Buried Dreams (14 page)

Inmate Gacy had once been a marine, but, in the intervening years, his health had gone bad on him. For the first time since his teenage years, John passed out, for no apparent reason. It was during orientation at Anamosa: all the new guys, the fish, standing in line, and Gacy flopped right over onto the hard cement floor, out cold. On his second day in prison.

After the standard two weeks in the fish tank, they put him out into the main population, and John made friends with the nonviolent offenders, first-timers like himself. He let them know about his heart condition, about how any little excitement could kill him, and his new buddies kept him out of any conflicts, just the way guys such as Richard Dalke had protected him when he was a teenager.

One of John Gacy’s closest friends at Anamosa was a man named Ray Cornell, a twenty-one-year-old serving time for forgery and breaking and entering. Cornell, who was released from Anamosa in July 1970, was never arrested again and went on to become the respected prison ombudsman at the reformatory. Years later, Cornell recalled Gacy’s rise to a position of power in the prison. “When I first came in,” Cornell said, “I think he was simply working in the kitchen. . . .”

John’s heart bothered him a lot the first few months. Maybe it was the aggravation. Anamosa—officially known as a “reformatory"—is a medium-security institution, and though the inmates were all convicted felons, most of them were young, younger than John Gacy, who was then in his late twenties. Early on, John had some problems with the young
guys in the kitchen, inmates who didn’t have his experience working with food. These guys could be dead wrong about something and they’d still argue. John would yell back, but then, suddenly, his heart would act up on him. Everybody’d have to stop yelling and get the gasping inmate to the infirmary right away. And then, when the supervising food-service coordinator investigated the argument, he’d find that John Gacy had been right ali along.

“Very quickly,” Ray Cornell recalls, “within a matter of months, he became number-one cook, or lead cook on the afternoon shift.”

Cornell worked in the library, which he soon discovered was not a prime job in the prison hierarchy: you can’t trade prose and poetry for aftermovie tickets or protection. Guys just come in and check out books: you give them what they want, and that’s it. Cornell thought Gacy “enjoyed considerable power because of his control over one of the necessities of an institution, which is food.”

Working in the kitchen, John was able to see that certain prisoners and members of the staff got special dishes: steaks sautéed in mushrooms, extra desserts, good stuff the assholes never saw. In return, Cornell noticed that Gacy got “cigars, not available in the prison commissary, that were brought in to him by employees. He got extra movement, pop tickets, and movie tickets that were often given in exchange for special things such as steak sandwiches and that sort of thing by officers on the evening shift.”

In his freshly pressed white shirt, Gacy would come into the library where he’d sit and read
The Wall Street Journal
and
Barron’s.
“The quality of the clothing that was available to him,” Cornell remembers, “was superior to what the rest of us wore.” The white shirts, Cornell said, “were a token of privilege in the institution.” Gacy said he needed them to keep the kitchen sanitary. Cornell said he “got them from an officer.”

Wherever he went inside the walls at Anamosa, John carried a black briefcase. He was a busy man. Anamosa was one of the first prison institutions in America with an all-inmate Jaycee chapter. John Gacy, Cornell recalls, “was the best Jaycee I ever saw.” Initially, when Gacy joined, there may have been 50 Jaycees out of 650 inmates. In less than two years, there were over 230 Jaycees at Anamosa, the bulk of them directly recruited by John Wayne Gacy.

John was also active in the prison Jaycees’ efforts to improve conditions at Anamosa. He and others worked through the legislature to get the rate pay for prisoners raised from twenty-five cents a day to fifty cents per day.

It was just as Ma always said: Hard work leads to success. John was elected chaplain of the Anamosa Jaycees. He won the Spoke Award, the Spark Plug Award, and Jaycee Sound Citizen Award. John Gacy, Cornell says, “is the hardest worker I have ever seen.”

Take the miniature-golf course:

When an elderly couple in Anchany, Iowa, decided to give up on the miniature-golf business, they donated the structures to Anamosa. John Gacy made arrangements with the warden to have all the little windmills and open-mouthed dragons brought 120 miles to the prison; John worked on getting the cement foundation poured and personally supervised the actual assembly of the course. It was John who contacted a local department store and talked them into donating several rolls of indoor-outdoor carpeting so that prisoners could rehabilitate themselves playing miniature golf on a proper surface.

The Jaycees helped with the work, but Gacy personally put 370 hours into the project.

In the summer of 1969, the
Des Moines Sunday Register
ran an article about the golf course. In the picture that ran with the story there are four men posing in the middle of the course, with the stone walls of Anamosa rising behind them. John Gacy stands out in this photo. He is the only inmate not in prison blues: Gacy is wearing a pressed white shirt. He looks as if he might be a supervisor or a guard and not a convict at all.

Gacy’s heart kept acting up on him at Anamosa. Cornell personally saw one of the attacks the Jaycee chaplain suffered there. John, Cornell, and a man named Larry were coming out of the movie that showed on Saturday afternoons at the reformatory. Something was brewing, Cornell thought, between his two friends John and Larry. “We went down from the prison auditorium to the area where the golf course was,” Cornell recalled, “and John had gone down ahead of us ... and was already on the golf course. When Larry got to the golf course, all of a sudden, just as he stepped across the sidewalk onto the grass, he took his shirt at the collar and
ripped it off and the buttons went flying everywhere and he was moving across the golf course to where John was.”

Larry was a normally “gregarious individual,” very “outgoing,” but now he was in a fit of rage, running toward John Gacy, bare-chested, out of control, and Gacy had a heart attack. At least Cornell thought it might be a heart attack because John’s “face went ashen and then gray. He began to shake and stumble. Obviously something was wrong. But, of course, he was the target of an attack by an individual—or at least an impending attack—by an individual somewhat larger than he. He stumbled and appeared to be on the verge of going down.”

Gacy was gasping for air, clutching at his chest, hardly able to stand. Larry might have wanted to hit Gacy, punch him out, but he obviously didn’t want to kill him. “At that time,” Cornell said, “the entire incident ended in terms of any physical confrontation. And we walked to the prison hospital with Mr. Gacy.”

John couldn’t fight because of his bad heart, and he used his kitchen power base to secure the services of various bodyguards. One of his biggest fears was rape, homosexual rape, a sad and brutal fact of prison life. Ray Cornell remembers that Gacy expressed contempt for prison “punks,” that he “hated” and “loathed” homosexuals. The idea of being forced to commit unnatural acts: everyone could see it scared the shit out of John Wayne Gacy.

The Old Man cried when they sent John away. It was the only emotion anyone had ever seen him display. John Stanley Gacy never cried, even at family funerals: the Old Man sitting in his chair, sobbing.

John never saw that. The family lived through it but John was in jail, building miniature-golf courses. “When I was sentenced,” John said, “my dad, I don’t think he was even surprised. It was like he always expected it, like he knew it was going to happen. Right around in there, when I was sentenced, he said something about how I had to work twice as hard now to wipe out the blot on my good name. Except it was his fucking name he was talking about. Just like, I was the one who put the blot on his name.”

John worked to clear his name for the Old Man’s sake. “In Anamosa,” John recalls, “I did the impossible. I finished high school in seven months: twelve credits in seven months.
I earned four college credits, psychology. I was head of the inmate student council, I was the legal counsel for the Jaycees, I got two bills passed in the state legislature, I ran the whole kitchen. I was the most decorated inmate. A model prisoner.

“And my goal was to learn more about John Gacy the individual. Why I got involved with the kid. I couldn’t figure it out. I mean, I had a wife, I had two children, I had wealth. So why get involved with Voorhees? If I wanted a whore, I knew where to go. They even had some boys there, that’s what I heard.

“I did everything I could to figure it out. I took individual analysis and transactional analysis and group therapy, and about the only thing I could come up with was just what the doctors had already said, that it was curiosity on my part.”

In later years, when fear and depression grabbed him by the throat, when anger, like steel bands, tightened around his chest and squeezed his heart, when thoughts of suicide, like pus or poison, flooded his brain, in those bad, down times, John was willing to believe that his “innocent curiosity” had finally killed the Old Man.

John was having a portrait done of his father, by an inmate at Anamosa with some painting talent. The guy was a killer—not murder one: something about a bar fight—and he lived in North House while John was in South House, but everyone came through the chow line together. John just approached the guy one day and asked him to do a portrait of the Old Man.

“I do ‘em from photos,” the guy said. “You got to get me a photo.”

John wanted the painting done for the Old Man’s birthday. He wrote Ma, and she sent a picture. The painter didn’t seem to think the fifteen dollars John offered was enough to bust his ass on the work. “I had to keep on him, and keep on him about it,” John recalls.

Fucking artist: it took him over three months to complete the painting, and John Stanley never saw it. On Christmas Day 1969, the Old Man died. He’d been sick and they wouldn’t let John out to be by his side and that was a pain he’d never forget. It felt like God was running his heart through a wringer. After the Old Man passed on, they didn’t tell him for a day or two, like the assholes didn’t want to spoil
his holiday in prison. “Merry Christmas, John, your old man just croaked.” And then . . . then they wouldn’t even let him out to attend the funeral.

He spent that day, the day they laid the Old Man to rest for the last time, with correctional counselor Lionel Murray, who recalled that John was “emotional about it. He requested to see me. He cried in my office.”

John called Ma, who remembered that John was in the office of “a consultant or something. He was out there with him all day. He was all broken up. They would not allow him to come for the funeral, and that made it worse for him.”

Years later, John found he couldn’t talk about that day, really talk about it, without breaking down. “Yeah,” John said, and there were tears in his eyes, “my dad was right about a lot of things. I let him down when he died.” John made no effort to wipe away the tears, and he spoke in a choked whisper. “I let him down. And I’ve paid for it. My whole life . . . “

The words in John’s mouth were injured things with no life of their own. He couldn’t go on, couldn’t talk about the Old Man’s death anymore. He winced, as if something had suddenly ruptured deep inside. “The shame,” John said, but he was unable to complete the thought. Impossible to say it: the Old Man died of shame.

In fact, the tumor Ma said was inside John Stanley’s brain had held out to the last. It had never burst. The Old Man had died of cirrhosis of the liver, and all John had to remember him by was a portrait painted by a killer.

Christ, Ma could piss him off. He loved her, but she just got these dumb, wrong ideas and wouldn’t let go of them. Just like Ma always thought that she got John out of jail. “I asked the governor, I wrote a letter to ask him to come home because I was alone. And I got a call that the parole officer wanted to see where he was going to live. This was on a Wednesday. And Friday the doorbell rang and John was there.”

The way it happened, John said, “I was a model prisoner and I earned my release.”

In May 1969, five months after being sentenced, John applied for early parole consideration based on his outstanding work with the Jaycees, his adjustment to prison life, and—as he explained to his counselor, Lionel Murray—his
confusion over the crime he was supposed to have committed. Murray recalled that Gacy protested “being incarcerated. He felt that politics and power had a lot to do with the fact that he was there.”

The parole board replied with a standard one-year kick, which meant they’d consider parole for Gacy again on the May 1970 docket.

In March 1970, Gacy made another request for early parole, and—since Gacy said he planned to live with his mother in Illinois upon release—a supplemental progress report was written for the out-of-state parole board. Gacy’s request was considered on the May docket, and he was paroled in June 1970. Any prisoner whose record was clean might have expected parole on the same charges after five years. But John Gacy was a worker, and he served a mere sixteen months of his ten-year sentence.

As his parole date neared, John was transferred to the Riverview Release Center in Newton, Iowa. On the day of his release, Gacy was picked up by his friend Charles Hill, who still believed the colonel had been framed. Gacy had written frequently to Hill and continued to insist upon his complete innocence. He said it made it all that much harder for him, doing time with a clear conscience.

Hill and his wife took Gacy to dinner. The colonel said prison had been “awful rough” on him. He talked about his father’s death and choked up a little, right there at the dinner table. The prison administrators hadn’t even let him go to the funeral; they wouldn’t even let him see his father one last time.