Last week, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal signed the nation’s most
expansive school voucher program into law. Since the GOP sweep of
statehouses in 2010, similar measures have been introduced by the
legislatures of more than 30 states — including Pennsylvania, where a
bipartisan school voucher bill was defeated in the House in December.
Few doubt that there is a crisis in America’s public schools. But
focusing so much attention on where money is spent — instead of how —
oversimplifies a complex problem.
Real reform will require replacing our top-down system focused on
arbitrary benchmarks and administrative minutiae with one that places a
highly skilled class of teachers at the vanguard. We know this because
it’s a long-standing recipe for success in the countries that
consistently out-educate us.
A stubborn faith in American exceptionalism — and in the ability of
money to solve every problem — has left us mired in industrial-age
education policy. Meanwhile, countries such as Estonia, Slovenia,
Singapore, and China have bounded ahead. If U.S. officials took notice,
they chose to remain silent.
Fortunately, that’s beginning to change. In 2010, at the behest of
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development released a study detailing the strategies of
the countries that ranked highest in its educational assessments. Last
fall, the National Center on Education and the Economy updated the
findings to develop a series of recommendations for U.S. policymakers.
A glance reveals a handful of tried-and-true strategies, most
diametrically opposed to America’s. They include diverting resources to
students who need them most, putting less emphasis on class sizes and
more on teacher autonomy, and keeping standardized testing to a minimum. Continue reading at Philly.com.
“The future has already arrived. It's
just not evenly distributed yet.” - William Gibson
I reserve one shelf of my library for
books whose age or condition makes them unsuitable for gen pop. Most
of these volumes – which include such gems as a PartisanReview
from 1952 (featuring the Camus essay “Art and Revolt”), a
tattered Hillman paperback of Cheever stories from 1961, and the
original catalogue from a 1953 show of Fauvist art at MoMa – are
preserved in plastic report folders with a single black snap. It's a
lame strategy, I know; and if it's worked at all it's only because
in their sequestered state they are rarely toyed with. A few of
these books, however, boil with such literary and/or historic
intensity that they demand the occasional fondling (you know the
type). William Gibson's story collection “Burning Chrome” is one
of them.
Published in 1987, the copy of the Ace Books paperback
version of Burning Chrome in my possession is not especially old; but
time has not been good to it. The binding is cracked and the metallic
silver of the original cover is partially gone, bent and abraded to a
soft pulpy white from repeated readings at subway stops, cafes and
bars (my three favorite reading haunts). The pages are all intact and they smell like old binding glue and
cigarette smoke.
I say “in my possession” because my
copy of Burning Chrome does not technically belong to me; as such it
stands as a testament to one of my most enduring book rules: Never lend out a volume that you are not willing to lose. (The person who lost
this one is an old bandmate and cyberpunk enthusiast who I
haven't seen in nearly a decade).
What the book should look like
There are a number of writers who can
rightly be called prescient: Aldous Huxley comes to mind, certainly
Jules Verne and Orwell would count themselves in such a group. But
for those of a certain age, William Gibson is unique; by the time
I read “1984” the book was nearly four decades old; Madonna
topped the music charts and George Bush the elder was in the White
House. Sure, Big Brother had made it into our lexicon, but he wasn't
staring down at us from a “telescreen.” And while I remember (barely) “Brave New
World” as a jarring and tantalizing read (all that implied sex, you know),
life in Huxley's totalitarian World State seemed too far-fetched to
be anything but pure dystopian fantasy.
For readers from my generation,William
Gibson stands above them all for drawing us a topographical map to
our future. Gibson conjured up images of an fully connected, globalized world -- and all the things that could go wrong in such a world -- before most people had ever seen a
personal computer and cell phones were the size of shoe boxes.
Gibson's stories are hardboiled
affairs bubbling with what Bruce Sterling called a combination of
“low life and high tech.” By the time the title story, “Burning
Chrome,” appeared in Omni magazine in July 1982, Gibson had already
conceived of the Matrix, prophesied the rise of hacker culture, and
was sending his own “console cowboys” into cyberspace (a term he
coined, by the way) to snatch booty from rival zaibatsus and
ethereal crime syndicates. (All this a month before the first Commodore 64s hit stores).
“Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a
cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous
system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome
nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of
information, and high above it all bum corporate galaxies and the
cold spiral arms
of military systems. Bobby was another one of those
young-old faces you see drinking in the Gentleman Loser, the chic bar
for computer cowboys, rustlers, cybernetic second-story men. We were
partners.”
Burning Chrome contains Gibson's first
published story: Fragments of a Hologram Rose – which was
written as an assignment for a science fiction class he took at
University of British Columbia in 1977 (the same year that Tandy
introduced the world's first PC, the TRS-80 Model 1.)
Tandy TRS-80 circa 1977
In Fragments, Gibson paints his
archetypical protagonist – the disenchanted nihilist-cum-samurai
seeking purity is a diseased world. In this case it's the lovelorn
Parker who subsists on a diet of cigarettes, coffee and Apparent
Sensory Perception against a backdrop of shantytowns, illegal
immigrants, indentured servitude, shadow corporations and unending
brownouts known as the “Sprawl.” This toxic megapolis turns up
in a number of Gibson's stories; and three of his novels –
"Neuromancer" (1984, the first ever novel to win the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards), "Count Zero" (1986), and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" (1988)
– are known collectively as the Sprawl Trilogy (none of which I own).
Universally recognized as the father of cyberpunk and for making hacking cool at a time when most
hackers couldn't get a date to the prom, Gibson tackles not only
the soul-sucking tendencies of technology, but the alienating inequity of
globalization and the ascendency of multinational corporations as unfeeling empires feeding wanton profit-lust.
His prose is often juiced with an
acetic rhythm and slick vernacular that recalls the Beats – who were an early influence
– and 1940s-era dime-store pulp fiction: Sam Spade meets Blade Runner with some William Burroughs thrown in
for good measure.
“I took you to Barcelona a week before I took you to Vienna. I remember you with your hair tucked back into a gray beret, your high Mongol cheekbones reflected in the windows of ancient shops. Strolling down the Ramblas to the Phoenician harbor, past the glass-roofed Mercado selling oranges out of Africa. The old Ritz, warm in our room, dark, with all the soft weight of Europe pulled over us like a quilt. I could enter you in your sleep. You were always ready.” – New
Rose Hotel.
In his preface to the Ace paperback
edition, Sterling opines: “If poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court
jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophesies, and
scratch ourselves in public.”
Gibson did all of those things
(although I'm not entirely certain about the scratching part). And while we may not have drug-addled
dolphin warriors, virtual reality “sistim” addicts or a sleep-inducing ASP
machine yet, Gibson got it right enough for me. His foresight and creativity places him among a select few writers
who are ahead of their time, and yet will never be outdated (unlike my sad sorry copy of "Burning Chrome.")
Details:
Burning Chrome (paperback) By William Gibson Published by Ace Books (1987) Originally published: Arbor House (1986) Introduction by Bruce Sterling Purchase date/price: N/A Borrowed from bandmate sometime in the late 1990s Condition: poor (significant cover damage, pages ok)
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.
Gary M. Heidnik, Philadelphia Police mugshot
Throughout the preliminary hearing and
trial, the other three victims leveled one accusation after another
charging Rivera with aiding Heidnik despite what
they said were several earlier opportunities to run away and get
help. Even the accounts of her eventual escape are contradictory and
incomplete.
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
Inside a house on the 3500 block of
North Marshall Street, police found three women chained together in a
makeshift basement dungeon. Even more chilling, during a subsequent
search of the house, medical examiners found frozen limbs inside a
freezer in the kitchen and charred human remains simmering in a pot
on the stove. Investigators arrested the home’s owner, Gary
Heidnik, a former nurse and ex-con with a history of mental illness.
As details began to surface, Heidnik would prove to be an enticing
catch.
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 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
Directly under her was Lisa Thomas ―
Heidnik's third abductee, taken three days before Christmas ― but
Rivera admits that it was her duty to tell him when the other girls
misbehaved, which she says she did “on a couple of occasions”
after which the offenders were punished with beatings, torture and
starvation.
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
Agnes
Adams, the last woman taken captive, told the court that Rivera could
have left the house any time she wished and even had a key to the
backdoor. Whether Adams was present in the basement long enough to
formulate such an opinion notwithstanding (Adams spent less than 24
hours as a captive before being rescued), Rivera herself testified
that she left the house with Heidnik on numerous occasions, and in at
least one case drove Heidnik’s Cadillac to a body shop while he
drove ahead of her in his Rolls Royce. When Peruto brought this fact
up at the preliminary hearing, wondering aloud why Rivera didn’t
simply drive away, she said she feared for the safety of the other
women. Rivera told the Daily News' Barbara Laker much the same thing.
“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
By 1970, when Rivera was nine years
old, urban flight, spearheaded by the rapid dissolution of the city’s
industrial base, was changing the face of many of Philadelphia’s
working-class neighborhoods. Anyone who could afford it moved to the
suburbs or the Northeast, leading to increased crime and drugs in
places like Fairmount. By 1985, “urban renewal” would
push Latinos out of the neighborhood, further up Broad Street into
North Philadelphia.
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.
“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.
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
Waiting for her to return, I imagine
what Heidnik must have thought of her. It’s easy to see how a man
of his mental condition could fall for her. By the end, I think
Heidnik must have truly believed she was on his side. Then I think of
his hands around her neck and the fear she must have felt as he led
her down the basement steps. After barely 30 minutes with her I
think I know what she must have been contemplating. “I will
get out of this.”
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.
