Heidnik&Josefina

Aiding and Abetting: Twenty years after the Heidnik case, the author revisits his own link with a controversial witness. By Christopher Moraff Sometime in the late summer or early fall of 1986, Gary Michael Heidnik, a 43-year-old self-ordained minister and some-time stock trader, descended the basement steps of his North Philadelphia home and began digging a four foot deep hole in the hard earth floor. Over the next nine months the hole would grow ¯ ultimately becoming home to six partially clad women, only four of whom would live to one day ascend the basement steps. So began Gary Heidnik’s spectacular run as Philadelphia’s most reviled celebrity. Long before Hannibal Lecter enjoyed his fava beans and Chianti, Heidnik was stockpiling a freezer full of human body parts in his North Philadelphia house. For those of us coming of age in the city during the late 1980s, the entire spectacle offered a chilling backdrop to our teenaged years. Depending upon whom you talk to, Heidnik was the anti-Christ, a cannibal, or just that “sick fuck from Franklinville.” Whatever you choose to call him, when the State of Pennsylvania executed Heidnik by lethal injection on the night of July 6, 1999, after feeding him a last meal of pizza and black coffee, the City of Philadelphia closed the book on one of the most notorious chapters of its criminal history and breathed a collective sigh of relief. Some people might call that closure. This year will mark twenty years since Heidnik dug his basement hole. To this day, the case remains a dark memory burned into the soul of a city. But scratch just a bit below the surface and one wonders if, in the end, the sensationalism of Heidnik’s crimes didn’t serve to distort ¯ or at least conveniently simplify ¯ the story of what really happened inside 3520 N. Marshall Street in the winter of 1986-87. Never fully resolved are questions regarding the actions of the first woman taken captive, a young Hispanic prostitute named Josefina “Nicole” Rivera, who after four months as Heidnik’s prisoner managed to escape and notify police. Newspaper accounts of the day describe her as “courageous” and recount her dramatic flight from Heidnik. But often overlooked are the repeated contentions of the other survivors that as days and weeks passed in the Marshall Street basement, as Heidnik’s “senior” captive, Rivera began to

emerge as a key player in the events unfolding there. Throughout the preliminary hearing and trial, the other three victims leveled repeated accusations charging Rivera with aiding Heidnik in his debauchery despite what they said were several earlier opportunities to leave him. Even the accounts of her eventual escape are contradictory and incomplete. Yet despite these facts, the state chose Rivera as its star witness against Gary Heidnik, resisting suggestions that she be tried as a co-conspirator. Upon reflection, the reasons are clear: Heidnik’s penchant for victimizing the mentally disabled meant that trial testimony from his victims would be shaky at best; his defense team, led by super lawyer A. Charles Peruto Jr., would tear them apart on the stand. But Rivera presented something different. Educated, savvy and well spoken, she had just the right combination of cunning and credibility to ensure Heidnik a trip to the execution chamber. And in the end, that’s just what she did. As a 19 year-old freshman at Temple University, my own involvement with the case began shortly after Heidnik’s trial when my father and a filmmaker colleague bought Josefina Rivera’s story with the intention of turning the whole lurid affair into a movie. While that project never coalesced, throughout the process our little group began to suspect that the complexities of trying such a sensational case had led prosecutors to minimize Rivera’s role by any means necessary ¯ among them, it turns out, are charges that the District Attorney’s office coerced at least one potential witness to keep his mouth shut. As we reach its twentieth anniversary, like so many other Philadelphia natives, the Heidnik case still haunts me. But at the heart of my unease is a gnawing sense that where the “House of Horrors” is concerned, justice may not have been fully served. Consider that over more than four decades, Heidnik’s mounting insanity never crossed the line to murder, yet within three months of his abducting Josefina Rivera, two women died ¯ at least one under circumstances that still aren’t 100 percent clear. Did some dark part of Rivera enjoy the power she wielded, or were her actions just a cunning ploy with one ultimate goal - survival? I suspect the truth falls somewhere in between. But the answer, if there is one, must ultimately lie with Rivera herself, possibly buried somewhere in the four hours of taped interviews with her that have spent the last decade sitting at the bottom of my bedroom closet. I decided it was time to revisit them. “I knew from the beginning that the only way out was through Heidnik’s heart. I had

to gain his trust.” - Josefina Rivera The Court: You have advised her [Josefina Rivera] to testify? Mr. Grimes: Yes. Mr. Peruto: Let the record reflect I have several witnesses that could place her at different scenes that may make her a co-conspirator in this case. - Commonwealth vs. Gary Heidnik, Preliminary Hearing, April 23, 1987 ________________________________________________________________________ On Thursday March 26, 1987, the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer screamed with the headline: “Horror in Franklinville: Captives Found in Chains.” Inside a house on the 3500 block of North Marshall Street, police found three women chained together in a makeshift basement dungeon. Even more chilling, during a subsequent search of the house, medical examiners found frozen limbs inside a freezer in the kitchen and charred human remains simmering in a pot on the stove. Investigators arrested the home’s owner, Gary Heidnik, a former nurse and ex-con with a history of mental illness. As details began to surface, Heidnik would prove to be an enticing catch. This was not Gary Heidnik’s first run-in with the law, nor, it seems, his first attempt at realizing his bizarre quest: to serve as father-god to his own harem of wives and children. Beginning in the early 1970s, Heidnik began frequenting the Elwyn Institute for the mentally retarded in West Philadelphia, using the area as a sort of base of operations for his evolving scheme. In 1971 he formed his own church “United Church of the Ministries of God”, naming himself bishop. Over the next seven years he would continue to exhibit strange and disturbing behavior ¯ he maintained a scrubby appearance, often wearing the same clothes for days in a row, and was said to emit a foul odor. During that time, while collecting disability from the U.S. Army, he would also manage to turn a $35,000 stock investment into $500,000, granting him the leisure to pursue his mission. Then in 1978, Heidnik was arrested after authorities found his then-girlfriend’s mentally retarded sister chained in his basement. The institution where she lived had alerted authorities after the woman failed to return from a visit with her sister and Heidnik. He would spend just over four years in jail for the crime. Upon his parole, he bought his final home ¯ on Marshall Street in North Philadelphia. Through the summer of 1987, as the investigation of Heidnik unfolded, it became apparent to police that they were dealing with a deeply disturbed human being.

From interviews with the survivors, a picture would begin to emerge of the nightmarish events that occurred in Heidnik’s home in the weeks following Thanksgiving 1986. Over the next several months, the victims would tell harrowing tales of beatings, rape, torture and ultimately murder. Reading through the trial transcripts, a picture emerges of life in Heidnik’s basement, which by New Years Day 1987 was becoming increasingly crowded with captive women prompting Heidnik to expand his hole. Most of the women maintained street personas, and names tend to shift and morph depending upon context and who is speaking. There was Agnas Adams, also called “Vicky”; Jacqueline Askins, known as “Donna”; and “Nicole”, Josefina Rivera’s own alter ego. It’s a common enough practice for those forced by circumstance into less than desirable lifestyles. Within a short period of time, a strange hierarchy began to develop in the basement as Heidnik placed Rivera in charge of the other girls. “Since I was the first, I had seniority over the everyone else,” Rivera recalled. It was a responsibility she apparently accepted with some relish. Directly under her was Lisa Thomas ¯ Heidnik's third abductee, taken three days before Christmas ¯ but Rivera admits that it was her duty to tell him when the other girls misbehaved, which she says she did “on a couple of occasions” after which the offenders were punished with beatings, torture and starvation. For the other women in the basement, Rivera soon became an object of fear. The senior member in charge ¯ Gary’s eyes and ears ¯ on a whim she could bring his wrath. “Gary would ask Nicole should he do this, should he do that, and she would tell him yes,” Thomas testified at the preliminary hearing. In a moment of creativity, said Thomas, Nicole even invented a new form of torment ¯ electrocution ¯ showing Gary how, by placing electrical cables on the women’s chains, he could make them writhe and jump. “She would tell us that she’s gonna put water in the hole,” Thomas explained, “and while she’s doing that, she was laughing and she was putting the wires in the hole with the water.” Rivera denies that she instructed Heidnik in electrocution torture. “I’m just not that inquisitive about electricity and stuff,” she said. By her own admission, though, she was never a victim of this particular torture. Heidnik’s hole was home to five women when, on February 7, after spending at least 24 hours on “punishment” suspended by a single handcuffed arm from a pipe in Heidnik’s basement, 25 year-old Sandra Lindsay died of apparent asphyxiation. Lindsay was the

second woman taken captive ¯ within ten days of Rivera ¯ and was at least mildly retarded. To dispose of the body, Heidnik dragged Lindsay upstairs, dismembered her, and began methodically cooking her body parts in his oven. According to Rivera, the body was later ground up and fed to the other women mixed with dog food. Again, Rivera says she was never forced to eat the concoction. As time passed, a strange relationship was beginning to materialize between Gary Heidnik and his senior captive ¯ one that, in the end, would prove to be Heidnik’s undoing. Experts have a name for what may have been happening: they call it Stockholm Syndrome. The term refers to events surrounding a 1973 failed bank robbery in Sweden during which several hostages perplexed investigators by exhibiting support and even sympathy for their captors. Over the course of five days, strapped with dynamite and under the constant threat of death, the hostages ¯ three women and one man ¯ established an emotional bond with the robbers. Joseph M. Carver, Ph.D, a clinical psychologist and expert on Stockholm Syndrome, says that emotional bonding between abductees and their captors is a common enough theme in social psychology. “In the final analysis, emotionally bonding with an abuser is actually a strategy for survival for victims of abuse and intimidation,” Carver writes. But the other women would dispute this assessment: they believe Rivera ¯ or Nicole ¯ enjoyed what she was doing. According to their testimony, something very different may have been going on. Agnes Adams, the last woman taken captive, told the court that Rivera could have left the house any time she wished and even had a key to the backdoor. Whether Adams was present in the basement long enough to formulate such an opinion notwithstanding (Adams spent less than 24 hours as a captive before being rescued), Rivera herself testified that she left the house with Heidnik on numerous occasions, and in at least one case drove Heidnik’s Cadillac to a body shop while he drove ahead of her in his Rolls Royce. When Peruto brought this fact up at the preliminary hearing, wondering aloud why Rivera didn’t simply drive away, she said she feared for the safety of the other women. During her last month with Heidnik, court records show that Rivera traveled with him on numerous occasions to run errands. It’s a fact she doesn’t dispute. “We went to a restaurant, we went to a record shop, and we drove all over the Pine Barrens looking for a place to dump Deborah Dudley’s body,” Rivera told us. “We did a lot of things.” Yet at other times, she seems to contradict herself. “Neighbors said they saw me driving his van and saw me outside on several occasions, but that just wasn’t true.” ________________________________________________________________________

“I don’t know who’s gonna die here, but I’m not gonna die here.” - Josefina Rivera Q: Whose idea was it to give the girls electric shocks? A: It was Nicole’s - Testimony of Lisa Thomas ________________________________________________________________________ For nearly 15 years the tapes sat in my closet. Periodically, while rifling through a stack of long-outgrown blue jeans or launching some valiant attempt at forcing a little organizational structure into my fragmented life, the small silver Maxell boxes would reappear, representing something mysterious and, frankly, discomforting. I didn’t even have a VCR. The floor model I bought at the local Sears didn’t come with a box, so I carried it to my car wrapped in a plastic trash bag. Later that night, I’m sitting on my bed holding the box marked “Josefina: 1-2” in my hands. With some trepidation I place the tape in the machine. For a moment, I’m staring at a black screen, wondering if something isn’t wrong with the VCR or if perhaps a decade at the bottom of a musty closet might have detrimental effects on videotapes. And then she appears. She sits before a light gray backdrop, this woman who was the first hostage abducted by the notorious basement collector-of-women Gary Heidnik as well as the calculating instrument of his eventual demise. Her skin is the color of bronze and her dark eyes dance nervously across the camera lens as she waits for the interview to begin. She is visibly worn beyond her 29 years, with dark troubled eyes and the reluctant smile of someone who is used to getting over. Rivera was just 25 years old when Heidnik abducted her and the trauma of her captivity, compounded by years of street life, have etched an element of sadness into her face. And yet the sadness is framed by an unmistakable trace of self-confidence. “Victim” is not a word you think to use when describing the woman on the tape. She wears a homemade cross around her left wrist, but other than that, the halter-top she is wearing makes her appear naked before the camera. While the story she tells follows closely her testimony at trial, the tapes themselves reveal much about the woman in them. Her nonchalance and her abundant traces of humor suggest an element of detachment that appears almost cold.

Rivera is simultaneously headstrong and coy, vaguely comfortable in her role before the camera, aware that a simple gesture can as easily be used as a tool of deception as a plea for understanding. If she wasn’t born an actress, she learned to become one. It’s as if everything that happened was just to get to this point. To have someone listen. Gary listened. But she had no choice, right? As Nicole, she could live, survive, make it out someday. As Josefina, she was surely doomed. ________________________________________________________________________ Josefina Rivera was born and raised just miles from the Marshall Street house where Gary Heidnik would years later hold her captive. An intelligent girl from a working-class family, Rivera recalls a pleasant childhood. Raised by foster parents, she exhibited early on the gift of adaptability necessary for survival in her hard-scrabble Fairmount neighborhood ¯ today largely gentrified, but at the time a marginal barrio of hard- working, lower-income Latino families mixed with working-class Whites. “My parents were strict,” she remembers, “but we never wanted for anything. They were good foster parents.” By 1970, when Rivera was nine years old, urban flight, spearheaded by the rapid dissolution of the city’s industrial base, was changing the face of many of Philadelphia’s working-class neighborhoods. Anyone who could afford it moved to the suburbs or the Northeast, leading to increased crime and drugs in places like Fairmount. By 1985, “urban renewal” would finally push Latinos out of the neighborhood, further up Broad Street into the barrios of North Philadelphia. At a young age Rivera apparently learned of the dichotomy that existed between the aspirations she was taught to pursue in school and those more immediate goals represented by the streets. She attended John W. Hallahan High School, a Catholic girls’ school in North Philadelphia, and by her telling was a capable student. But the lure of the street was simply too strong to ignore. By the time she was 18, Rivera had moved out of her home and had her first daughter. Listening to her story, I recognize that as Rivera made the transition from girl to woman, what emerged was a street-savvy, fast-talking yet intelligent woman ¯ a survivor. Nicole emerged. And yet listening to her, it is difficult to determine where reality ends and fantasy begins. She is noticeably reluctant to talk about her past, and only after being pressed does she offer a glimpse: how she started Go-Go dancing and, after her eldest daughter was taken by her biological father, descended into a life of “hustling.” “I did it for me and my kids,” she explains.

________________________________________________________________________ “Just one more thing, I can’t understand how this woman has no deal whatsoever.” - A. Charles Peruto, Preliminary Hearing, April 23, 1987 ________________________________________________________________________ Gary Heidnik was a lot of things, but he was not a serial killer. In fact, to kill the women he kept represented the antithesis of his mission ¯ to procreate as much as possible, creating an ever-growing family of wives and children in the process. As demented as it was, his mission was one of creation, not destruction. Describing his motives, Rivera testified: “He thought as though society deprived him of a family and he wanted to have a family and children.” As he was chaining her to a pipe in his basement, Rivera says, “He kept talking about why he was doing this, like his reason, that they had taken his kids from him.” He told the other women the same thing. According to Jacqueline Askins, the second-to- last woman taken hostage, “Gary wanted ten girls, he said, and he wanted as many babies as possible before he died.” In Heidnik’s mind, the women he kept were under his care. And while no one would argue that he was especially adept in his nurturing, the fact that Heidnik’s overall plan necessitated keeping his “wives” alive and at least relatively healthy is indisputable. Even for someone as delusional as Gary Heidnik, it is hard to have babies with dead women. What’s more, even his abuse it seems was not the expression of some deeply rooted sadistic impulse but was rather a method of keeping control over his charges. Heidnik was essentially a pragmatist. His methods were crude ¯ more akin to those used to punish an unruly dog than any refined technique for inflicting pain. More importantly, he doesn’t appear to have gotten any particular enjoyment out of abusing the women beyond the very direct results of solidifying his control over them. He wasn’t even particularly good at it. And this was one of the first weaknesses that Rivera, in her final transition into Nicole, was able to exploit. Nicole, it seems, did have a sadistic impulse. ________________________________________________________________________ Q: Did Josefina Rivera ever strike you? A: Yes. Q: Did she strike you when Gary wasn’t around? A: Yes. And then while he was there she struck me. Q: When she struck you when Gary was not around, was she doing it just to pretend? A: No. She enjoyed it.

- Testimony of Lisa Thomas “Deborah Dudley’s death is what got everyone free,” - Josefina Rivera ________________________________________________________________________ A month and ten days after the death of Sandra Lindsay, Heidnik would once again find himself disposing of a body ¯ this time of 23 year-old Deborah Dudley, the fourth woman taken captive. The tapes, chronological until now, skip right over details of Dudley’s death. Only when pressed does Rivera reluctantly offer this assessment: “When Deborah Dudley came, she was arrogant, she was loud, determined to do things her way. Nobody liked her.” Avoiding looking directly at the camera, Rivera continues: “She was one of those people that’s just a pain in the ass. There’s one in every crowd.” While accounts of Dudley’s death are fragmented, several facts are clear: As punishment for some infraction, Askins, Thomas and Dudley were placed in the water-filled hole, which was then covered with a board. Heidnik, with Rivera’s help, began applying electrical wires to a common chain connecting the women, sending a shock through them all. According to Rivera, Dudley, in the middle, was apparently getting the brunt of the current. In her court testimony, Rivera says, “He told me to come over and hold the wire to Deborah’s chain and I held the wire there. And then I took the wire off.” In the tapes, she describes what happened next. “You could hear Debbie hollering and screaming and then she just stopped,” Rivera recalls. “Heidnik thought there was something wrong with the cord, so he went upstairs to find another one. Then Donna started saying that Debbie was dead, that she was face down in the water so when Heidnik came back down, I told him he’d better check on Debbie.” By helping Heidnik in his torture and murder of Dudley, Rivera gained enough of his trust to begin setting the path to her eventual escape. She says it was only after Dudley’s death that her chains first came off ¯ after Heidnik made her sign a letter confessing her role in the murder and subsequent disposal of the body. Other witnesses have testified that they saw Rivera on the street before that. But regardless of exactly when Rivera’s chains came off, she seems certain that her escape six days after Dudley’s death would not have happened without it. Was Deborah Dudley just a pawn in Rivera’s escape scheme? Was Rivera an opportunist who would use any means necessary ¯ even sacrificing one of the other women, one that by her own admission she didn’t like ¯ to survive?

Whatever the answer, one fact is certain: a week after Deborah Dudley’s death, Heidnik would be behind bars. Standing in the New Jersey Pine Barrens with Heidnik, disposing of Dudley’s body, Rivera says, “everything just broke.” There are several conflicting versions of Rivera’s eventual escape from Gary Heidnik. According to Rivera herself, on March 24, under the pretense of getting him another captive, Rivera convinced Heidnik to allow her out on her own. While he waited at a gas station near 6th and Girard, Rivera made her decision to put an end to Heidnik’s bizarre drama. At trial, Rivera first claimed she went straight to her family’s house to call police, but then admits that she did in fact stop at her boyfriend Vincent Nelson’s house first. According to Nelson, who was interviewed on March 30, 1987 by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rivera suggested to him that they go and rob Heidnik and then exact revenge before they ultimately decided to call the police. According to police reports, Heidnik had nearly $2000 in cash on him when he was arrested. But those details would not come out at trial. The prosecution was apparently able to use some form of leverage against Nelson, who had a criminal record and had done prison time. “The DA’s office went down there and told him he was gonna go to jail if he didn’t keep his mouth shut,” Rivera says of Nelson. “A lot of what he was saying wasn’t true.” Whatever happened, Nelson never testified as a witness for either party during the trial. Heidnik’s attorney confirms this. Charles Peruto Jr. says he planned to call Nelson as a rebuttal witness, hoping to show that Rivera was not in such a rush to get the police involved. “The day he was scheduled to testify he called me and said he couldn’t do it; that they would lock him up if he testified,” Peruto says. “He disappeared after that, I couldn’t find him anywhere. When he resurfaced a year later, he told me that a detective had visited him and told him that they had something on him and he’d be in serious trouble if he testified.” In May of 1987, charges were officially filed alleging that among other things, Heidnik “commanded, encouraged, or requested [Rivera] to engage in specific conduct which would constitute such crime [murder] or attempt to commit such crime.” Essentially, the state was alleging that Heidnik forced Rivera to help him. Heidnik chose Philadelphia attorney A. Charles Peruto, Jr. to defend him. A local celebrity in his own right, Peruto seemed the obvious choice to try such a high-profile case. By the summer of 1987, Gary Heidnik too was becoming something of a celebrity; not a

day went by that the Inquirer didn’t run a story on Heidnik, focusing on everything from his Army service to his success in the stock market. ________________________________________________________________________ The Court: What happened when you went home [Heidnik’s house] Rivera: Went home and went to bed, whatever. The Court: So you were no longer a prisoner? Rivera: Right. - Commonwealth vs. Gary Heidnik, Preliminary Hearing, April 23, 1987 ________________________________________________________________________ Charles Peruto Jr. is not an easy man to get a hold of. After trading voice messages for more than a week, I finally get him on the phone. As Heidnik’s attorney throughout the case, I sense he is anxious to set the record straight. While Peruto says that on some level, the victims in the Heidnik case got the justice they deserved, he admits there are some loose ends that remain unanswered after 20 years. “I have always contended that Josefina Rivera was more than just an innocent bystander,” Peruto tells me. But Peruto says that as far as he knows, there was never any discussion about pressing charges of any kind against Rivera, despite the incriminating testimony of the other victims. “Only the District Attorney would be in any position to file charges,” he says. “And let’s face it, they weren’t going to have their star witness charged with a crime.” Yet the legality of her behavior during captivity is certainly an issue that Rivera herself must have explored; after all, she consulted an attorney ¯a man named Joseph Grimes ¯ before testifying. Peruto speculates that at some point, Rivera ceased being a victim and became at least a quasi-accomplice. Throughout the preliminary hearing, he seemed perplexed that Rivera should testify at all without some sort of deal. “Do you have a lawyer,” he asked her in court. “Yes I do,” she replied. Peruto pressed. “Did the lawyer tell you you’re not to be prosecuted?” “No,” Rivera answered. Later in the hearing, Peruto raises the question again. “And you have no idea whether you’re going to be prosecuted or not?” At that point the judge put a stop to his questioning. “I don’t think you need to explore that any further,” the court instructed Peruto. ________________________________________________________________________

It was a hot September day in 1990 when I first met Josefina Rivera. Our meeting followed several weeks of negotiations and wasn’t ultimately confirmed until that very day. It happened like this: following Heidnik’s trial, through a serendipitous series of events, my father and a filmmaker colleague had become acquainted with Rivera, bought her story, and began developing a proposal that they hoped would lead to a movie contract. By all accounts the story was sensational enough, and my father, an astute businessman, knew an opportunity when he saw one. About six months prior, while he and his friend Ronald Hersh were driving back from a dinner meeting in Center City, they stopped at a red light on the corner of Broad and Poplar Streets and were approached by a young Hispanic prostitute. It was early spring, and the car windows were down. The hooker was persistent and in an attempt to engage the men in conversation, she leaned seductively against the open car window. At that moment Hersh, seated in the passenger seat, noticed the clumps of tiny scars that dotted the woman’s forearms. “My God,” he asked, “what happened to your arms?” The woman was forthcoming and eagerly answered. “You remember Gary Heidnik?” Both men said they did. “Well, I was one of his captives,” the woman revealed. The rest, as they say, is history. At that time, Hersh owned a small independent film company and had made several notable documentaries while simultaneously working as a director for ABC. But he’d never tackled anything quite like this before. For the next several months the two men quietly worked to develop a game plan. When my father asked for my help with the project, I readily accepted. A college student and aspiring novelist, the prospect sounded enticing. First, we needed to get Rivera’s story ¯ the whole story ¯ in her own words. A formal interview was arranged. For four hours and through two full videotapes, Rivera recounted her life, focusing on her four months with Gary Heidnik. We hoped to get at least one of the other women’s stories too. And so, in an attempt to track one of them down, I was charged with picking Rivera up at her home and driving her on a series of “errands” ¯ hopefully finding either Lisa Thomas or Agnas Adams in the process. When I pull up in front of her North Street rowhouse, Rivera is waiting for me. It’s approaching 90 degrees outside, and to make matters worse, the power window on the driver’s side of my silver 1982 Mercury Cougar is busted, allowing me barely two inches of fresh air. The air conditioner has never worked. Without waiting for me to open the door for her, she hops into the front seat and after preliminary introductions we begin to drive east on Girard Avenue. Rivera is sparsely dressed in a white half shirt and denim cut-offs. Her frizzy hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail; she wears sandals on her feet.

“Can’t you roll down that window?” she asks. Her face is hardened, yet I can see she was attractive once. I sense that her petite frame and inviting smile mask a potential for fierceness that must come as a shock to those who are experiencing it for the first time. Her arms are dotted with small, soft fleshy spots ¯ the scars, she tells me, are from the shackles she was forced to wear in her days of captivity. After that, we speak little of Heidnik. Right away, I sense Rivera ¯ Nicole? ¯ is in full control. Immediately, it seems, she knows what role to play, which persona is appropriate today. She is flirtatious, but only half-heartedly, as if it’s not worth the effort for me. She knows I know her story, but this seems incidental, and she exhibits not a hint of reticence. Her casualness begins to put me at ease until I force myself to regroup. After driving for several minutes, Rivera tells me she needs to get cigarettes. She’ll show me where to go. Passing several convenience stores on the way, we finally stop in front of a small run-down corner store on Front Street in the city’s “Badlands” section ¯ an area infested with drugs and gangs. “I’ll be right back,” she says. Waiting for her to return, I imagine what Heidnik must have thought of her. It’s easy to see how a man of his mental condition could fall for her. By the end, I think Heidnik must have truly believed she was on his side. Then I think of his hands around her neck and the fear she must have felt as he led her down the basement steps. After barely 30 minutes with her I think I know what she must have been contemplating. “I will get out of this.” After about five minutes, she’s back. I see no pack of cigarettes. Later, when she asks me for one of my own, I resist the temptation to call her on her pit stop. At the time, I accepted her inconsistencies as par for the course ¯ symptoms of a life I could never fully understand. For the next several hours, we drive around Philadelphia ¯ making several stops to ask about the other girls before finally winding up at in front of DA’s office where Rivera has to pick something up. While we accomplish little of substance that day, the experience would leave an indelible mark on me. Over the course of the next year, the movie project slowly dissolved, becoming one of those “if only” memories Dad and I share at family get-togethers. And so for the next twenty years, Josefina Rivera and the Marshall Street “House of Horrors” disappeared from my life, if not my soul. ________________________________________________________________________ Q: Are you still friendly with Nicole? A: No, I’m not. Q: How Come? A: Because she helped him. Q: She helped him do what? A: Kidnap me.

- Testimony of Agnas “Vicky” Adams ________________________________________________________________________ At his trial, Heidnik went so far as to openly blame the killing of Sandra Lindsay on the other girls, specifically Rivera and Thomas. “Rivera was the brains behind it,” he testified. “And do you understand that I am guilty of everything but murder? I did not murder those women. Do you understand?” The prosecution, for it’s part, used this as further evidence of Heidnik’s delusions. In his undertakings, Gary Heidnik inadvertently embarked on a surreal and distorted experiment of sorts, with both he and Rivera alternating as subject and instigator. Most would say that murder was a forgone conclusion for a man like Gary Heidnik, that it was just a question of when, not if, he would kill. But some events require that all relevant circumstances be in just the right place at just the right time to elicit a specific conclusion. Regarding at least some of what occurred at 3520 N. Marshall Street between November 1986 and March 1987, I believe both Gary Heidnik and Josefina Rivera are equally relevant. In a March 2002 interview, Rivera, who by then was living with her children in a New Jersey motel, said she was sorry for what she did and was still haunted by memories of her time with Heidnik. Referring to Deborah Dudley’s murder, she told City Paper reporter Brian Hickey, “I remember putting the wires on her chains. People don’t think it bothers me, but it really, really does.” Reading the comment, I couldn’t help thinking of what she told us more than a decade before. “All I want is peace of mind,” she had said. I often wonder if she ever got it, though something tells me it’s still a long way off. ###