Buried Dreams (2 page)

Even as the neighbors spoke, John Gacy was giving another voluntary statement. At four o’clock on the afternoon of December 22, one day after his arrest, Gacy asked to talk with Larry Finder, of the state’s attorney’s office. In the course of the conversation, Gacy began describing where some of the bodies were buried, and Finder said he was having difficulty picturing the graves in his mind. Gacy asked for a sheet of paper and a pen. Resting the paper on the metal part of the bunk in his cell, Gacy drew a rectangle and began filling it with smaller rectangles he said represented
graves, or trenches, where the bodies were buried. There could be as many as thirty of them.

And while Gacy was drawing his map, the neighbors were being grilled by reporters. No, they said, the man never seemed insane. He drank now and again, no more than anyone else, and if he had one too many, which happened infrequently, he simply became a little louder, a little more friendly. He was proud of himself and his business, maybe even a bit of a braggart, and, sure, sometimes he bullied the teenage boys who worked for him, but the man himself regularly put in twelve- and sixteen-hour days. He pushed himself hard and obviously felt he had a right to revel in his accomplishments, to expect from his employees the same perfection he demanded of himself.

The crawl-space map was the work of a perfectionist: very neat, very precise, everything neatly squared off on a thin sheet of pink paper. When he finished the work, the suspect’s head dropped to his chest in a sudden, poleaxed bow. His fists were clenched tightly at his sides, but he remained motionless, as if suddenly frozen, unconscious. There was no sound in the room. After about a minute, Gacy raised his head and stared at the rectangles within rectangles on the pink sheet. “What’s going on?” he asked, and there was a grogginess in his voice. “Did Jack . . . I see Jack . . . drew a diagram of the crawl space.”

The people who lived on Summerdale, of course, did not know then of the map Jack drew, and when they talked of John Gacy, they were, in a sense, defending themselves. The monster of Summerdale? None of the neighbors had met that John Gacy. No one could believe it; no one wanted to believe it. The crimes, if indeed Gacy was guilty, would diminish them, haunt them the rest of their lives. It couldn’t be true. They would wait and see.

Evidence, the most grisly and final evidence, was being collected and catalogued from the moment Daniel Genty found the first body. On December 23, 1978, two days after the arrest of John Wayne Gacy, the first two bodies were exhumed from the crawl space under the house, and police were driven from the house by methane gas, a product of putrefaction, which caused nausea and a kind of physical dizziness altogether separate from simple moral revulsion. The bodies were taken to the Cook County Forensic Institute, the morgue, for autopsy and identification.

Several of the bodies had lain for years in the crawl space and had been partially converted to adipocere. The lardlike product of decomposition has a stench so all-pervading that clothes, once exposed to it, must be destroyed; it was a stench that floated, faintly, over the lawns of Norwood Park and lacerated minds like the sounds of screams in the night.

Some evidence technicians, investigators, police, and coroner’s deputies working in the crawl space below the house wore disposable paper jumpsuits to save their clothes, and gas masks with charcoal filters to mute the smell. The newer bodies, those buried less than a year, had distended, the cavities had ruptured, and noxious gases—methane, hydrogen sulfide, half a dozen others—erupted from the graves as they were uncovered. Putrid fluids escaping from the bodies permeated the soil, and a particularly virulent form of streptococci bred there, so that the danger of working in the crawl space was very great. A cut, even the smallest nick, could lead to gas gangrene. The men who worked in the crawl space under John Gacy’s home shaved after work, at night, and they were careful with their razors.

Such details weren’t fit for the evening news, and reporters concentrated on official statements. Sheriff Richard Elrod told the assembled journalists that the remains were all those of young males, boys, and that there might be as many as twenty more buried under the house. Investigators still weren’t willing to take John’s count—or perhaps it was Jack’s—at face value. The search was suspended on December 24 and 25, but ten more bodies were recovered from the crawl space when the digging resumed two days after Christmas. There were shots, on the evening news, of investigators carrying body bags out of the house on Summerdale. Some of them seemed much too small to contain the remains of an entire human being.

The next day, December 28, Cook County medical examiner Robert J. Stein stood in front of John Gacy’s house and said, “I have horrible news. Six more bodies were exhumed today.”

Morbidity, like a magnet, drew hundreds of people from Chicago and nearby suburbs to Norwood Park. They stood outside the death house, hunched against the cold and shifting from foot to foot. Ropes strung to stakes served as police lines and kept the crowds off Gacy’s property and that of his two adjacent neighbors. When more bodies were carried out
of the house and into the glare of the television lights, the crowd reacted as one, surging forward, and their voices, from a slight distance, sounded like the rumbling of a single great beast.

There were those in the crowd who felt that the stench of death clung to Gacy’s neighbors, that the good people who lived on Summerdale and Berwyn were, in part, responsible for the unthinkable nightly parade of horror. John Gacy had lived among them, killing, killing, killing. Some of those who stood watching knew, for a stone-cold fact, that they could spot a killer on sight. They would have put a stop to it.

Gacy’s neighbors lived as if under siege. Most of them had stopped talking to reporters. Every day, over the Christmas holidays, the crowd stood out in front of their homes like an angry accusation. “How could you let this happen?”

Inside the house, investigators found Jack’s map of his own private boneyard uncannily accurate. Bodies had been buried parallel to the foundations on all four sides with the exception of a narrow section between a strip of concrete and the main floor support, where one victim was laid perpendicular to the wall. One body was buried under a slab of concrete. Along the southeast wall, Jack, or John, had worked his way in from the foundation and buried two bodies on a diagonal. Two more, farther in toward the center of the house, lay perpendicular to the foundation. It was, the medical examiner noted, an extremely orderly arrangement, one that made full and efficient use of the space available. The work of a perfectionist.

None of the victims had been mutilated, but some of the bodies exhumed had been buried in plastic garbage bags. Several of the bodies were found with what appeared to be their own underwear lodged deeply in their throats; other bodies were found with a length of rope wrapped tightly around their necks. Some of the bodies had been buried in common graves and were in a similar state of decomposition, indicating that they had been killed at about the same time, perhaps on the same day. Bodies exhumed along the southeast wall had been buried one on top of the other—one victim lay face down, his head to the west, and below him, a second body lay face up, head to the east—in positions that suggested sexual activities, as if the killer wished to humiliate his victims, even in death.

Gacy had, evidence technicians discovered, repeatedly
spread the crawl space with layers of lime, apparently in an effort to stanch any odors and to hasten decomposition. Lime, ordinary calcium oxide, forms a caustic fluid, calcium hydroxide, when combined with water. The death house had been built over reclaimed swampland, and the crawl space periodically flooded. When that happened, calcium hydroxide seeped into the graves, macerating the bodies and sometimes dissolving organic matter altogether. In some cases, John—or Jack—had doused the bodies with muriatic acid to speed decomposition.

Water continued to seep into the crawl space during a late-December thaw. Evidence technicians sloshed knee deep through the putrid chemical muck of death. To facilitate the search effort, portions of the main floor had been removed so that the gases could escape and lights could be focused on the crawl space, where the remains of the victims were catalogued with archaeological precision.

When the excavations were finally complete, when the last of twenty-nine bodies had been removed from the property, when police were finally satisfied that there were no more victims to be found there, the house was little more than a shell.

Bernard Carey, the state’s attorney general, claiming the house unsafe and a public nuisance, filed suit to have it torn down. That spring, a wrecking crew demolished what was left of Gacy’s house and hauled the scrap to a dump. All that remained was a flat, excavated plain of yellow-brown mud, slowly reverting to swamp.

By September of that year, grass had begun to grow again on the mud flat that was once 8213 Summerdale. Once every few weeks that summer, an unfamiliar car—another “tourist"—drifted down the street, coasting past the manicured lawns and formal gardens, past the house with the flowering crabapple trees on the lawn, past the house where a statue of the Virgin stands in its own little shrine. The cars would pull to a stop next to the only empty lot in dozens of square blocks. The tourists seldom got out of their cars. Instead, they sat and stared.

There was nothing to see that summer, and there is nothing now: nothing of interest in that empty lot. A few steel girders, five or six feet long, lay twisted in the ocher mud, in a place where the grass will not grow. It is a very small lot, actually—too small, it would seem, to accommodate
twenty-nine graves. A pair of mourning doves pick in the gravel at the foot of one of the girders. These birds—named for the male’s soft, melancholy call—are common to suburbs throughout the Midwest. Still, the fact that mourning doves should feed here, in this place, where so many died: it is a poetry too rich for the mind’s appetite. The tourists—there are still tourists—never stay long. They drive back up Summerdale, back past the manicured lawns, past the gardens, past the shrine of the Virgin, past the people of Norwood Park watching from their windows.

Behind those windows, there are Poles and Germans, Lithuanians and Italians: Americans all. Most everyone is Catholic; most families attend church on Sunday. It is a blue-collar suburb composed of frugal, hardworking people whose homes, in many cases, are the embodiment of a life-long dream. Very few of John Gacy’s former neighbors have moved out of Norwood Park. Property values aren’t what they once were on Summerdale.

Most of the people who live on Summerdale, in constant sight of that empty lot, don’t care to discuss their former neighbor and become angry at the very mention of his name.

“What he did was carefully, thoroughly planned. John Gacy is Satan.”

There are those among his former neighbors—a very small minority—who are more generous of spirit. “He slept six years in that house with all those people buried there? That’s not normal. That’s insane.” Comparing the man they knew to the one they didn’t has led some to suppose that Gacy might be schizophrenic, “some kind of split personality.”

He was evil.

He was insane.

At twilight, on a late summer’s evening, when the air is as still and thick as cotton, the mourning dove’s call drifts across the neatly mowed lawns of Norwood Park.

As the summer of 1979 gave way to winter, four more bodies—four more victims, including Rob Piest—were recovered from the Des Plaines River. Thirty-three bodies in all. John Gacy was now accused of committing more murders than anyone in American history; John Gacy was also undergoing one of the most intense psychological and psychiatric evaluations in American criminal history.

CHAPTER 2

C
AST BACK FAR ENOUGH,
and there is a shining time, at the dawn of memory, that the mind’s eye sees bathed in a misty, golden light. Fragmented incidents emerge out of the mist, and sometimes we can’t truly recall if we actually remember these things, or if our parents, or brothers and sisters, told us this story about ourselves and our minds have manufactured fond images to suit the tale. We recall trivial tragedies—a lost toy, a skinned knee—with bemused nostalgia. It is a time when the worst that could happen—the worst that did happen—is stripped, within minutes, of its pain. It is a time of innocence, before the age of reason, at the dawn of memory.

Images of Opal Street, almost rural in the 1940s: six houses set on a single block, the prairie grasses lush and green in the spring, stretching out forever, in all directions. A ragman with a horse-drawn cart who collected discarded clothes. The railroad thumping through, screaming south and east toward nearby Chicago. Houses with large yards and big vegetable gardens; a cinder alley that split the block. Streetlights but no sidewalks. Summer evenings and Ma’s rule: “Be home when the streetlights come on.”

Fragmented images: caught picking corn in the neighbor’s garden and Mrs. Kranz—was that her name?—dragging the kids home to the Old Man. Wasn’t she the one with the pigeon coop? And the Polack—you could call him the Polack if you were Polish, too—the Polack with his chickens and turkeys. The turkeys so dumb you could put their heads under their wings, rock them in your hands, and put them to sleep in the middle of the day; just standing by the fence, you
could set them all to gobbling, that strange, strangled sound of outraged poultry, and the Polack would come bursting out the back door and you could hardly hear him hollering for the sound of the angry turkeys. The Greek whose goats ran free, always in the backyard, raiding the grapes that grew there.

A big fort the kids built in the prairie, half underground, all scrap lumber and tar paper. Summer evenings catching fireflies in a bottle—all the kids screaming and laughing—so there would be lights in the clubhouse.

A first train ride to Springfield, to visit an aunt and uncle. John was four and the train is one of his first coherent memories. But later there is a story told about him walking out the front door and wandering down a city street, naked as a jaybird, innocent as only a very young child can be. All the adults running and laughing, catching up to him, carrying him back to the house, dressing him. A funny incident: but did he really remember it, or had his mother just told him the story? John couldn’t be sure.