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Survivor Accounts Revive Focus on Gary Heidnik’s Basement Torture Case

A 1987 escape led police to the dungeon that ended his crimes.

Overview

  • New reporting features survivor Jackie Askins describing daily assaults, electrocution in a water-filled pit, and being forced to dismember a body.
  • Between November 1986 and March 1987, Heidnik abducted six women and kept them chained in a concealed Philadelphia basement.
  • Sandra Lindsay died from starvation and abuse, and Deborah Dubley was electrocuted and buried in woods, according to contemporaneous accounts.
  • Heidnik posed as a self-ordained preacher with the United Church of the Ministers of God, and his lawyer said he aimed to breed captives to create a “perfect race.”
  • Josefina Rivera’s escape prompted a police raid that rescued three women; Heidnik was executed in 1999, and the case has been linked in commentary to The Silence of the Lambs as relatives voice conflicted feelings about his death.