In 1987, a US Army veteran named Gary Heidnik was living in a run-down section of North Philadelphia. Heidnik was a curiosity in the neighborhood. His house had bars on the windows and a yard filled with trash. Yet parked in his driveway was a Rolls-Royce and a Cadillac. A sign on the front of the house read United Church of the Ministers of God. And on Sundays, the house hosted a church service where music and cries of praise the Lord could be heard from the street outside. The rest of the week, however, neighbors noticed a seemingly constant stream of female visitors going in and out of the front door. Given what would later be revealed about Gary Hyneck, it was at first widely assumed that the church he'd incorporated was a fraud created solely to bill money from naive Christians or to dodge taxes. But the real story was somewhat more complicated. In 1971, Heidnik, who had been an atheist all his life, claimed to have had a religious experience while looking out over the Pacific Ocean from the coast of Malibu in California. He said that God had told him to go to Philadelphia and open a new church which would reject donations and care for the mentally and physically disabled. A few months later, while under treatment in a mental hospital, Heidnik submitted the paperwork to incorporate the United Church of the Ministers of God, appointing himself bishop for life. Over the following 15 plus years, Heidnik held services under the United Church banner wherever he happened to be living. On Sundays, a church member would take one of Heidnik's cars and drive around picking up congregants, delivering them to Heidnik's residents. After a short sermon and some gospel music, Heidnik would take the congregation composed primarily of mentally disabled people from the surrounding neighborhoods on trips to fast food restaurants or occasionally a local theme park. It was against the church's constitution to collect donations, so a collection plate was never passed around. And if a congregant became homeless, Heidnik would allow them to stay at his house until they got back on their feet. Years later, after his arrest, even Heidnik's own lawyer admitted that he'd initially suspected that the church was just a front. But eventually, quote, "After I took the case, people started calling me saying they'd been members and they wanted to know if someone was still holding services. I was amazed. The more I found out about it, the more I was convinced it wasn't a tax dodge. But there were other perks to appointing yourself bishop of your own church that Heidnik's lawyer failed to mention. By the time of his final arrest in 1987, Heidnik hadn't held a job in at least 10 years. His only visible income was the $1,350 VA disability payments he received every month. That's over $46,000 a year in 2025 money. a result of qualifying as 100% disabled upon his discharge from the army, which was hardly enough to sustain Heidnik's lifestyle. It turned out that in 1975, Heidnik had opened an investment account with Meil Lynch in the name of the United Church of the Ministers of God and over the next 12 years parlayed an initial investment of around $20,000 into a portfolio worth almost $600,000, equivalent to roughly $1.5 million in 2025. Heck, who was judged to have above normal to superior intelligence according to his military records, was described by his broker as an astute investor who took an active part in managing his portfolio. And since the account was under his church's name, he avoided paying capital gains taxes and even got a discount on Meil Lynch's broker fees. But this wasn't the only perk of being a bishop that Heidnik exploited. There's very little information in the public record describing the precise nature or theology of Heidnik's church, but there are indications that he was running it as a kind of polygamous cult with himself as the leader. He began wearing a clerical collar and introducing himself to women as a minister while regularly seducing members of his congregation. At least five women became what Heidnik called his spiritual wives and gave birth to six children by him. His first spiritual wife, a woman named Joel Cron, continued associating with Heidnik even after he'd propositioned her daughter. The daughter told Cron to watch out because Heidnik was becoming like, quote, "Another Jim Jones." Heidnik targeted developmentally delayed women, even camping out near a treatment center that serviced that population specifically for the purpose of finding new congregants to pray upon. An employee of the Elwin Institutes in West Philadelphia, a sheltered workshop program for the mentally disabled, told local media that Heidnik had approached her after work one day when she was getting food at the McDonald's next door and began engaging her in conversation. She was holding a baseball card the restaurant had given her as part of a promotion, and Hyik asked her who the player on the card was. When she answered correctly, he asked a few more questions, and she answered those as well. When it became clear that the woman was not mentally disabled, but rather was an employee of the Elwin Institutes, Heidnik lost interest completely and ended the conversation. He had been testing her, and the fact that she could answer simple questions correctly had apparently proved to Heidnik that her IQ was too high for a potential victim. As one woman who knew Heidnik and his brother for seven years put it, he only liked women who had minds like a box of Jell-O. And this prediliction would come back to haunt him. In May of 1978, Heidik somehow convinced the staff at a mental hospital to let him take one of their patients, a 34year-old who had quote the mind of a 5-year-old out on a day trip. The woman was actually the cognitively impaired sister of Heidnik's living girlfriend. And instead of returning the woman to the institution, he kept her locked in a storage room in his house, subjecting her to 10 days of horrific abuse. After the woman was rescued, Heidnik was convicted of crimes related to the incident in June the same year and sentenced to prison. Gary Heidnik and his brother Terry had both been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Gary had shown signs of severe mental illness from the earliest stages of his life. During his incarceration, he was repeatedly transferred to Farview State Hospital, a state-run psychiatric prison, then called an institution for the criminally insane, to receive treatment before being parrolled in 1983. Terry Heidnik would later tell reporters about a conversation he had with his brother during this period. Terry Heidnik said that after Gary's arrest in 1978, he offered to help Gary by taking him away from the city because he was living like a rat. He said his brother's reply made him sick. ''He said he got caught because the victim got to a telephone and knew where she was at. He said, 'Next time they won't know where they're at, and I'm going to have a lock on their telephone.' I said, 'Wait, we're trying to get you better, and you're talking like you want to get better at not getting caught.' Then he said, "I'm getting the drift of this thing." I went with a mentally disabled girl, but she could identify me. The next time she'll have to be blind, so she can't identify me. I walked away from him then.'' Just 3 years after his release on parole, Gary Heidnik would make good on that promise. Heck was by this time regularly picking up prostitutes and other vulnerable women from the streets of Philadelphia to bring to his house at 3520 North Marshall Street. On November 25, 1986, Heidnik abducted Josephina Rivera, a 25-year-old sex worker, incapacitated her, and then trapped her in a pit he had dug in the floor of his basement. Over the following months, Heidnik would abduct five more women, subjecting them to horrific forms of torture while keeping them chained up in the basement dungeon. Josephina Rivera, the first and oldest of the captives, began exhibiting Stockholm syndrome like symptoms, participating in the beatings of the other victims and even suggesting new methods of torture for Heidnik to employ. The other captives would later claim that Rivera had suggested using electrocution on one of the women, Deborah Dudley, for some perceived misbehavior. After Heidnik stripped the wires from an electrical cord and held the exposed ends against her chains, Dudley collapsed to the floor dead. In a panic, Heidnik forced Rivera to sign a confession, taking responsibility for the murder and made her participate in the disposal of the body. But in the aftermath, he started allowing her more freedom during the day. He would take Rivera on shopping trips or out to restaurants. And when the two returned, they would laughingly torment the other victims with stories of the day's activities. At one point, the remaining women concocted a plan to bludgeon Heidnik with household items and make a break for it. But Rivera told him about the plan before they could carry it out, leading to even more torture. Rivera was even allowed to drive Heidnik's car and helped him lure the last victim, Agnes Adams, to the house on North Marshall Street. By this time, Heidnik had begun digging a second pit in the basement next to the first one. He told the women he planned to take them all to a plantation he supposedly owned in South Carolina, where they would live together as a polygamous family. And once he abducted five more women, the two groups would rotate between the plantation and the house in Philadelphia. The day after the Agnes Adams abduction, Josephina Rivera convinced Heidnik that she might have more luck finding other victims to abduct if she searched the streets alone, and she set out by herself for the first time, agreeing to meet back up with Heidnik once she'd found another woman to bring home. Instead, she ran to an ex-boyfriend's house and called police. The other three surviving captives were freed, and Heidnik was arrested on a litany of charges, including murder. A central element of Hidneck's original planned defense at trial revolved around his mental health. And suddenly, Gary Hyneck's psych history was of significant interest to the justice system and the media. Hideneck's brother, Terry, said that when he heard about the charges, he quote believed it right off the bat. Gary was very capable of that. He said they had a family history of both brothers had attempted it themselves. Terry Heidnik said that Gary's personality seemed to radically change around the age of six or seven after he fell from a tree, suffering a massive head wound that deformed his skull so badly that other kids started calling him football head. According to Terry, after the fall, Gary had become much more violent and began torturing animals and getting in frequent fights with his peers. Heck had spent considerable time in psychiatric hospitals over the preceding years, and local media tracked down people who had interacted with him during his stints at various prisons and mental institutions. One anonymous official from Greaterford Prison said that during Hyneck's term there, he was hospitalized twice because, quote, he talked to no one, neither inmates nor staff. We thought he had a serious problem and that's why we sent him to Farview, the maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. A West Philadelphia man who said he'd spent time with Heidnik in a VA hospital in 1983 remembered Heidnik as someone who rarely spoke and mumbled when he did. I wasn't able to comprehend what he was saying. Heck would shake his head, not speak in a whole sentence. Instead, he always carried a pad and pencil and would write if he wanted to communicate. But the most important part of Hnik's background for our purposes was the period he spent in the US Army. Heidnik enlisted in 1961 and was shipped off to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas for training as a medic, where his conduct and efficiency were both rated as excellent by his superiors. In May 1962, he was posted to the 46th Army Surgical Hospital in Land Stol, West Germany as an orderly. But just 3 months after arriving in Germany, Heidnik went on sick call. He asked to see a doctor after complaining of dizzy spells, headaches, nausea, blurred vision, and what would later be described as a nervous breakdown. In October 1962, just 6 months after being posted to Germany, Heidnik was transferred back to the United States to a military hospital in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. A neurologist there noted that Heidnik seemed to be exhibiting symptoms of a mental illness. He was complaining of quote seeing things moving which the doctor thought suggested a hallucinatory experience possibly attributable to schizophrenia or a schizoid disorder. Doctors recommended he be released from service and after 3 months in the hospital heck was honorably discharged on January 30th, 1963 with a disability rating of 10% soon increased to 100%. But after Heidnik's final arrest when his lawyer A. Charles Peruto tried to get the army to release his medical records for his criminal defense. He found the army to be strangely resistant. To prepare for an insanity defense, Peruto had asked the army for any records related to Heidnik's hospitalization, typically a routine request in a criminal defense case, but the army refused to turn them over. Journalists started trying to track down more information about Heidnik's military service, but Army spokespeople refused to say why Heidnik had been sent back to the US from his posting in Germany or even the reason for his discharge, admitting only that, quote, "A person could be honorably discharged for being unsuitable for service or for a medical reason." The judge in the case even had to help Heidi's lawyer obtain a federal court order from a different judge requiring the army to hand over the records. Years later, a Philadelphia psychologist, Dr. Jack Abshi, would spend months pouring over Hidenik's medical charts trying to piece together the history of his treatment by the army. According to the book seller of horror by Ken Englade, Absi concluded that quote those initial symptoms the soldier Heidnik suffered pointed not so much towards psychosis as to the after effects of hallucinogens. While schizophrenics are noted for emotional fragidity, aloofness, and an inability to develop close relationships, Heidnik's complaints were subtly different. He admitted that he didn't respond well to authority and he also griped that others didn't like him because he performed his jobs better than they did. I was by far the best, he told one doctor and others pulled rank out of jealousy. Also, when Absi saw the drugs that were prescribed for Heidnik, an alarm went off. His medication included Stellazine, which particularly attracted Api's attention. It's a major tranquilizer, not a Valium. Stellazine has kick. If one examines the adverse reaction of these drugs as listed in physicians desk reference, it would be questionable why someone would be placed on these without a diagnosis of severe psychosis or some other psychiatric definition, said Api. It's obvious that they're drugs of choice for someone who's hallucinating. Either Heidnik was having a psychotic reaction visav the hallucination or he was responding to a hallucinatory agent. Since he was not a schizoid personality type, it's understandable that this diagnosis of schizophrenia was totally erroneous and that Hyeneck was having a hallucinatory experience. Eventually, the reason for the army's hesitance became clear. Reporters have been trying to confirm a widely circulated speculation that Gary Hyneck's medical discharge and 100% disability from the military may have been the result of secret army experiments involving LSD. In a corridor outside a city hall courtroom where Hyneck's preliminary hearing was postponed for the second time, reporters peppered Hyneck's attorney, A. Charles Peruto Jr., with questions regarding Heidnik's possible defense. It was reporters who asked Peruto whether Army LSD tests might have a bearing on the case. The Associated Press story included this paragraph. He mentioned a few things, but I won't tell what it was, Peruno said when asked about the LSD. I can only say that I don't want to answer any questions along those lines because they may be extremely relevant at some later date. Over the following weeks, Arudo got more specific. Accused torture murderer Gary Hynik entered an army hospital in West Germany for stomach pains while stationed there 25 years ago, but emerged 10 months later as a cuckoo bird, his lawyer said yesterday. Attorney Charles Perudo Jr. said he thinks the army drugged Hynik with LSD or measculine during the hospital stay in 1962 and 1963, but he said he's been unable to prove his suspicions. During a hearing yesterday, Perudo complained that the army has resisted requests for records of Heidnik's hospitalization. Outside the courtroom, Perudo said several of Hyneck's ex Army buddies have reported that Hyeneck was a little goofy when he entered the hospital for what the lawyer called bad stomach pains. But the ex pals said Heidnik was absolutely bonkers when released 10 months later. Perudo said Heidik has told his lawyer he doesn't know whether he was drugged while in the hospital. But the suspect also said he sometimes stayed awake for 2 or 3 days while hospitalized, said Peruto. Sounds like it's probably measculine or LSD, said Peruto. He was the perfect guinea pig for it. He was so wacky he didn't know if he was drugged or not. And eventually, Perudo claimed to have found proof of his suspicions. Perudo said that Army and VA documents show that Hineik was the subject of LSD tests between 1961 and 63. Although an Army spokesman said records didn't show such testing, Perudo's initial plan for Heidnik's trial was based on this line of defense. It had been Perudo's intention to introduce testimony designed to link Hyeneck's treatment at the West German military hospital to army experiments with LSD and other hallucinogens. What he wanted was to create a circumstantial trail showing that Hyeneck may have been a guinea pig for drug tests and that the experiments irreparably fried his brain. If my client were to testify, he would say he went into an army hospital where LSD experiments had been carried out, said Peruto. He would say he went in for a stomach problem and they gave him something that kept him up for three or four days. He was psychotic. That made him the perfect guinea pig. But the judge refused to allow it. She said that because Perudo didn't have direct proof that Hidenik had been subjected to hallucinogen studies, he wouldn't be allowed to use the argument in his insanity defense. Of course, most proof would have been destroyed in 1973 when CIA director Richard Helms ordered all MK Ultra files to be shredded. almost 15 years before Heidnik's arrest. As to Perudo's contention that Heidnik would have been the perfect guinea pig for these experiments, it's true that most MK Ultra research and CIA backed hallucinogen studies occurred on military bases in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and colleges. And at least some of the doctors to whom MK Ultra work was subcontracted out intentionally targeted psychiatric patients for experimentation since they'd be easier to discredit if they blew the whistle on the project. The criteria for being judged 100% disabled from a mental health condition as Heidnik was are extremely stringent. According to VA disability guidelines, in order to qualify as 100% disabled, a person must be judged quote so adversely affected as to result in virtual isolation in the community. The person must demonstrate gross repudiation of reality with fantasy, confusion, panic, and explosions of aggressive energy resulting in profound retreat from mature behavior. And crucially, the conditions which caused the disability must be 100% attributable to the person's military service. In other words, the disability has to have been directly caused by something that happened during the claimant's military service. It can't be a pre-existing condition. So, whatever caused Hyneck's mental illness, VA doctors were convinced that it happened during the 14 months he was enlisted. But if Heidnik's lawyer really had found records proving that he'd been experimented on in the army, it seems that he never produced them publicly. After the hallucinogen defense was disallowed, Perudo had to abandon the LSD angle and pursue a more conventional insanity defense. But how plausible were Peruto's claims? Well, Fort Sam Houston, the Army base in Texas where Heidnik had undergone training, was a site for MK Ultra research. A project conducted there called Project White Coat lasted until 1973, but Perudo specifically claimed that Heidnik had been experimented on in a hospital, implying it must have occurred either during his stay at the Army Hospital in Lanstol, Germany, or at Valley Forge Military Hospital in Pennsylvania. Now, there is substantial evidence indicating that Project Artichoke, one of the CIA's MK Ultra precursor programs, was implicated in the interrogation of returning Korean War PS at Valley Forge Hospital in the early 1950s. But that was nearly a decade before Heidnik arrived there. And there's no hard evidence that those interrogations involved hallucinogens. There's no evidence that any MK Ultra experiments were taking place at Land Stol when Heidnik was there either. But the US Army was conducting parallel research on the use of hallucinogens for interrogation during the period of Hidenik's service. And it turns out that at least one of the army's studies was using soldiers all over Europe as subjects. Between 1961 and 63, Project Third Chance examined LSD's potential as a truth serum for interrogations by dosing unwitting participants with acid. In one case in France, a private from South Carolina named James Thornwell, who was suspected of stealing classified documents, was subjected to sleep deprivation, starvation, hypnosis, and eventually surreptitious doses of LSD during over 3 months of confinement and interrogation. The experience had a profoundly negative lifelong effect on his mental health. And in 1980, South Carolina's two senators shephered a bill through Congress granting Thornwell a payout of almost $700,000. Congress only identified 10 victims of Project Third Chance, but at least one of them was located in West Germany, where Heidnik had been hospitalized. Why would the army want to interrogate Heidnik? It's hard to say, but according to his brother Terry, after Gary's discharge from the army, quote, "He never talked about what happened in Germany, but I think he got into a fight. He was into all kinds of money-making schemes and loaning guys money, and something happened with all this, and they sent him back to the States." The CIA had conducted human experiments with hallucinogens in West Germany, starting in the early 1950s under the anesthesiologist Dr. or Henry Beecher. But these took place near Frankfurt, some 80 mi away from Landtol Hospital, and it's not clear if these experiments were still ongoing by the time Heidnik entered the country in 1962. Ultimately, there isn't enough evidence to definitively say that Gary Heidnik was subjected to army or CIA mind control experiments during his time in the military, but given the massive gaps in the historical record, it can't be ruled out either. Heidnik can be definitively connected to at least two sites, Fort Sam Houston in Texas and Valley Forge Hospital in Pennsylvania, which provably conducted CIA backed mind control research. But at least according to the surviving records, neither site conducted hallucinogen experiments, and there's no proof that Highneck's time there overlapped with the CIA projects. The fact that his lawyer, Charles Perudo, actually attempted to use government LSD induced insanity as a defense suggests that he must have believed he had fairly persuasive evidence of the connection. But he had access to a much greater share of Hyneck's records, which have never been released publicly. So, if there was proof in those documents, we'll likely never know. Heck's insanity defense, minus the LSD claims, proved unsuccessful. And in 1988, he was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, six counts of kidnapping, and numerous other offenses. He was sentenced to death, and his lethal injection was ultimately carried out in July of 1999.
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By: Psych History Show
Raped by: Otto Heckel
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