Buried Dreams (34 page)

Back in Chicago, in September, John struck up a business relationship with a fellow contractor named Richard Rapheal, who had just organized his own company, Rafco Incorporated. Rapheal was remodeling and building retail stores, and he asked John to subcontract his drugstore bids. Gacy did the carpentry, the fixture installation, and acted as superintendent on a number of drugstore jobs being done at the same time.

There had been no known deaths—no boys killed at John Gacy’s hand—for almost five months.

John theorized about this fact, this marked contrast to the holocaust of the previous year. Perhaps the do-gooder in him, the Asshole, knew—somewhere below the level of consciousness—that the Other Guy had been set loose in late May, when John Gacy failed with Carol, when his dream of a clean new life died. Could it be that he was working himself into the ground, outsmarting Bad Jack with fatigue? John knew only that he didn’t do much cruising in those months. What with his work for PE Systems, PDM, and Rafco, with his political duties to fulfill, the yard party, and his clowning to think about, John was “too tired” to set the black Olds spinning down to the park. Let the docs chew on that one. No boys died for five months; John just “didn’t have the time.”

And then, at the beginning of November, John learned that Carol was getting married. Her decision was irrevocable, and the killing began anew.

On November 3, Frank Landingin, a nineteen-year-old who was known to hustle drugs and to pimp, was released from jail, having made bond on a battery charge. Landingin had been arrested several times, mostly for assault and auto theft, and this charge had involved an assault on his girlfriend. At about two in the morning of November 4, Landingin met
his father, Francisco, in a North Side bar. Frank told his father he was going to look for his girlfriend, apparently to make up. Frank Landingin was last seen walking west on Foster Avenue, just off Broadway, at about three in the morning.

Eight days later, the body of a young white male was found floating in the Des Plaines River, downstream from the bridge on I-55. The victim had been gagged with his own underwear before or just slightly after sex, and something, perhaps the gag itself, or, more horribly, some unbearable external stimuli, had caused the victim to retch and drown in his own vomit.

After exhumation of the bodies under Gacy’s house, police saw a familiar grisly pattern: The underwear gag was a Gacy trademark. Twelve of the victims had died not of strangulation but of asphyxiation related to clothlike gags shoved deep into the throat. The body found floating in the Des Plaines River on November 12 was the thirteenth victim to die choking on his own underwear. He was identified as Frank Landingin.

Less then three weeks after Landingin disappeared, a short, brown-haired, twenty-one-year-old man from the suburb of Elmwood Park had Thanksgiving dinner with his family. James Mazzara was living with friends on Clark Street, three blocks from Bughouse Square, and when he returned to the city, he found that he’d been evicted. James Mazzara, who called himself MoJo, was last seen alive walking alone in the direction of Bughouse Square, carrying a suitcase.

A month later, the body of James “MoJo” Mazzara was found floating in the Des Plaines River, only a mile downstream from the I-55 bridge.

Financially, 1978 was the best year yet for John. He expected to report about two hundred thousand dollars in gross receipts. He owned three new vehicles: a Chevy van, a pickup truck, and a new black Olds. PDM, PE Systems, and Rafco were all off and running, moving ahead on their own momentum and John’s own considerable drive. He looked forward to doubling his gross in 1979: close to a half-million-dollar year.

Politically, John had solidified his position in North Side Democratic circles. No need to brag, to exaggerate: John Gacy had clout.

The Rignall and Donnelly matters had been settled with a minimum of fuss. A quarter-million-dollar-a-year businessman, a precinct captain, with clout, could reverse a fruit-picker or space cadet in any cop house in the city. Barring a bad mistake, something dumb and stupid, John Gacy was bulletproof.

There were the bodies to consider, of course, and just after the Christmas holidays, in January 1979, John planned to pour about thirty yards of concrete in the crawl space. Cement one foot thick, covering everything, “but not,” John told the docs, “because I thought there was anything buried there.” The concrete floor would eliminate his seepage problems, and get rid of the musty odor, the bad, dead smell that rose out of the crawl space when it flooded; the faint, sickly sweet odor that filled the house on hot summer days. The concrete would strengthen the foundation so John could build a second story onto the house. Make the whole place into a recreational palace. John thought he might install a whirlpool and a sauna on the second floor. Just lie back in the Jacuzzi after a hard business day. And down below, under a foot of concrete, there’d be a nice little secret.

That way, with the concrete down there, he could start a new life. The past would be over and done. No one would have to think about it again.

On December 11, 1978, John Wayne Gacy killed his last victim, a fifteen-year-old high-school sophomore named Rob Piest.

The boy died between nine and ten o’clock at night, and witnesses who talked with Gacy slightly before the murder said he was neither drunk nor on drugs. Gacy even took two business calls while the boy was dying, and the men who talked to him said he seemed calm and rational.

John couldn’t understand why the Other Guy came out with Piest: it sure didn’t look like the same guy who had to get drunk and stoned to kill; the one who killed in the early-morning hours, who covered everything as he went along.

The murder of Rob Piest: it was dumb and stupid. Atypical. Not like Bad Jack at all. To get caught.

CHAPTER 20

ROB PIEST, A FIFTEEN‐YEAR‐OLD
sophomore at Maine West High School, loved woods and rivers, all the wild places of the Midwest. He was two merit badges shy of becoming an Eagle Scout, and he planned to earn scouting’s highest award with a community service project that involved cleaning up a portion of the Des Plaines River. He was a good student—on the honor roll as a freshman—a passionate outdoor photographer, and a member of Maine West’s gymnastic team. Rob was a developing athlete, a boy of medium height with a gymnast’s trim, muscular build and supple grace. A good-looking young fellow with shaggy brown hair, Rob tended to date girls a year or two older than himself.

Rob’s mother, Elizabeth, regularly picked her son up at school after gymnastics practice and drove him to his part-time job at the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines. The drugstore was only eight blocks from home, but Rob’s schedule was so tight that his mother usually brought a dinner for him to eat in the car on the way to work.

The boy worked almost every night, often filling in for other employees when they called in sick. In only four months at Nisson, he’d managed to save nine hundred dollars, which he planned to use as a down payment on a Jeep. With a four-wheel-drive vehicle, Rob could get out into the wilderness more often, take more photographic safaris. It was going to be tough, though; he was making only $2.85 an hour at Nisson, not nearly enough to cover payments on the kind of vehicle he wanted. Worse, he’d just been turned down for a
raise. Rob would be sixteen, old enough to drive, in three months. There wasn’t much time.

On December 11, 1978, Elizabeth Piest picked Rob up at about 5:00
P.M.,
a little early, and they had time for a quick dinner at home. It was his mother’s forty-sixth birthday and the family would wait on the cake and ice cream until Rob finished work at nine that night. He arrived at the Nisson Pharmacy a little before 6:00
P.M.

John Gacy was really running. It was another “drugstore day,” and he was checking out jobs all over the city, pushing his new four-door Olds 98 hard. The first black car hadn’t stopped Jack, and John never could explain why he hadn’t given up the stratagem, why he traded that car in for a second black Oldsmobile, a Royale, equipped, like the first one, with red and white spotlights and a CB antenna.

By three in the afternoon of December 11, John had already put in an eight-hour day. He knocked off for an hour to visit at Northwest Hospital his Uncle Harold, who had been so helpful to the family when John Stanley was sick. He was John’s favorite uncle, a goodhearted guy who “took the brunt” of John Stanley’s rages.

At Northwest, John learned that Harold had slipped into a coma and wasn’t expected to live through the night. It was two weeks until Christmas, the beginning of another hollow holiday season. The Old Man had died the day Christ was born: died of shame, John knew, without a son by his side to comfort him. Because of Voorhees. Now Uncle Harold was passing on and there was nothing John could do, nothing anyone could do about the dark season, about Christmas.

John left the hospital at 4:00
P.M.
He felt “a little depressed.” Goddamn bells ringing all over the city, carols on the car radio: sounds of death and shame. Christmas.

An hour later, at five o’clock, Richard Rapheal talked with John Gacy on the phone. A Rafco business meeting was scheduled for seven that evening. Rapheal wanted to introduce Gacy to another superintendent and discuss a job that was supposed to start the next day.

Gacy said he’d be there, at Rapheal’s house in Glenview, at seven sharp. Rapheal said he’d order John a pizza.

Phil Torf, the co-owner of Nisson Drugs, Rob Piest’s
employer, had called John Gacy that day and asked him to stop over and “give me an assessment of how my store was put together.” About a year before, Gacy had enlarged the store and “given it a general face-lift.” Torf wanted to do some “minor rearrangment.” Gacy wasn’t much of a craftsman in Torf s opinion, but he knew the pharmacy business—knew, for instance, which items to stock on the top shelves and how to funnel people through the impulse-buy aisles to the pharmacy counter in the back. Torf thought the contractor was ambitious and a bit of a braggart, but he got the work done fast.

Half an hour after his conversation with Rapheal, Gacy walked into Nisson Drugs. It was about 5:30
P.M.
He made some measurements, then talked with Torf for over an hour. Gacy wanted sixteen hundred dollars for the job, but the pharmacist said he thought he could do the work himself. Maybe Gacy could just give him a little advice. The two men were standing by the pharmacy counter in the back of the store.

Rob Piest came in at about six, walking to the back of the store, near the pharmacy, where he sat down and began putting price tags on merchandise to be stocked.

“Looks like you got a new crew,” Gacy said. “A lot of new faces.” He was looking directly at Rob Piest, who was near enough to hear the conversation.

Torf said he hired “a lot of high-school kids,” but they usually went on to college or full-time jobs.

“I’ve been hiring a lot of high-school boys to work for me,” Gacy said. He glanced over at Torf's new stockboy.

Rob Piest didn’t say anything.

Linda Mertes, who worked at Nisson Drugs, remembered Gacy from the work he’d done there in 1977. She talked briefly with the contractor when he came in, did some work, then joined Gacy and Torf by the pharmacy in the back of the store. She stood just in front of Rob Piest.

Linda asked Gacy about Mike Rossi. “He’s doing much better now,” Gacy said. “I started him at two or three dollars an hour. Now anyone who works for me starts at seven dollars an hour.”

“Hey, Rob,” Linda said, “you want a job?” It was a joke, and neither Gacy nor Piest said anything. It would have been bad form with Phil Torf standing right there.

*
*
*

“I never talked to the Piest kid,” John said. “I went in, measured the store. I was there for a couple of hours. And we were just bullshitting about old times.” There were some seeds dropped, though. “We started talking about money,” John said. “Okay, I know the kids were listening, but I never offered any one of them a job. The Piest kid, I never mentioned anything about a job. But I knew he was pissed off about what they paid him there.” John didn’t say how he knew that.

After the seeds were dropped and Torf rejected his bid, Gacy left Nisson Drugs, at about seven. Torf noticed that John had left his appointment book on the desk behind the pharmacy counter.

Where the hell was Gacy? He’d never missed a business meeting before. It was after seven, the pizza was cold, and Rapheal had two other guys, just sitting there waiting for Gacy. There was no way even to get ahold of the contractor: every time he called the house, Rapheal got the phone answering machine.

“It was snowing,” John said, “so I went back to my house to change vehicles because I had to do some plowing. I cleared my phone machine and Phil Torf had called, said I left my appointment book there.”

Phil Torf told police that he never phoned Gacy about the book. He was adamant on that point.

John didn’t recall any messages from Rapheal.

“Nisson Drugs is on the way to Glenview,” John explained. “I figured I could pick up my book, then drive out to Glenview for my meeting.” This is the only reason he went back to the drugstore.

Sixteen-year-old Kim Byers was working Nisson’s checkout counter near the front door. It was a cold night and every time a customer opened the door, Kim caught a blast of frigid air. Rob Piest’s parka was draped over the counter, where he’d left it after taking out the garbage. It was a blue Pacific Trails parka, and Kim put it on against the cold.

At about seven-thirty, when business was slow, Kim took some photographic negatives out of her purse. They were photos of her taken at a homecoming dance. Kim wanted
reprints and enlargements to give to her sister for Christmas. She tore off the top receipt—number 36119—and absent-mindedly put it in the pocket of Rob’s parka. She filled out the photo logbook with the date and put the envelope in the “to be developed” bag.

John Gacy parked his black Chevy pickup in front of the liquor store near Nisson Drugs. The plow on the front was pointing out, toward Touhy Avenue. It was a little after eight. When he walked into the store Phil Torf said, “Forgot something, huh?”