Buried Dreams (28 page)

The women’s-lib stuff got all twisted in Doreen’s mind, the way John saw it. She wanted to go out to eat every night, she didn’t like to cook, she didn’t like to clean up the house. She wanted a housekeeper. She’d ask questions like, “John, why is it that I can’t do anything right for you?”

Just like Carol, she wouldn’t help with the business, but she’d spend the money. Once, during an argument, John remembers telling Doreen that she wanted all the gravy and none of the responsibility.

Doreen said, “I don’t want to be your assistant contractor. You expect too much.” John finally had to have it out with her. “Doreen,” he said, “this just isn’t working out.” He told her it would be best if they broke off their engagement. John said he was leaving on a business trip for PE Systems and he’d be gone for a week or so. That’d give her plenty of time to move out.

John said, “Doreen, I want you gone when I come back.”

In June of that year, when he came back to the empty house, John knew he was “going through a bad low point.” Business was booming, but John felt “confused.” He began thinking about Carol, wondering if they could get back together. Carol, he thought then, was the only person who could somehow “save” him.

John told the docs he didn’t know who Carol was going to save him from: the house was empty. Ma would come for her summer visit, get on his nerves, and restrict his freedom for a month, but then the house would be empty.

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*

Sometime in August 1977, after Ma had gone and the house was empty again, Michael Rossi recalls that Gacy told him “to go down into the crawl space and dig a trench line for some drain tile.” The trench was to be a couple of feet deep and a foot wide. Gacy gave very specific instructions about where to dig and, according to Rossi, “he would actually mark it out with sticks.” If someone deviated from the line, according to Rossi, Gacy “would get very upset.”

Rossi dug only one trench down there, but he supervised more digging done by other employees, and Gacy ordered that the job be done right. He’d stick his head in the crawl space and holler when someone took a shortcut and dug off-line.

After John’s arrest, after he was charged with murder, he told police that he had his employees dig trenches so he would “have graves available.”

But that was after the trauma of arrest, after not sleeping for a week, after the shock of being charged with monstrous crimes, and Jack was out then, saying strange things to the police: weird, incriminating, contradictory things that John swore he couldn’t remember.

As for the trenches, John, to the best of his recollection, told employees such as Rossi where to dig in very unspecific terms. Sometimes they dug the pits too deep, like they were graves or something, and then, sure, he yelled about the work. You don’t need to dig drain trenches that deep.

John certainly didn’t want to implicate anyone else in the murders, but what if someone, or some group of his employees, had been killing? Lots of people had keys to the house, and John was traveling all over the country for PE Systems, so what if some kids had a party in the house while he was gone and someone OD’d on drugs? They could bury them in asshole John’s place.

That’s why John was still mad about the way the state charged him. How could they connect all those bodies to him? Okay, they were in his house, but he didn’t remember putting them there. What if someone else did some of them?

The proper charge, John figured, would be “concealing evidence of a homicide.” Because, okay, he did remember burying some of them. Say he was charged with every one, even the ones he didn’t remember, or the four the state said were “mine,” that the cops found floating in the river. John
read in some lawbook that concealing evidence of a homicide is a 10-year term. If he served consecutively, that would be 330 years.

Of course, he could always serve it concurrently. That would be 10 years. Just like Iowa.

John figured that if he could just see it whole, understand it, bring back an image of someone else doing even one murder, it would muddy the state’s case. They’d have to amend the charge.

And something in the back of his mind, something floating in the fog, always connected Rossi with Szyc. That’s what John told the docs.

If Rossi said John was specific about where to dig in the crawl space, he was lying. John remembered that he really didn’t give a shit where Rossi dug.

If the cops were saying he told them he wanted to “have graves available,” they were lying. He didn’t recall saying that. It was “a self-serving statement” on the part of the cops, a statement designed as part of a frame-up. They had a lot of bodies and needed a “scapegoat.”

Because it didn’t make sense: if it was during working hours when Rossi dug down there, then he was talking to John Gacy. Not Jack. Jack came out only at night, and then only when John was drunk or stoned on pills. John didn’t think Jack, Bad Jack, if he existed, could get a sober John Gacy to provide graves for him. Not in the summer and fall of 1977.

Nothing fit together, but the cops and the prosecution wanted to make it look like a rational John Gacy planned to kill, and they wouldn’t admit that the proper charge was concealing. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t legal, but the state had John and they needed to convict him of the murders. Because of the publicity. Gacy told the docs he felt like a “victim” in the whole deal.

Aside from John Szyc, the boys who died in 1977 were a mystery to John.

He could recall nothing of Jon Prestige, a twenty-year-old just in from Kalamazoo, Michigan. On March 15, Jon told a friend he was going to take a look at this Bughouse Square place he’d heard about. The boy’s body was the first one exhumed from the crawl space under the house.

John told the docs he didn’t recall Matthew Bowman,
nineteen, who disappeared on July 5, after Doreen moved out.

The victim labeled “body twenty-five” was Robert Gilroy, eighteen, who probably died the day he disappeared, September 15. Gilroy was a horseman and, because he didn’t own a car, was hitchhiking to a place called the Blue Ribbon Stables when he disappeared. That would have been after Ma finished her annual summer visit and the employees dug the trenches.

Only ten days later, a nineteen-year-old ex-marine named John Mowery disappeared. Gacy said he honestly couldn’t recall how Mowery s body ended up in his crawl space.

Russell Nelson graduated on the principal’s honor roll in the small town of Cloquet, Minnesota. He attended the University of Minnesota and, at twenty-one, was planning to get married. Nelson and his fiancée had already picked out the names of their children, but on October 17—less than a month after John Mowery disappeared—Nelson, who was in Chicago visiting friends, did not come back from a disco near Clark and Broadway. His body was found in the wet mud under the house.

The victim labeled “body eleven” was identified as Robert Winch, a sixteen-year-old runaway also from Kalamazoo, who disappeared on November 11.

Exactly one week later, on November 18, Tommy Baling was watching
Bonnie and Clyde
on TV at a North Side bar. He was twenty years old, about five feet eight, and weighed 135 pounds. Tommy left the bar, intending to go home to his wife and infant son. He had been married in a double-ring ceremony, and his wife identified the ring the medical examiner found on “body twelve.”

A few weeks later, on December 9, David Talsma—a nineteen-year-old just out of marine basic training and living at home until he got his active-duty assignment—told his mother he was going to a rock concert in Hammond. He left the house at about seven that evening and ended up in John Gacy’s crawl space.

John didn’t remember any of those boys. Two of them were U.S. marines. How could a guy with his health problems kill a couple of marines? Up in 3 North, the docs gave him photos of the victims to study, but they were a gallery of strangers to John, and he told the docs that he honestly couldn’t be sure that any of those boys were “mine.” The
only one he recalled was Szyc, and he probably remembered him because of the TV set, the clock radio, the car, and the funny way he spelled his name.

Mrs. Rosemary Szyc didn’t think her son, John, had run away. The boy had an apartment of his own, a car, a girlfriend. He had left all his clothes in his apartment, and his income-tax papers were spread out on the table, as if he had been working on them. Mrs. Szyc called the police and reported her son missing. The boy’s car couldn’t be found, and his TV and clock radio were missing from the apartment. Mrs. Szyc supplied the police with those serial numbers. She and her husband paid a month’s rent on the apartment and tried not to touch anything in case the police might want to search it for clues.

During the next two years, Mrs. Szyc or her mother frequently called Area 5 police, who told them there was nothing new—they were unable to find a trace of John Szyc.

Sometime in the late summer or fall of 1977, police picked up a young man in a white 1971 Plymouth Satellite. A service-station attendant had accused him of filling up his tank and driving off without paying. The man was Michael Rossi, and he said his boss, a contractor named John Gacy, could explain the problem about the plates on the car.

Gacy talked to Area 5 police, paid for the tankful of gas, and said that a kid named John Szyc had sold him the car in February. It wasn’t much of a car, but the kid needed money to leave town.

Not long after that, John Szyc’s parents received a letter:

“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Szyc,

“I was unable to locate your son, but I did learn that he sold his auto in Feb of ‘77 and told the buyer that he needed money to leave town.”

The letter was signed by an Area 5 police investigator.

* Name changed.

CHAPTER 17

UP IN
3
NORTH
in Cermak Hospital, John tried to recall the moment of the rope. He told the docs it was almost like making it up, like inventing a near-murder, but he could pull one isolated incident out of the fog. Some kid, his face so twisted in fear you could almost laugh. Big eyes straining like balloons blown past the bursting point. And John Gacy, moving in slow motion now, fighting his way in, out of the glittering mist. Taking over. Seeing it whole and clear: a boy about to die. And thinking, Jesus Christ, what am I doing?

There was a rope around the boy’s neck—a length of ordinary clothesline—and it was fastened on the side, just above the shoulder in the simple tourniquet knot John had learned in the Boy Scouts. Easy to tie, that knot. You just place one end over the other and pull tight: a crossover knot, the first thing you do when tying your shoes. The knot was tight against the boy’s neck. John found a broken hammer handle up against the first twist of rope, and it was secured there by a second crossover knot.

One knot, a hammer handle, the second knot. That’s all there was to the rope trick. You could turn the handle and control the flow of blood to the brain.

John quickly undid the knot and told the docs he let the boy go. He couldn’t even remember if the kid had been handcuffed—though thinking about it, John figured he must have been.

And if he tricked the boys into putting the handcuffs on behind their backs, John could “suppose” that he tricked them with the rope. Same deal: “Just one more trick, I won’t
hurt you.” First the handcuff trick, then the rope trick. John figured he must have instilled confidence in them at this point, the way he could with his customers. Just like the time he was asked to build that roller rink, paid fifty cents to get into a skate palace and took notes on construction techniques because he knew nothing at all about building roller rinks. Still, he got the building done in forty-five days. You had to be a good con man in his business, and maybe that part of John Gacy came out with the rope trick. John asked the docs: “What if it was all a game with me? What if it was a game and I let it get out of control?”

It was hard to think about. Everything had “double meanings.” Perhaps another side of his personality—the do-gooder, nonviolent one—came out as the rope tightened around the boys’ necks. Dying, that way, was quick. It wasn’t messy, like the first one—the stabbing—with all that blood to clean up, and the boys wouldn’t have suffered long. There were no everlasting “gurgulations.” Maybe he gave them the rope trick, this gentle gift, out of compassion. Death came unbidden, just the way John had prayed for it when he was their age. It was a kind of suicide that left no sin on your soul, a dying that came out of the night, like a gift from God.

John could recall dozens of boys he’d had sex with, boys who were still alive, and they’d seemed so lost to him, so afraid of life. He knew what they felt, because he’d suffered in the same way at their age: the shameful desires, the loneliness, the sense of being “different.” And hadn’t John prayed for a death that came from outside himself? So maybe he was doing them a favor. Maybe he killed them “out of compassion.”

All hypotheses.

Compassion and the need to outsmart teenage boys: maybe they were all wrapped up in a bundle with two other aspects of John’s personality—John Gacy the alcoholic drinker, and John Gacy the drug taker.

He had to draw it out, define his terms to the docs. An alcoholic, as John saw it, is a person who gets drunk all the time and can’t help it. An alcoholic drinker is one who drinks too much on occasion and who may “consequently black out” and not remember what it was he said or did.

So, okay, what if he went into a sort of blackout, then picked up someone at the park, strictly out of “compassion,” out of a desire to help? “I could have been trying to be nice
to someone.” So the alcoholic drinker picks up someone basically as a happy drunk, a drunk who exhibits his mother’s virtues: trust, compassion. But the alcoholic drinker would have his mother’s major fault: He would be naïve. So—this was John’s supposition—when the drinker realized that he was with some hustler who was “really bent on greed,” it broke something loose inside him. “My father’s side,” John said, “could have come out then with my dad’s distrust, and his violence, with the idea that everyone is out to fuck over you and you got to fuck them before they fuck you. See, that attitude came out more in my dad when he was drinking.” And maybe it came out in John that way. Maybe there was more of the Old Man in him than he was willing to admit.