![]() Grace Cords/YouTube Gary Heidnik’s first victim, Josefina Rivera, talks about her time with the real-life Buffalo Bill killer during an interview in 1990. But soon, those tendencies were about to reach new depths. In fact, Heidnik had two other children with two different women, both of whom had also complained of his deviant sexual practices and penchant for locking them up. ![]() He’d even been charged with spousal rape of Betty Disto, the Filipino mail-order bride he wed in 1985 and who left him in 1986, but not before bearing him a son, Jesse. He’d been charged with crimes related to sexual assault before but never served any significant time. Furthermore, he learned how to manipulate people – and he put that skill to use on the women he’d started keeping locked up in his basement. He ultimately raised more than $500,000 for his cult. ![]() Gary Heidnik started the United Church of the Ministers of God in 1971 in Philadelphia with just five followers and a $1,500 investment - but things grew wildly from there. Following his discharge due to mental health issues (namely schizoid personality disorder) after just 13 months, Heidnik worked briefly as a nurse before finding a way to control people via religion. His troubles continued through high school, where he remained isolated and socially stunted before joining the Army after graduation. He’d suffered through an abusive childhood during which, he claimed, his father abused him and even mocked the young boy’s bedwetting by forcing him to hang his soiled sheets for the neighbors to see. Gary Heidnik - born in Eastlake, Ohio on Novemeventually learned how to control people after a rough start to his life. In the meantime, he's been asked to demonstrate how Orion can crack unsolved cases in the files of Scotland Yard, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the FBI Behavioral Science Unit - the inspiration for The Silence of the Lambs.The Ecletic Collection/YouTube Gary Heidnik’s mugshot taken after his arrest in 1987.Ĭould they have ever imagined that, in the basement under their feet, Gary Heidnik, the real-life Buffalo Bill killer had six women chained up in a pit? The Troubled Young Life Of Gary Heidnik In Ontario, Canada, Orion picked out a sex killer's neighborhood from an area of hundreds of square miles, reducing a database of 3,200 names to a handful of likely suspects.Rossmo has created a private company to develop and market the Orion system. In one case, the program pinpointed the work site of a man who was robbing credit unions during his lunch break. With a couple of keystrokes, he calls up a street plan with a red dot over a single square block - an area that includes the apartment in which the Paper Bag Rapist was apprehended.Orion is being tested in serial arson, murder, rape, and other investigations, often with spectacular results. "It produces a map that expresses the probability of offender residence," Rossmo says. Using data on the typical distance traveled to commit a crime, the computer calculates the probability of any given point on the map being the offender's home - and then repeats the process for all the other points on the map and every crime site. "The computer performs 790,000 different calculations," says Rossmo, who began developing the program in the early 1990s while earning a doctorate in criminology and working night shifts on the skid row beat. ![]() As the program goes to work, however, a pattern emerges. Rossmo is using the career of the Paper Bag Rapist - a notorious criminal who wore masks when assaulting victims - to demonstrate how Orion can help detectives figure out where serial criminals live, often within a few hundred yards.At first glance, the crime sites on the screen look like a random collection of dots scattered all over the map. "There are 79 crimes on this screen," says the detective-inspector, pointing to a Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC that displays a map of the Vancouver area. He knew that no such computer program existed - but he was busy inventing it.Five years later, in his office at Vancouver Police Headquarters, Rossmo unveiled the real thing: Orion, a software program for hunting serial criminals. Kim Rossmo remembers smiling as he watched that scene. In the 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs, a frustrated Jodie Foster tells an FBI colleague that if there had been a spatial pattern to serial killer Buffalo Bill's murders, the computer would have picked it up. ![]()
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