Buried Dreams (31 page)

Gacy planted an important seed. “I didn’t pay the kid,” he told the investigator.

Janus had interviewed Donnelly previously, on the day after the incident, when the boy’s wrists were still bruised from the handcuffs. The investigator had written up a “basic summarization” of Robert Donnelly’s statement.

Donnelly himself recalls that he told Janus and other law-enforcement officials the whole story: how Gacy had impersonated a police officer and pulled a gun to get him in the car, how he was immediately handcuffed. There was no talk of money: Donnelly was neither a hustler nor a homosexual. At the house, Gacy threw a drink in the boy’s face, then poured another down his throat. Donnelly said he was raped in various painful ways, that Gacy tied something—he couldn’t see what it was—around his neck and choked him. The boy said that Gacy pointed the gun at him and told him there was one live shell in the chamber. Gacy pulled the trigger more than a dozen times until there was a loud report, obviously the sound of a blank. Donnelly said that Gacy, using only his hands this time, choked him until he passed out. When he came to, he was still cuffed, and there was some sort of gag in his mouth. He remembers telling the officers that his head was thrust into a bathtubful of water until he passed out. Donnelly said the man held his head underwater, nearly drowning him like that, four times. The man, John Gacy, kept him on the brink of death all night long. Donnelly, in fact, was in so much pain he had begged the man to kill him.

A lot of this wasn’t in the “basic summarization.”

After listening to Gacy’s version of events, Janus called in assistant state’s attorney Jerry Latherow, who talked with both Robert Donnelly and John Gacy in separate interviews. Janus asked that charges of kidnapping and deviate sexual assault be brought against John Gacy, but Latherow refused.

One witness said the “slavery sex” was a matter of mutual consent.

One said he was viciously sodomized, terrorized, nearly killed.

The state’s attorney noted that Gacy had, in both versions of the story, first offered the boy a drink. He had driven him to work in the morning. Gacy was too “nice.”

Donnelly, by contrast, appeared to be mentally unstable. Actually, he had recently completed therapy designed to relieve stress after his father died. Donnelly, the eldest of eight children, had to take care of the family by himself. He entered therapy because his doctor “noticed I was having a stress buildup.” He was still in shaky condition when he met John Gacy.

Worse, Donnelly spoke slowly, with a kind of stutter.

Gacy, on the other hand, was intensely fluent, the owner of a prosperous business, and a respected—indeed, an influential—member of the community in which he lived. The man had political connections.

Latherow found evidence of Gacy’s sodomy conviction. Still, it would be impossible, the assistant state’s attorney thought, to get a felony conviction on the latest incident. In his summary report, Latherow found “too many difficult matters to believe in Donnelly’s story.” Gacy was a “better” witness. “Even though Gacy had a sex-offense conviction several years ago,” Latherow concluded, “he was much more credible than Donnelly.”

If Bad Jack—or whatever you wanted to call the Other Guy—felt like torturing some boy nearly to death, then releasing him, he couldn’t have chosen anyone more suitable than Robert Donnelly.

Call it Bad Jack’s little trick on Asshole John: Release the bad witnesses; let the space cadets complain to the cops. John Gacy would have to outsmart the police to save himself. Just a little message from Bad Jack to John: “Don’t fuck with me, asshole.”

The way John was beginning to see it, 1978, the year he was finally arrested, was a time of conflict: John against the Other Guy, each out to outsmart the other, each one looking to take over.

The Other Guy knew John. Asshole John, the goody-goody, could plant seeds, pull “a reverse” when he needed it.

Just like a few years before, driving back from Schaumburg a little drunk with his mother, John was doing a hard seventy miles an hour when a cop pulled up behind and started beeping. A state trooper in an unmarked car: John would have seen him five miles back if he hadn’t had a few J&Bs. The only thing to do was bluff it out.

Bad Jack probably remembered that reverse as well as John, who could recall the conversation with the cop nearly word for word. “I waved him on,” John explained. “Moved over a lane so he could pass. Guy stays right on my ass. I step on it, go on up to seventy-five to get out of his way. The guy puts on the revolving light, and he’s beeping like crazy. So I start waving over my head like, ‘Go on by, ya son-of-a-bitch.’ We must have gone fifteen miles like that: he’s got the red light going on his dash, and the siren’s screaming. I turns to Ma, I says, ‘I think he wants us to stop.’ “

Just before the place where 90 runs into the Kennedy, John pulled over. The cop walked over to the car, steaming. John looked up and said, “Damn, I got to get my mother here to the hospital.”

The cop said, “Yeah?”

“Yeah. She’s got a heart condition. I’m taking her to Resurrection, right down on Talcott. I don’t get her there on time, anything happens to Ma, it’s your fault. You want to stand around, you better give me your name.”

John laughed, remembering the whole thing. “Shit, I reversed the whole thing on him. I says, ‘I want your name and your badge number, because if anything happens to my mother, I want to know who to sue.’ “

The cop walked over to Ma’s side of the car and asked her if she was all right. John’s Ma is fair, and she can find excuses for bad behavior, like the tumor that pressed on her husband’s brain when he was drinking, but Ma is straight-out honest and doesn’t lie. Fortunately, John had been driving with the window open, and Ma was half frozen, so she said, “I’m just so cold, I feel numb.”

John explained how the feeling came over him then. His mother was sick, and he needed to get her to the hospital. The poor woman was numb, for Chrissake, and this cop wanted to stand around and bullshit. John exploded.

“That’s it, damn it!” he shouted, righteously angry. “I’m taking my mother to the hospital RIGHT NOW!”

The cop walked around the car, grabbed John’s arm, and said, “You better watch your mouth, buddy.”

John said, “Now you’re putting your hands on me? Do you know who the fuck I am?” In Chicago—more than any other city in America—that question can give a cop pause. He looked at John, then looked at the new Oldsmobile with custom plates.

“Just lead me to the hospital,” John said, backing off, giving the cop an out, using psychology.

“I can’t do that without authorization.”

“Well, just let me get my mother to the hospital. Can’t you see how sick she is?” John recalled how he felt the tears beginning to burn in his eyes then. His Ma: her heart. How he loved her.

“Yeah, okay,” the cop said, “just drive a little slower on the way. You’re almost there.”

John turned off, on his way to Resurrection, in a hurry to get medical attention for his mother, and when he was sure the cop had gone, he pushed the big Olds up to eighty and started laughing. Almost gave Ma a real heart attack. “I feel numb,” she says. Shit.

Reversed the whole damn thing on that cop.

Just like in Cermak, John reversed a priest there. John asked to see the first one, but he sure felt like an asshole because he had to ask, “Father, can you confess to something if you don’t even know you did it?” John recalled that the priest told him the Church didn’t “require a confession if you have no knowledge of the sin.”

“God knows what’s going on,” the priest said, and John didn’t make a confession.

That priest didn’t give John any pressure, but the next one they sent him, when he got sick in April 1979, John had to show him his place. “By the time he left,” John remembered, “he was asking me to forgive him. I told him he was overstepping his bounds as a priest.”

“I says, ‘Do you believe in God?’

“He says, ‘Of course.’

“I says, ‘Why do you think I need God just because I’m down and out right now? Don’t you think about God when you don’t need him for nothing? That’s the trouble with the world. People only think about religion when they need it. You should thank God for the good days and he’ll be there in the bad ones.’ “

John said that “I switched the conversation around on him. And he actually did, he asked me to forgive him. Because he wasn’t sure he was being Christian.”

John told this pushy priest that God is around all the time; anyone can feel him. “I had this priest second-guessing himself,” John said years later. “He thought I needed him just because I was in that situation, and I told him, ‘Bullshit, I got God around me all the time.’ “

John told the priest that his religion was something he lived every day, not something he turned to in hard times only. If that was why the priest had come, John said, “Then I don’t need you.” John “proved that I had stronger faith than him. And he left feeling like an asshole, I think.”

To “work a reverse” with the psychiatrists was a little tougher, though.

John recalled one of his sessions with Doc Freedman, “when we were trying to get the Other Guy out, and I jumped his ass because we weren’t spending enough time. I said, ‘You have to get me going, and that takes time. Especially because the Other Guy don’t come out unless I’m taking Valiums or drinking. He don’t come out in the day. He don’t come out until after midnight.’ I says, ‘You’d have to get me drunk, get me mad to have the Other Guy come out and then he could tell you about all those assholes in the crawl space.’ “ If the rules said they couldn’t look for Bad Jack with Scotch and Valium, John thought, then they had to put in hour after hour: they’d look for the Other Guy using time.

John said, “Doc, I come all the way over here to your office in chains, and you been late twice. What is this shit? You got no reason to be late. We can’t get the Other Guy out because we don’t spend enough time and then you’re late.”

John recalled that he looked around at Freedman’s office and saw that it “was totally disorganized.” The whole place needed to be remodeled for efficiency, and John explained to the doc how work is done. “First of all,” he said, “in any job, you are not late. Because you’re getting paid. If I was doing this office, I would not be late.” John felt his mind going so fast that he skidded right by his point, and he was off, motormouthing about work. “And if you came in and told me to do the shelves before the floors, I’d tell you to get the hell out. Of your own office. Because when I do my work, we do it my way. That’s just how I am. Then later, if you don’t like
what I did, or you want it done some other way, then we can talk about it. But don’t try to tell me how to do my job when I’m doing it.”

John remembered that Dr. Freedman just looked at him and very softly said, “John, taking that all into consideration, you should remember that I’m the psychiatrist and you’re the patient. That’s why we’re going to have to do it my way.”

Years later, the memory of that confrontation still made John laugh. “He reversed me, that fucking old man.”

Although some of the jigsaw puzzles John did at Cermak took over a hundred hours, it took longer to fit the pieces of his life together. He had been in 3 North for almost a year before he could see that in 1978, his last year as a free man, he was actually at war with himself. John Gacy and the Other Guy, fighting for dominance.

After breaking up with Doreen, John Gacy had begun seeing Carol again, hoping they might be able to get back together. There was a thought in the back of his mind that he could give up PDM, liquidate his assets. The whole family could move somewhere, some small town where there wasn’t a park, a place to cruise, and they’d open a fried-chicken place, Brown’s or a Kentucky Fried. It would be a family operation, with the girls, Tammy and April, helping out. The young employees—employees John would have nothing to do with sexually—could take over in the night shift so that the family could be together, at peace, in the evening. In the night. No more Pogo. No more politics. No more parades. He’d pour cement in the crawl space, sell the house, start a new life. Maybe they’d go down South, someplace like Arkansas, where things were slower and he could be closer to Ma and Karen. John Gacy wanted a close family life down there, in the South, with no place to cruise.

John said that was his plan in the spring of 1978. Get away from the park, from Uptown. Get back with Carol. Live at peace with himself.

The Other Guy didn’t like that. It was like the Other Guy said, “Why fuck up a good thing?” And he gave John another little warning in the spring of 1978.

On the night of March 21, 1978, Jeff Rignall, twenty-six, left his girlfriend’s apartment in New Town. Rignall—who later testified that though he had sexual relationships with
women, he preferred men—was the sort of proud, unashamed gay man John Gacy called “a faggot.”

Rignall had just had an argument with his girlfriend about their relationship, and he stepped out to have a drink and think it over. As Rignall started walking, a big black Oldsmobile with spotlights and antennae pulled into a driveway, blocking his path. It was a cold night, but the window was rolled down and the driver said, “Hey, where did you get such a good tan?”

“I just got back from Florida,” Rignall said.

“Where you going?”

Rignall said he was going to a local bar frequented by gays, and the man in the car said, “Hop in, I’ll give you a ride.” The driver was holding a joint, about to light up. Rignall figured the man would offer him a toke on the way to the bar and he stepped around the car—noticing a customized license plate: three letters and two numbers—in order to get in on the passenger side.

The driver seemed friendly enough, and Rignall figured him for one of those poor suburban guys with a wife and kids, some guy who couldn’t admit his homosexual tendencies and cruised New Town in the dark, looking for sex. It was sad the way some of these guys hid in the closet. They came into the gay bars, and they were almost pathetic in their efforts to fit in.

The driver was talking about his property in Florida, just a normal conversation, and he passed the joint to Rignall, who hit on it and passed it back.