Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1 Taken
Chapter 2 The Hole
Chapter 3 Gary
Chapter 4 Escape
Chapter 5 Sandra
Chapter 6 Screwdriver
Chapter 7 Lisa
Chapter 8 Christmas
Chapter 9 Deborah
Chapter 10 Jacqueline
Chapter 11 Losing Sandra
Chapter 12 Alpo
Chapter 13 Sleepless
Chapter 14 Losing Deborah
Chapter 15 Upstairs
Chapter 16 The Pine Barrens
Chapter 17 The Outside
Chapter 18 Poker
Chapter 19 Freedom
Chapter 20 A New Reality
Chapter 21 Limbo
Chapter 22 The Trial
Chapter 23 Heidnik’s Mind
Chapter 24 The Verdict
Chapter 25 Moving On
Chapter 26 Recovery
Chapter 27 Reunion
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
‘I stood there for a moment, silently speaking to myself: Josefina, you will survive this. You are strong. You are a fighter. You adapt.’
As a young mum-of-three, Josefina Rivera was determined to get her troubled life back on track. But then she met Gary Heidnik and the next four months became a living nightmare.
Along with five women Josefina was held captive in a cellar where she was starved, beaten, and repeatedly raped to fulfil Heidnik’s desire of creating a ‘family’ of ten children.
Cellar Girl is the shocking but ultimately inspiring story of how one brave, young woman saved herself and others from a life worse than hell.
About the Author
Josefina Rivera now lives a happy and contented life in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
This book is dedicated to Florence Patterson, my mom, for all her strength, encouragement and discipline that helped me endure.
To Chris Lyle, for not standing in front of me or behind me but beside me through the aftermath.
And to God, for bringing me through it all.
I’m not going to allow what I see hinder what I believe.
(Anon)
Prologue
I wander along the seashore, my eyes scanning the beach. I’m looking for sea glass. In my pocket are three pieces I have found already – one is small and green, another is a curved white shard, edges worn down, and the third, a thick blue circle, has bumps on one side like the bottom of a bottle. My fingers rub at the frosted glass in my pocket as the gusty sea breeze whips at my hair and lashes at my cheeks. I inhale deeply – the salty air fills my lungs, carries away all my thoughts and lets me walk on, free to search the shore.
The pieces of glass are from old ships. Ships that once sailed the Atlantic Ocean, ships that broke down and threw stuff overboard: wine, jars, plates, glasses and bottles. The glass sank to the bottom of the ocean and during the tide, it was tossed and rolled around the seabed, over and over the sand, until the sharp fragments were worn down into smooth rounded pieces. And during high tide the sea brings in these little jewels, these fragments from another place and time. The mistier, more opaque the glass, the older it is.
I started collecting sea glass three years ago when I moved to Atlantic City, the place I now call my home. I’d always loved walking along the beach, the vast ocean beside me, lapping at my feet. The constancy of the tide I found relaxed me, made me calm. Whatever mood I was in, the sea would echo it back to me, whether I felt good, bad, sad or angry. I could walk the beach for hours, even during fierce storms when the rain came at me from every angle, driven by a punishing wind that stung my face and legs and the sea was whipped into a frothy, bubbling foam. But when I started to spot the sea glass, I felt compelled to pick them up, to rescue them and take them home. I have whole jars filled with glass. They are the tiny remnants of another life that remind me of who I am.
Like me, the sea glass has been worn down over time, its rough edges smoothed out, shaped and moulded by the tumbling oceans and shifting sands. And it is the very act of being battered and bashed about that has made these tiny discarded slivers of glass so beautiful. They have survived, they have endured the very worst that Mother Nature could throw at them and still they have come ashore. A reminder that life goes on. I look for them and I gather them up like treasure. A bounty of broken beauty only I can truly appreciate.
Out here, near the ocean, I feel peaceful, anchored. And I am finally strong enough to tell my story. The real story, the whole story, the true story. For many years I tried to forget, tried to block out of my mind all those months I spent chained in that cellar in North Marshall Street. But you don’t forget, you never forget. In some ways I envy Gary Heidnik, the man who raped, beat and tortured me and five other girls, who killed two of them. Heidnik gets to rest in peace.
There is very little peace in my mind. Just these quiet moments walking along the beach. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about those four months of hell I endured at Gary Heidnik’s hands. Reminders are everywhere. Small, seemingly innocent things can set off a thought in my head that takes me back there.
I can walk outside and a crack of lightning will scare me enough to send me scurrying back indoors for comfort. Or I’ll cross a street and see some workmen digging out a hole in the road and my heart will freeze in my chest.
These things don’t mean anything to most people. But they’re enough to cause me endless sleepless nights, a panic attack or at worst months of depression when I can’t even get out of bed.
I may be free but in many ways I’m still chained to Heidnik. And to the dark, difficult memories of what went on in that basement while the rest of the world went on as normal.
Since then of course nothing in my life has been normal and every aspect of Heidnik’s horrific crimes has been picked and pored over in detail by countless strangers. Thousands of words have been written about what happened – some true, some not.
Now I want to set the record straight so that people can judge for themselves what I did in that basement and what I felt I had to do in order to survive and to get the rest of the girls out.
Everything I did was to one end – survival, for myself and the others. As far as I could see, there was no choice, only necessity. And every single minute of every day I was down there, I knew it could be my last on this earth.
And even though I escaped, I know I’ll never truly get away from Heidnik, not really.
At least I’m here to feel this torment, I tell myself. At least I have my health, my faith, my family and a million different reasons to feel grateful. Like my pieces of glass, I have been changed, shaped by the world into which I was thrown.
So now I’m ready to face what happened – I’m ready to go back to the cellar, to go back to the hole and relive every moment of torture that he put me through.
Would you have done the same in my situation? Could you have done what I did? I don’t think any of us can know how we will react under such extreme circumstances until we are there, living through them.
So I don’t ask you not to judge me – I know I’ll be living with other people’s judgments for the rest of my life, and long after I am gone. It doesn’t bother me because I know only God will judge me in the end and I’ve never been ashamed of what I did.
Walk with me now down those dark, foreboding steps, cross over into an alternative reality where nothing makes sense anymore and the rules of normal life simply don’t apply.
Take a journey with me now into the very depths of hell.
And then ask yourself, what would you have done?
Chapter One
Taken
I cradled my tiny boy in my arm, stroking his head and whispering to him: ‘How you doing, my little man? You feeling okay today?’
He slept soundly in my embrace and I touched the tip of my forefinger to his squat nose then traced round his full, thick lips, just like mine.
He looked perfect, just perfect, in his sky-blue romper suit. I sighed. Just an hour earlier I’d come to the Intensive Care Nursery in the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philly’s city center where he was staying while he was getting up his strength. He’d been born early, just like my other kids, so he was tiny, like a little doll. I’d bathed him and changed him as he’d squirmed irritably in my arms.
When he was all clean and dry, I gave him a bottle and halfway through the feed, he’d dropped off. I placed him gently in his see-through plastic cot and his legs splayed open in complete peacefulness. I pulled up his soft cotton blanket and just stared at him.
Now five weeks old, Ricky’s skinny arms were beginning to fill out and his small, trusting fingers wrapped themselves unconsciously around my own.
Ricky was my third child but I knew that getting him back home to live with me was no longer my decision. I would have to prove to child protective services that I was a good mom, someone willing to put my children’s needs before my own.
Ricky, you see, had been born with drugs in his system.
Tears sprang to my eyes now as I made a heartfelt, silent promise to my sleeping child.
I will do the right thing by you, Ricky. I’ll clean up my act. I‘ll get the other kids back. We’ll all be a family. I promise. Momma will make things right again. You’ll see.
He was so content, so innocent I couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow at the way I’d brought him into this world.
He didn’t ask to be born this way – it was my fault. I knew that.
Just a year ago everything was going so well – I’d been clean from drugs for a while, I had my two girls and I was living with the man I loved.
How quickly everything had unraveled. Working during the day, I’d left my sister Iris in charge of the kids. What I didn’t know at the time was that she was out most of the time, getting high. When the neighbors discovered her kids running wild up and down the streets unsupervised they’d stopped the eldest boy and asked him where his mom was.
‘I don’t know,’ came back the honest reply. That’s when child protective services swooped in. They took Iris’s three kids and my youngest daughter Zornae, who was just a year old at the time, and I had to find a new place to live.
Thankfully they left LaToya, my five-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. But months later Toya, or Bookie, as I called her, was snatched by her father. By then my relationship with Zornae’s father was also beginning to break down and I was pregnant with Ricky. Everything was a mess. To my eternal shame, I fell back on the bad habits that had plagued me since I was a teenager: smoking crack and hustling.
I will go into the full details of how this sorry mess came to be later on, but for now all you need to know is that I was a vulnerable child, in an environment where taking drugs was the norm, who had found something that blocked out all the badness in the world and I was hooked. So hooked it stopped me being the mother I wanted to be. My addiction came before anything else. If had my time again, I’d never have tried crack. It ruined my life, ruined it in the worst possible way.
Now I looked down at Ricky and told myself: you will fix this, Josefina. You have to fix this.
I left the hospital that day and returned to my new apartment. This place meant everything to me. It was going to be the place I could reunite my family. I’d fixed it up real nice, with bunk beds for the girls and a cot for Ricky. The date had been fixed in court when child protective services would visit to approve my new home.
Now I just needed a little more time to get off the drugs and everything would be okay. I made myself a cheese and ham sandwich then took a bath.
It was November 26, 1986, the day before Thanksgiving. I just needed some cash to see me through the holidays, to tide me over, keep me from rattling. So I switched off the TV, turned off the lights and went outside.
* * *
‘Are you dating?’ the man asked.
It was around 9 p.m. and I was out walking the streets, looking for a customer so yeah, that’s what I was doing, dating.
I wore my usual black jeans, leather jacket, a black T-shirt and sneakers. I never had to dress up to pick up guys. Naturally slim with full lips and prominent cheekbones, I always found it easy to get work. I’d put on a bouffant wig over my ponytail this evening and pulled my jacket tight to keep out the early winter chill.
Tonight was no different from any other night of the week, apart from the fact that it was the night before Thanksgiving so there weren’t many cars going up and down Front Street, Philadelphia. Still, it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes before I noticed a car pass and then turn round at the bottom of the street.
That’s good, he was probably coming back to pick me up, I figured. I didn’t relish the idea of being out in the cold for long.
A tan Cadillac Seville pulled up alongside me – a nice car, an expensive car.
Then the window came down and the guy asked me if I was dating.
It was my very first look at Gary Heidnik.
And all I noticed was a pair of bright, very piercing blue eyes – so pale and translucent you felt you could see right through them and into his skull. Except you weren’t looking at him. He had you in his stare.
Other than those eyes, there was nothing unusual about this guy. Nothing at all.
He was white, with an ordinary face – straight nose, square jaw, wavy brown hair and a trimmed beard. He was slim and wore a brown cowhide jacket with fringing down the arms. Just a regular guy.
‘Yeah,’ I replied.
‘I want to do something. Will you come back to mine?’
‘I don’t go back to other people’s houses,’ I said. I had to have a few ground rules and this was one of them.
‘Well, I’m six feet tall so it’s kind of hard for me to do stuff in the car,’ he said and I peered into the car. Leather upholstery, clean and fresh-smelling. It’s true, he had long legs but still I was reluctant. I didn’t have many rules in this line of work but it’s one I’d usually been quite strict about. After all, you didn’t want to waste time driving to and from someone’s house when you could be back out working again in ten minutes if you gave them what they wanted in a parking lot.
But I could feel the temperature dropping around me.
‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘I’ll give you fifty bucks.’
‘How far is it?’ I asked.
‘Only about fifteen minutes’ drive. Come on, we’ll be done in half an hour then I’ll drop you back.’
‘Okay.’
Fifty bucks – it was enough to make my night worthwhile and then I could get back to the warmth of my apartment. Get a hit, get high and relax. And think about getting my kids in the morning. If only I hadn’t. If only I had tried to get clean that night. It would have worked out better for us all.
I slid into the passenger seat next to him and as we started to drive he asked me if I had kids.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘That’s why I can’t be long – I’ve got the babysitter back home minding my kids, so if I’m late she’s on golden time.’
It wasn’t true but I wanted to be clear from the start that I wasn’t going to be hanging around afterwards.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked as we sped through the dark, empty streets.
‘Gary,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’
‘I’m Nicole,’ I told him. This was my working name – I didn’t like to use my real name Josefina Rivera while I was out on the streets. For some reason it felt uncomfortable, so when I was hooking, I called myself Nicole.
We
headed through to the slum district of Philly and soon we pulled through a waist-high chain-link fence into a yard. We’d arrived at his home – 3520 North Marshall Street.
He took me in through the front porch. It was very dark outside and in the house too. This wasn’t a good neighborhood – lots of drug dealers, deadbeats and burnt-out cars. It got itself a reputation recently as the ‘OK Corral’ of Philly thanks to a gang shoot-out. Still, I didn’t mind. I’d been pretty much everywhere and thanks to my own drug habit, I was used to seeing the seedier side of life.
Crack was my drug – always uppers, never downers. At first it had started out as a bit of fun. When you’re young, you think you’re invincible, you never imagine becoming so hooked on something that it’s all you can think about. You never imagine being driven to extreme lengths to get a hit. Or that you’d put drugs before a life growing inside you. And for me, somewhere along the line crack had taken over. It wasn’t a choice anymore. Crack had become the only way to get through the day. I needed a hit first thing in the morning or I couldn’t move at all. It didn’t matter how much money I made, I always spent it all. If I made $50 or $500 I could always be sure of one thing – by the next day it would be gone and I’d be back out on the streets.
Gary led the way inside. I briefly looked around to see we were in a living room with a couch and TV and a few rugs on the floor. We walked through to a dark dining room with a pinball machine, dining chairs and dining table. It was a normal, regular house as far as I could see. The only thing that struck me as peculiar was the fact that instead of wallpaper, he’d stuck something unusual on the walls: money.
He’d glued dimes, nickels and quarters all around the walls of the dining room. And in the kitchen the walls were covered with pennies. Jeez, why would anyone do that? It looked like it must have taken hours.
He led me upstairs to his bedroom and on the wall along the staircase and all along the corridor upstairs there were more dollar bills. Occasionally there was a $20 bill, I guess just to make it interesting. Maybe he was showing off. Letting the world know he’s got enough dough to paint his house with the stuff.
Cellar Girl Page 1