March 26: Torture Chamber Found in Basement

On this date in History .... March 26, 1987:  

Photo courtesy of www.nydailynews.com

Philadelphia police respond to a 9-1-1 call and find a torture chamber in the basement of a former mental patient where three naked women were chained to pipes.  The true story would become the basis for horrific scenes in the movie, "The Silence of the Lambs".

Gary Heidnik was a mental patient and sex offender who had become a wealthy investor, driving a Rolls Royce and avoiding paying any taxes by becoming a self-appointed bishop of his own church. A sign hung outside the torture chamber home identifying it as a church.  

He was quite good at managing his "church" finances, turning $1500 into over half a million in about ten years.  Despite his wealth, he chose to live in the "seedier" parts of the city.

He killed one woman by putting her in a pit of water with a live electrical wire; another by starving her to death while remained chained to the wall; another by dismembering her, cooking and feeding body parts to the other captives. Attempts at escape were punished with screwdrivers in the ears or being suspended by the wrists for hours at a time.

Heidnik believed a man needed a lot of children and do achieve that, he needed to build a harem.  After his mother's death in 1970, he tried to kill himself at least a dozen times.

He received the death sentence and was the last person executed in Pennsylvania in 1999.

March 26: Gary Heidnik's Torture Chamber

On this date in History ..... 1987:

Philadelphia police respond to a 9-1-1 call and find a torture chamber in the basement of a former mental patient where three naked women were chained to pipes. 

Gary Heidnik was a mental patient and sex offender who had become a wealthy investor, driving a Rolls Royce and amassing over half a million dollars from his investments.  He had avoided paying any taxes by becoming a self-appointed bishop of his own church. A sign hung outside the torture chamber home identifying it as a church. 

He papered some of his walls in the house with one and five dollar bills, and had glued pennies over about half of the kitchen walls.

In 1986 he began kidnapping women for his "harem". He told his first victim of his intent to get ten women and have each of them bear him a child.  He wanted to have a large family of ten children.

The women barely survived on the food he gave them which ranged from bread and water to stale hot dogs and peanut butter sandwiches, He finally just solved the food problem by feeding them canned dog food, beating the women until they ate it.

He killed one woman by putting her in a pit of water with a live electrical wire; another by starving her to death while remained chained to the wall; another by dismembering her, cooking and feeding body parts to the other captives.

He was convincted in 1988, received the death sentence and was executed in 1999.

February 19: The Donner Party

On this date in History .... 1847:

The Donner party is rescued from the Sierra Nevada mountains after being trapped there for months in a sudden blizzard. 

 

They tried a new route instead of the standard regular route through the mountains. The so-called short-cut was anything but. It added three weeks to their journey, depleting their supplies. Eventually a party of them tried to get through the snow for help. Some of them made it to an Indian village and word reached the nearby fort, who sent out a rescue party.

 

Of the 89 original members, only 45 survived. Historical lore is filled with stories of cannibalism among the survivors, but recent anthropological studies have shed some doubt on the validity of those stories.

 

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