A mentally-retarded drug abuser, Harrison Graham was well-known in his Philadelphia ghetto neighborhood. Sometimes, he would amuse the local children with his "Cookie Monster" puppet; other times they found him digging graves -- for dogs, he said -- in nearby vacant lots. Apparently, no one suspected that his simple mind might hide a darker urge, compelling him toward homicide.

In early August 1987, Graham quarreled with his landlord's nephew, afterward evacuating his apartment, nailing the door shut out of spite. Police were summoned on the afternoon of August 9, when neighbors filed complaints of a pervasive stench that emanated from the room. Inside, patrolmen found two strangled women's bodies, three more skeletons beneath a mound of garbage on the floor, another tied up in the closet. Graham had been living in the squalid hole since 1983, and he had not been idle.

Officers began to search the neighborhood for Graham, house by house, while newsmen noted that the suspect's dwelling stood a mere three miles from Gary Heidnik's "house of horrors," where another ghoulish scene had been discovered five months earlier. The roof of Graham's building yielded skeletal remains of victim number seven, but initial warrants simply charged the missing suspect with abuse of corpses. Murder was not proven until August 11, when a medical examiner reported that the freshest victims had been strangled some time in the past ten days.

On August 14, another skull and partial skeleton were excavated from the dirt floor of a row house three doors down from Graham's building. He surrendered two days later and confessed to seven murders since the winter months of 1986. According to his statement, Graham picked up female addicts on the street, enticing them with offers of a fix, and brought them home where they were murdered after sex. On August 26, psychiatrists declared that he was competent for trial.

In April 1988, dispensing with his right to trial by jury, Graham laid his case before a solitary judge. Convicted on seven counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of abusing a corpse, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, followed by six electrocutions. The unusual sentence -- hailed by Graham's lawyer as "compassionate and brilliant" -- theoretically assures that he will never be paroled.