Gary Heidnik was a serial killer who ran a cult which targeted mentally disabled people. He would keep some of his victims in dug out pits in his basement, which went on to inspire Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.
Heidnik's brother, Terry, 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 which 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. Heidnik 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 Heidnik's term there, he was hospitalized twice because: ''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. Heidnik 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.''
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 Landstuhl, 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 US 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: ''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, Heidnik was honorably discharged on Jan. 30, 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: "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 Heidnik'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 Apsche, would spend months pouring over Heidnik'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, Apsche concluded that: ''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 fragility, 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 Apsche saw the drugs that were prescribed for Heidnik, an alarm went off. His medication included Stellazine, which particularly attracted Apsche'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.''
It's obvious that they're drugs of choice for someone who's hallucinating. Either Heidnik was having a psychotic reaction vis-à-vis 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 Heidnik 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 Heidnik'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 Heidnik's preliminary hearing was postponed for the second time, reporters peppered Heidnik'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 Heidnik 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 Heidnik 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 Heidnik's ex Army buddies have reported that Heidnik 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 Heidnik 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 Heidnik was the subject of LSD tests between 1961 and 63, although an Army spokesman said that 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 Heidnik'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 Heidnik 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. 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 Heidnik 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 MKUltra 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 MKUltra 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 MKUltra 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: ''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 Heidnik'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 MKUltra 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 Landstuhl, Germany, or at Valley Forge Military Hospital in Pennsylvania. Now, there is substantial evidence indicating that Project Artichoke, one of the CIA's MKUltra precursor programs, was implicated in the interrogation of returning Korean War POWs 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 Landstuhl when Heidnik was there either. But the US Army was conducting parallel research on the use of hallucinogens for interrogation during the period of Heidnik'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 shepherded a bill through Congress granting Thornwell a payout of almost $700K. 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: "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 miles away from Landstuhl 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 Heidnik'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 Heidnik's records, which have never been released publicly. So, if there was proof in those documents, we'll likely never know.
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By: Psych History Show
Raped by: Otto Heckel
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