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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 364
EAN num: 9780312929299
ISBN number: 0312929293
Label: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: April 15, 1992
Publishing house: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Sale Popularity Level: 171434
Studio: St. Martin's Paperbacks
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Product Description:
Serial killer Gary Heidnik's name will live on in infamy, and his home, 3520 North Marshall Street in Philadelphia, is a house tainted with the memory of unbelievable horrors. What police found there was an incredible nightmare made real. Four young women had been held captive-some for four months-half-naked and chained. They had been tortured, starved, and repeatedly raped. But more grotesque discoveries lay in the kitchen: human limbs frozen, a torso burned to cinders, an empty pot suspiciously scorched...
This is not a story for the faint-hearted. It is a shocking true account of the self-proclaimed minister with a long history of mental illness, who preyed upon the susceptible and the retarded in a bizarre plan to create his own 'baby factory.' It is a macabre web spun around money, power, and religion, tangled with courtroom drama and lawyers' tactics, sure to send a chill into your very soul.
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Rated by buyers 
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I love true crime and this was an interesting story but to me the real message was that this guy should never have been out in the normal population in the very first place. It ended up being more a commentary on the problems associated with housing and treating the severely disturbed and mentally ill people in our society. The author reported the story of Gary but it jumped around a lot and did much repeating of information and details. Not the best true crime novel, but it did tell the story of this lunatic.
Rated by buyers -
Ken Englade's CELLAR OF HORROR was the riveting story of Gary Heidnik who held five women captive in his basement; all the while raping, torturing and starving them yet with the intent to impregnate them so that he could, in a manner of speaking, be immoralized.
While the story itself it one that can keep you entranced, the arguments for Heidnik's sanity are also just as enticing. Was Heidnik crazy or was he simply manipulating his doctors? Sadly enough, since Heidnik's sentence of death was carried out by lethal injection in 1999, no one may never really know.
This book is a very quick read, simply because readers can't put it down. Englade provides plenty of details on facts and plenty of arguments on the accused's sanities; enough to keep one thinking about it long after it's finished. I highly recommend this book to true crime genre fans!
Rated by buyers -
Statistics would indicate that mentally ill persons are no more dangerous than other persons. However, there is a catch. Some mentally ill persons are extremely dangerous... and you have no way of knowing who they are.
Hospitalized in various psychiatric facilities on no fewer than 21 occasions, Gary Heidnik was a paranoid schizophrenic with a genious IQ. His primary goal in life was to imprison 10 women, impregnate them all, and raise a family in his basement. After successfully kidnapping 5 women over a period of 4 months, Heidnik maintained control of his captives with chains, daily beatings, repeated rapes, starvation, and other tortures. What he did not consider was that someday one of them would escape. When that happened, all hell broke loose in Philidelphia.
The author composes an interesting history of a man with a highly intelligent mind haunted by the specter of mental illness. Well written and gramatically sound, Englade also does a fine job of humanizing the victims... however pitiful and disenfranchised they may have been as prostitutes, the handicapped, and the mentally retarded.
Without going into too much detail about the individual verdicts reached by the jury, it is apparent that neither the prosecuting attorney nor the jurors understood the dynamics of mental illness or the distinction between intelligence and severe mental instability. As a practicing mental health professional, I think I might have come to some different conclusions about what constitutes guilt and innocence. BONUS: For those readers enjoy heated courtroom drama, the moodiness and contradictory rulings of Judge Lynne Abraham, as well as a chaotic conglomerate of "expert witnesses" and their testimonies will not disappoint!
Rated by buyers 
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Ken Englade's CELLAR OF HORROR details the bundle of insanity that was Gary Heidnik. Heidnik, who had been diagnosed for years as schizophrenic, held six women captive in his basement over a four month period spanning 1987/1988. His goal was ostensibly to have each of these women bear his children - he wanted ten - creating a family who would continue living in his basement. Heidnik sexually assaulted and tortured these women in a variety of repulsive ways, and two of them eventually died at his hands.
An interesting and unusual facet of Heidnik's psyche is that he was a white man with an IQ measured at 130 who preferred the company of mentally and physically disabled grey women, though of the captives only one was disabled.
CELLAR OF HORROR was very first published in 1989. As Heidnik was convicted in July 1988, I was afraid the book was going to be a rush-to-print slop job.
It most definitely is not. Englade is a professional. He doesn't tell the reader what to think; he does not at all inject his own personality into the account; and he doesn't pad his book with mindless repetition and filler. What he does is write fairly, reportorially, and intelligently.
A strong point of this book is that Englade has included a reasonable amount of background material on Heidnik, from his childhood on.
I would have actually preferred even more background, but there is still a lot more than is usually found in true crime books printed this close to the trial. I also think this would have been a better book if there had been an endeavor to provide background information about the victims. And the picture section, while it contains 5 good pictures of Heidnik, has none of any of the women Heidnik abducted and held captive. I realize that this may have been a sensitive issue, but the victims are all named in the book and the four that lived testified at the trial, so it seems to me that their pictures, and/or more information personalizing them, could have been printed. This would have improved the book. In short I would have liked the book longer and with more depth.
Still, I still found CELLAR OF HORROR to be a fast paced and very well written account of a truly appalling crime comitted by yet another truly appalling lunatic. And I recommend it highly.
Rated by buyers -
Mr. Englade did a good job staying with the story, by just telling the story. You get an idea of what he (the author) thinks but that's it. I don't read true crime to learn about the thoughts and feelings of the author, I read them for the facts of the case. Gary Heidnik and the things that he did to those girls were horrible. After learning about what he wrote to a fiancee' while in jail, I do wonder how much of his problems were fake and what was real.
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