March 26, 1987.
Responding to a 911 call, police raid the Philadelphia home of Gary Heidnik and find a appalling and shocking crime scene. In the basement of Heidnik's dilapidated house is a veritable torture chamber where two naked women were chained to the walls and another was stuck in a pit dug into the ground. A fourth woman, Josefina Rivera had escaped and called police.
Gary Heidnik was a former mental patient and sex offender who had somehow managed to become a wealthy stock investor. He owned a Rolls Royce and beat Uncle Sam on his income taxes by making himself the bishop of his own church. The sign on the front of his house read, "United Church of the Ministries of God." One room in his house was wallpapered with money. At the end of 1986, Heidnik decided to create his own harem and began kidnapping women off the streets of Philadelphia.
Six women were kidnapped and held in Heidnik's dungeon. All were raped and tortured while the others were forced to watch. He killed one of the women by putting her in the pit, filling it with water and putting a live electrical wire into the water. Another of the women was killed when Heidnik let her starve to death chained to the wall. In perhaps the most grisly and horrid episode of the entire incident, Heidnik dismembered his victims, cooking parts of their bodies and feeding them to his other captives. The women who were found alive recovered after being treated for dehydration and malnutrition.
Although Heidnik was clearly mentally disturbed (his initial defense was that the women were already tied up in the basement when he moved in and he had been discharged from the Army in 1962 for psychiatric problems), he was found guilty and convicted of murder on July 1, 1988. He received a death sentence, but had not yet been executed as the twentieth century came to an end.
Heidnik was one the inspirations for the Buffalo Bill character in Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs.
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