Buried Dreams (12 page)

The boy could see the cops didn’t believe him, not even a little bit. They told him they’d get the story out of him. “You’ll crack,” one of the cops said. “You can’t stand the pressure.”

That night, at work, Schroeder talked with Gacy about his interview with the police.

“I didn’t mention your name,” Schroeder said.

“Good,” Gacy replied. “Don’t get me involved. Don’t tell them anything. It’s your word against Voorhees’. They can’t prove anything.” Somehow, in all the excitement, all. the counseling he had to do, Gacy forgot to give the boy his three hundred dollars.

The next day, Gacy again instructed the boy not to say anything. “Just don’t get me involved,” Gacy said. He was understanding, though. He said he knew it had to be tough on the boy and asked him how he was holding up. Schroeder shrugged and said he guessed he was holding up all right. In fact, it was just like the cop said: Schroeder found “I couldn’t stand the pressure.” Over the weekend, he met with his parents and a lawyer, who urged him to go the police and tell the truth.

On Monday, September 9, Schroeder met with Gacy at about noon. The colonel went through the same litany and
added one further inducement. “Get yourself a good lawyer,” he said, “and don’t worry about the fee. I’ll take care of the fee.”

Gacy’s offer was several hours late. That morning Schroeder had voluntarily gone to the police, told them Gacy had offered him three hundred dollars to beat Voorhees and “persuade” him not to testify. He confessed to the burglaries at the lumber company and the car lot, and he implicated John Wayne Gacy in those thefts.

That Monday night Gacy was arrested and charged with attempting to suborn perjury and malicious threats to extort in connection with the beating. He went free on a one-thousand-dollar bond. On Thursday, the colonel was again arrested, this time on a charge of burglarizing Brown’s Lumber. He could not raise ten thousand dollars for bail and was immediately jailed.

Appearing that day before Judge George Heath, Gacy, in an emotional statement, proclaimed his complete innocence in the Voorhees beating affair. “I am guilty of none of these,” he said, “except for making a verbal threat to Voorhees in December of 1967, when he wanted me to give an amplifier or else he would tell his father. . . .”

Judge Heath ordered a pretrial psychiatric evaluation. Until that could be arranged, the colonel would remain in jail. Several hours later, Gacy met with the county attorney and five law-enforcement officers. While the officers took notes, Gacy drew a detailed verbal map of Waterloo’s seamy underbelly.

He talked about the wife-swapping, and he named names.

He talked about the gambling, and he named names.

He talked about the prostitution ring, and he named names.

The colonel talked well into the night. Guards, he might have reasoned, tend to coddle cooperative and informative prisoners. In any case, it is not at all unpleasant to sit in the limelight and talk while important men hang on your every word. His first day in the slam and he was already a Very Important Prisoner.

Several people Gacy named were fellow Jaycees, a small group compared to the total membership, but they were some of the very men who had stood behind the colonel during his troubles. They were men who believed in him, supported him in his abortive bid at the presidency. Now
they were being fingered by their own Key Man, the best Jaycee chaplain in the state of Iowa.

On November 2, Gacy entered an institution where he would submit to psychiatric evaluation, an institution with a quaintly archaic name: the Psychopathic Hospital, at the State University of Iowa, in Iowa City.

Schroeder never got his three hundred dollars.

CHAPTER 7

WHILE GACY WAS IN
jail awaiting trial, investigators were now working overtime on the Gacy case, determined to convict him on the sodomy charge. The colonel, it seemed, was a master of manipulation. One incident involved another East High School senior, Richard Westphal, a seventeen-year-old who had been employed at the Park and Broadway restaurant for two years. Westphal was helping remodel the basement rec room and building a bar in the Gacy house. He worked at the house a couple of times a week for almost two years.

Occasionally, Gacy and Westphal would break off to play a game of pool. Sometimes other boys were present, and several times, Gacy suggested they play pool “for a blow job.” When the boys declined the proposition, Gacy laughed. Just one of his jokes.

Another of Gacy’s odd jokes was his habit of offering Westphal Marlynn’s sexual favors. Once in a while, Gacy turned the joke into a kind of humorous threat: “If I ever catch you in bed with my wife, you’ll owe me a blow job.” One night in January 1967, Westphal would later testify, he and Gacy were working on the basement bar. It was late and cold, and Gacy told Westphal he was welcome to sleep in the
guest room. Shortly after Westphal got into bed, the door opened. Marlynn Gacy walked into the room and got into bed with Westphal. It was Westphal’s first time, and it likely remains one of the oddest such experiences of his life. As soon as Westphal and Marlynn were done, Gacy stepped into the room and switched on the light. It was almost as if he had been waiting outside the door for just the right moment. The colonel did not seem to be in the least upset. He was, in fact, triumphant.

“See, I caught you,” he said. “Now you owe me a blow job.”

Gacy and his wife left Westphal alone and confused in the room. The boy had been making pretty good money at the two jobs he worked for Gacy. But now he had been caught screwing the man’s wife. Days later, Westphal said, he was “more or less coerced” into paying Gacy what he owed.

Another boy who worked for Gacy at the same restaurant told police that his boss drove him up to the Sand Pits quarry one night after work where they talked for some time, and the colonel urged the boy to drink as much beer as he liked. The boy drank more than enough, began feeling ill, got out of the car, and vomited.

The youth wiped his mouth and looked up, bleary-eyed. Gacy was standing there, holding a pistol. It was a six-shot revolver, and the colonel opened the chamber and removed five shells.

“Let’s play Russian roulette,” he said.

The boy was drunk, but it sure didn’t sound like fun to him. “Are you kidding?” he said. “I could get killed.”

“That’s exactly what I had in mind,” Gacy said. “You know too much.”

“Hey, no,” the boy said, and Gacy—very professionally, just as they do on the cop shows—pointed the gun at the boy’s face and said, “Run.”

“Don’t—”

“Get down on your fucking knees.”

“No.”

Gacy pulled the trigger, and the hammer clicked down on an empty chamber. The boy stood his ground. The hammer snicked down a second time and hit another empty chamber. It was a pretty one-sided game of Russian roulette.

Gacy pulled the trigger five times and hit five empty
chambers. He thumbed back the hammer one last time. This was the Big One, the death shot, right in the face. The boy stared into the barrel of the gun. He was eighteen years old. No one dies when he’s eighteen. When you’re eighteen, you know that you’re going to live forever. Why would someone want to kill you? It had to be a joke, some kind of weird practical joke.

Gacy pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked down on the last empty chamber.

The boy concluded that his boss sure had one strange sense of humor. Jokes about killing you, for Chrissake.

Whatever Gacy meant about the boy “knowing too much,” it struck police as a legitimate worry. In addition to Gacy’s involvement in prostitution, gambling, and wife-swapping, the police discovered that the Voorhees affair was not, by any means, an isolated incident. The colonel, it seemed, had formed a little club, a sort of junior Jaycee chapter, consisting of his employees and other teenage boys. There was an open bar, and the boys were encouraged to drink as much as they liked. John was a real joker when he entertained his club, always making humorous propositions about playing pool for blow jobs.

Sometimes he was more serious, though. When he was alone with a boy he might tell him about the book he once wrote. It was all about sex, so, besides owning the Kentucky Fried Chicken stores and being the Jaycee “Man of the Year” and a colonel in the Illinois Governor’s Brigade, Gacy was also a distinguished scientific sex researcher. He had some kind of certificate attesting to his expertise in the field. Most of his research had been done when he was in Illinois. That’s why the governor of that state had appointed him to conduct an ongoing series of scientific experiments, the results of which would be used to “revise the antiquated sex laws” there. Most of the research was of a heterosexual nature, but—purely in the interests of science and in the bold spirit of true research and because the law applies to everyone, no matter what his or her sexual orientation—some of the experiments had to be of a homosexual nature. This was the governor’s wish.

The experiments, however, were to be conducted in the strictest secrecy. At that particular time, it was not politically feasible for the governor to declare publicly his intention to revise the sex laws. The colonel was dutybound to compile
his research in the utmost privacy. He was a sort of sexual secret agent.

Incredibly, at least one of the members of Gacy’s little club bought this story. In the summer and fall of 1967, Gacy conducted a series of “experiments” with a fifteen-year-old boy. Science was served in Gacy’s rec room, though they sometimes met at a motel. Almost every time they met, Gacy encouraged the boy to get good and drunk. The man, however, had to remain clearheaded—proper research methods—and he seldom had more than one or two drinks. Such are the sacrifices of science.

The colonel was thorough in his methods, and when they had completed whatever experiments were on that day’s research schedule—when the boy had been paid his five dollars out of the governor’s secret fund—Gacy usually asked a detailed series of questions about responses and feelings before, during, and after the acts performed. Just some things the governor would want to know.

The police asked the boy the very same questions, though in a different context. Just some things the prosecuting attorney would want to know. The boy said he felt guilty, all the time, every day. He seemed confused and was not entirely coherent: a fifteen-year-old-boy already moving on a slick slide toward alcoholism.

David Dutton, spearheading the prosecution for the county attorney’s office, wanted a sodomy conviction very badly. The boys who met in the rec room paid Gacy monthly dues for the privilege. Monthly dues!

Hygiene is important in a place like the Psychopathic Hospital, where so many people are forced to live in such close proximity. That’s why John told the night crew there that he’d be forced to put them on report if they didn’t do a better job mopping the floor. He did not have to live like an animal in some filthy cave. His papers specifically said that he had joined the court in requesting a psychiatric evaluation, which meant that he should be considered in the category of a private patient. He had voluntarily sought out help for his problem. His goddamn taxes were paying salaries, and he wanted his money’s worth. That meant clean floors at the very fucking least.

Not that he didn’t treat people with the respect he expected to receive in return. It was just a matter of sanitation
and common courtesy. On the whole, he got along perfectly with everyone.

John knew the nurses liked him. He was always joking around them, making them laugh. And when somebody got out of line, John was prompt in letting the proper authorities know.

There were, of course, bad days for John in the hospital. He remembered that he broke down in tears once, but the nurses were there and they helped comfort him. Just by talking. Because they could see that “instead of being a perpetrator, I was really a victim.”

One or two of the attendants were very good at their jobs, really efficient, and John was shocked when he found out how little they made. He told one fellow that after this whole nightmare was over, after John got out and was back in business, there’d be a job waiting at “twice your salary here.”

Some of the nurses, however, were very poor workers. They slacked off, didn’t give it 100 percent, and often weren’t around when they were needed. When that happened, John felt obligated to step into their shoes. A few of the patients, for instance, were complete slobs. They’d leave stuff lying around their beds or in the dayroom where people could stumble over it and break their necks. With that kind of safety infraction, a clear and present danger, you couldn’t wait for a nurse to decide it was time to make the rounds. In a very nice way, John told the patients to pick up after themselves. It was a way of showing compassion for people. Sometimes, yes, he had to bark at them, but only as a last recourse. He couldn’t understand why he had to do what others should have done, what he was actually paying them to do. Just like that old saying about how you have to do something yourself if you want it done right.

Sometimes he felt as if he was “running the whole place by myself.”

During his seventeen days at the Psychopathic Hospital, Gacy underwent both mental and physical examinations. Given the results of the physical exam, which included an electroencephalographic test, it seemed highly unlikely that Gacy had actually had “a mild stroke” in Springfield in 1965. Whatever he was hospitalized for, it wasn’t a stroke.

Gacy told the doctors he had constant health problems throughout his life. At the age of nine he learned from his
family doctor that he had been born with a “bottled heart.” Doctors at the Psychopathic Hospital knew of no such medical condition.

Still, his records showed that he had been hospitalized for what he said were “heart problems” once at the age of thirteen and several times between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. He told the doctors that he never finished high school because of these problems—administrators had felt that attendance at class would endanger his health—and when the military saw his medical records, he said he was immediately classified 4F. The most painful memories of his childhood and teenage years were those long, dreary weeks of hospitalization, weeks and years of suffering made almost unbearable by his father’s angry insistence that John was “faking.” Once, when John had a bellyache and was certain there was something terribly wrong, the Old Man refused for the longest time to take him to the hospital. When he finally did go, they found that his appendix had burst and they had to work fast to save his life. That was one time John almost didn’t mind the pain and the long stay in the hospital. It was worth it to see his father proved wrong in front of everyone. The thing of it is, John almost had to die to prove that he wasn’t a phony. It was like death was some kind of goddamn ultimate argument: death was the one thing that would prove something to the Old Man.