‘He went out to work every day, making tile. I stayed home and looked after Toya, cleaned the house, you know, the usual, boring stuff.
‘Twice a week, we went out – once to the pictures, once to a restaurant. It was the same week in, week out. Not my cup of tea. I lasted a few months and then we packed it in – I told him I wasn’t happy and he accepted that. He was so good to me, didn’t make a fuss, didn’t make it difficult for me to leave. We just went our separate ways. It was hard on Toya though – she was three at the time and she loved her daddy Ron.’
‘You wish you had stayed?’ asked Sandra.
I thought for a minute.
‘No. No, it was the right thing to do. I mean, if I had stayed any longer I would have got more and more miserable and then I would have made Ron miserable too. And that would have been much worse than the way we left things, as friends. As it was, there wasn’t any big fight or rows. He sent me off with a smile and I’m pleased we both kept things pleasant. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not the marrying kind.’
Sandra sighed. ‘Nobody’s ever asked me to marry them,’ she said sadly. I knew what she wasn’t saying – that maybe nobody would.
‘Don’t worry Sandra,’ Lisa said comfortingly. ‘They will one day.’
Sandra looked up gratefully at Lisa. ‘You think so?’
‘I know so!’ Lisa laughed. ‘Some day your handsome prince is going to get down on one knee and give you a rock so big your hand is going to fall off just trying to keep the damn thing on!’
We all started giggling and Sandra gave Lisa a playful push.
It turned out to be a good day after all.
Chapter Nine
Deborah
It was late at night when Deborah Dudley arrived, and the manner of her entrance set the tone of her whole incarceration.
Unlike with the other girls, Deborah wasn’t crying when she was brought down in handcuffs and naked.
No, Deborah was mad, real mad, and she was screaming and shouting and cussing Gary out like she couldn’t believe he had the cheek to lock her up.
Deborah was black, like the others, but she was much darker than the rest and not real pretty like Lisa or sweet like Sandra. No, Deborah seemed hard.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you little shit?’ she screamed at Gary as he started to work on the muffler clamps.
He didn’t reply, just kept on going.
‘Are you deaf? You fucking freak?’ she screamed at him again. Then, when she didn’t get a response she looked round at all of us sitting downstairs in chains, watching her in silence.
‘Whatcha ya’ll lookin’ at, bitches?’ she shouted. ‘You got something to say about all of this? Let me out of here, you bastard!’ she addressed herself to Gary once more but by now he had the chain attached and he was lifting the bags off the board over the hole.
When he’d opened it up he pointed inside and ordered Deborah: ‘Get in!’
‘Uh-uh.’ She shook her head defiantly.
‘Get in the hole!’ he said.
‘No, I’m not getting in there. I don’t want to be down there.’
I wanted to tell her to just shut up and do as she was told, that she was just making things harder for herself. She didn’t seem to grasp what was going on here.
She just kept on refusing until Gary grabbed hold of a shovel handle and started beating her behind hard with it. She was cowering now, trying to protect herself from the blows, but I could see she was still objecting.
Finally, exasperated, Gary just pushed her inside the hole and quickly slid the board over the top, weighing it down again with the bags.
‘Stupid bitch,’ he exclaimed, more in frustration than anger, then he headed back upstairs again.
Once we were sure Gary was out of earshot we called out to Deborah, trying to reassure her and tell her what was going on.
It was the night before New Year and now there were four of us locked up in that cellar in North Marshall Street.
I used to believe that the way you start a year is the same way you’re going to finish it but I couldn’t let myself think like that in here. If I believed I was going to spend a whole year in this prison then I’d go mad.
Meanwhile, Deborah was keeping us all up with a lot of shouting and hollering – she was asking us to let her out of the hole.
‘We can’t let you out,’ we told her. ‘If he finds out we’ll all get punished. Just make things easy on yourself and quieten down otherwise you’re going to make him mad.’
But Deborah didn’t quieten down – she never quietened down. And she ended up bringing a whole ton of trouble down on her own head and ours too.
Deborah Dudley had had a hard life. We found out later she’d been brought up in the Richard Allen Projects, a large, run-down government housing estate riddled with crime and drugs.
Deborah had been abused all her life – she had grown up quickly and learned to fight to survive.
She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t that smart either. Deborah hadn’t had a whole lot of options in her life so she was working the streets when Gary picked her up, though neither of them said where that was.
The thing was – Deborah didn’t know any other way than to fight so when she found herself in Gary’s sex dungeon she thought she could fight her way out.
Every moment of every day from the time she arrived, she fought Gary. She refused to get in the hole, she didn’t want to submit to sex and she shouted and yelled at him all the time. She shouted and yelled even when he wasn’t there.
Ordinarily, I would have admired Deborah’s refusal to be beaten down by Gary. She refused to give in. But it was tiring for the rest of us being around that level of aggression and anger all the time because it made us all nervous in case we all got punished.
‘All he wants is for us to submit to his plan,’ I told her, outlining his crazy idea of us all having his babies down in the cellar. ‘If you just do as he says you’ll be okay.’
But Deborah never submitted. It was bad enough being locked up in the cellar and now Deborah was making it harder.
She provoked Gary into beating her so much and now, instead of doing it himself, he ordered us to do it. I guess it was part of his sick idea of creating rank in our group; maybe he got the idea from his time in the army, I didn’t know. All I knew was that it was horrific to me. I’d never beaten anyone in my life before.
But Gary wanted to ensure complete obedience, to establish his total authority over us, and so when he ordered me to beat Deborah, it was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do.
‘You beat her now with this,’ he said, handing me the wooden stick. ‘And you make sure to do it hard. That girl’s got an ass like leather. She won’t feel a thing unless you give her a decent whack.’
So now I took up the stick and steeled myself to approach Deborah.
‘Don’t you hit me with that damn thing!’ she warned. ‘I’m gonna bust your ass real bad if you touch me just once with that.’
I tried to ignore her as I took the stick, pulled my arm back and landed a blow on her thigh. She started hollering but I didn’t rest until I’d hit her five or six times. I wanted to do it hard and quick – get it over with.
I didn’t even think to object. If I had, Gary would have beaten me instead, or worse. And I was still hoping I could gain his trust. Mind you, since Deborah arrived, I couldn’t tell if it was working. He seemed so wound up and frustrated a lot of the time now and he kept trying to think of different ways to punish her.
‘I just don’t know what to beat her with anymore!’ he exploded one day. ‘She’s got a hide so hard nothing makes any difference.’
After Gary returned upstairs I went over to her to try and give her a hug.
‘I’m sorry, Deborah. We’ve just got to do as he says,’ I explained. ‘Can’t you see that you’re making things worse for yourself by objecting all the time?’
Deborah accepted the hug but she was still mad, spi
tting mad.
‘Why didn’t you take the stick and just hit him with it?’ she said. ‘You could have beat him round the head and then we could all get out of here.’
She was gesturing wildly now, her hands flew to her head like she couldn’t believe I could be so stupid. In her mind it was all so simple.
‘We wouldn’t be able to get out,’ I explained patiently. It was like talking to a child. ‘He keeps all the keys to the padlocks upstairs so once he was unconscious, we wouldn’t have any way of getting the chains off. It would be more dangerous that way – we could starve.’
‘It’s true,’ Lisa chimed in. ‘Gary doesn’t get visitors. It would only take a few days and then we’d all die of hunger and thirst.’
‘This is bullshit!’ shouted Deborah. ‘All you bitches are pussies! How come none of you found a way out of here yet? If we all keep yelling someone’s gonna hear us and then they’ll come and get us.’
I’d been in the basement for around seven weeks by this point and I knew there was no chance. I told Deborah about how the radios stopped the neighbors from hearing us, how I nearly escaped and lay out in the yard for twenty minutes yelling and still no one came. I told her how Gary had paid off all the drug dealers in the area so no one bothered him. Still, Deborah refused to submit.
So Deborah spent most of her time in the hole – she was just on bread and water while the rest of us were now getting a bit of variety in our diet. Occasionally Gary brought down canned soup with crackers, noodles, waffles, hot dogs or cheese sandwiches. It made a nice change from bread and water but it just made Deborah even madder to see us with it. Nothing seemed to calm her down and she thought she had a whole load of plans to get us out of there.
‘Let’s jump him,’ she suggested for about the sixth time that day. ‘If one of us stands by the bottom of the steps and another one on the other side we can easily overpower him and knock him out with the stick.’
‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘And then what? How are we going to get out of here? Like I said a million times, he doesn’t bring the keys for the padlocks down with him so how are we supposed to get out of the basement? How many times have I got to tell you – no one knows we’re here!’
‘We’ll figure something out.’
‘That’s not good enough – I’m not going to risk starving to death on a plan we haven’t thought through. I’m not risking my life on some stupid, half-baked idea which won’t work.’
‘She’s right,’ Sandra said to Deborah. ‘How are we going to get out? If we want an escape plan we’ve got to know how we’re going to escape. Not just how we’re going to take him out. And just suppose we don’t manage to knock him out, he might decide to kill us all for attacking him.’
‘Shuddup, Sandra!’ Deborah retorted. ‘You just stay out of this. This is between me and Nicole.’
‘I’m just saying – you should listen to Nicole,’ said Sandra, quietly now, cowed by Deborah’s vast temper. ‘She’s got her head screwed on. She says she’s gonna find a way out for us. You’re just making everything worse for yourself.’
‘At least I’m not weak and giving in to everything like you lot!’ Deborah spat. ‘We gotta try to have a plan. If you all listen to Nicole here you’ll be down here for the rest of your lives.’
Not for the first time I got a sense that Deborah didn’t appreciate the seriousness of our situation.
She seemed to think she could just punch her way out. It wasn’t that simple – Gary was a cold, calculating son of a bitch. He was going to keep right on going until she gave in. She couldn’t win this way.
‘If you keep fighting him like you’re going those punishments are just going to get worse and worse,’ I said. ‘Who knows what he might do? He’s not right in the head. You’ve got to realize that.’
‘Oh, I suppose I’m going to die here, aren’t I?’ Deborah shot back sarcastically.
‘Yeah – pretty much!’ I screamed at her now.
That shut her up.
That night we all got some proper rest for the first time in ages. I hoped I’d got through to her. I was just trying to stay strong and focused on getting Gary to like me and I knew Deborah resented the fact that I didn’t get beaten anymore or put in the hole but she hadn’t seen what I’d been through already, none of them had.
Years later that conversation replayed over and over in my mind.
‘I’m going to die here, aren’t I?’ I heard Deborah saying.
‘Yeah, pretty much!’ I replied, meaning, ‘If you keep doing what you’re doing.’
That was all.
I wanted her to understand that I meant she would die there if she carried on the way she was going. I wanted to get through to her, make her understand that she could choose how this went for her.
How was I to know at this stage what was going to happen to Deborah? How could any of us know just how sick Gary Heidnik was?
I knew in my heart that he was capable of anything – but in the end the horrors he visited on us were worse than anything I could ever have imagined.
* * *
The next day Deborah was sulking. Now Gary came down to have sex with us – since Sandra hadn’t had her period either he assumed she must be pregnant too and now, when he lay us down to have sex with us, it was Lisa or Deborah at the end. Afterwards, he handed out cookies to us all, cheap supermarket cookies with vanilla on one side, chocolate on another and cream in the middle – we got two apiece. The sweet cream and crunch of the biscuits were wonderful but it wasn’t enough to fill us up.
Gary didn’t talk much anymore – he seemed locked into Deborah’s non-stop dramas, intent on getting her to give in to him.
He went to put her in the hole again before he left but she refused.
‘I’m just going to wear your butt out beating it,’ he sighed, picking up the stick again.
We went through the same routine of him beating her and then she finally got in the hole.
After he left I erupted at her. ‘I don’t understand this, Deborah. Please explain – what part of this aren’t you getting?’
‘If you think I’m just going to sit here quietly and take this shit, forget it!’ Deborah yelled. ‘For. Get. It!’
She started mumbling to herself and I could only catch snippets of her train of thought: ‘Damn stupid bitch… Lording it over the rest of us… Thinks she’s better than us… bullshit…’
She yelled at me again. ‘You ain’t no better than me, Nicole! You just taking it like a bitch. You hear me? You’re just taking it!’
‘Yeah, yeah. I hear you Deborah,’ I sighed.
It seemed I’d failed to get through to her again. I stopped talking – I just didn’t know what to say to her anymore.
Chapter Ten
Jacqueline
It was January 18, the day before my birthday, and we knew that there was someone else in the house.
We’d heard Gary’s familiar heavy footfall on the porch and this time it was accompanied by another set of feet, lighter, quicker than his.
Sure enough, twenty minutes later, he came down with a small skinny girl in shackles who was almost skipping down the steps next to him.
‘This here is Jacqueline!’ said Gary. ‘Jacqueline – meet the girls. That’s Nicole, Deborah, Sandra and Lisa.’
We all nodded towards her as she looked at each of us in turn, confused and upset, but not bawling.
Gary was now doing her muffler clamps but Jacqueline was so small her feet just slipped right through them. So he put handcuffs on her ankles instead – now he was chatting away as if recounting a day at the office.
‘I was out on the northside looking for a girl and I see some hooker in front of one of the hotels so I stop to pick her up. Anyway, she’s about to get in the car when Jacqueline here comes racing over from the other side of the street, shouting: “Don’t pick her! Don’t pick her! She’s got AIDS! Pick me!” It’s freezing cold and she’s jumping up and down shouting to pick her – so, you know, I
let her in the car.’
Jacqueline was rolling her eyes now as Gary told the story, like she couldn’t believe she’d done that.
Gary motioned for Jacqueline to get down into the hole and though she obviously didn’t want to, she eventually got in, squatting down at first to get her balance, then swinging her little legs in and then crouching down inside it.
He pulled the board over the top as he kept on speaking: ‘So then Jacqueline here gets in the car instead of the other girl and I take her back.’
Just then we heard Jacqueline shouting up through the board: ‘She doesn’t have AIDS! I lied – she doesn’t have AIDS!’
This made Gary laugh out loud and a few of us smiled despite the appalling situation.
Jacqueline, who later told us she was eighteen, seemed to have no concept of danger, no sense of entering a hellish new reality. We didn’t want her to feel bad so we all just let her talk, telling her little about the punishments we’d all been subjected to. We only told her about Gary’s plan and she listened, her eyes wide with shock like we were recounting a story about someone else.
‘No way!’ she exclaimed. ‘That is so weird. Isn’t that weird? What’s this guy on?’
We told her – Thorazine. But we didn’t tell her the worst. It felt mean somehow. She’d find out soon enough. Even Deborah was quiet – I wondered if she felt sorry for Jacqueline. I did. Eighteen is no age.
Suddenly something occurred to Jacqueline.
‘I just bought some new shoes!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh damn! I bet somebody else be stealing them now!’
I wanted to laugh. That was what Jacqueline was worried about. Shoes!
The next day everything changed for me – and strangely enough, it was all down to a pair of shoes.
Well, slippers, actually.
We were all sitting round talking when we heard the door to the basement opening up – Gary came down with the Chinese menus again.
‘Seeing as it’s Nicole’s birthday today you’re all gonna get a special treat. One dish each! Happy Birthday Nicole!’
Until this moment I’d been trying to forget that it was my birthday, that I was turning twenty-six chained up in a cellar in a madman’s house. I must have told Gary some time in my early days there – I didn’t even remember when. It had been almost two months since Gary abducted me, and there was still no sign of my period. I was convinced I was pregnant.
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