Serial killer's house of horrors where he tortured, raped and killed kidnap victims

Gary Heidnik kept his victims in a torture chamber (Image: Serial Killers Documentaries/Youtube)

A serial rapist enticed women to his property and held them captive in his torture chamber - murdering some whilst forcing survivors to consume human remains.

Gary Michael Heidnik presented himself as a religious leader, establishing the United Church of the Ministers of God at his Philadelphia home and declaring himself a "bishop". During a four-month period from November 1986 to March 1987, he kidnapped six Black women, shackling them in a concealed dungeon beneath his house and subjecting them to sexual slavery.

Within that basement lay a pit - a squalid, darkened cavity in the ground - where Heidnik confined multiple captives simultaneously. The women were held naked, restrained with chains, starved of sustenance and hydration, repeatedly assaulted, and exposed to severe physical and psychological abuse.

Jackie Askins was abducted and hauled into the chamber unclothed and handcuffed, where she discovered four other captives. The predator had filled the pit with water and employed it to electrocute the women.

Jackie revealed to 6ABC Action News that Heidnik inflicted daily sexual assaults and violence, saying: "They [the victims] were all tied up, chained up. Two were on the bed, one was by the pool table, and one was standing up by the window.", reports <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/evil-preacher-kept-sex-slaves-36331705" rel="Follow" target="_self">the Mirror</a>.

Gary Heidnik made his captives eat victims remains (Image: Serial Killers Documentaries/Youtube)

She added: "He wrapped tape around our mouth and drove a screwdriver right in our ears and turned (it)."

Heidnik cooked portions of his victims' bodies and served the remains to the surviving women - combined with dog food. At one stage, Jackie was even compelled to dismember one of the bodies.

She said: "He took me upstairs to the bathroom, and he said, 'We all gotta play a part in this.'" Heidnik's legal representative Charles Peruto explained Heidnik "was trying to enslave 10 girls to have a baby with all of them, and he was going to create a perfect race. He believed that the races, eventually - hundreds of years from now - would all be mixed and there would only be one race.

Gary Heidnik was caught because of a bad smell (Image: Bettmann Archive)

"And that's when we would find peace. He believed [white people] should mix with black people and vice versa so we could get closer to a perfect race."

Local residents eventually detected a repulsive smell emanating from Heidnik's property, an overpowering odour sufficiently disturbing to arouse concern. In March 1987, one of the prisoners, Josefina Rivera, succeeded in fleeing.

She alerted authorities and described the horrors of the cellar, triggering a police operation that exposed the torture dungeon and freed three surviving victims.

Sandra Lindsay perished from a fatal combination of malnutrition and abuse, whilst Deborah Dubley was electrocuted and her remains concealed in woodland. Heidnik met his end by execution in 1999, becoming the final individual to receive capital punishment in Pennsylvania.

Josefina Rivera was one of his captives (Image: Internet Grab)

The fictional serial killer Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs drew partial inspiration from Heidnik. Tracey Lomax, whose sister Lindsay fell victim to him, harboured conflicted emotions regarding his execution and has avoided watching the movie.

She told CNN: "Nobody wants to watch a movie about their loved one being held against their will. I really wanted him to stay in jail. I wanted him to do time because I wanted him to not be able to run away from the women that he killed. Because I know that they spooked him. I know that they came back to haunt him. His death was so much easier than his victims' (deaths)."