Gary Heidnik — The Basement of Horrors

Gary Heidnik was a Philadelphia man who between November 1986 and March 1987 kidnapped six women and held them captive in a pit he had dug in the basement of his home on North Marshall Street. A self-styled bishop who had founded his own church and accumulated a substantial investment portfolio — at one point worth over $500,000 — Heidnik presented a deceptive facade of stability. He had, however, previously been convicted of kidnapping and assault in 1978 and served time in a psychiatric institution. Heidnik chained the women to pipes in the pit and subjected them to systematic sexual torture, starvation, and electric shock. Two women died in captivity. In a particularly horrifying act, he forced the surviving captives to eat food mixed with the remains of one of the deceased victims. His goal, according to his later statements, was to create a harem and father as many children as possible. The crimes were exposed in March 1987 when Heidnik released one of his victims, Josephine Rivera, after she agreed to help him lure additional women. Instead, Rivera immediately led police back to the house. Officers found three women still alive and chained in the basement. Heidnik was arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, rape, and numerous other offenses. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1988. After years of appeals, Gary Heidnik was executed by lethal injection in Pennsylvania on July 6, 1999. His crimes partly inspired the character of Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs, and his case remains one of the most disturbing examples of prolonged captivity and abuse in American criminal history.