I nodded mechanically, barely listening, trying to imagine what it would be like on the day itself. This was my chance to tell them the truth, tell them all what really happened. I wanted it so badly, but I couldn’t help feeling a little fear, as much from the trial itself as what was to come after.
At this moment I couldn’t see myself in the future or imagine what would happen afterwards. It was as if my life was on hold, just waiting for closure.
I was frightened of being met at the other end of this trial by that same void. What came after Heidnik? The trial and what had happened to me was defining my life right now, defining me. But what happens afterwards? As much as I wanted to know, I was afraid of the answer.
Mary was asking me now if I’ve seen enough – did I need to know anything else?
‘No,’ I told her. ‘I’m ready.’
And I really was – ready to face the world, ready to face Heidnik again, ready to take on Peruto.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Trial
I stood in front of the long mirror, eyeing myself critically.
It was Monday 20 June, 1988 and though there was a crisp chill in the air at this time in the morning, I knew in just a few hours the heat would be overpowering. So I had chosen a long sundress with large blue flowers and put on my best wig: long with tumbling auburn curls.
I tried to breathe normally but I felt a slight constriction in my chest. Today was the day I would give my evidence against Heidnik.
‘Don’t you worry about anything,’ Mom told me on the phone the night before. ‘You survived Heidnik, this here is going to be a piece of cake. Just get up there and tell the truth and don’t let anything distract you from that. You can do this Josefina. Remember that.’
I recalled my mom’s words of reassurance as I adjusted my dress and applied my lipstick: You can do this. You survived Heidnik, you can do anything.
It was Day 1 of the trial and I was the first captive to be brought to the stand. Before me, Gallagher would call up Sandra’s mother to give evidence and then Officer Armstrong, who came to the house when neighbors complained of the smell but failed to discover us there.
I wanted to hear all the evidence but I wasn’t allowed so I knew I’d have a few hours to wait in the morning.
Now I stood at the mirror, expecting the cops at any minute to pick me up for my day in court and I couldn’t help feeling the huge weight of expectation and anticipation that had built up to this moment.
I was the prosecution’s main witness. I had been told that. Of all the captives held in the basement, I was there the longest. Of all of us still surviving, I was the most articulate. If anyone was going to send Heidnik to the chair it would be me.
The next couple of hours went by swiftly. Mary met me at the house and accompanied me to City Hall. We waited in a small room for everyone to arrive – the jury, the attorneys and all the press.
Finally, it was time. I was led into a packed courtroom and the first person I saw on the table to my left was Heidnik, looking like a complete nut.
He was wearing the same Hawaiian shirt he had on at the preliminary hearing and I swear it looked like it hadn’t been washed since then. He was there, but he was also absent, as if he didn’t have a clue what was going on. I learned later he was doped up on Thorazine for the most part, but still, there was something vacant about him. His hair was wild and scruffy, his eyes stared straight ahead in a fixed, uncomprehending gaze and he didn’t seem to be aware of anything around him.
Peruto, on the other hand, looked like a primped and preened poodle, his hair and beard neatly coiffed, his starched white shirt elegant and his tightly fitting suit bright and dapper. He seemed eager and excited, keen to get going.
I was led to the stand where I was sworn in and Gallagher got to his feet to start the questioning. I didn’t stumble. I didn’t get flustered. For three hours I slowly recounted the whole sordid story from beginning to end. Gallagher was amazing – he talked to me with a low, calm voice. His respect was evident.
By the time I’d finished the courtroom seemed baking hot. It was ninety degrees outside but thanks to a broken air conditioner, it felt even hotter inside.
It was Peruto’s turn. I knew what was coming. I’d had a taste of Peruto’s line at the preliminary hearing. He jumped to his feet theatrically. Everything about him seemed for show.
‘Why did he say he was keeping you captive?’ Peruto asked.
‘He wanted us to have children,’ I replied, but now my voice carried a hint of coolness.
‘Why did he pick the cellar?’
‘He said he didn’t want to do it in the conventional way because the city kept taking them away.’
‘How many women did he say he wanted and how many babies?’
‘He wanted ten women to have ten children, all in the basement.’
Where was this going? I’d already stated all this in my previous testimony.
‘He walked, talked and acted the same but what he was doing may not be what you would do, right?’
‘Yes.’
Suddenly the penny dropped – he wanted to prove Heidnik’s plan was so out there, so crazy, it could never have come from a sane person.
But soon Peruto switched tack – he went on the attack, accusing me of conspiring with Vincent Nelson to rob Heidnik before going to the police. Ridiculous.
I denied it.
He accused Nelson of being my pimp.
‘I never worked for anybody but myself!’ I asserted.
He then accused me of wearing a wig!
For a moment, I was thrown off guard. I could see what he was trying to do – cast doubt on my testimony, make me out to be a liar, someone who wanted to pull the wool over the jury’s eyes. But I refused to be undone.
He asked me if I was wearing a wig today.
‘Yes,’ I told him honestly. I had nothing to hide.
Now this irritating and horrible little lawyer was really beginning to annoy me but I tried not to let him get to me. At least, not on the surface.
‘Did you get any of your information from the media?’ he asked.
‘I was there. I don’t need to get it from the media.’
He started trying to imply that once I was free I could have escaped at any time, that I stayed because I wanted to. I told the court again that my plan was to escape at a time when I could ensure the safety of the other girls.
There was silence for a few moments.
Finally Peruto said: ‘Is it a fair statement that you would like to see the defendant convicted of first-degree murder?’
‘That’s right,’ I shot back.
The judge ended the day’s session before Peruto could get in any more of his pointless questions and I returned home that night, exhausted and agitated. The house seemed so quiet, I roamed from room to room, unsure what to do with myself.
Eventually, I made a ham sandwich and ate it in front of the TV. When Angelo got back from work we cooked up some crack and got high together.
I took the bitter-tasting smoke deep into my lungs, eager to let the drugs wash away all my tension and worries. It didn’t take long. In a few moments I was back, floating on that cloud of happiness, drifting into another world where Heidnik and all the terrible memories of the cellar couldn’t touch me.
But the next day I was back in the witness box and Peruto was going at me again, all along the same lines as the day before. He wanted to try and trip me up, get me to contradict my earlier testimony and admit to being complicit in Heidnik’s scheme.
He asked if I’d been to a place called Carmesino’s.
‘No,’ I told him. ‘I don’t even know what Carmesino’s is.’
Apparently it was a place to buy cop stuff – uniforms, hats, and police gear. Next Peruto came at me: ‘What if I told you I had a witness who saw you buying handcuffs in Carmesino’s?’
‘Then they must be lying,’ I replied.
Now the judge spoke: ‘Or mistaken.’
> On and on it went – I wondered if Peruto was defending Heidnik or prosecuting me? The whole time he was on the attack, but he had nothing to go on so we kept returning to the same points over and over.
Eventually, I lost it.
‘Is this all you’ve got?’ I demanded. ‘The same five questions? I’ve answered them all already.’
Judge Abraham waded in on my side. ‘She’s right, Mr Peruto. Get on with it – whatever you have to ask her ask her. If not, she’s done.’
It was enough to silence him. Frustrated he sat down. ‘Your witness.’
Gallagher rose slowly to his feet again. He had just a few short questions.
First he asked me what the first thing Heidnik did was after we got done dumping Deborah Dudley’s body.
‘He stopped to buy an Inquirer so he could check his stocks.’
Then he asked me if I knew where Gary got his ideas from.
‘Yes – he got them from watching movies and TV. He got the idea of feeding us parts of Sandra’s body from the movie Eating Raoul, and he got his ideas on punishment from Mutiny on the Bounty. He also saw The World of Suzie Wong, and he liked the way oriental woman were. That’s why he picked a Filipino wife.’
After this I was free to leave the stand. I wanted to stay for the other girls’ testimony but at the same time I wanted to get as far away from that courtroom as possible.
I felt a surge of good feeling. I’d done what I set out to do. I knew my testimony had been strong and that despite his best efforts Peruto had failed to rattle me.
No matter how he rephrased the words or sentences it was never going to change the basic fact that we were all there because of Gary Heidnik’s bizarre ideas.
And two girls were not.
In all that time I spent in the witness box Heidnik never looked up, at me or even around at all the dozens of people packed into that small sweltering room.
Some part of me wished he had – I wanted him to see me, wanted him to know that I’d won. He knew how to work the system, that’s what he’d told me time and time again and that was how he ended up fooling numerous psychiatrists into believing he was perfectly sane, when all the while he had naked women chained and starving in his cellar.
No, I didn’t want him to get off on an insanity plea, that was true, because, knowing Heidnik, eventually he would have found a way to get out again and back on the streets. Heidnik had to be stopped once and for all.
He was too smart, too cunning to be let out ever again. If anybody could get out of prison after being sentenced to life, it was him.
So I knew he wasn’t properly insane, not in the way the legal system defined it anyway. My lawyer had explained all the terms to me before the trial. A person who is legally insane is not responsible for their actions if, because of a ‘disease of the mind’, he does not know the ‘nature and quality’ of his acts, or doesn’t know that those acts are wrong.
Gary Heidnik was not legally insane and I knew this because of what he did to the two bodies. With Sandra, he’d dismembered her body and tried to destroy the evidence because people knew they were linked and if her body was discovered, the police would come after him.
Nobody knew that Deborah Dudley was with him and they had no history together so he dumped her body whole in the wooded forests of the Pine Barrens. If they found her, it didn’t matter.
He knew killing the two women was wrong but only one death could lead back to him so he used different methods of dispatch. If he didn’t know he’d done wrong, why go to the trouble of cutting Sandra up into piece and hiding her in his freezer?
No, he’d approached these issues with his logical, cold and methodical mind. When he killed those women and got rid of their bodies, he was not insane.
I truly believed Heidnik deserved all that was coming to him – I knew that and perhaps he knew it too. The way he looked in court, it was like he was defeated already. My mind replayed our exchange in the house when I asked to see my family. Did he know it was all over then? When did he give up?
Not long after his arrest he tried hanging himself in the shower of the prison with a T-shirt. Another messy, unsuccessful suicide attempt. So perhaps he sensed the end was near, that he didn’t deserve to live.
But he didn’t deserve a lawyer like Peruto either.
In the end, the defense was based on a complete dead end – attacking the victims. Was that seriously going to help his client?
I didn’t hear Jacqueline and Lisa’s testimonies because they were on the same day as mine but I read the reports the next day that they didn’t differ all that much in the details.
If I had been defending Heidnik, I would have tried to find out why he was even allowed to be walking the streets. It was obvious he had serious problems. Who was responsible? The army? The medical professionals? The criminal justice system?
Yes, I think I would have found a better place to point the finger than the victims. In the end it probably did his case more harm than good.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Heidnik’s Mind
I returned to court on Thursday 23 June to hear the expert witnesses brought in by the defense. If my testimony had set the scene for the battle, the experts were to be the heavy infantry, fighting it out to decide Heidnik’s mental state.
I wanted to hear for myself what they made of Gary Heidnik.
Peruto called up a psychologist, Jack Apsche. Apsche was charged with researching and evaluating Heidnik’s mental health records. He had spent weeks wading through records in the States and Germany. Now he seemed ready to give his conclusions.
‘In your opinion,’ Peruto started. ‘Did Gary Heidnik know right from wrong?’
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘In my opinion he did not know right from wrong.’
‘In your opinion, did he know the nature of his acts?’
‘He did not know the nature of his acts.’
‘Was he suffering from a mental disease?’
‘Yes.’
‘What disease?’
‘Severe schizophrenia.’
Apsche went on to catalogue Heidnik’s twenty-one admissions to mental health institutions, starting from his time in the army in 1962, when he was diagnosed as ‘someone incapable of showing emotions and feelings and not having the capacity for interpersonal relations’.
The admissions stacked up one on top of the next – he complained of paranoia, hallucinations, delusions, depression and attempted suicide over a dozen times.
At one point he stopped speaking for two and a half years, claiming the devil had put a cookie in his throat.
‘He did not say a word during that entire two-and-a-half-year period,’ asserted Apsche. ‘He engaged in nonverbal communication such as rolling up his pants leg. That was a signal that no one was supposed to talk with him, and he assumed everyone would understand that.’
At one point Apsche testified, when Heidnik was admitted to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Coatesville, he listed his race as ‘black’.
I nearly fell off my seat! There was no one whiter than Heidnik.
‘He was convinced he was black because his mother had told him so,’ Apsche explained. It started to add up – maybe that’s why he picked black girls for the most part. Did he think I was black too?
Peruto was trying to establish that Heidnik could not have been faking his illness, it was genuine from the start.
But when Gallagher cross-examined he threw doubt onto some of the specifics of Apsche’s testimony. He contended that Heidnik had been faking all this time to collect his $2,000 a month in benefits from the Veterans Administration and the Social Security Administration.
The following day it was the turn of Dr Kenneth Kool, another expert witness for the defense, there to lodge the insanity plea firmly in the jurors’ minds.
He was a courtroom veteran and his relaxed and easy manner suggested he was as comfortable there as the judge herself.
Peruto asked him if he had reached a conc
lusion based on the information.
‘I don’t know every element,’ Kool began. ‘But I have what I assume to be the highlights.’
‘From November to March did he appreciate the nature and quality of his acts?’
‘No.’
‘He could drive a car,’ said Peruto. ‘Did that make any difference?’
‘No.’
‘If I told you that he placed a body in New Jersey, would that change your opinion?’
‘No.’
Kool went on to testify that Heidnik was delusional and did not know it, that he was psychotic, he had an unbalanced perception of reality and his lifestyle was bizarre and regressed.
‘What is a delusion?’ asked Peruto.
‘A delusion is an unreality perceived by the victim of it to be a reality.’
‘Are you aware of his goal?’
‘I’m aware of his delusional goal.’
Kool outlined Heidnik’s grand plan, his ‘partnership with God’ to produce a whole community of children and described it as a ‘fixed delusion’.
Did Heidnik know that what he was doing was unlawful, asked Peruto.
I sat forward in my seat. Now we were getting down to the crux of the matter.
Kool was unwavering in his conviction. ‘He had some awareness of man’s law, of what the laws of the Commonwealth were, but he saw God’s law as superior. He did not have the capacity to reflect upon these things.’
This was news to me – in all the time I was chained up in Gary’s basement, he’d never mentioned God to me once. It was Sandra who had told me he was the pastor of his own church. He himself made no reference to God or this so-called pact – and I probably spent a lot more time getting a feel for the mind of Gary Heidnik than any of these experts. So how was it the psychologists had this impression?
Kool was now delivering his testimony with quick efficient answers. Yes, he has seen a progression of illness from the medical records. No, he didn’t believe that buying a copy of the Inquirer to check his stocks after dumping Deborah Dudley’s body contradicted his assessment of Heidnik’s mental state.
Cellar Girl Page 19