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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how.
I am your Norwegian host, Samus Viborg Thun, and tonight I bring to you a fresh new Serial Killer Expo say. I will be surprised if you have heard of tonight's subject. I will, however, not be surprised if you have seen the Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs, based on the excellent book with the same name by author Thomas Harris.
Harris is on my top three list of favorite authors. His writing style is unique, and his research for his works is always extremely extensive, and it shows in the quality of his novels. His most famous works are his four novels about Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising.
I very much enjoy all of them. But The Silence of the Lambs has a special place in my heart. The film based on it started my fascination with serial killers way back in the mid-1990s, and the interest has only increased as I grow older. In the book, we are presented with Hannibal Lecter safely locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane.
But a serial killer is on the loose. The nickname of said killer is Buffalo Bill. He kidnaps women, keeps them prisoner as he feeds them to fatten them up, and ultimately kills them before flaying their skin. He uses the skin to create a suit of a human woman that he wants to put on as he wishes to transform himself.
Bill doesn't torture his victims much, aside from hosing them down with freezing water, if they do not do as commanded. The phrase, "'It puts the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again,' tends to stay in the mind of everyone, long after having seen the film. The women Bill kidnaps are kept in a hole in his basement."
Tonight's subject is one of several serial killers Thomas Harris used as inspiration for the fictional Buffalo Bill. He too kidnapped women to his house and brought them to his basement. He too put his victims down a hole in his cellar floor. The difference is that tonight's subject treated his victims far, far worse than Buffalo Bill.
His name is Gary Heidnik, torturer of at least six women and killer of at least two. And this is his saga.
If you enjoyed this show, please head on over to patreon.com forward slash the serial killer podcast. There you can join the $10 plus club, where everyone who donates $10 or more gets 100% exclusive access to bonus episodes. Right now there are three such episodes out, and they really add spice to the show.
Remember, patreon.com forward slash the serial killer podcast to support the show and gain exclusive benefits as an official TSK producer. Imagine, if you will, dear listener, a David Fincher-esque film not yet made. It's a dark, wet, and freezing night in the slum area north of Philadelphia.
For Josefina Rivera, the 26th of November, 1986, was a night that she will never forget. She has just left her North Philly apartment after having argued with her boyfriend, and was now looking to score some money. For Josefina, work consisted of walking the streets in search of a willing John who would be prepared to pay for her sexual favors.
which usually consisted of a brief liaison in the back of a car or a sleazy motel room. All she needed was a few quick tricks so she could buy Thanksgiving dinner for her family. Scantily dressed, with her makeup starting to smear from the rain and sleet, she walked back and forth, looking anxiously at each passing car.
With the temperature dropping and less and less cars passing, Josefina had almost convinced herself to quit for the night when a car drove slowly past her and stopped. As she moved towards it, she saw that it was a silver and white Cadillac Coupe de Ville. The rain was hammering its shiny hood, and it seemed almost like a thing alive as it sat rumbling close to the curb.
She moved closer as the driver's window slid down, and a bearded man asked if she was hustling. She told him she was, and after a brief discussion concerning payment, she got into the car. The man introduced himself as Gary, and told her he had to make a stop before they got down to business. Josefina, giving her name as Nicole, agreed, and shortly after they pulled into a nearby McDonald's.
What follows is again almost as if taken from some American 90s crime film. The pair, him in shabby clothes and slicked-back curly hair, she in very revealing clothing and heavy makeup, both went in and sat down in a booth. He bought himself a cup of coffee without asking if she wanted anything. With a quick appraisal born of experience, Josefina studied her customer.
The man was fairly fit, white, his face framed by a neatly trimmed dark beard below cold, blue, very intense eyes. He was not ugly, but he had a stern expression to him. Although he wore an expensive watch and jewelry and drove an upper-tier car, she noticed again that his clothes were cheap and soiled. They had stains on them.
Grasping for things to say, she again asked him his name. Gary Heidnik, he answered with a sour expression, sounding annoyed at her talking. Several minutes later, he finished his coffee and told her they were leaving. When she asked where they were going, he told her they were going to his house. After leaving McDonald's, Heidnik drove through the streets, through the rain and sleet and the dark night,
until he turned into North Marshall Street and pulled into the driveway of number 3520, his home. The house was a two-story white-and-black brick townhouse. It had a wooden porch veranda, and the windows were all covered with iron bars. It was a very run-down place, with garbage and old tires thrown across the small front yard.
As he pulled into the dilapidated garage next to the house, Rivera couldn't help but notice another car parked in front of them. It was a 1971 Rolls Royce. For an unkept man living in a seedy neighborhood, he certainly had a taste for expensive cars. When they reached the door, Heidnik pulled out a strange key and pushed it into the lock. When Rivera remarked about it,
He explained that he had cut the key into two pieces, half of which stayed in the lock, preventing anyone but him from entering. The door opened into a kitchen, which was decorated by pennies that had been glued to half of its walls. The light was dim, full of dirty dishes, grime, and the whole place had a sepia look. If you, dear listener, have seen the David Fincher film Seven,
You would instantly understand what sort of place Heidnik's home was. Heidnik led her to a living room with sparse, aging furniture. The only fittings that seemed to be in reasonable condition were a television, a VCR, and a cassette tape player. He offered to show her a movie, but when she refused, he led her up a narrow staircase to his bedroom. As she reached the door of the bedroom, she had to stop.
She didn't quite understand immediately what she saw. In front of her was a hallway leading into the bedroom, and at first glance it looked like it was covered by a tattered, thin rug. But looking closer, she saw that the hallway had been partially covered with one- and five-dollar bills. Heidnik told her to stop hanging about and to get in the bedroom. He wasted no time in stripping his clothes off,
and after giving her a twenty-dollar bill, he jumped into bed. She did the same, and shortly after, her obligation to him was over, or so she thought. As she was getting dressed, Heidnik stepped behind her and began choking her with his hands. Unable to resist, she begged him to stop, and offered to do anything to make him do so. He released his grip,
But instead of letting her go, he pulled her arms behind her and attached a set of handcuffs to her wrists. He then pushed her ahead of him and guided her back down the stairs to the kitchen, where another door led to a basement. The room was cold and damp, and Rivera, dressed only in a blouse, began to shiver uncontrollably.
When she complained, Heidnik told her to be quiet and threatened to hit her with a piece of wood if she did not comply. After she had quieted down, he dragged her to a soiled mattress and attached metal clamps to her ankles and connected them to one end of a chain. He then applied glue to the clamps and dried them with a hairdryer. The other end he fastened around a large pipe that was attached to the ceiling.
When he had finished, he told her to sit up and promptly laid his head in her lap and went to sleep. Having drifted off in the night, Josefina awoke and found she was alone. With the feeble daylight that shone through a small boarded-up window, she was able to view her surroundings. The basement was small, with concrete floor and walls.
Apart from the mattress, the only other items in the room were a chest freezer, a washer-dryer, and a worn pool table. In the center of the room, a small area of concrete had been removed, and a pit had been dug into the ground underneath. While she wondered if she would end up in such a hole, she remembered that it was Thanksgiving, and became ravenously hungry.
A short time later, Heidnik appeared, and offered her an egg sandwich and a glass of juice. She was about to take it, when she began to worry that it might be drugged or even poisoned. Fighting her pangs of hunger, she refused it. Heidnik then took the food away, and returned with digging implements, and set to work to widen and deepen the hole in the floor.
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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable.
For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it.
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As she watched him working, he told her that all he had ever wanted was a large family, and to that end had already fathered four children to four separate women,
but had lost contact with them for various reasons. He told Josefina that his plan was to get ten women and make all of them pregnant to him, so he could raise his family. As Rivera contemplated what his plan entailed, Heidnik approached her and demanded sex, after which he went back upstairs.
Left alone a second time, Josefina managed to loosen one of the ankle clamps and, after prying the covers loose from the window, stretched the chain to its full length and lifted herself halfway out of the window. Unable to escape fully, she began to scream, hoping that a neighbor or passerby would hear and come to her aid. Unfortunately, that particular neighborhood was used to screaming,
and her calls went unheeded by everyone, except one, her captor, Gary Heidnik. Hearing her screams, he managed to pull her back inside the basement and beat her savagely with a wooden club until she quieted down. Then, pushing her down into the tiny hole in the floor, he forced her head onto her chest and covered her with a piece of plywood and stacked heavy weights on top of it.
To make sure that her screams didn't attract any outside attention, he set up a radio and tuned it to a hard rock station at maximum volume and left. As she lay half-naked and cramped up in the freezing earth, Josefina Rivera struggled to breathe and waited to die. Listening to the radio news, she mentally ticked off each hour, wondering when he would come for her.
Twenty-seven hours later, he returned. But he was not alone. From the confines of the pit, even though the radio was still on, Josefina clearly heard a woman complaining and the sounds of a chain dragging across the floor. A short time later, Rivera's heart leapt as the board was lifted and Heidnik dragged her from the pit. Unable to stand properly from severe cramping,
She looked up and saw another young black woman, naked, except for a flimsy blouse, chained to the pipe in the ceiling in the same manner as she had been the first night. She stared at the woman, who seemed to be completely oblivious to what was happening to her. Heidnik later introduced the girl as Sandy, before leaving them alone, as Sandy began to speak
Josefina began to understand why the new arrival seemed so detached. She was clearly intellectually disabled. In my research, all the sources keep referring to Sandy not as having a disability, but simply calls her retarded. It shows how different society viewed marginalized people just three decades ago. Sandy told Rivera that her real name was Sandra Lindsay.
and she had been a friend of Heidnik's for several years since they had met at the Elwyn Institute, which was a local hospital for the mentally and physically handicapped. She described Gary as a good friend, who always looked after her, in a voice devoid of emotion. She described how she had often had sex with Gary and his friend, Tony. Later, she fell pregnant, presumably to Heidnik,
but had an abortion, as she was afraid of being a mother. When Heidnik learned what he had done, he flew into a rage and told her that she was evil, and offered her a thousand dollars to have his baby. When she refused, Heidnik took her prisoner and brought her to the house. As she finished her story, Sandy dissolved into tears as she began to realize her predicament.
To placate her, Rivera told her about herself, describing how at 25 she had three children that didn't live with her and how she had began walking the streets as a teenager. One hour later, Heidnik returned with quote-unquote dinner, which consisted of dry crackers and bottled water. He then left suggesting that the two young women get to know each other better.
Two hours later he returned and resumed his work on enlarging the pit. A short time later he stopped working and raped both women before he left. The following morning he seemed in a buoyant mood and brought them a breakfast of warm oatmeal. While they were eating breakfast, they heard someone knocking on the front door.
Heidnik went to investigate, and returned to tell Sandy that her sister and two cousins had come looking for her, but had gone away assuming no one was home. He later forced Sandy to write a note to her mother, telling her that she had gone away, and would call later. He told the women that he would post the letter from New York, so her mother would think Sandy had run away.
Although Sandy didn't seem to understand the implication of the note, the streetwise Josefina was becoming painfully aware of Heidnik's real intentions, to keep them prisoner indefinitely. Their prison was the cellar with the hole in the ground. It was always very cold, and they only had a small square box with a toilet seat on it to use for their natural needs.
Since Heidnik visited them so sporadically, the box often overflowed, causing the room to constantly smell of feces and urine. The times the women's excrement went outside the small box, Heidnik became furious. He would force the women to clean up, often using their bare hands, and would beat them savagely as punishment. The women would only be allowed to clean themselves up before he wanted to rape them.
As the days dragged into weeks, Heidnik's behavior became increasingly bizarre. He fed them sporadically, and kept them semi-naked so that he could indulge his sexual appetite when he felt like it, which was often. When he was absent, they huddled together for warmth, and waited in fear for his return. On occasion, they tried calling for help,
which resulted in savage beatings which in turn caused them to cry even louder any deviation from his rules was punished by further beatings or a period of incarceration in the dreaded hole another form of punishment he devised was to attach girls to an overhead beam by one arm and leave them suspended for hours on end
This is actually a method of torture very similar to one used by the Spanish Inquisition several hundred years ago. The Nazis also used this method in order to coerce prisoners into divulging secrets. The pain resulting from hanging by one arm from the ceiling is extreme.
The tendons in the shoulder is not meant to sustain the whole weight of the body and will stretch and ache tremendously. Blood flow will also, after a while, be restricted. And left for too long, such a position is fatal. While Heidnik was developing his skills as a torturer, Sandra Lindsay's mother was actively searching for her. The Monday after Sandra supposedly left home,
She was reported missing to the police. While making the report, Mrs. Lindsay told an officer that she believed her daughter was being held against her will by a man she knew only as Gary, who lived at 3520 North Marshall Street. She gave the officer all the information she had, including a phone number, but was unable to provide Gary's last name.
The officer tried calling the number and even went to the house, but got no response. Later, when Mrs. Lindsay showed him the letter she had received, followed by a Christmas card containing five dollars, the officer started to believe that Sandra Lindsay was just one more runaway. As a last resort, the officer went looking for Heidnik's friend, Tony Brown.
He eventually found him at a McDonald's restaurant in West Philadelphia that Sandy was known to frequent. He asked the mentally challenged Tony if he knew the whereabouts of Sandra Lindsay. No, was the simple reply. He then asked him for Gary's last name, but Tony misspelled it as Heideke, H-E-I-D-A-K-E, leading the officer to conduct a search for the wrong man.
and eventually dropped the inquiry. At the time, the officer had no way of knowing how close he had come to avoiding the horrors that followed. On the 21st of December, like many residents of Philadelphia, Gary Heidnik was out shopping, but it wasn't presents he was looking for. Anxious to expand his harem, his collection of sex slaves, as he used to call them,
He cruised the streets looking for a suitable subject. As he turned into Lehigh Street, he found her. As all the other victims of Heidnik, Lisa Thomas was a young black woman. She was on her way to a girlfriend's house when Heidnik pulled up beside her in the Cadillac. It was very cold, and his breath looked like smoke as he leaned out the window of his rumbling car. He sneered and asked how much she charged for sex.
But she became angry and told him she wasn't a prostitute. He quickly apologized and offered her a ride instead. Heidnik managed to appease her by the change in his demeanor and his impressive car. With not very good winter clothing, getting a ride in a nice hot car was simply too tempting for the young woman. So she got in.
He asked where she was going, and she told him she had to go around a corner to her girlfriend's house to pick up something. He drove her there and waited while she went inside. When she returned, he suggested that they go somewhere to eat, and when she agreed, he drove to a local restaurant. While they were eating, he asked her to go to Atlantic City with him the next day, but she complained that she had nothing suitable to wear.
Heidnik then produced a $50 bill, telling her that they would go to a nearby Sears store to buy her some clothes. When they had bought the clothes, Heidnik took her back to Marshall Street and gave her a glass of wine and put on a video movie. While Lisa was watching the movie, she became drowsy from the combined effects of the wine and allergy medicine she was taking.
and eventually lay down on the run-down lounge and fell asleep. Hours later, she woke up to find that Heidnik had undressed her. Before she had time to clear her head, she was taken up to his bedroom and violently raped. When he had satisfied himself, Lisa started to get dressed and asked him in a quiet voice to please take her back to her girlfriend's house. Without a word, Heidnik refused.
grabbed her by the throat and began choking her until she complied with his demands. He handcuffed her and took her down a steep set of stairs, down into the dark and cold basement, telling her that he was going to introduce her to his two friends.
I don't know.
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And so ends part one of the saga of the real-life Buffalo Bill, Gary Heidnik. Next week we continue the story of Gary's cellar of horror. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Weyborg Thun, and this podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons who pledge their hard-earned money every month.
There are especially a few of those patrons I would like to thank in person. These patrons are my 18 most loyal patrons. They have contributed for at least the last 25 episodes, and their names are Sandy, Maud,
You really helped produce this show and you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
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