receiving five years’ probation. He was also ordered to spend a year in the House of Correction under ‘work release’, which meant he went to work during the day and returned to jail at night. In spite of a letter from Dahmer’s father, pleading with the judge not to release him without treatment, he was released after just ten months and went to live with his grandmother, before moving into his rooms in the Oxford apartments in May 1990.

Exactly a year later, a naked fourteen-year-old Laotian, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was found wandering on the streets of the Milwaukee neighbourhood in which Dahmer’s flat was located. He talked to a couple of women, but was largely incoherent, having already been drugged by Dahmer. The police were called and took the boy back to Dahmer’s flat to investigate. Dahmer told them, however, that Konerak was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend and that they had had a drunken argument. The police handed the boy over to Dahmer, noting a strange smell in the apartment. Dahmer killed Konerak a few hours later.

From September 1987 to July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer killed sixteen men, the majority of them black. Their ages ranged from fourteen to thirty-one and they all lived high-risk lifestyles.

The killing process was always the same. He picked his victim up at a gay bar, lured him back to the basement to pose for photographs, usually in return for payment, and then he would offer him a drugged drink, strangle him, masturbate on the body or even have sex with it. He would then cut the corpse up and get rid of it. He would take photographs throughout and would also sometimes boil the skull, to remove the flesh and then paint it grey to look like plastic, keeping it and other body parts as mementos. He began experimenting with various chemical methods and acids to dispose of the flesh and bones which would be poured down a drain or flushed away in the toilet. He often preserved the genitals in formaldehyde.

He told police that he also ate some of the flesh of his victims, claiming that by doing so, they would come alive in him again. He experimented with seasoning and meat tenderisers. Eating human meat gave him an erection, he said, and his fridge contained strips of human flesh.

Before they died, he sometimes tried to perform a kind of lobotomy on his victims. After drugging them, he would drill a hole in their skulls and inject muriatic acid into their brains. He was trying to create a functioning zombie-like creature that he could exercise ultimate control over and control, after all, was really what it was all about. Needless to say, most died during this procedure, but one, apparently, survived for a few days.

On 29 January 1992, the jury was selected for Dahmer’s trial. He was indicted on seventeen charges of murder, later reduced to fifteen, to which he pled guilty, against the advice of his legal team, but claiming insanity. His counsel had to pursue the argument that only a person who was insane could have committed Dahmer’s crimes. The prosecution, on the other hand, had to prove that he was legally insane, an evil psychopath who murdered his victims in cold blood and with malice aforethought.

Security in the courthouse was unlike that for any trial in Milwaukee’s history. A sniffer dog was brought in to search for bombs and everyone entering the courtroom was searched and checked with a metal detector. A barrier, eight feet high, made of steel and bullet-proof glass was erected around the place where Dahmer would sit, to protect him from the public.

The jury deliberated for five hours before deciding that Jeffrey Dahmer should go to prison and not hospital. He was found sane and guilty on all fifteen charges.

On the day of his sentencing, he read out a statement, an apology of a kind. 'Your Honour, it is now over. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn't ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did, but not for reasons of hate. I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused . . . Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I believe that only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me from my sins...I ask for no consideration.’

He got none. He was given fifteen life sentences, a total of 957 years in prison.

They sent him to the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin where, for his own safety, he was kept apart from the general prison population. The segregation was not entirely successful, however, as he was attacked by a razor-wielding Cuban one day while leaving the prison chapel. His wounds, however, were superficial.

On the whole, though, he was a model prisoner, becoming a born-again Christian, and gradually persuading the prison authorities to allow him more contact with other inmates. This proved costly for him.

One day, he was paired with two other dangerous inmates on a work detail. One was Jesse Anderson, a white man who had murdered his wife and blamed it on a black man. The other was Christopher Scarver, a black schizophrenic doing time for first-degree murder who suffered from delusions that he was God. It was a volatile combination, Scarver being partnered with one man, Dahmer, who had killed so many black men and another, Anderson, who had tried to blame a black man for a murder he had committed.

On the morning of 28 November 1994, the guard left the three men to get on with their work. He came back twenty minutes later to find Dahmer and Anderson lying in pools of blood. Dahmer’s skull had been smashed in with a broom handle and he was pronounced dead at eleven minutes past nine in an ambulance on the way to hospital.