When you hear the words “Silence of the Lambs”, the name “Hannibal Lecter” will
no doubt spring to mind.
But the real villain in the book and the preceding movie is the character of “Buffalo Bill”,
a tortured serial killer who endeavors to make a suit out of the flesh of women.
If you know your serial killers you’ll know Ed Gein actually made a woman suit, but he
didn’t keep women captive in a dungeon-like environment.
The character Buffalo Bill also shares serial killer Ted Bundy’s modus operandi, in faking
an injury to gain the trust of women he would then bundle into a vehicle.
But Bundy didn’t share many other traits with the Silence of the Lambs character.
Today we’ll look at someone who really was like Buffalo Bill, in this episode of the
Infographics Show, The real life ‘Silence of the Lambs’.
His name was Gary Michael Heidnik and he was born on November 22, 1943, in Cleveland, Ohio.
He had a younger brother, who with Heidnik was the child of a broken marriage.
The parents divorced in 1946, and the children stayed with their mother for a number of years
but then later went to live with the dad and his new partner.
This young boy would as a man become one of the USA’s most notorious serial killers,
not for the number of people he killed but because of what he did to his victims before
they were killed.
But let’s first look at the development of the boy into the crazed adult.
As we said, the two kids went to live with their dad.
We are told that these weren’t happy times for young Gary.
It’s said both boys suffered verbal and physical abuse from a father who was less
than loving.
It’s said Gary was a bed-wetter, something which the father would use as an excuse to
humiliate the young boy.
The father later denied this, but Gary’s brother Terry has gone on record saying indeed
their father was a monster.
″It got to the point where we’d be afraid to pick anything up because he’d beat us
if we dropped something like a glass or something,″ Terry told the media of his father after his
brother’s arrest.
″I was knocked unconscious once,” he added.
When the father was interviewed by the media he denied having treated his children violently.
So, this might have been a reason why the child turned into a murderous adult who had
a predilection for torture.
But there is one more thing, something we see a lot of when we read stories about serial
killers.
Gary was said to have fallen out of a tree when he was just a kid and suffered an injury
that may have affected his brain.
He developed a misshapen head after this, which at school elicited taunts of “football
head” from other kids.
It’s also said the bullying got worse when the father would make both boys wear pants
with bullseyes sown into the backs of them, spurring on kids to kick the boys.
Suffice it to say, Gary became a loner in school, despite doing quite well academically.
The boys eventually returned to live with their mother, but she was now an alcoholic
and would take her own life in 1970.
Terry has said both he and his brother suffered from schizophrenia and both tried to commit
suicide several times.
Gary’s last attempt would be while he was in jail.
In spite of this difficult upbringing, Gary managed to secure himself a job with the U.S.
army.
It’s said he was a clever young man with an IQ of 148.
But things turned bad for Heidnik when he was working at the 46th Army Surgical Hospital
in Germany.
One day he reported to the doctor, saying he had terrible headaches, felt nauseous,
was dizzy and his vision was blurry.
The doctor said he had gastroenteritis but added that he seemed to show some signs of
mental illness.
It’s not known if any of that was related to the brain injury he had suffered as a child.
In 1962, aged 19, Heidnik was sent back to the U.S. and to a military hospital in Philadelphia.
There he was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder and he was honorably discharged from
the army.
This didn’t stop him from working in his chosen field.
Heidnik then became a registered nurse and after that a psychiatric nurse.
This latter job he was fired from for not getting to work on time and for being rude
to patients.
He himself over the next few years would be a patient in a mental facility on a few occasions
and it’s said he would try to kill himself 13 times in all.
His brother was also admitted into psychiatric facilities as a young man after trying to
commit suicide, and their mother as you know did actually kill herself.
A cursed existence they all seemed to have, but Gary was the only one who would turn his
own anguish towards the attention of others – to a criminal extent at least.
But prior to committing his crimes he had some success in matters of religion.
In 1971, a year after his mother took her own life, Gary started a church.
That was called the “United Church of the Ministers of God.”
It started small, but in a few years was thriving and had earned Gary well over a million dollars
in today’s money.
It’s said he had total control over the money flowing into the church and soon he
had a nice new house and came to own a Rolls-Royce and a Cadillac.
But darker things were about to happen.
In 1976 he was charged with aggravated assault after shooting a tenant of one of his houses,
only for the bullet to graze the tenant’s face.
Two years later and Heidnik would be arrested again.
This time he had signed a young woman out of the hospital.
The woman was the mentally retarded younger sister of Heidnik’s then girlfriend.
When the woman was returned to hospital it was found she had been sodomized and had contracted
gonorrhea.
It turned out that Gary had kept her prisoner in his basement after getting her out of hospital,
and that’s where he had raped her.
He was charged with unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, kidnapping, rape and involuntary
deviate sexual intercourse, but he spent most of his time inside mental institutions.
It’s said during this time he refused to speak, once writing on a piece of paper, “The
devil put a cookie in my throat.”
He was out in 1983.
Gary then married a Filipino woman called Betty Disto.
She had flown into the USA, which was a grave mistake for the woman.
Before that, the two had only known each other through letters they sent.
In 1985 they were married, but soon Disto would be raped by her husband and was also
forced to watch him having sex with other women.
She managed to escape from him with help from the Filipino community, but by that time she
was carrying his child.
Ok, so now we get to the crimes that shocked the world and inspired the character of Buffalo
Bill.
These were a string of kidnappings, some of which would end in murder.
The first of these victims was Josefina Rivera.
She was kidnapped by Heidnik after she had visited his house as a prostitute.
She survived her ordeal, later telling the press, “He came up behind me and grabbed
me by my neck.
I wasn’t able to breathe, and then I went unconscious.
When I regained consciousness, he had me on the bed.
He had a handcuff on my right wrist.
He kept telling me to shut up or he was going to choke me.”
She was put into a basement and shackled, and as she was the first of the women he had
kidnapped – they would all be African-Americans – he designated her a position of highest
rank once she was among his other captives.
He raped and beat them all nonetheless.
One of his other victims, Sandra Lindsay, died while being his prisoner.
It’s said she likely died from starvation, an untreated fever and also her injuries and
how she’d been strung-up by Heidnik.
It’s then reported that Heidnik dismembered her body, putting her arms in the freezer
and cooking her ribs and her head.
The smell from the cooking was so bad neighbors complained, only for Heidnik to tell the visiting
cops that he had been “cooking a roast” and it burned.
It was later said that Heidnik had ground-up her body and served it to his other captives,
although his defense attorney denied this in court.
Rivera said of this episode, “The smell was the worst thing I have ever smelled.
When he would come down to have sex with everybody, we could smell the odor all over him.”
Rivera also said she had been asked to help kill another victim, Deborah Dudley.
She was asked to put water into a pit that Hednik had dug.
Once Dudley was placed into the pit, Rivera was asked to place a loose, live electrical
cable on the woman’s shackles.
She died instantly and after she and Heidnik buried the body in some woods.
The youngest victim said the same thing, that she was shackled, tortured and raped.
Her name was Jacqueline Askins and she was only 18 when she was abducted by Heidnik.
She later told the media that Heidnik would sometimes torture them all by stabbing screwdrivers
into their ears.
On March 23, 1987, Heidnik and Rivera both abducted Agnes Adams.
She would be the last victim.
Heidnik had gained Rivera’s trust by now and so when she asked him for some time-out
to visit her family he agreed.
As soon as he dropped her off she called her boyfriend and then got on the phone to the
police and Heidnik was soon arrested.
One of cops that turned up at the house later told the press, “We went to the cellar door,
down to the cellar, in the back, and sure enough, laying on the floor were these half-naked
girls, and they were screaming, ‘We’re saved, we’re saved.’
During his trial Heidnik’s defense tried to prove that he was insane, but given that
he had $550,000 (about $1.2 million today) in the bank which he had earned through stock
trading and various enterprises, that defense didn’t work.
He was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Even his ex-wife, Filipino Betty, had filed a suit to say her ex-husband was not mentally
competent to be executed, but the sentence stayed.
On July 6, 1999, Gary Heidnik was executed by lethal Injection.
His last meal was two slices of cheese pizza and two black coffees.
He had no final words.
If we look back over the life and times of Gary Heidnik, it seems he was the result of
some very bad parenting, although that is no excuse for what he did.
The daughter of his brother once told the press that the boys did indeed suffer at the
hands of their parents.
“His dad was an alcoholic, and his mom took poison.
They found her in the basement.
She was tired of the abuse.
They were really sick parents, and they gave their kids some serious problems,” she said.
It’s said he had had a breakdown while in Germany and experts say he could have been
schizophrenic, but still, he managed to start his own religion and earn lots of cash.
There is also lots of evidence that that this man with a high IQ purposely dated young women
with mental problems, perhaps because they were easier to control.
We might also look at another statement from Rivera, talking about the time she and other
woman were kept prisoner at the house:
“Gary came down with a box of Christmas cards, and he made Sandy write in the cards.
He made her write, ‘Dear Mom, I am all right, don’t worry, Love Sandy.’
Then he put on gloves, gave her a $20 bill, and he had her put it in the card.
He wouldn’t touch it himself.”
Do these sound like the actions of an insane man?
Then again, it’s said Heidnik almost believed he had created a good place for the women
to be, that he was even, “holding parties there.”
This does sound rather insane.
So, what do you think about Heidnik’s execution?
Is insanity an excuse to get out of the death penalty?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video Most Evil Cult Leader That Ever Lived.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.