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fathering a host of children by them. Early on in his adult life, he had had a girlfriend who had borne him a child. A little later on he dated a retarded young woman whom he regularly beat and starved. Another woman he had a relationship with, also mentally subnormal, disappeared soon after meeting Heidnik. He then married a mail-order bride, a young Filipino woman named Betty. When she arrived to meet him, in September 1985, he took her to the marital home where a retarded woman was sleeping in his bed. She was disturbed by this, but agreed to marry him, mainly because she could not afford the fare back to her country. However, a week later, she returned to the house to find her new husband having sex with three women in their bed. She demanded to be sent back to the Philippines but he refused, forcing her to stay in the house and cook for his many female guests. He also forced her to watch him having sex with them. Eventually, she escaped with the help of others from the Filipino community in her neighbourhood and went to the police, who charged Heidnik with sexual offences. Later, Betty gave birth to a son by Heidnik.
     
    T ORTURE AND CANNIBALISM
     
    Once Betty had left, Heidnik began his career of sexual deviancy and violence in earnest, abducting five women and holding them in the basement of his house in Philadelphia. He chained them up, kept them in filthy conditions, starved them, sexually abused them, beat them and tortured them. When the first woman died of mistreatment, he dismembered her body, ground pieces of it in a food processor and mixed it with dog food, which he forced the surviving women to eat. The victim’s arms and legs were kept in a freezer, while her ribs were cooked in the oven. He boiled her head in a pot on the cooker. The next woman died when he electrocuted her in the bath, bound in chains, applying an electric current to the chains. He tortured the remaining women by digging a large pit to throw the victims in when they misbehaved, which he would then cover with planks. Another of his tortures involved hanging the women up by their wrists and forcing metal screwdrivers into their ears, which gave them permanent hearing loss. He also encouraged the women to fight with each other and tell him stories, rewarding them with small privileges when they did so.
    After months of this hellish existence, one of the women managed to escape, and on March 24, 1987, she left Heidnik’s house, saying that she was visiting her family and promising to return with another ‘wife’ for him. Over the time they had spent together, she had managed to persuade him that they had a special, close relationship and he believed her when she had said she would recruit another victim for him. However, the minute she was out of his sight, she went straight to her boyfriend’s house and then to the police.
     
    S CENE OF DEPRAVITY
     
    At first the police did not believe her story, suspecting that she was suffering from some kind of delusions. However, when she raised the hem of her trousers and they saw the cuff marks on her ankles, they realised that the story was true. The police raided the house and found a scene of depravity that shocked even the most hardened officers. However, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Heidnik maintained his innocence and continued to plead not guilty, even taking to defending himself in court. This time, however, he stood no chance of getting off. He was convicted on an array of charges, including first-degree murder, five counts of rape, six counts of kidnapping, four counts of aggravated assault and one count of deviate sexual intercourse. The jury found him unanimously guilty of the murders of two of the women, Deborah Dudley and Sandra Lindsay, and also of the other charges. After making an attempt at suicide, he was executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999. When his father was told that his son was going to die, he replied that he wasn’t interested. Unsurprisingly,