Buried Dreams (25 page)

Rappaport, for the defense, was smart, able to draw correlations between things that made John think. This doc didn’t come right out with his theories, but John could tell, by the tone and push of his questions, where Rappaport’s mind was going. Just like if John really did hate the Old Man, which was still hard for him to admit, then maybe there was a kind of thing where he, John, became John Stanley, dominant over the hustlers, who were dumb and stupid. Then as the Old Man, he had to teach the hustlers, who were really him as a young man. Follow that one through—John took and expanded on Rappaport’s questions—to realize that the Old Man thought teaching was punishment.

So what’s the ultimate punishment?

And then where would you hide your secrets? If you were the Old Man? John felt puzzle parts slipping together with Rappaport. The Other Guy and the Old Man. Twist those pieces around. See how they fit together.

Rappaport worked differently from Freedman, who was the most distinguished of the defense docs. John thought of
Freedman as “that fucking old man,” but it was an affectionate nickname, because John liked him and thought he was tough. Freedman just took everything and picked it apart. “John,” Freedman once asked, “do you realize that the phrase you use, ‘dumb and stupid,’ is redundant?” The doc was right, of course, and John had to sit around thinking how dumb and stupid he sounded saying dumb and stupid all the time. The fucking old man knew a lot and he was closer to the disease, whatever it was, than anyone else. One day Freedman and John were sitting alone in the doc’s office, and this little fucking old man said, “Is Jack Hanley in? I’d like to speak to him.”

Just like that, at 11:00
A.M.
John had to explain that Jack Hanley was a name he used when cruising. The Other Guy might not be named Jack Hanley, if that guy existed, and John, after nearly twelve months in jail, thinking about it, putting the pieces together, was coming to the conclusion that yes, crazy as it sounded, there might be someone else living in his body. It was pretty nutty, but if the Other Guy existed, John didn’t know him, much less know his fucking name. Besides, whoever it was hiding inside—you could call him Bad Jack—if he came out, he came out at night, after midnight, when John was drunk or stoned on pills. Maybe you had to make John mad for Jack to come out. You don’t just ask to meet him, like you would some celebrity at a party. “Oh, my goodness, isn’t that the Other Guy, the one who is supposed to have killed thirty-three people? Could you introduce me to him? I’d like to have a little chat.”

Jack didn’t come out like that. There were probably special circumstances that caused him to surface, that triggered him. Maybe it was a combination of alcohol and drugs, of fatigue and anger. Maybe the trigger was something the victim did or said, some wrong move that released the killer.

The doc just filed that one away. No expression. He didn’t share his theories, and John was never sure what Freedman was thinking. John had to guess about Freedman's theories, but now the tough old fart was asking to meet Jack, and John thought the doc was closer to the truth than the others. Real close. John’d work on it, try to bring the murders in out of the fog.

He warned the docs that he wasn’t talking about what he knew, what he really remembered. It was all what John called “rationalization” it was all “supposition.” Just like
Butkovitch: there was a stretch of five, maybe seven hours he couldn’t recall. Then Gacy woke up and found Little John Butkovitch dead, the rope tight around his neck.

But, John thought, maybe if he talked about how it “must have” happened, he’d just flow into the Other Guy’s thought patterns. With Rappaport and Freedman he’d be a real motormouth, rationalizing and supposing without even thinking about it. Because that’s how he remembered one detail he’d forgotten about the Greyhound bus boy. He’d forgotten about the sound of the boy’s breath bubbling up through the holes in his chest—"the gurgulation that went on and on"—and he’d gotten that just by going over the story. Telling it over and over again.

Years later, John said that was his technique with the docs who really wanted to help. He tried to motormouth his way into something he’d forgotten, like the gurgulation. If it worked once, maybe it’d work again, maybe he could motormouth his way into the Other Guy’s personality.

Just like, if he found a body in the morning—and he couldn’t even recall burying some of them—but if he found a body and it was handcuffed and it had a rope around its neck, he’d try to visualize slipping the cuffs on, try to see the rope going around the smooth young neck.

Start with the handcuffs. Okay, John Gacy, sometimes when he wanted sex, he handcuffed guys. You could say he raped them, but that was bullshit.

The thing about rape, John explained, is that, in some way, it has to be consensual. Even if the guy does it because of force, it’s consent. If the kid has an orgasm, that’s proof of consent. When John got some dumb kid cuffed, on his knees, terrified, he had to be sure the kid wouldn’t bite it off if John stuck it in his mouth. No one ever tried, so that was consent: the proof was right there between his legs. No one ever bit it off. When they were done—the hustlers and the naïve first-timers—it was fun to belittle them, show them up as the lying little queers they were.

“If you never done it before, how come you know what to do? Huh? How come you’re so good at it, you never did it before? Answer that.”

Show them they were fruit pickers in their own minds and that they had consented to it.

Later on, right in the same conversation, John would
revert to the fatherly image he had over younger kids, offer them a drink, use his Jaycee chaplain voice to explain about morality: “Nothing is wrong unless you make it wrong in your own mind.”

Before he got to that point, though, John Gacy had to get the cuffs on them. You couldn’t wrestle around with these little assholes, try to sneak the cuffs on, using force. Antonucci proved that in the summer of 1975.

What you wanted to do, you wanted to “plant seeds” in their minds about sex, see how they responded. If the seeds seemed to be growing, the handcuffs came next. Some kids were straight. Antonucci, you could plant seeds all night long, the kid wouldn’t go for nothing. But John had learned from Tony Antonucci. There was a better way to get the handcuffs on them. You could trick them.

Just like Michael Rossi, the employee who sometimes clowned with Pogo as Patches the clown: John said Michael was the first one he remembers using the “handcuff trick” on.

There is a problem here: John told this story to the docs and to the cops. He told it to a reporter years later, how sixteen-year-old Michael Rossi was the first to fall for the handcuff trick. During the police investigation of the crimes committed by Gacy, Rossi admitted to investigators that he had a continuing sexual relationship with John Gacy and that the sex was a condition of his employment. When Lieutenant Kozenczak of the Des Plaines Police Department put Rossi on a lie-detector test and asked about the disappearance of one particular boy, investigators felt Rossi was “basically truthful,” but the official report read that because of “erratic and inconsistent responses” they were “unable to render a definite opinion.” The question here was not sex; it was murder. Could Rossi, after working for Gacy for two years, have some guilty knowledge? Did he know anything of the murders? The state’s attorney’s office declined to prosecute Michael Rossi. What the boy knew or might have guessed—whether he knew anything at all—was not as important as what John Gacy had done.

Later, testifying under oath, Rossi denied ever having sex of any kind with John Gacy. Under oath, Rossi claimed that Gacy never got the cuffs on him.

Maybe John’s story is a fantasy about the perfect employee. A young kid, he wants work, you plant some seeds, slap the cuffs on him, rape him until he shows consent, and
then the kid comes back and works for you. That way you can have him any time you want.

Rossi said he met Gacy on May 22, 1976, when he was working with Max Gussis, a plumbing contractor who was helping remodel the kitchen in the Summerdale house. John was putting in a new dishwasher, and Rossi went down to the crawl space to install the waterline. A week earlier, fourteen-year-old Samuel Stapleton and fifteen-year-old Randall Reffett were killed, probably on the same night, and buried in a common grave under the house. It was dark in the crawl space except for the work light Rossi was using, so he didn’t notice anything unusual down there. Just sort of a damp, musty odor.

Rossi was doing morning work for Max the plumber at twenty-five dollars a day, but Gacy offered the boy a job at three dollars an hour and promised him a full forty-hour week. According to Rossi, the job interview was held at Gacy’s house around lunchtime. Max the plumber was there.

Rossi, who was about 5 feet 7 and weighed 160 pounds, had sandy brown hair. According to Rossi, John planted a few seeds at the first interview, asking the boy how “liberal” he was in regard to sex. Rossi didn’t say where Max was while John was planting seeds, and Max later testified that it was two years later when Rossi told him, “John is queer.”

Max Gussis said, “Mike, you’re crazy. I never seen anything wrong with this man.” So Max, who was sitting in on the lunchtime interview, according to Rossi’s testimony, apparently missed the reference to “liberal” attitudes toward sex and all that the conversation implied.

Rossi testified that he told Gacy, “I don’t want to hear about that stuff,” and John dropped the subject. Rossi said he never went back to Gacy’s house that night. He said that in the time he knew John, he sometimes saw handcuffs in the house. Gacy, Rossi swore under oath, never put him in handcuffs.

John’s story is at odds with Rossi’s testimony. He said Max brought two boys to help him with the plumbing work and told John he was going to have to let them both go. John asked which was the better worker and Max said, “Rossi.”

John told Rossi he might have a job for him but that he didn’t have time to talk just then. As John recalled the conversation, he said, “Tell you what: I’ll be done around ten tonight, I’ll pick you up by your house.”

Rossi said, “I live on the forty-seven-hundred block of Drake.”

John said, “Fine. Ten tonight, be standing out on the corner by your house, I'll pick you up. We’ll talk about the job.”

Rossi was on the corner at ten sharp, and the two drove back to the empty house and discussed the job. Maybe John dropped a Valium. “I told him,” John said, “that I was liberal-minded about sex.” They were smoking marijuana, according to John, and drinking heavily.

“What would you do if some guy approached you for sex?” John asked.

Rossi, in John’s version of the story, said, “I don’t know. It never happened.” The boy was behind the bar, where the handcuffs were, and he was “fiddling” with them. John said, “Hey, I’ll show you a trick. You can put these things on and take them off without the key.”

Rossi didn’t believe it.

“You can. It’s a kind of magic trick.”

“Yeah?” Rossi put the cuffs on, snapped them on tight, like John told him, so the trick would work right. “All right, they’re on tight,” Rossi said. “How do I get ‘em off?”

And then John told Rossi the secret of the handcuff trick. “You don’t get ‘em off. The trick is, you need the key.”

Rossi didn’t seem scared or upset. “I thought you could slip your hand out or something.”

John said, “No way, asshole. And now . . . I’m going to rape you.”

Years later, in this version of the story, John described in detail what he did with Rossi, how he stripped the boy, sat on his chest, forced him to perform oral sex, and how he, John, “got into it orally” with the handcuffed boy. There were orgasms and there was no biting, so actually the whole thing was consensual sex.

Afterwards John took the cuffs off and they had a few more drinks and talked, John said, about how it wasn’t as bad as people made it seem. Nothing wrong with it: it was bad only if you made it wrong in your own mind. Business, John explained to Rossi, was a process of mutual benefit. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. There were ways a young man could get ahead, make a lot of money, earn promotions at PDM.

It was getting late now, around 2:00 or 3:00
A.M.,
and
John drove Rossi home, telling him they had to be at work early the next morning.

“Eight that morning,” John said, “there he was at work.” When he caught Rossi alone sometime around eleven, he asked him how he felt about the handcuff trick. Rossi said that when he got home to his mother’s, where he was living, he thought about finding a gun, coming back, and killing John.

“So why didn’t you?”

John, in this version of the story, recalls that Rossi said, “I need the job. I want to get ahead.”

With the docs, John motormouthed through his “suppositions” about the murders.

Randall Reffett and Sam Stapleton disappeared on the same day. Since they were buried in a common grave, is it possible they were killed together, on or about the same time? It stands to reason that if one boy was being killed before the horrified eyes of the other, the second boy would surely flee. Unless he was somehow restrained. Unless the Other Guy knew the handcuff trick before John Gacy.

The conscious John Gacy thought he discovered the trick while raping Michael Rossi sometime during the early-morning hours of May 23. Reffett and Stapleton disappeared on May 14, nine days earlier. Was it possible that the idea—the handcuff trick—rose in John’s subconscious mind and surfaced consciously?

The trick worked; that was the only thing John knew clearly.

John Gacy didn’t remember William Carroll, who was last seen on June 10. John Gacy didn’t remember anything about Rick Johnston, who vanished less than two months later.

John wondered whether there was something about getting the cuffs on these kids, the fact that it was “a trick,” that brought out the Other Guy? John thought, “You’d have to be pretty dumb and stupid to let a stranger put you in a pair of handcuffs.”

The conscious John Gacy discovered, in the summer of 1976, that the handcuff trick wasn’t foolproof. Not yet. He hadn’t quite perfected it. At least one more boy managed to fight his way out of the cuffs.