Eat Thy Neighbour (29 page)

Beyond the confines of the kitchen there was little to be found except filthy furniture and dirt, but that one room was mute testimony to the extent of Gary Heidnik’s brutal insanity. The scorched and filthy cooking pot held a human skull and the yellow, gelatinous remains of human fat. This, along with a heap of charred ribs and selected roasts and chops, some cooked, some not, belonged to Sandra Lindsay. The industrial food processor on the counter had obviously been used to grind meat; there was already little doubt of what meat, but when one of the police opened the refrigerator, any lingering uncertainty was removed. On one shelf was a human forearm and elsewhere, neatly wrapped in plastic bags and labelled ‘dog food’ were 24lb of Sandra Lindsay’s flesh. To one side was a pile of arm and leg-bones with varying amounts of flesh still clinging to them.

Over the following days, as police and forensic investigators scoured the house and garden, the newspapers, including the
prestigious
Philadelphia Inquirer
, had a field day describing the ‘House of Horrors’, the ‘Torture Dungeon’ and the ‘Mad Man’s Sex Orgy’. It was shock journalism at its very worst. But for Gary Heidnik bad press was the least of his concerns. What he needed was a good lawyer. At least with the small fortune he had made playing the market he could afford one.

Chuck Peruto was one of Philadelphia’s best, and flashiest, legal eagles and he charged accordingly. His standard fee for capital offences was $10,000 plus expenses. He believed that everyone, no matter how hopeless their case looked, was entitled to the best defence money could buy, but in Heidnik’s case he was willing to make an exception. It was the kind of publicity he really did not need, so he told Heidnik that his fee was $100,000 plus expenses. He must have been surprised when Heidnik unhesitatingly agreed.

On 23 April 1987, Gary Michael Heidnik, aged forty-four, appeared in court for his preliminary hearing. Opposing Peruto was Assistant District Attorney Charles Gallagher who was determined to make every one of the eighteen charges – including murder, rape, kidnapping, aggravated assault, involuntary deviant sexual intercourse, indecent exposure, false imprisonment, unlawful restraint, simple assault, indecent assault and all the rest – stick like glue to the Marshall Street maniac. At the preliminary hearing it was a foregone conclusion that Heidnik would be bound over for trial, but Peruto insisted that his client could not obtain an impartial trial in Philadelphia because of the sensational publicity he was receiving in the press. The judge agreed and the venue was changed to Pittsburgh, 300 miles to the west.

When the trial opened on 20 June 1988 in the courtroom of Judge Lynn Abraham, Peruto already had his defence settled. He would, not surprisingly, plead insanity. District Attorney Gallagher countered by insisting that Heidnik had been too methodical in both his execution of the crimes, and the methods
he employed in hiding his grisly work, for him not to have been completely aware of what he was doing. Peruto asked the judge to consider the possibility that Josefina Rivera was equally culpable. Judge Abraham agreed, but stipulated that if Heidnik was sane enough to enlist Rivera’s help, he was certainly not insane. Peruto withdrew the suggestion.

The most damning evidence came from the captives’ description of their time in Heidnik’s homemade prison, but there was other, equally horrific testimony. Dr Paul Hoyer, of the county medical examiner’s office, detailed the gruesome finds in Heidnik’s kitchen, stating that the body parts had, apparently, been cut from the corpse with a power saw just as the girls had suspected at the time. Gallagher’s final witness turned out not to be connected with the case at all. Robert Kirkpatrick, Heidnik’s broker at Merrill Lynch, testified that Gary Heidnik was ‘an astute investor who knew exactly what he was doing’. Peruto’s defence was already badly damaged before he ever called his first witness.

Peruto limited his defence to establishing Heidnik’s mental condition at the time of the kidnappings and torture. First to testify was Dr Clancy McKenzie who, for reasons unknown, refused to directly answer Peruto’s questions concerning Heidnik as an individual, but rambled on about schizophrenia as a general condition. It was all Peruto could do to get him to admit that Heidnik probably did not know the difference between right and wrong. The following day Jack Apsche, a noted Philadelphia psychologist was slated to testify, but Judge Abraham ruled that the majority of Apsche’s testimony was inadmissible. It was a severe blow to Peruto, but he had one final witness, Dr Kenneth Kool, a psychiatrist. Kool delivered his evidence but later, in a closed session with the judge, it came out that Kool had only spent twenty minutes with Heidnik who simply refused to say anything. When Judge Abraham asked him on what he had based his testimony, Kool admitted he gleaned his information
from Heidnik’s past clinical records. Like Apsche before him, most of Kool’s statements were struck from the record. On 30 June, after ten days of testimony and arguments, the jury retired to consider their decision. Sixteen hours later they found Gary Heidnik guilty on all eighteen counts. Three days later Judge Abraham imposed the death penalty.

For eleven years, while one appeal after another wound its way through the court system, Gary Heidnik was incarcerated on death row at Graterford Prison at Rockview, Pennsylvania. On 6 July 1999 at 10.29pm, he died by lethal injection. No one came forward to claim the body.

Agnes Adams, Josefina Rivera, Lisa Thomas and Jacquelyn Askins have filed suits to claim shares of Heidnik’s money in compensation for their ordeal.

Just as Ed Gein, whom we met in an earlier chapter, served as a model for the crazed killer in Thomas Harris’s 1988 book
Silence of the Lambs
, so did Gary Heidnik. His penchant for keeping his captives in a pit in his basement became an integral part of the twisted character of Buffalo Bill.

Seventeen

Bringing Home the Bacon: Nicolas Claux (1990–4)

I
n the late 1970s and early ’80s a new, youth-orientated subculture arose out of the then-current music scene. Just as the hippies had arisen out of ’60s hard rock, the new movement – known as ‘Goth’ – shaped itself out of the ‘punk’ and ‘new romantic’ musical scene. The name was derived from the nineteenth-century neo-Gothic movement in literature and architecture that provided the Goths with their look and lifestyle. Dressed in heavily romanticised versions of Victorian clothes, their hair dyed raven black, the Goths flock to their chosen musical venues where they listen to bands with names like Marilyn Manson, Sisters of Mercy and The Damned. There are enough Goths for them to hold parties and conventions all over the world. For most, it is no more than a weekend escape from the drabness and drudgery of modern urban life. For others it becomes a full-time lifestyle. Among the more serious and edgy members of the Goth community there is a predilection to adopt vampire-like personas taken straight from the pages of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
and Anne Rice’s
Interview with the Vampire
novels. For 99.9 per cent of the Goths it is all just good clean fun but for a tiny minority it becomes something much more dark and disturbing. Nicolas Claux was one of the few who took it all just a little too far.

Nicolas Claux’s father worked in the international finance section of a French banking firm and, as a result, travelled widely.
When Nicolas was born in 1972 his family was stationed in Cameroon, Africa, and moved to London when he was five years old. Two years later they returned to their native Paris. According to Claux, his parents never denied him any material necessity but were cold, unemotional people who seemed incapable of showing affection to their son. Nicolas seemed predisposed to return the favour, failing to display the normal emotions of a child. He was so withdrawn his mother was concerned that he might even be autistic. He was not, but insists that the only feeling he harboured for his parents was utter indifference.

One day, when little Nico was ten years old, he became embroiled in a heated argument with his grandfather. During the exchange the old man suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and dropped dead. Such a traumatic event would undoubtedly cause deep disturbance for even the most normal child, and for Nico it became one of the defining moments of his life. From that point on he was obsessed with every aspect of death. Funeral rites, wakes, cemeteries, mortuaries, all began to exert a morbid attraction on him. He began reading everything he could lay his hands on that discussed death and the possibilities of an afterlife. Of particular fascination were fantasy novels and comic books concerned with vampires, werewolves, black magic and the occult.

As his morbid streak grew and festered, more family moves – first to Portugal when he was twelve and then back to Paris at sixteen – only served to alienate him further from his family and people his own age. Seeking refuge from his loneliness, Claux began to wander through the famously elaborate graves and crypts of Parisian cemeteries. Between 1990 and 1993 he came to know the layout of these necropolises as well as most teenagers know their own neighbourhoods. Soon, the interests became more specific. ‘I would examine rusty locks and evaluate the weight of cement [crypt] lids. My favourite things were mausoleums. The most impressive ones can be found at
Père Lachaise, Montmartre or Passy cemeteries. I would peep through their windows to see the inside. Some were decorated with furniture, paintings or statues.’ But somehow, looking was not quite enough. He needed to be inside; to share the experience of the dead.

With a combination of lock-picks and crowbars Nicolas Claux began breaking into the tombs that fascinated him most. Sometimes, if rusty door hinges refused to budge, he would simply break in through a window. Once inside, he revelled in the dank, dark surroundings, feeling, in his own words, ‘like an emperor reigning in Hell’. To prolong the eerily satisfying experience, he would break in during the day, remain there and creep out to wander alone among the graves and crypts during the dark of night. But just as peering through the windows and rusty grilles had not been enough to satisfy his ghoulish curiosity, neither was simply staring at the coffins resting on their lonely biers.

I woke up one day feeling this sinister urge to dig up a corpse and mutilate it. I gathered a small crowbar, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, black candles and a pair of surgical gloves in a backpack. Then I took the metro [to] the Trocadero station. It was nearly noon. The gates of the Passy Cemetery were wide open, but nobody was inside. The undertakers were out for lunch.

Passy is a small Gothic graveyard with plenty of huge mausoleums, which were built during the nineteenth century. It is located right between two large avenues, so it is impossible to climb inside at night. But anyway, nobody could ever imagine that there was someone robbing graves at noon.

I had this special grave in mind. It was a small mausoleum, the burial site of a family of Russian immigrants from the 1917 revolution. I had already prised
open the iron door a few days before, and I had closed it afterwards so it would seem that nobody had ever touched it. All I had to do was kick it open . . . At this point, my mind was in total chaos. I had flashes of death in my head. I took a deep breath, and I climbed down the steps leading to the crypt.

It was a rather small one, with damp walls, buried deep inside the cemetery ground. There was no other source of light than the candles I had brought. To begin, for more than an hour, I removed one of the heavy coffins from its stone casing. It was especially hard not to let the coffin fall all of a sudden to the ground, but somehow I managed to slowly lay it down without making too much noise.

I examined the casket for a while. It was solid oak and sealed with big screws. It looked brand new, so I expected to find a recently deceased corpse. First, I unscrewed the coffin, which took me less than 10 minutes. Then I prised it open with the crowbar. Once opened, a horrible stench of putrefaction came out of the box. It smelled like [embalming fluid] . . .

Then I saw the body inside. It was a half-rotten old woman, shrouded in a white sheet, covered with brown stains. Her face seemed to be smeared with oil, but it was simply the death fluids oozing from her skin. The stench was so intense that I nearly fainted. I tried to lift one side of the sheet, but it was . . . [stuck] to her skin like flypaper. The teeth were protruding from the mouth, but her eyes were gone. I stared into the empty eye sockets, and all of a sudden something broke into my mind.

That’s when I picked up a screwdriver. The corpse inside the coffin started to move slightly, like it had guessed what would happen next. So I began to stab the belly, the rib area and the shoulders. I stabbed her at least 50 times. I really can’t remember. All I can remember is that when I woke up
my forearms were covered with corpse slime. I tried to sever her head, but I did not have the right tools. I took Polaroid snapshots [of the corpse].

After violating his first grave, Nico said he spent much of his free time searching the cemetery for new graves to desecrate, but even this did not satisfy his increasingly morbid urges. He needed to be even closer to the dead, so he began to collect souvenirs from the desecrated tombs and carry them back to his apartment. ‘Throughout my apartment bone fragments and human teeth were scattered around like loose change; vertebrae and leg bones hung from the ceiling like morbid mobiles.’

More evidence of his fascination with death, pain and mutilation took their place along with the remnants of deceased bodies. There were ‘hundreds of videocassettes, mostly slasher and hardcore [sadomasochist] flicks . . . Several bondage magazines were piled in a far corner.’ On top of his television set were jars filled with human ashes.

In 1992, at twenty years of age, Claux spent a year in the French military working as a gunsmith, but decided that there was no fulfilment in working with instruments of death; it was death itself that he craved. In 1993 he applied to a Parisian mortician school but, for whatever reason, his application was declined. Taking the next, logical step, he got a job working as a morgue attendant at St Vincent-de-Paul’s children’s hospital. ‘I found that it was the best way to be in contact with corpses . . . my first contact with a corpse there was when I assisted [in] the autopsy of a ten-year-old girl. The other attendant showed me how to stitch up her belly, and that was the first time I ever got to touch a fresh corpse. I was amazed by how red and clean her organs were.’