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.

November 13: Hillside Strangler

On this date in History .... 1977:

12 yr old Sonja Johnson & 14 yr old Delores Cepeda, the youngest two of the Hillside Strangler victims, were killed. Their bodies were discovered a week later. Eleven of the fourteen Hillside Strangler murders took place between Oct 18 & Dec 9 of 1977, with six of those eleven taking place in November. 

The two murderers were cousins. After 400 witnesses testified in the trial, Angelo Bueno was sentenced in 1984 to life w/o parole & died in prison in 2002. Ken Bianchi, convicted on Halloween 1983, was denied parole in Aug 2010 and is re-eligible in 2025.

Bianchi had always wanted to be in law enforcement but he dropped out of the law enforcement classes and his application to the sheriff’s department was rejected.  He found jobs as a security guard but because he was always stealing from his employers, he changed jobs frequently.  He moved to Los Angeles and hooked up with his cousin Angelo.

The two experimented with different murder methods which included lethal injection, electrical shock, and carbon monoxide poisoning.  When Bianchi admitted to Angelo that the LA police were questioning him about the murders, Angelo sent him to Washington, where Bianchi murdered two college girls.  But because he was working alone, he left too much evidence behind.  He was found and connected to the Hillside Strangler murders.  He tried faking multiple personalities but that didn’t work and eventually he confessed everything he knew, implicating his cousin.

One young lady was very lucky. In 1977, the two murderers stopped one 22-year old and planned to kill her but when they found out she was the daughter of actor Peter Lorre, they let her go.  She had no idea how lucky she had been until the two were arrested and their story got out.

November 11: Dorothy Puente

On this date in History .... 1988:

A body was found buried in the backyard of a 59 year old convicted check forger. 

Dorothy Puente had opened a boarding house after getting out of prison for forgery and robbing people from a bar and a social worker began to get suspicious when many of the 19 people she referred to Puente began disappearing.  Then neighbors began to complain about severely bad smells coming from her property. An investigation found 6 more bodies.

Puente was convicted, after a 5 month trial with over 3000 pieces of evidence, of murdering her boarders for their Social Security checks. She was charged with 9 counts of murder, convicted of 3 but is believed to be responsible for up to 25 deaths.  A similar storyline was used on an episode of “The Closer”.