American newsmaker who posthumously came to the attention of the public after his daughter, the noted actress Anne Heche, wrote in her 2001 memoir, Call Me Crazy, that he repeatedly raped her when she was a child.
He died on 3 March 1983 in Manhattan, New York, aged 45, when Anne was 13. The cause of his death was HIV/AIDS, which she believed was contracted from a homosexual partner: “He was in complete denial until the day he died. We know he got it from his gay relationships. Absolutely. I don’t think it was just one. He was a very promiscuous man, and we knew his lifestyle then,” Anne Heche said on Larry King Live. 
She has said that he repeatedly raped her from the time she was an infant until she was 12, giving her genital herpes.
When asked “But why would a gay man rape a girl?” in a 2001 interview with The Advocate, Anne Heche replied, “I don’t think he was just a gay man. I think he was sexually deviant. My belief was that my father was gay and he had to cover that up. I think he was sexually abusive. The more he couldn’t be who he was, the more that came out of him in [the] ways that it did.”
In a 1998 interview, she reflected that her father being closeted ultimately “destroyed his happiness and our family. But it did teach me to tell the truth. Nothing else is worth anything.”
Anne Heche was the youngest of five children of Don and Nancy Heche (née Prickett). Since her husband’s death from AIDS, Nancy has been a Christian therapist and motivational speaker, who lectures on behalf of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family about “overcoming homosexuality”.
Three of the five children of Don and Nancy Heche are deceased. Susan died of brain cancer, Cynthia died in infancy of a heart defect and Nathan died in a car crash shortly before his high school graduation. Anne claimed his death was a suicide. Abigail is the fourth sibling.
Link to Wikipedia biography