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the police, who searched his house and found the scene of horror in the basement. At the trial that followed, Heidnik claimed his innocence, but the jury found him guilty and on July 6, 1999, he was executed by lethal injection.
     
    S CHIZOID PERSONALITY DISORDER
     
    Gary Michael Heidnik was born in November 1943 in Eastlake, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. His mother was an alcoholic and his parents, Michael and Ellen, divorced soon after the birth of his younger brother, Terry. First, the boys went to live with Ellen and her new husband, and after that, lived with their father and his new wife. The boys were mistreated by their parents, in particular their father, who would humiliate Gary by hanging his stained sheets out of the window for the neighbours to see whenever he wet the bed. As a child, Gary also fell out of a tree while at school, leaving him with a strangely shaped head, which made him an object of ridicule for his schoolmates. Interestingly, a number of serial killers, torturers and otherwise violent individuals, have sustained serious injuries to the head at an early point in their lives, and there appears to be some correlation between this sort of accident and violent behaviour. Gary’s brother Terry, himself a man with serious mental problems, often commented that he believed Gary’s extremely violent behaviour started with the head injury he received from his fall as a child.
    As a teenager, Gary was keen to join the army, and his father arranged for him to attend Staunton Military Academy in Virginia. He did well there, but after two years he suddenly left and went to live with his father again. At eighteen, he joined the regular army and trained as a medic, but he began to suffer from mental illness and was discharged with a disability pension and a diagnosis of ‘schizoid personality disorder’. After this, he tried his hand at various jobs but eventually left all of them, and for the next few years found himself in and out of mental institutions. When his mother committed suicide by drinking poison, his condition deteriorated and he became mute for long periods of time. He also became extremely violent, at one point attacking his brother Terry. When his brother visited him during his period of recuperation, he told him that if he had died, he would have soaked his body in acid to dispose of it.
    From this point, Heidnik began to show extreme signs of mental disorder, saluting and rolling up his trousers, wearing the same clothes all the time, and giving up any semblance of personal hygiene. He then decided to start his own ‘church’, along with his girlfriend, who was also mentally subnormal, and styled himself ‘Bishop Heidnik’. Strangely, although he was so crazed, he was good at financial investments, and showed a great deal of skill at making money for the church, amassing a sizeable profit during this time.
     
    A BUSE OF RETARDED WOMAN
     
    In 1976, Heidnik fired a gun at his landlord, slightly injuring the man’s face. The police charged him with aggravated assault and carrying an unlicensed pistol, and when the house was sold, the owners found a hole dug into the floor of the basement containing boxes of pornographic magazines. Heidnik’s next brush with police came when he took his girlfriend’s retarded sister out for the day from the mental hospital where she lived, and kept her prisoner in his apartment for several days. When staff from the home came out to fetch her, they found that she had been raped, vaginally and anally, and had contracted a sexually transmitted disease in the process. Heidnik was arrested and charged with the crime. He conducted his own defence, pleading not guilty, but was given a three- to seven-year jail sentence, most of which he actually spent in mental institutions.
    When he was released, Heidnik resumed the sick relationships he had always had with women. He seemed to be attracted to mentally subnormal black women, and had a crazed notion of