Gary Heidnik was born in Eastlake, Ohio, in 1943. His parents divorced in 1946, and after spending some time with his mother, he was sent to live with his father and stepmother. He claimed that his father abused him, but his father denied doing any such thing. He was a good student, but was not well liked by his classmates. He was made fun of for having a weird shaped head and being weird in general, and he was pretty hateful when people tried to talk to him. He enrolled in a military school, but dropped out and enlisted into the Army. He did very well with his training, but was honorably discharged after a short time after being diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder. After that, he was in and out of psychiatric hospitals due to multiple suicide attempts and mental health crisis. Somehow, he wound up married to a woman from the Philippines that he met through a matchmaking service. (Which he should have never been selected for, because as much as I want to move myself out of the South in this circus of horrors for women's rights and lack of education, I would not want to marry someone like this to do so.) What is even worse, is this man procreated and had living children.

Heidnik began racking up a series of charges for his criminal record, beginning in 1976. Aggravated assault, deviant sexual practices, kidnapping, rape, etc. He began abducting women, keeping them in his basement, assaulting them and killing them. I will not go into a bunch of details here, because reading them and learning how truly disturbed this guy was was an essential part of the book. He did some really gruesome things to the women he abducted. Discovery of his crimes and how he was caught was worthy of being on World's Dumbest Criminals, if there ever was an example.

Some of the things in this book seemed very familiar to me, but I had never heard about this man. Turns out, he was one of the serial killers that they based the weirdo from Silence of the Lambs on. I have read a couple of books by this author, and I have no complaints over the writing style or the research put into the books. They are well written and informative. I think I have two more by this author I have left to read, and I am looking forward to those. If you are interested in this book, it is currently available on Audible Plus. This was a wild ride for waiting in the school pickup line this week.