The first time I saw Steven Heider was on the cover of the New York Daily News in 1993. He was squatting next to a pile of cuffs and shackles laid out on the floor.
The second time was years later, when I found a YouTube clip from The Maury Povich Show.
In it, Heider has sandy blond hair, a pair of square science-teacher glasses, and a full mustache. So that is how I imagine he looks when he picks up the phone, more than two decades later. When I press my ear to the receiver, I listen for his mustache hair bristling into the mouthpiece.
“Obsession, that’s what this was all about,” he says. He speaks slowly, with the reflective swagger of a man rolling a toothpick in his mouth. It’s been years since he’s discussed Wilensky with the press, and still his sound-bite assessments flow easily.
“I don’t think he knew what he was going to do. He was obviously disorganized in some respects,” he says. “But obviously he had developed a fatal obsession.”
Fatal obsession. I’d seen the words before in the headline of the New York magazine article. I wonder if the reporter had borrowed the phrase from Heider.
When the Wilensky case broke in 1993, Heider was the detective assigned to handle the flood of media that poured into the small upstate town of Colonie, just outside Albany. It was an unlikely spot for Gary Wilensky’s final resting place—three hours north of Manhattan, four from his hometown of Roslyn, and almost two hours south of North Creek, where his deserted cabin was found strung up with chains, shackles, and security equipment. Colonie was only supposed to be a stopping place for Gary, not a final destination.
But parked in an empty lot on Wolf Road, just down the street from Colonie’s police department, Gary left his plan behind. And left Heider to answer questions about it.
The area had its share of local crime, but this case presented a bizarre set of circumstances new to the department. Not only did the case continue to unfold after the perpetrator was deceased, but the wave of attention from national and even international media outlets was unprecedented.
Heider fielded a barrage of calls and interviews from newspapers and TV stations, both during and after the investigation.
“This was right after Waco, Texas, and there was a lot of national news attention to twisted cases like these,” he recalls. “I think that this was bizarre enough where it appealed to people’s sensational tastes, so to speak. You don’t end up on the front page of the Daily News every day.”
A local reporter called him Hollywood Heider. Now everyone just calls him chief, or Colonie chief of police, a title he’ll continue to hold even after he’s retired from the role. He’s done remarkably well for himself in the years since he last spoke of Gary Wilensky. And speaking with him, I can see why. His instincts are spot-on.
“Why are you investigating this case?” he asks, with a sudden gentleness reserved for an answer he’s already inferred.
“I was his student,” I say.
“How old were you then?”
“Fourteen.”
“Were you ever interviewed by a police detective?”
“No.”
He waits for my next thought. “If I were, I would have defended his character,” I say. “That’s kind of what I’m interested in most. Why I was so protective of Gary, why I felt so connected to him, even after his horrific crimes were committed.”
There is a pause on the line while Heider considers this, and I worry I’ve said too much.
“What you describe is his exact MO with many young women,” he says. “He’s what we call in my business a predator.”
Back in 1993, Heider’s specialty was crimes against children—from physical abuse to sexual assault. This was not his first case involving a coach and his student. In fact, he’d seen many adults in positions of authority exploit children left in their care.
“The classic case of a child abuser is not a stranger in a black van,” he says. “It’s a very friendly person who uses their position to gain the trust of young people and get them to do things they wouldn’t normally do.”
These predators use their authority to make children feel special, and in turn earn the children’s allegiance, he explains, and then pauses.
“This must be very cathartic for you.”
I agree with him, without considering if it’s true. I’m still craving more information—hard evidence of what Gary left behind at the scene of his crime. I know there were tape recordings of Gary reading the letters he’d sent to the Mother and the Daughter.
“What about the cassette tapes? What was on them?” I ask.
“Hours and hours and hours of him talking about things,” Heider says. “Some of it was talking about the victim and his obsession with her.”
“And the photographs? I read that police found photographs he’d taken of other students without their knowledge.”
“We recovered some photo evidence that appeared, that may have—” Heider hesitates, taking care with his words as I steer him in this direction. “Throughout Manhattan he was taking pictures of various girls he had coached,” he says.
I want to see these photos. I want to know if I was in one. But the request requires tactfulness. Asking for access to Gary’s stalking photography feels like its own perversion, an admission of guilt, as someone who still desired a child predator’s approval. A co-conspirator at worst, an unhinged reporter at least. So instead of asking to see the photos, I pose a more general, professional-sounding question.
“Is there any additional evidence from the case I can access?”
I learn I have to file a Freedom of Information Act request. Shortly after we hang up, I do.
The package arrives only a month or two following our call: a manila envelope marked Piper Weiss, containing a series of tan filing folders pressed over fresh Xerox ink. No photographs. Just documents.
There are dozens of articles—some I’ve read, many I haven’t—and a stack of police reports from that evening and the following days: found items belonging to the deceased; a sketch of the suspect; two press releases about the crime—one with scant information and a second more detailed write-up of the hours in which Gary’s attack, death, and subsequent plans were uncovered.
There is a copy of a check from his checkbook with a picture of a log cabin on it (“Scenic America”), and lease for a house “off Cemetery Road,” with some chillingly prophetic stipulations. “[The tenant] shall conduct himself in a manner that will not disturb the neighbors’ peaceful enjoyment of their premises. The tenant further agrees that he will not use or permit said premises to be used by any person in any noisy, dangerous, offensive, illegal or improper manner.”
A series of witness accounts are included. One woman who saw him twice in the parking lot of the Colonie Sheraton Airport Inn, just before the incident, noticed his long, oversize coat, knit wool cap, and “intense-looking eyes.” A hotel desk clerk who witnessed the crime described Gary as wearing a “scarf around his neck” and a “sea captain’s hat.” Both witnesses noted the wheelchair beside his car. Later, an officer saw “the shine of a gun barrel.”
There is a record of his rental car, the address of a medical supply store where his wheelchair was purchased, and the floor plan of the Sheraton Airport Inn in Colonie. Also included in the package are excerpts from the letters to the victims that Gary wrote and recorded on an audiotape before tossing them behind the Turf Hotel parking lot.
Each slip of paper helps piece together an account of Gary’s final hours, but only a few provide a window into his mind. Between the articles and police reports, in no particular order, is evidence of an internal chaos. They include frantic, handwritten to-do lists and a record of supplies, a stalking timeline, and a series of questions he intended to ask, presumably, once his victim was captured.