Twenty five years after convicted murderer Gary Heidnik set out to father an extended
family in his North Philadelphia basement, the author revisits his
own link to Philadelphia’s most notorious crime.
Kinetoscope Trailer from 1990 interviews with Josefina Rivera
Sometime in the late summer or early fall of 1986, Gary Michael Heidnik, a 43-year-old self-ordained minister and some-time stock trader, descended the basement steps of his North Philadelphia home and began digging a four-foot deep hole in the hard earth floor.
Over the next nine months the hole
would grow ― ultimately becoming home to six partially clad women,
only four of whom would live to one day stumble back up the basement
steps.
So began Gary Heidnik’s spectacular
run as Philadelphia’s most reviled celebrity. Long before Hannibal
Lecter enjoyed fava beans and Chianti, Heidnik was stockpiling a
freezer full of human body parts in his Fanklinville house. For
those of us coming of age in the city during the late 1980s, the
entire spectacle offered a chilling backdrop to our formative years.
When the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
executed Heidnik by lethal injection on the night of July 6, 1999,
after feeding him a last meal of pizza and black coffee, Philadelphia
closed the book on one of the most notorious chapters of its criminal
history. Some people might call that closure.
But scratch just a bit below the
surface and one wonders if, in the end, the sensationalism of
Heidnik’s crimes and the urgency of closing a horrendous case
didn’t serve to distort ― or at least simplify ― the story of
what really happened inside 3520 N. Marshall Street in the winter of
1986-87.
Never fully resolved are questions regarding the actions of the first woman taken captive, a young prostitute named Josefina “Nicole” Rivera, who after four months as Heidnik’s prisoner managed to escape and notify police. Newspaper accounts of the day describe her as “courageous” and recount her dramatic flight from her deranged captor. But they make little mention of the persistent allegations of the other survivors that as days and weeks passed in the Marshall Street basement, Heidnik’s “senior” captive began to emerge as a key player in the events unfolding there.
Never fully resolved are questions regarding the actions of the first woman taken captive, a young prostitute named Josefina “Nicole” Rivera, who after four months as Heidnik’s prisoner managed to escape and notify police. Newspaper accounts of the day describe her as “courageous” and recount her dramatic flight from her deranged captor. But they make little mention of the persistent allegations of the other survivors that as days and weeks passed in the Marshall Street basement, Heidnik’s “senior” captive began to emerge as a key player in the events unfolding there.
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| Gary M. Heidnik, Philadelphia Police mugshot |
Yet despite these facts, the state chose Rivera as its star witness against Gary Heidnik, overlooking evidence that could have potentially implicated her as a co-conspirator. It's not hard to see why: Heidnik’s penchant for victimizing the mentally disabled meant that trial testimony from his victims would be shaky at best; his defense team, led by Philadelphia super lawyer A. Charles Peruto Jr., would tear them apart on the stand.
But Rivera presented something
different. Educated, savvy and well spoken, she had just the right
combination of cunning and credibility to ensure Heidnik a trip to
the execution chamber. And in the end, that’s just what she did.
As a 20-something sophomore at Temple
University, my own involvement with the case began shortly after
Heidnik’s trial when I joined my father and a filmmaker friend in
purchasing Josefina Rivera’s story with the intention of turning
the whole lurid affair into a movie. While that project never
managed to coalesce, throughout the process our little group began to suspect
that the complexities of trying such a sensational case had led
prosecutors to minimize Rivera’s role by any means necessary ―
including, as it turns out, at least one allegation of witness tampering.
Like so many other Philadelphia
natives, the Heidnik case still haunts me. But at the heart of my
unease is a gnawing sense that key parts of the story were never fully
explored, and important questions never answered (although Brian
Hickey does a pretty good job in his 2002 Philadelphia Weekly
story “Return to the House of Horrors”).
This
year marks 25 years since Heidnik's arrest and trial, an
anniversary the Philadelphia Daily News chose to commemorate with a
boilerplate profile of Rivera that, sadly, failed to shed any new
light on these enduring questions (despite it being reported by a
superb Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter).
Reading the piece brought back a rush
of memories about meeting with Rivera, and the hours of videotaped
interviews that have spent the last 15 years sitting at the bottom of
my bedroom closet. The last time I dug into them, in 2006, I spent
two months reporting the case for a graduate course in journalism. I decided this was a good a time to dig out those tapes -- and the box of press clippings, trial transcripts and assorted notes where they are stored -- and offer what I consider to be a more comprehensive version of the events.
+++
“I knew from the beginning that the only way out was through Heidnik’s heart. I had to gain his trust.”
- Josefina Rivera
The Court: You have advised her [Josefina Rivera] to testify?Mr. Grimes (Rivera's attorney): Yes.Mr. Peruto: Let the record reflect I have several witnesses that could place her at different scenes that may make her a co-conspirator in this case.
- Commonwealth vs. Gary Heidnik, Preliminary Hearing, April 23, 1987
On Thursday March 26, 1987, the front
page of the Philadelphia Inquirer screamed the headline:
“Horror in Franklinville: Captives Found in Chains.”
 |
| Police search Gary Heidnik's basement in 1987 |
This was not Heidnik’s first run-in
with the law; and a review of his history reveals that the path leading to Heidnik's basement is one he had been paving for quite some time.
In the early 1970s, he had begun frequenting the Elwyn Institute for the mentally retarded in West Philadelphia, using the area as a sort of base of operations for cruising disabled women whom he thought made easy targets for sexual exploitation.
In the early 1970s, he had begun frequenting the Elwyn Institute for the mentally retarded in West Philadelphia, using the area as a sort of base of operations for cruising disabled women whom he thought made easy targets for sexual exploitation.
In 1971 he formed his own church, the
“United Church of the Ministries of God”, naming himself bishop.
Over the next seven years he would continue to exhibit strange and
disturbing behavior ― he maintained a scrubby appearance, often
wearing the same clothes for days in a row, and was said to emit
a foul odor. During that time, while collecting disability from the
U.S. Army, he would also manage to parlay a $35,000 stock investment
into $500,000, evidence of a sharp intellect behind the madman's
veneer.
The windfall granted him the leisure to
pursue his bizarre mission: to serve as father-god to his own harem of wives
and children.
In 1978, Heidnik was arrested after
authorities found his then-girlfriend’s mentally disabled sister
chained in his basement. The institution where she lived had alerted
authorities after the woman failed to return from a visit with her
sister and Heidnik. He would spend just over four years in jail for
the crime. Upon his parole in 1982, he bought his final home ― on
Marshall Street in North Philadelphia.
+++
Throughout the spring of 1987, as the
investigation of Heidnik unfolded, it became apparent to police that
they were dealing with a deeply disturbed human being. From interviews with the survivors, a
picture would begin to emerge of the nightmarish events that occurred
in Heidnik’s home in the weeks following Thanksgiving 1986. Over
the next several months, the victims would tell harrowing tales of
beatings, rape, torture and ultimately murder.
Reading through the trial transcripts,
a picture emerges of life in Heidnik’s basement, which by New Years
Day, 1987, was becoming increasingly crowded with captive women,
prompting Heidnik to expand his hole. Most of the women maintained street
personas, and names tend to shift and morph depending upon context
and who is speaking. There was Agnes Adams, also called “Vicky”;
Jacqueline Askins, known as “Donna”; and “Nicole”, Josefina
Rivera’s own alter ego.
Within a short period of time, a
strange hierarchy began to develop in the basement as Heidnik placed
Rivera in charge of the other girls.
“Since I was the first, I had
seniority over the everyone else,” Rivera recalled. It was a
responsibility her co-captives insisted she accepted with some
relish.
 |
| Lisa Thomas |
For the other women in the basement,
Rivera soon became an object of fear. The senior member in charge ―
Gary’s eyes and ears ― on a whim she could bring his wrath.
“Gary would ask Nicole should he do
this, should he do that, and she would tell him yes,” Thomas
testified at the preliminary hearing.
In a moment of creativity, according to
Thomas, Nicole even invented a new form of torment ― electrocution
― showing Heidnik how, by placing electrical cables on the women’s
chains, he could make them writhe and jump.
“She would tell us that she’s gonna
put water in the hole,” Thomas explained, “and while she’s
doing that, she was laughing and she was putting the wires in the
hole with the water.”
Rivera vehemently denies that she
instructed Heidnik in electrocution torture. “I’m just not that
inquisitive about electricity and stuff,” she said. Yet by her own
admission, she was never a victim of this particular abuse.
Abduction turns to murder
Heidnik’s hole was home to five women
when, on February 7, 1986, after spending at least 24 hours on
“punishment” suspended by a single handcuffed arm from a pipe in
Heidnik’s basement, 25 year-old Sandra Lindsay died of apparent
asphyxiation. Lindsay was the second woman taken captive ― within
ten days of Rivera ― and was mentally disabled. To dispose
of the body, Heidnik dragged Lindsay upstairs, dismembered her, and
began methodically cooking her body parts in his oven. According to
Rivera, the body was later ground up and fed to the other women mixed
with dog food. Rivera, however, insists she was never forced to eat
the concoction.
As time passed, a strange relationship
was beginning to materialize between Gary Heidnik and his senior
captive ― one that, in the end, would prove to be his
undoing. Experts have a name for what may have
been happening: they call it Stockholm Syndrome. The term refers to
events surrounding a 1973 failed bank robbery in Sweden during which
several hostages perplexed investigators by exhibiting support and
even sympathy for their captors. Over the course of five days,
strapped with dynamite and under the constant threat of death, the
hostages ― three women and one man ― established an emotional
bond with the robbers that, in at least one case, continued as friendship even after the ordeal was over.
Joseph M. Carver, Ph.D, a clinical
psychologist and expert on Stockholm Syndrome, says that this kind of
bonding between abductees and their captors is a common theme in
social psychology. “In the final analysis, emotionally bonding
with an abuser is actually a strategy for survival for victims of
abuse and intimidation,” Carver writes.
But the other women would dispute this
assessment: they insisted Rivera ― or rather Nicole ― enjoyed what she
was doing, and passed up several opportunities to escape and retrieve
help.
 |
| Agnes Adams |
“There wasn't an opportunity for me to run,” she said. “If I had done that, he would have killed the other girls. He wasn't gonna leave nothing for anyone to find.”
During her last month with Heidnik,
court records show that Rivera traveled with him regularly to run errands. It’s a fact she doesn’t dispute. “We
went to a restaurant, we went to a record shop, and we drove all over
the Pine Barrens looking for a place to dump Deborah Dudley’s
body,” Rivera told us in 1990. “We did a lot of things.”
+++
“I don’t know who’s gonna die here, but I’m not gonna die here.”
- Josefina Rivera
Q: Whose idea was it to give the girls electric shocks?A: It was Nicole’s.
- Testimony of Lisa Thomas
For more than 10 years the tapes sat in
my closet.
Periodically,
while rifling through a stack of long-outgrown blue jeans or
launching some valiant attempt at forcing a little organizational
structure into my fragmented life, the small silver Maxell boxes
would reappear, representing something mysterious and, frankly,
discomfiting.
I didn’t even have a VCR.
The floor model I finally bought at the
local Sears didn’t come with a box, so I carried it to my car
wrapped in a plastic trash bag. Later that night, I’m sitting on
my bed holding the box marked “Josefina: 1-2” in my
hands. With trepidation I place the tape in the machine. For a
moment, I’m staring at a black screen, wondering if something isn’t
wrong with the VCR or if perhaps a decade at the bottom of a musty
closet might have detrimental effects on videotapes.
And
then she appears.
She
sits before a light gray backdrop. Her skin is the color of bronze
and her dark eyes dance nervously across the camera lens as she waits
for the interview to begin. She is visibly worn beyond her 29 years,
with dark troubled eyes and the reluctant smile of someone who is
used to getting over. Rivera was just 25 years-old when Heidnik
abducted her and the trauma of her captivity, compounded by years of
street life, have etched an element of sadness into her face. And yet
the sadness is framed by an unmistakable trace of self-confidence.
She wears a homemade cross around her left wrist, but other
than that, the halter-top she is wearing makes her appear naked
before the camera.
While the story she tells follows
closely her testimony at trial, the tapes themselves reveal much
about the woman in them. Rivera is simultaneously
headstrong and coy, vaguely comfortable in her role before the
camera, keenly aware that gestures, smiles and turns of phrase carry a power
all their own. If she wasn’t born an actress, she learned to become
one, to easily switch between personas when her life depended on it.
It's a gift that ultimately saved her from Heidnik's basement: As
Nicole, she could live, survive, make it out someday. As Josefina, she was surely doomed.
The birth of Nicole
Josefina Rivera was born and raised
just miles from the Marshall Street house where Gary Heidnik would
years later hold her captive. An intelligent girl from a
working-class family, Rivera recalls a pleasant childhood. Raised by
foster parents, she exhibited early on the gift of adaptability
necessary for survival in her hard-scrabble Fairmount neighborhood ―
today largely gentrified, but at the time a marginal barrio of
hard-working, lower-income Latino families mixed with working-class
Whites. “My parents were strict,” she remembers, “but we never
wanted for anything. They were good foster parents.”
 |
| Josefina Rivera |
At a young age Rivera learned that a
dichotomy existed between the aspirations she was taught to
pursue in school and those more immediate goals presented by the
streets. She attended John W. Hallahan High School, a Catholic girls’
school in North Philadelphia, and by her telling was a capable
student. In fact, on meeting her one is struck by the eloquence with
which she speaks and her seemingly innate comprehension of human
nature. But the lure of
the street was simply too strong to ignore. By the time she was 18,
Rivera had moved out of her home and had her first daughter. As Rivera made the
transition from girl to woman, what emerged was a street-savvy,
fast-talking yet intelligent woman ― a survivor. Nicole emerged.
On tape, she is noticeably reluctant to
talk about her past, and only after being pressed does she offer a
glimpse: how she started Go-Go dancing and, after her eldest daughter
was taken by her biological father, descended into a life of
“hustling.”
“I did it for me and my kids,” she
explains.
+++
+++
“Just one more thing, I can’t understand how this woman has no deal whatsoever.”
- A. Charles Peruto, Preliminary Hearing, April 23, 1987
Gary Heidnik was a lot of things, but
he was not a serial killer. In fact, to kill the women he kept
represented the antithesis of his mission ― to procreate as much as
possible, creating an ever-growing family of wives and children in
the process. As demented as it was, his was a mission of creation,
not destruction. Describing his motives, Rivera testified: “He
thought as though society deprived him of a family and he wanted to
have a family and children.”
As he was chaining her to a pipe in his
basement, Rivera told us, “He kept talking about why he was doing
this, like his reason, that they had taken his kids from him.”
He told the other women the same thing.
“Gary wanted ten girls, he said, and he wanted as many babies as
possible before he died,” Jacqueline Askins, the second-to-last
woman taken hostage, told a reporter in 1987.
In Heidnik’s mind, the women he kept
were under his care. And while no one would argue that he was adept
in his nurturing, the fact that his overall plan necessitated
keeping his “wives” alive is indisputable. Heidnik was
essentially a pragmatist. His methods were crude, but he doesn’t
appear to have gotten any particular enjoyment out of abusing the
women beyond the very direct results of solidifying his control over
them. He wasn’t even particularly good at it. And this was one of
the first weaknesses that Rivera, in her final transition into
Nicole, and freedom, was able to exploit.
+++
Q: Did Josefina Rivera ever strike you?A: Yes.Q: Did she strike you when Gary wasn’t around?A: Yes. And then while he was there she struck me.Q: When she struck you when Gary was not around, was she doing it just to pretend?A: No. She enjoyed it.
- Testimony of Lisa Thomas
“Deborah Dudley’s death is what got everyone free.”
- Josefina Rivera
A month and ten days after the death of
Sandra Lindsay, Heidnik would once again find himself disposing of a
body ― this time of 23 year-old Deborah Dudley, the fourth woman he kidnapped.
While accounts of Dudley’s death are
fragmented, several facts are clear: As punishment for some
infraction, Askins, Thomas and Dudley were placed in the water-filled
hole, which was then covered with a board. Heidnik, with Rivera’s
help, began applying electrical wires to a common chain connecting
the women, sending a shock through them all. According to Rivera,
Dudley, who was in the middle, was getting the brunt of the current.
In her court testimony, Rivera says,
“He told me to come over and hold the wire to Deborah’s chain and
I held the wire there. And then I took the wire off.”
On video, she describes what happened
next. “You could hear Debbie hollering and screaming and then she
just stopped,” Rivera recalls. “Heidnik thought there was
something wrong with the cord, so he went upstairs to find another
one. Then Donna [Askins] started saying that Debbie was dead, that she was
face down in the water so when Heidnik came back down, I told him
he’d better check on Debbie.”
Speaking to us in 1990, Rivera offered her theory of why things ended so badly for Dudley. “When Deborah Dudley
came, she was arrogant, she was loud, determined to do things her
way. Nobody liked her,” she said, adding bluntly: “She was one of those people
that’s just a pain in the ass. There’s one in every crowd.”
 |
| Heidnik in custody, 1987 |
By helping Heidnik with the torture and murder of Dudley, Rivera gained enough of his trust to begin laying the path to her eventual escape. She says it was only after Dudley’s death that her chains first came off ― after Heidnik made her sign a letter confessing her role in the murder and subsequent disposal of the body. Other witnesses have testified that they saw Rivera on the street before that. But regardless of exactly when Rivera’s chains came off, she seems certain that her escape, six days after Dudley’s death, would not have happened without it. A week after the incident, Heidnik would be behind bars.
Standing in the New Jersey Pine Barrens
with her captor as they disposed of Dudley’s body, Rivera says,
“everything just broke.”
+++
There are several conflicting versions
of Rivera’s eventual escape from Gary Heidnik. According to the
account she told us in 1990 (and one she repeated in court testimony), on March 24 -- under the pretense of
getting him another captive -- she convinced Heidnik to allow her out
on her own. (According to Laker, she had been promised she could see
her family; other accounts have her getting permission from Heidnik to phone her mother). While Heidnik waited at a gas station near 6th and
Girard, Rivera made her decision to put an end to his bizarre
drama.
At trial, Rivera first claimed she went
straight to her family’s house to call police, but then admitted stopping at her boyfriend Vincent Nelson’s house first. According
to Nelson, who was interviewed on March 30, 1987, by the Philadelphia
Inquirer, Rivera suggested to him that they go and rob Heidnik
and then exact revenge before they ultimately decided to call the
police. According to police reports, Heidnik had nearly $2000 in cash
on him when he was arrested.
But those details would not come out at
trial. According to Rivera, the prosecution was able to use some
form of leverage against Nelson, who had a criminal record and had
done prison time. “The DA’s office went down there and told him
he was gonna go to jail if he didn’t keep his mouth shut,” Rivera
said of Nelson. “A lot of what he was saying wasn’t true.”
Whatever happened, Nelson never
testified as a witness for either party during the trial. But
according to Heidnik’s attorney, that wasn’t for lack of effort.
Charles Peruto Jr. is not an easy man to get a hold of; back in 2006, after trading voice messages for more than a week, I finally got him on the phone. As Heidnik’s attorney throughout the case, I sensed he was anxious to set the record straight. Peruto said he planned to call Nelson as a rebuttal witness, hoping to show that Rivera was not in such a rush to get the police involved.
Charles Peruto Jr. is not an easy man to get a hold of; back in 2006, after trading voice messages for more than a week, I finally got him on the phone. As Heidnik’s attorney throughout the case, I sensed he was anxious to set the record straight. Peruto said he planned to call Nelson as a rebuttal witness, hoping to show that Rivera was not in such a rush to get the police involved.
“The day he was scheduled to testify
he called me and said he couldn’t do it; that they would lock him
up if he testified,” Peruto said. “He disappeared after that, I
couldn’t find him anywhere. When he resurfaced a year later, he
told me that a detective had visited him and told him that they had
something on him and he’d be in serious trouble if he testified.”
While Peruto said that on some level,
he believes the victims in the Heidnik case got the justice they deserved, he
admitted there are some loose ends that continued to nag him even after 20
years.
“I have always contended that
Josefina Rivera was more than just an innocent bystander,” Peruto said.
But Peruto added that as far as he
knows, there was never any discussion about pressing charges of any
kind against Rivera, despite the incriminating testimony of the other
victims. “Only the District Attorney would be in any position to
file charges,” he said, “and let’s face it, they weren’t
going to have their star witness charged with a crime.”
Peruto speculated that at some point,
Rivera ceased being a victim and became at least a quasi-accomplice.
Throughout the preliminary hearing, he seemed perplexed that Rivera
should testify at all without some sort of deal.
“Do you have a lawyer,” he asked
her in court.
“Yes I do,” she replied.
“Did the lawyer tell
you you’re not to be prosecuted?”
Peruto pressed.
“No,” Rivera answered.
Later in the hearing, Peruto raised the
question again. “And you have no idea whether you’re going to be
prosecuted or not?”
At that point the judge put a stop to his questioning. “I don’t think you need to explore that any further,” the court instructed the attorney.
At that point the judge put a stop to his questioning. “I don’t think you need to explore that any further,” the court instructed the attorney.
My day with Josefina
It was a hot September day in 1990 when
I first met Josefina Rivera.
Our meeting followed several weeks of
negotiations and wasn’t ultimately confirmed until that very day.
About six months prior, my father
and his friend -- the documentary filmmaker Ronald Hersh -- were driving
back from a dinner meeting in Center City. They stopped at a red
light on the corner of Broad and Poplar Streets and were approached
by a young prostitute. It was early spring, and the car
windows were down; in an attempt to engage the men in conversation,
she leaned seductively against the open car window. At that moment
Hersh, seated in the passenger seat, noticed the clumps of tiny scars
that dotted the woman’s forearms. “My God,” he asked, “what
happened to your arms?”
She asked them if they remembered the Heidnik case. Both men said they did.
“Well, I was one of his captives,” the woman revealed.
At that time, Hersh owned a small
independent film company and was working as a director for ABC. Talk began of developing a proposal for a film based on Rivera's experience. For the next several months
the two men quietly worked to develop a game plan. When my father
asked for my help with the project, I readily accepted.
First, we needed to get Rivera’s
story ― the whole story ― in her own words. A formal interview
was arranged. For two hours and through two videotapes, Rivera
recounted her life, focusing on her four months with Gary Heidnik.
We hoped to get at least one of the
other women’s stories too. And so, in an attempt to track one of
them down, I was charged with picking Rivera up at her home and
driving her on a series of “errands” ― hopefully finding either
Lisa Thomas or Agnes Adams in the process.
When I pull up in front of her North
Street rowhouse, Rivera is waiting for me. It’s approaching 90
degrees outside, and to make matters worse, the power window on the
driver’s side of my silver 1982 Mercury Cougar is busted, allowing
me barely two inches of fresh air. The air conditioner has never
worked.
Without waiting for me to open the door
for her, Rivera hops into the front seat and we begin to drive east on
Girard Avenue. Rivera is sparsely dressed in a white half shirt and
denim cut-offs. Her frizzy hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail;
she wears sandals on her feet.
“Can’t you roll down that window?”
she asks. Her face is hardened, yet I can see she was attractive
once. I sense that her petite frame and inviting smile mask a
potential for fierceness that must come as a shock to those who are
experiencing it for the first time. Her arms are dotted with small,
soft fleshy spots ― the scars, she tells me, are from the shackles
she was forced to wear in her days of captivity. After that, we
speak little of Heidnik. Right away, I sense Rivera ― or Nicole ―
is in full control. Immediately, it seems, she knows what
role to play, which persona is appropriate today. She is flirtatious,
but only half-heartedly. I’m not worth the effort. She knows I know
her story, but that seems incidental. Her casualness begins to put
me at ease.
After driving for several minutes,
Rivera tells me she needs to get cigarettes. She’ll show me where
to go. Passing several convenience stores on the way, we finally
stop in front of a small run-down corner store on Front Street in the
city’s “Badlands” section of Philadelphia ― an area infested with drugs and
gangs. “I’ll be right back,” she says.
 |
| Brian Hickey's 2002 Philadelphia Weekly cover story re-examined the case |
After about five minutes, she’s back.
I see no pack of cigarettes. Later, when she asks me for one of my
own, I resist the temptation to call her out on her pit stop. At the
time, I accepted her inconsistencies as par for the course ―
symptoms of a life I could never fully understand.
For the next several hours, we drive
around Philadelphia ― making several stops to ask about the other
girls before finally winding up in front of the DA’s office on Arch Street where
Rivera has a scheduled appointment. While we accomplish little of
substance that day, the experience leaves an indelible mark on
me.
Over the course of the next year, the
movie project slowly dissolved, becoming one of those “if only”
memories Dad and I occasionally rehash over dinner and drinks.
+++
Q: Are you still friendly with Nicole?A: No, I’m not.Q: How Come?A: Because she helped him.Q: She helped him do what?A: Kidnap me.
- Testimony of Agnes “Vicky” Adams
Heidnik was eventually charged with two
counts of murder, as well as multiple counts of kidnapping, rape,
aggravated assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent
exposure, false imprisonment and unlawful restraint.
At his trial, Heidnik went so far as to
openly blame the killing of Sandra Lindsay on the other girls,
specifically Rivera and Thomas. “Rivera was the brains behind it,”
he testified. “And do you understand that I am guilty of
everything but murder? I did not murder those women. Do you
understand?” The prosecution, for its part, simply chalked Heidnik's defiance up as
further evidence of his delusions.
In the final assessment most would say that murder was a
forgone conclusion for a man like Gary Heidnik -- that it was just a
question of when, not if, he would kill. There's certainly plenty of evidence to support that conclusion.
But consider
that over more than four decades and a string of crimes, Heidnik’s mounting insanity never
crossed the line to murder, yet within three months of his abducting
Josefina Rivera, two women died ― at least one [Dudley] under circumstances
that still aren’t 100 percent clear.
Did some dark part of Rivera enjoy the power she wielded? Did she push Heidnik further than he would have gone on his own as a way of proving her loyalty, gaining his trust, and with it her freedom? Or was she just a pawn in his game, and her actions – which included, by her own admission, helping Heidnik torture and murder at least one person – simply the desperate acts of a young woman struggling to survive?
Did some dark part of Rivera enjoy the power she wielded? Did she push Heidnik further than he would have gone on his own as a way of proving her loyalty, gaining his trust, and with it her freedom? Or was she just a pawn in his game, and her actions – which included, by her own admission, helping Heidnik torture and murder at least one person – simply the desperate acts of a young woman struggling to survive?
I, like most everyone else who knows anything about the case, would like to think it's the latter.
But I can't help but wondering how far I would go. I hope I never
have to find out.