Buried Dreams (20 page)

“Butkovitch and his buddies agreed to this,” Big John said, “and we smoked some grass, drank some beer. I drank Scotch, and I must have got bombed.”

Big John never said anything about a threat to expose the little tax dodge he was running. “We just all came to a reasonable conclusion, smoked and drank, and they all left together.”

So Big John was alone in the house, stoned on the marijuana, drunk on the Scotch, and, because he was exhausted as usual, he fell asleep, right there in the big leather chair.

It had been happening more and more lately. John would drift off into a dreamless sleep, a sleep as dark and empty as death. But then he’d wake inside his car, “cruising” the streets as a cop named Jack Hanley.

“I wasn’t out looking for Butkovitch,” John recalled. The farthest stop south on his cruising run was always Bughouse Square, a one-block park on the near North Side where male hustlers congregated. From there, Jack Hanley would drift up Wells, past the gay area in New Town, then turn back down Diversey, toward the lake, to cruise Clark and Broadway. Nothing doing that night.

Jack Hanley might have given it up then and driven right back to Norwood Park, but there was one last area to cruise, and it was just a bit north, on the way home. There were always hustlers, poor kids with parents just up from Appalachia somewhere, hanging out in the doorways around Montrose and Lawrence. Maybe Jack Hanley would get lucky. He liked ‘em poor, just in it for the money.

So Jack was checking out the dark streets, and there, at Sheridan and Lawrence, he saw John Butkovitch getting out
of his car, waving. Jack stopped, and the John Gacy personality took over.

“I wanna talk to ya,” Butkovitch said, and Gacy, drunk as he was, could see that the boy had also been drinking quite heavily.

“Jump in the car,” Gacy said. “Hurry up, there’s someone behind me.”

They started driving toward the Norwood Park. Butkovitch wanted to go get the carpeting out of the apartment right then, but Gacy said, “I’m not breaking into your dad’s building, you asshole.”

Butkovitch was so drunk he could hardly talk. “If I was gonna kick your ass, I wouldna needed them other guys,” he said, then switched subjects and said he wanted another drink. He looked in his pocket and couldn’t find his wallet. John said he didn’t have any money with him. They could go up to the house on Summerdale, have a drink there.

John Gacy later told the docs in 3 North that he remembers every bit of the conversation, even though it was one of the nights he woke up to find himself “cruising.” He remembers driving up the Kennedy Expressway to Norwood Park, remembers parking, going into the house, and recalls offering Butkovitch a joint. It’s all very clear. He liked to keep them in the refrigerator, already rolled, for the boys. Butkovitch had another drink and it dropped him over the edge, into a new rage.

“You shithead,” the boy shouted, “gimme my check! I could pound the crap out of you right now!”

Gacy was soothing. “You know I got a heart condition. No way you couldn’t kick my ass. Just the excitement alone, that could put me in attack. Probably kill me. What would you want to kill me for, John? For a carpet? You want to kill me for a carpet?”

John told the docs that the boy was drunk, ready to fight one moment and apologizing the next. “I figured I had to . . . subdue him some way,” John said and, in later years, he’d act out the way it happened, how he got the handcuffs on Little John.

The cuffs—the same ones John had used on Antonucci a week earlier—were on the bar. John kept them on the bar or on the dresser in his bedroom and he said, very brightly, like there was an interesting story here: “Holy shit, you should have seen it; just before I picked you up, this cop threw a guy
up against a car and put the cuffs on him. Man, you should have seen it.”

Butkovitch was sulky, sullen. “Big deal.”

“No,” John said, picking the cuffs up from the bar, “you should have seen it.” He was standing now, the cuffs dangling in his right hand. “Lemme show you what this cop did.”

“Why ya gotta show me?”

“Cuz then you’ll see. Here.” John Gacy put a cuff on the boy’s right wrist. “Okay, now put your other hand behind your back. C’mon, I’m just going to show you something . . . just for a second.”

When the second cuff was on and both the boy’s hands were fastened behind his back, John didn’t have to make soothing noises anymore, he didn’t have to talk about his bad heart.

“Now,” he said, “you ain’t gonna kick anyone’s ass, you ain’t gonna wreck anyone’s house.”

John, mimicking the boy’s voice, said: “Motherfucker, I’ll kill you when I get these off.”

John, very cocky, said: “You ain’t gonna get them off.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“You just relax,” John said. “I don’t take the cuffs off until you sober up. Could take all night.”

Butkovitch pulled at the cuffs, a futile effort that overbalanced him, and he stumbled. John “helped him to the floor because he was stumbling and he could hit his head on a coffee table, hurt himself.” Once he got Butkovitch on his back, John thought he might “have sat on the kid’s chest for a while.”

“When I get these cuffs off,” Butkovitch threatened, “you’re a dead man.”

But John Gacy was still John Gacy, because he remembers very well what he said. “Anyone gets killed, it’s you, John. Just sober up, okay?”

Gacy told the docs that he himself drank a few more shots of Scotch—"I had been bombed earlier and I got rebombed"—then lay down next to Little John. He was going to lay with him all night, that’s what John told the docs, he was going to lay there keeping the angry, drunken boy company until he came to his senses. “It must have been about three in the morning,” John said, and that final act of compassion, laying down with the drunken boy, was the last thing John Gacy remembered that night.

*
*
*

John woke up in his own bed. He had one of those vague hangovers where you don’t quite recall what happened or exactly where you are, and he had to look around to orient himself. He was in his own bed, alone.

It was still early and he had a sense that he’d been up late. After going to the bathroom, he wandered into the kitchen, looking for something to eat. A normal morning. There was a light still burning in the living room, and John thought, Son-of-a-bitch, who left that on? John fell asleep in his chair so often that waking up and finding a light on wasn’t unusual. Had he been in the living room last night?

He thought: Butkovitch. Little John is still here. John Gacy thought: Might as well wake him up, fix breakfast for him. That’s what John told the docs. He told them he was going to fix breakfast for a dead man. John Gacy still thought Butkovitch was alive.

He padded, barefoot, into the living room to get the light, and, as he came through the doorway, he could see some feet, legs to knees, on the floor; and then . . . then . . . there he was: Butkovitch, lying on his back, hands cuffed behind his back, just the way John Gacy had left him.

Except there was a rope around his neck, and the front of his pants was wet where he’d lost control of his bladder. Little John’s “eyes were closed but his face was red, that kind of blue-red, and his mouth was wide open.”

“I knew he was dead,” John said later, “because the rope was so tight around his neck.” John knelt by the boy, and the first thing he did was take the rope off. He tried to make himself believe “he’s only unconscious.” John put his head on the boy’s chest, listening for a heartbeat. There was nothing, no sound of life, but he couldn’t pull his head away, and he listened for several minutes. John massaged the boy’s neck where the rope had been, and he thought about applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before he realized he wasn’t thinking clearly. Little John was dead.

He turned him over and took the cuffs off, noticing then that the body was rigid but not completely stiff. John knew, from his experience working at the Palm Mortuary, that Butkovitch hadn’t been dead very long. Rigor mortis hadn’t fully set in.

John looked around in the early-morning stillness of the house. At least there was no blood to clean up this time.

*
*
*

How do you explain it?

John never put the rope around the boy’s neck, never pulled it tight, never watched him die. But there was no one else there that night, so he had to be the one. But why didn’t he have any recall? Why couldn’t he remember a thing?

And why were there no feelings? Here was a boy who had helped build his business, who ate dinner with his family, who played with his daughters, and now he was dead and John couldn’t picture him alive anymore. The death of John Butkovitch, however it had happened, was now something that was over, and no one had to talk about it again. That’s how Big John felt about the body.

There was, of course, work to be done. John went into the garage and got a rubber tarp. He brought the tarp into the house, rolled the body into it, and took it out to his private workplace in the garage. “I had to drag it,” John explained. “I couldn’t hoist him up onto my shoulder because of my heart.”

He did not understand why he had no feeling about the body. It was like a dog that had died: a pet that had passed on and there was nothing you could do for it anymore. You felt bad for it, but it happens. John left the body in the garage, wrapped in the rubber tarp for a day or so, just as if a pet had died. He would bury it when he had the time.

You’d think a man would be frightened—bury the damn thing right away—but John just left the body there, and then Carol came home that Sunday or Monday. Now he had a body in the garage and no way to get it in the house, into the crawl space. Carol was always in the kitchen, near the window that looked out at the big double doors of the garage.

When John thought about it later, he realized if he had actually committed the murder then—and he emphasized this to the docs—it couldn’t have been sex-related. “Why,” John argued, “would you put your thing in someone’s mouth if he wants to kill you? Guy could bite it off.” John told the docs he found Butkovitch fully clothed, so whoever killed the boy hadn’t violated him. John was adamant: there was no sex with Butkovitch. If you were looking for motivation, John theorized, you had to rule out sex. The killings weren’t any sex thing.

John had no time to think about motivation immediately after the fact, however. John Butkovitch’s body had to be
disposed of, and it was a problem in logistics. John looked at his garage: it was in a low-lying area, and the houses across the street were built up higher, so water ran downhill into the garage as well as into the crawl space in the house. John had put up cement walls around his garage, which meant that it held up to a foot of water in the spring, but John had planned for the flooding. When he poured the cement, he’d blocked off one area, leaving just a small square of dirt, where he intended to dig a drain so he wouldn’t have to go wading through his garage to get his tools.

Short of taking out the cement, a two-day job with a sledgehammer, the only place John had to dig was this hole, which was really too small, only three feet by a foot and a half. The first thing he would have to do would be to dig it deeper.

Carol could see him dumping a couple of wheelbarrowsful of dirt in the backyard and could never figure what they were for. John was always “puttering,” and it wouldn’t pay to ask him what he was doing this time. A woman could take only so many lectures about how hard her husband works.

John said, “I took his clothes off, there in the garage, so there would be no identification. I thought I should bury him there. So I dug the hole and put him there, but I had to dig under the foundation because a three-foot hole is not big enough for someone who’s five-five or five-six. Whatever. And it was hard to get the hole big enough. So I had to bend him over, and by this time he was stiff as a board. I just barely got him in the hole and I had to jump up and down on him to bend him over and get him deep enough in there.”

Then Big John poured cement over the hole, smoothed it over, and he didn’t have to think about Little John anymore.

Marco Butkovitch found his son’s 1968 Dodge—"very special” to Little John—parked near the corner of Sheridan and Lawrence. Little John always put the car in the garage, and finding it out on the street with the keys still in the ignition meant something was very seriously wrong. Marco phoned the police and mentioned that the night before, his son had intended to confront his boss, a man named John Gacy, about a check. Marco didn’t touch the car for fear of damaging whatever evidence it might contain.

The police came out right away and found several items
in the car: the keys, a checkbook, a jacket, and John Butkovitch’s wallet with forty dollars in it.

Gacy remembers that the police came out to talk with him about Butkovitch and that he told them exactly what happened: The boy had come out with some friends and they had argued about money for a while, until everything was settled. Butkovitch left with his friends. You could check with the friends on that one.

John Gacy spent hours thinking about Butkovitch, putting together the pieces of his life, the things he didn’t understand. It wasn’t until he was up in 3 North, at Cermak, that he remembered picking Butkovitch up the night the boy died. He probably wouldn’t have told the police that anyway, but at least he remembered it. Things were coming back to him slowly, like images floating out of a fog.

The police told the Butkovitch family that their son probably was a runaway. At any rate, according to Illinois law, John Butkovitch, at seventeen, was no longer considered a juvenile but a minor entitled to leave home if he wished.

The family argued that even if John had left legally, the circumstances were ominous. Who leaves home without their car, their checkbook, their wallet? No, John Butkovitch was not a runaway, and the family feared for his life. Marco called Gacy, who said he was willing to help in any way; he was sorry Little John, a good worker, had run away.

The Butkovitch family phoned the police every week, urging them to go out to Norwood Park to talk with Gacy one more time. After two years and over a hundred conversations, the police refused to take any more calls from the Butkovitch family.