Jack Apsche is one of the few people in history happy to have crossed
paths with a serial killer. That was Gary Heidnik, who tortured six women and
killed two, and was one of the inspirations for the Buffalo Bill character in
“The Silence of the Lambs.” Heidnik, who was arrested in 1987, was considered
inscrutable even by sociopathic standards. More than 150 mental health workers
in 22 hospitals interviewed him during his life. But perhaps the individual
Heidnik most revealed himself to was Apsche.
The interactions of the two men are a bizarre and intriguing tale of
depravity and redemption, resulting in the creation of an experimental
psychological technique that Apsche now touts as a treatment for others whose
lives have spun out of control. Now 65, Apsche works at the Ross Center for
Anxiety and Related Disorders on Wisconsin Avenue in Friendship Heights, a
specialist in treating troubled, often violent young men. He commutes from
Shepherdstown, W.Va., where he lives with his daughter, wife and seven dogs.
Apsche has a gruff demeanor nurtured by years of drug use, violent outbursts
and 20 months of service in the Vietnam War. Though now an esteemed
psychologist, when he was hired as a researcher for Heidnik’s defense, Apsche,
who had just received his PhD in counseling psychology, says he was addicted to
sex, suffering from nightly combat flashbacks and battling a cocaine addiction.
These days, Apsche looks back on the case as a lifeline. “Gary Heidnik
and September 1987 was an absolute turning point for me,” Apsche writes in a
book he recently completed and is hoping to publish about his relationship with
Heidnik. Immersing himself in the proceedings gave Apsche a sense of purpose
and spurred him toward self-reflection. “By looking into my own scared and
desperate experience, I could better understand what was driving Heidnik’s obsessions
and sexual violence,” Apsche writes.
A meeting that resonated
Perhaps it was Apsche’s own coarseness that appealed to Heidnik. The
first time they met, in a small room at Holmesburg prison in Philadelphia,
Apsche remembers being annoyed by Heidnik’s evasions. “Listen, when I was in
Vietnam, I killed more people than the Manson family, so let’s cut the s---,”
Apsche says he told the murderer. Perhaps their similarities resonated. Both
were poor husbands and fathers, Apsche now recalls, prone to grandiose thinking
and depressed, disturbed, violent individuals who engaged in obsessive sexual
behavior.
Whatever the reasons, over the next three years, while on death row,
Heidnik exchanged 26 letters with Apsche. The more than 150 handwritten pages
of letters provide harrowing insights into the mind of one of the most perverse
killers in U.S. history. Among Heidnik’s writings are drawings of the torture
chambers he dug under his house, as well as descriptions of his crimes. They
are now the basis for Apsche’s book, tentatively titled “Greetings From the
Crypt” — an opening line in one of the condemned man’s letters.
The letters changed Apsche’s life. He quit cocaine, booze and
womanizing, got remarried and regained custody of his daughter. He is now the
pioneer of a psychotherapeutic approach known as mode deactivation therapy, a
technique for treating angry, sexually disturbed patients. There is no doubt,
Apsche says in a series of interviews, that the MDT approach depends, to some
extent, on the understanding of human nature he gained through interacting with
Heidnik.
‘The consummate expert’
Apsche encountered Heidnik shortly after completing his doctorate in
counseling psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, the city where
Heidnik committed his crimes. In September 1987, Heidnik’s attorney hired him
as a researcher on the case. (Apsche was friends with the lawyer’s cousin, “and
they saw that I was smart,” he says.) He spent three months poring over two
boxes filled with Heidnik’s arrest records and psychiatric reports in an
attempt to ascertain the killer’s mental state.
Apsche was convinced that he could understand Heidnik as nobody else.
“To make up for my lack of experience, I determined that I would become the
consummate expert on Gary M. Heidnik and serial murderers,” he writes in his
book. “I dedicated myself to learning and knowing more about the subject than
anyone else in the world. And I did.” Thousands of experts across the globe
study sociopathic killers, of course, and it says something about Apsche that
he rates himself the best. Heidnik’s attorney claimed insanity, and Apsche
testified to that effect for a day and a half. “I was originally only hired as
a researcher, but because I knew more about Heidnik than anyone else, I was
asked to testify,” he says with characteristic bravado. But Heidnik’s
intelligence and articulateness, combined with the premeditated nature of his
crimes, convinced the jury of his competence, and he was sentenced to death.
Apsche, who maintains that Heidnik was, indeed, mentally ill — says
jurors rarely accept the insanity defense for people such as Heidnik because
they are “so seemingly adept at finding victims and concealing their grisly
crimes, and so skilled and diabolical in their detailed planning and deception,
that ordinary people cannot believe the killer was not clearly in control of
his actions.” After the trial, the young psychologist proposed writing a book on the
killer, and Heidnik agreed to cooperate. The men had a “unique trust,” says
Apsche, who admits he empathized with the killer, whom he viewed as beset by
powerful internal demons. They met five or six times in prison, for two-hour
sessions, and traded the letters. Ranging from one to 28 pages, the condemned
man’s letters are penned in blue ink on yellow legal-size paper. Their tone
oscillates between hostility and friendliness, and they are filled with
spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and smiley faces.
Read cumulatively, Heidnik’s letters — self-absorbed and wholly lacking
in empathy — illustrate how the mind of a tormenter works. He repeatedly and
passionately denies being a serial killer. “Those two deaths were purely
accidental,” he says. “There was no willful intent or premeditation on my part
to kill anyone.” He says more than once that if he wanted to kill the women, he
would have used a different method. In Heidnik’s mind, the fact that he kept
his victims locked in a cell, tortured and starving for months, was simply
incidental to their deaths. The single most disturbing letter contains a hand
drawing of Heidnik’s dungeon. “From purely the technical aspect neither death
seems possible,” he writes.
After three years, the letters stopped. Apsche thinks it was because he
was homing in on “what was really going on” with Heidnik. “I was asking him
questions nobody else was,” Apsche says, “and could relate to him in ways
others couldn’t, forcing him to confront what he was and what he’d done.” Eight
years later, in July 1999, Heidnik was executed at a state prison in Rockview,
Pa. After consuming two cups of black coffee and two slices of cheese pizza, he
was put to death by lethal injection.
As Gary Heidnik’s life was ending, Jack Apsche’s was beginning.
Belief in redemption
Apsche says that working with Heidnik helped him understand troubled
psyches. “I realized that most people are redeemable,” he says. “Heidnik was on
the end of the spectrum as far as evil goes, and most people, even ones that
seem like a lost cause to most others, can be redeemed.” Apsche was motivated
to work with kids, haunted by them. He saw similarities in the acutely troubled
young men he worked with and those with whom he had served in Vietnam, people
who had committed and been exposed to unimaginable violence.
Apsche now works with aggressive, inner-city 14- to 18-year-olds. “If a
kid is tough, you can’t out-bully him,” Apsche says. “This boot-camp bulls---
you see on TV only makes them more aggressive.” Most of the kids aren’t
sociopathic, despite their appearances, he says. There are kids so far gone
they can’t be helped, he admits. But most can advance. One youth Aspche
counseled, who physically assaulted staff members at a mental health
institution, was reacting to his own fears, Apsche theorized. His parents had
subjected him to unimaginable abuse. After receiving MDT counseling — which combines
behavioral science with concepts of acceptance and mindfulness, derived from
Eastern and Western meditative practices — the boy changed, Apsche says,
eventually enlisting in the Marines.
A series of 20 studies, conducted mostly by Apsche and published in the
peer-reviewed International Journal of Behavorial Consultation and Therapy, or
JBCT, showed MDT to be effective in treating both young sexual offenders and
violent ones. After two years of treatment, fewer than 10 percent committed
offenses again. Only severely depressed youngsters proved immune to MDT’s
benefits, Apsche says. It’s effective “because it combines a number of
approaches,” says Scott Zeiter, the former chief executive of North Spring
Behavioral Health Care in Leesburg. “Here you have all these kids that society
struggles with — and with Jack they’re doing mindfulness techniques in the
corner.” The kids get a sense that Apsche is authentic, says Zeiter, who hired
Apsche several years ago to work at the facility.
MDT has yet to become well-known enough to elicit significant critical
appraisal. Says Stephen Hayes, a psychologist at the University of Nevada: “The
first book [on MDT] just appeared, and that is usually when the critics start
showing up.” One recent review in a behavioral-therapy journal holds that
problems such as small sample sizes and lack of random subjects in existing MDT
studies must be considered, even as the article finds that the effectiveness of
the approach is “overwhelming.” “Thousands of new psychological approaches” crop up all the time, “but
only a handful are effective” says Joseph D. Cautilli, editor of JBCT. Cautilli
carried out an independent evaluation of MDT and said he found it to be one of
those rare treatments.
Final business
In 2010, Apsche turned to his long-unfinished business — writing the
Heidnik book. “It was the last part of moving on,” he says now. Twenty-five
years after the Heidnik case, Apsche has built himself a successful life. Gone
are the drunken, cocaine-fueled nights that saw him in bed with strippers until
sunrise. “For better or worse, Heidnik was my dark companion on the journey to
health,” Apsche writes. Heidnik destroyed many lives. But, in his years on
death row, he inadvertently saved Jack Apsche’s.
Washington Post
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