Buried Dreams (26 page)

On the night of July 26, 1976, David Cram, eighteen years old, was hitchhiking down Elston Avenue when a chunky man in a silver Oldsmobile station wagon pulled up and stopped. There was a PDM Contractors sign in the window, and Cram, who had been working at a tire-repair shop, asked how a guy got into construction and what it paid. The man, who introduced himself as John Gacy, said he could top Cram’s salary. The boy would start out at $3.66 an hour, with the 66 cents going for deductions. If Cram was interested, Gacy said, he should call that evening.

Cram made his call, and Gacy had an employee pick him up. They drove to Gacy’s house, where some other employees, all teenage boys, were waiting. They had an urgent job that night, painting Oppie’s hot-dog stand. The other boys drove the truck to the jobsite. Gacy and Cram were alone in the Oldsmobile.

David Cram felt that Gacy “built himself up” in the conversation. The contractor said he had a degree in sociology but that his other collegiate degree, in psychology, was “good to have” in his trade because you could “manipulate people a lot easier.” A man with a degree in psychology, Gacy said, could talk to you and “plant the seed in your head and let it grow like a forest.”

Gacy was talking about planting seeds and “describing his company and how an individual could progress,” and then “he just kind of faded into a conversation that he was bisexual.” An employee of PDM Contractors, Gacy said, “could progress in the company on their own standings, or morals.” Cram understood it to be a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” situation. A guy who scratched John Gacy’s back could make a lot more than three dollars an hour.

That was the end of the conversation on bisexuality. It was either then or soon thereafter that Gacy told Cram he was knocking down about “half a million a year and he projected a million for the next year.” A lot of money there for someone who didn’t mind a little back scratching. Cram was young and “I wasn’t too familiar with construction companies at the time.” The “image he painted for me,” Cram said, “was like, bulldozers and cranes, you know, tall sky-scrapers and that’s what I thought we’d be doing.” They were, however, on their way to paint a hot-dog stand.

Gacy said he had a fully stocked bar and that he didn’t mind if employees came in for a few drinks after work. He
said that he had just given a Bicentennial party at his house and mentioned the names of prominent people—politicians, lawyers, judges, “very impressive officials"—who had attended.

They arrived at the hot-dog stand and began painting. John told Cram that if he had any questions, just ask. If he made a mistake, it was his own fault for not asking. Gacy was a perfectionist about the work, but he pitched in and did as much physical work as any of the boys.

Cram worked steadily for Gacy for the next few weeks, and one day, cleaning out the garage beside the house on Summerdale, he found “a couple of wallets with identification in them,” and the physical description on the driver’s license of one fit Cram pretty well. He never could remember the actual name on the license, but he asked Gacy if he could have it. Cram was underage, too young to buy liquor legally, and he thought he could use the license for that purpose. According to Cram, Gacy “just chuckled it off and said that I didn’t want those, those were from some deceased person or something like that, something that had to do with some kind of syndicate.” What he did, Gacy said, besides contracting, he worked for the Syndicate. He set people up for hits. He didn’t do it himself, kill the poor sons-of-bitches, but he set them up.

Once, after Cram had been slightly late for work, Gacy gave him a watch he said had belonged to “one of the deceased persons” the Syndicate had hit on John’s say-so.

After knowing Gacy for some time, many people simply dismissed his more outrageous statements as an odd sort of bragging, self-administered fodder for his big-man complex. Syndicate killings: what impressive connections; I certainly better be careful around you, John Gacy. The man tended to exaggerate.

It’s likely Cram didn’t take all this assassination talk very seriously either, because on August 20, or 21—a couple of weeks after Rick Johnston disappeared—Gacy told his new employee that because of his recent divorce “he had plenty of space in his house. Three bedrooms.” Cram could have one of the bedrooms for twenty-five dollars a week. John made it sound as if the boy would have the whole house pretty much to himself. For only a hundred dollars a month.

Cram moved in on August 21, 1976. The next day was his nineteenth birthday, and he spent most of the night with a couple of his friends, driving around in a truck and drinking.
Cram got back to the house well after midnight, and he was fairly drunk. Maybe a little stoned. Cram couldn’t recall if he’d been smoking any dope.

It sure must have seemed like it, though, because when he came in the door, John Gacy was standing there “and he had a clown suit on.” All 230 pounds of Pogo, smiling his dark, sharp-pointed smile.

There was no goofy-clown voice that night. John told Cram he was “preparing for the next day. He said he had some kind of benefit, charity to do with some kids, with the clowning, and he thought it would be rather cute if, you know, seeing as how it was my birthday, that he leave the uniform on. . . .”

They moved off to the barroom, a kind of sunken living room in the back of the house, where John’s big lounge chair was in front of the TV. Cram was pretty bombed already, but John, still dressed as a clown and acting all jolly, poured them both a couple of hefty shots of pure grain alcohol, the fiery 190-proof stuff. Cram didn’t recall if they smoked any marijuana—it wouldn’t have been unusual for Gacy at that time of night—but Cram remembers that John took some kind of tranquilizer. A Valium, maybe. John had started taking a lot of Valium. They both had a few more drinks.

Pogo, all made up to entertain kids, was pouring down the drinks, popping pills, probably taking the occasional hit off a joint. Something—the alcohol or the pills, maybe just the costume—turned Pogo into a genuine Jolly Joker then, and he began to perform. Cram said the man in the clown costume “was showing me some of his puppets and so on and so on. Then he came up with a handcuff trick, how you can escape from handcuffs. He demonstrated them, and he shook them off. I was so plowed, I didn’t, you know, really pay attention to it.”

Pogo asked if David would like to try the trick.

John Gacy told Cram, “Maybe someday you’ll need it.”

He held his hands out in front of him for Pogo to handcuff him and show him the trick. He felt cold metal tight around his wrists; he saw a big clown face with a dark, sharp smile, inches from his face.

Cram couldn’t get out of the cuffs. “The trick was,” he said later, “you needed the key.” The boy held his hands up to the man in the clown suit, said he was locked in solid, and asked Gacy to “get them off.” But the clown “grabbed me by
the chain between the cuffs and swung me around the room a couple of times.”

Cram was screaming, “Get these off me!”

But Pogo swung him around another time, and John Gacy’s voice came rasping out of the dark mouth on Pogo’s face: “I’m going to rape you.”

Gacy let go of the chain between the cuffs then and Cram stumbled back against the TV stand, but he did not fall down.

Huge Pogo, merry as only a clown can be, lumbered toward Cram. The boy was cuffed, and the clown was going to rape him. Pogo moved slowly, very sure of himself now.

But Cram had spent a year in the Army and knew something about hand-to-hand combat. He kicked high and hard, catching Pogo in the head, smearing the greasepaint there. The clown fell heavily and lay still for several moments. Cram had plenty of time to get the keys and unlock the cuffs.

By the time Pogo could stand, Cram, who had “sobered up” quite a bit, was standing there, both hands free. The boy and the clown stared at each other for a moment. Nothing was said. Except for the paint smudge where he’d been kicked, Pogo looked like one of the sad-faced clowns hanging on the wall in the front room.

Cram said he “went and locked myself in my room.”

More “motormouth suppositions” on Gacy’s part.

John Gacy, in 1976, knew nothing of the Other Guy. But what if they learned from each other somewhere below the level of consciousness? What if there was a sort of telepathy going on between them? What if the Other Guy knew about John Gacy? What if he was smarter than John and learned from his mistakes?

John “rationalized it out” for the docs:

The conscious John Gacy could use Pogo for a number of things. So then, in the summer of 1976, John Gacy had learned that you could use Pogo to trick people into putting on a pair of handcuffs. This was the conscious John Gacy, who was “totally nonviolent” and interested only in “consensual sex.”

But what if the Other Guy was watching, learning all the time? Just like with Cram—it was a disaster. A smarter John Gacy would have tricked Cram into putting the cuffs on
behind his back. Try to kick with your hands behind you; you’d fall flat on your ass. A smarter Gacy wouldn’t announce he was going to rape somebody. You want to keep tricking them, outsmarting them.

If the Other Guy was in there—and John was beginning to think he was—then it’s possible that he learned from the incident with Cram. The only thing: The Other Guy was “bent on violence.” Using Pogo, Bad Jack could trick them into being handcuffed, but with their hands behind their backs.

And that made sense, because that’s the way John found some of the victims in the morning: with their hands cuffed behind their backs.

And if the Other Guy tricked them into the cuffs—hypothesis again—he probably tricked them with the rope.

Because John knew something about the other victims: He found them all strangled, ropes wrapped tightly around their necks, fastened with a tourniquet knot John Gacy learned in the Boy Scouts. So the Other Guy was using things John Gacy knew, like the knot.

The Other Guy—Bad Jack—was perfecting the rope trick in the black hours John lost before he found the bodies in the morning. It must have been Bad Jack who killed Godzik in December 1976.

CHAPTER 16

ABOUT A MONTH AFTER
he’d moved into the Gacy house, David Cram was sleeping in his room, wearing an old pair of jeans for protection. Gacy occasionally visited him in the night, erection in hand, and the fastened pants slowed him
down
,
gave Cram a chance to protest. This night, as they lay in their separate rooms, Cram woke to a strange sound. Gacy was calling out to him from
his own
bedroom
in
a high-pitched singsong voice:

“Dave, you know what I want.”

Cram chose not to reply. Later he told police that Gacy came into his bedroom and said, “Dave, you really don’t know who I am. Maybe it would be good if you gave me what I want.”

Gacy stepped forward, then jumped on the bed and put his forearm to Cram’s throat. He was growling, like an animal, deep in his throat. Cram recalled, “I knocked him off me. He came back in and grabbed a hold of my pants and I moved one way and he was moving the other way, and they ripped . . . we fought a lot more, and finally he laid there.” Cram told investigators that he managed to straddle Gacy and was about to hit him, but then it seemed as if the older man passed out. Cram pulled his punch, and Gacy regained consciousness. Then, as Cram recalls, Gacy “got up, walked to the doorway, turned around, smiled a little bit, and said, ‘You ain’t no fun. . . .’ “

Cram moved out after that incident. He quit PDM and tried to make a go of his own contracting business.

John now had an empty house again, and Mike Rossi moved in not long after Cram moved out. Rossi paid the same rent as Cram, which was the exact amount John was sending Ma each month to pay off the house.

The way John saw it—having Cram and Rossi stay, paying rent—was part of his “do-gooder” personality. If you looked at it, his house was always open. First there was Roger, from Bruno’s, the one Ma thought was “gay” there was Mickel Ried, the boy who had some sex with John and who caught a hammer blow on the head when he argued about money; there was Cram, handcuffed by Pogo; and now Rossi.

John compared himself to one of those animal-lovers who always take in strays. John said he “felt sorry for them, and I liked to help them out.”

Rossi was a hard worker who earned his raises, and soon John had him supervising jobs. Rossi became John’s right-hand man at PDM. Rossi was ambitious and learned fast. John saw a lot of himself, his own youth, in the boy. He knew he “browbeat” Rossi, just the way his dad had hollered at him, but together they got the work done, on time and on
budget. Rossi, who testified that he never had sex with John Gacy, stayed the better part of a year in the house at 8213 Summerdale.

John insists he did, in fact, have sex with Rossi, “whenever I wanted it.” It was, as John remembered, the usual bisexual stuff, “no kissing, no fondering,” none of that ugly shit. John liked to “dominate” Rossi, order him around—"Get on it, Rossi, right now!” When Rossi wanted something—he didn’t have a car and he was forever asking to borrow the truck to take his girlfriend on a date or some shit—John let him know how he could earn the truck for the night. “Get on it, Rossi!”

He taught the boy that one hand washes the other, John said, and sometimes Rossi would do something when he didn’t want anything at all from John. In this version of the relationship, John would ask, “Okay, whatta ya want now?” after it was over, and Rossi would just smile. The little fucker was saving them up, like in a bank. He was smart.

Then, according to John, sometimes Rossi would “tease me with it, get me all hot” and then put in his request before capitulating to John’s dominance.

Carol, who was seeing John occasionally, noticed “that Rossi manipulated John and John manipulated Rossi. They were both doing it to one another.” The two of them, Carol thought, were “very close,” and John told her “that Michael felt like a son to him.”

Greg Godzik was seventeen, about five feet seven, slight, and muscular. He went to Taft High and was on a school work program doing afternoon labor at the Republic Lumber Company for $2.35 an hour. Gacy, who shopped at Republic, offered Greg a job at almost twice the salary. The boy lasted just under three weeks on that job, then disappeared.