Buried Dreams (36 page)

John heard himself saying those words, and he had to think about them for days. Maybe Jack didn’t commit “the crimes” at all, and that’s why John could never bring back the moment of the rope. Why didn’t the docs jump on that? What Jack said sure sounded like a clue. Why didn’t they look into the idea that Piest, or any of the little bastards, actually killed themselves? By accident. Jagging off with the rope.

Every year, an estimated five hundred to one thousand Americans die from autoerotic strangulation. The victims range
in age from nine to seventy-seven, and include both men and women, though the majority are teenage boys. The body usually is found behind a locked door, a noose around its neck. There is evidence of masturbation.

The use of near-asphyxiation to heighten solitary sexual pleasure is a dangerous gamble. Dr. Robert Litman, a Los Angeles psychiatrist who has studied the phenomenon, told
The New York Times
that “there is an extremely sensitive area of the carotid artery. Just turn the wrong way and you become unconscious. You may do it right forty times, but on the forty-first, you may make a wrong move and die.”

The folk myth about the hanged man’s erection, forensic pathologists say, is based on fact. The carotid arteries, located on either side of the neck, carry oxygen-rich blood from the heart to the brain. When these arteries are blocked, as in strangulation or hanging, the abrupt loss of oxygen to the brain can often cause erection and even orgasm in a dying man. There is no sexual pleasure in such a death: the victim is either unconscious or dead at the point of orgasm.

In Chicago, the Cook County coroner sees about thirty cases of masturbatory strangulation a year. It seemed unlikely that thirty-three boys had come over to 8213 Summerdale to have their autoerotic accident.

John wished Jack had never opened John’s mouth, never mentioned the rope and erections. It was like Jack made some kind of bad slip that fucked them both up. Because now the docs thought there was something sexual in “the crimes.” John could imagine that thought festering behind the doctors’ eyes and noncommittal expressions. They might think that he handcuffed them and used the rope to make them hard. Against their will. But you can’t have an orgasm against your will. If you’re not into it. And even if some kid went and got hard under the rope, who’s he gonna tell? A young kid like that, he thought he wasn’t into it. Now he’s worried about his manlihood. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s actually a fruit picker in his own mind. Because if you have an orgasm, that means you’re into it.

You can let that kid go.

And then maybe every once in a while, Jack took it too far and there was an accident and someone died. Even so, if there was no struggle, then it was consensual. They wanted
to die. Orgasm was proof of that. They were fruit pickers in their own minds, and they wanted to die.

That’s how someone could read it. It’s how John figured some of the docs rationalized the crimes. So how come that theory didn’t fit in at all with the four Jacks; or the gentle gift, given out of compassion; or the way Jack became the Old Man and punished the boys because they were young John Gacy and Voorhees combined?

If Bad Jack used the rope to get the little bastards hard, there was sex in there, right at the core of everything. That cheapened everything, the sex idea, and it just wasn’t true. John had already shown the docs—by going over the victims he could remember—how none of them were sexual. Just like:

The Greyhound bus boy was self-defense.

Butkovitch was about a carpet.

Godzik was about dope.

Szyc was about a car.

And Rob Piest was . . . what?

John didn’t know. Piest was a real puzzler, all right. One thing, though: The more he thought about the Piest kid, the more he began to like him. John told the docs he felt real affection for the dead boy. As the trial neared, John began referring to Piest as “Robby.” He heard later that it pissed off some of the prosecutors because the kid’s name was Rob and no one ever called him Robby. Never mind the assholes: John would call the kid what he liked.

Because Robby did what all the cops in Chicago couldn’t do: He stopped Jack.

A revelation here: It wasn’t just Robby who stopped Jack. You had to give John Gacy a lot of the credit. Ma’s side, the good side, had to be working in there, and that’s why the Piest thing didn’t fit in with the others. It was a totally different crime, committed, for the most part, by a totally different person.

First of all, John wasn’t drunk or stoned, which meant he wasn’t weak enough to let Jack out, anyway. Second, it all happened between nine and ten o’clock at night, well before the time Jack went cruising. Third—and this was the major difference right here—the crime itself was pretty dumb and stupid.

“Everybody saw me in the store,” John explained. “The
kid goes out, says he’s going to talk to a contractor. Who else could it be?”

The Other Guy didn’t operate like that. He went cruising under cover of night. He carefully picked the little bastard he wanted, and he covered his tracks. Bad Jack was a “criminal genius.” With Piest, there was a trail that led right to the door of John’s house. So it was just as John thought all along: He had picked up Robby.

The puzzle was coming together now, and John had to put it in context so the docs could understand. John Gacy had been fighting with Jack for years, but after Carol remarried, Jack was gaining the upper hand. And then, with Christmas coming and Uncle Harold dying, Jack was coming out whenever he wanted. There was only one way to stop him.

What happened, John brought Piest home, then stepped aside and let the part of himself he couldn’t control kill the boy. There was a kind of tragic heroism here, as John saw it: he had purposely left a trail that led right to his door. He was going to sacrifice himself to stop Jack.

It may have been all unconscious in there, but John told the docs that it was almost like he sat back and waited for the coppers to bust him. Because killing Robby was so dumb and stupid, they couldn’t help but find “the perpetrator.”

John Gacy had finally outsmarted Jack, with stupidity.

CHAPTER 21

ELIZABETH PIEST SAT BY
the candy counter in the Nisson Pharmacy, waiting for Rob to come back from his job interview. At nine-twenty, she asked Kim Byers to call if Rob came back, and went home to wait.

“Something’s wrong,” she told her husband, Harold. “I can’t find Rob.”

At nine forty-five, she called Nisson Drugs. Rob wasn’t there. Ten minutes later she called again to ask Phil Torf who “this contractor” was.

Phil Torf said, “John Gacy.”

Rob Piest was already dead.

John left the boy’s body on his bed. He showered, changed clothes, and drove to Northwest Hospital. Uncle Harold “wasn’t there,” John recalled, “and his bed was already stripped down.” It was eleven o’clock, during a shift change, but several nurses saw a man fitting Gacy’s description on the floor.

John’s aunt had already left, so he drove over to her house, even recalling the route he took: down Addison to Harlem, Harlem to Kullum. She was next door at a neighbor’s, and John visited with her for two hours. “I had two or three beers,” John said, “then left there about one-thirty.”

Back at his house, John phoned his older sister and told her that Harold had died. He wondered if he should call Ma, but John’s sister thought it would be best to wait until morning.

“I went into the bedroom,” John said. “The kid was lying on the bed. Well, it didn’t belong there. I pulled down the stair ladder to the attic. Went back to the bedroom, picked it up, put it over my shoulder, and carried it up the ladder to the attic. Closed the thing up, got undressed, and went to sleep.”

John insisted that he didn’t sleep with the body. Why would you want to sleep with some kid, he’s already dead?

While John Gacy was inquiring about his uncle at North-west Hospital, Elizabeth and Harold Piest were at the Des Plaines Police Department, filling out a missing-persons report on their son. The report contained a description of Rob and the clothes he was wearing, as well as the name of a man he had planned to ask about a summer job: John Gacy.

The police told Harold and Elizabeth to go home and wait. Des Plaines is a small suburban station, and the case would be handled by the juvenile division in the morning.

The Piest family couldn’t wait until morning. They felt Rob was in trouble. He could be hurt, unconscious somewhere out in the frigid night; perhaps he was being held by
the contractor. They could find no “John Gacy” listed in any of several local phone books and decided to search for the boy themselves. Rob's twenty-one-year-old sister, Kerry; his twenty-two-year-old brother, Ken; and Harold Piest took their cars and began driving slowly down the empty streets and back alleys of Des Plaines. They gave the family’s two German shepherds, Caesar and Kelly, bits of Rob’s clothing to smell and set them loose in likely spots. Maybe the dogs could find Rob if he was unconscious. Elizabeth Piest stayed home by the phone to coordinate the effort and check off areas already covered.

The family searched all night while John Gacy slept.

John woke early, and he met with Richard Rapheal about the drugstore jobs a little after seven that morning. Gacy, according to Rapheal, seemed like the same old John, coherent and normal in every respect.

Sometime that morning, John called his younger sister in Arkansas and asked her to tell Ma that Uncle Harold died. He said he would call late that night about the funeral arrangements.

John put in his usual workday and arrived home about seven-thirty that night. He cleared the phone machine, made a few calls, and waited for Rossi, who was coming over later. John was going to take him out late and “look for Christmas trees.”

“See,” John explained, “the year before I had found some Christmas trees.” He was hoping to find some good ones this year, after midnight.

At eight-thirty that morning, the Piests went back to the Des Plaines Police Department and spoke with officer Ronald Adams. The family was exhausted, frantic with worry. Adams was an experienced youth officer, and this didn’t look at all like a typical runaway situation.

Adams called a phone number Phil Torf had supplied. John Gacy said, yeah, he’d been to the Nisson Pharmacy last night. He’d asked Torf about some fixtures and he hadn’t said anything about any job to any kid. Adams thought the whole deal stunk. He asked for investigatory help.

A detective named James Pickell checked out the number Adams called and found it was listed not to John Gacy but to PDM, a corporation at 8213 Summerdale, Norwood Park.
He drove by the house and took the license off a new Olds 98 in the driveway. Pickell ran a registration check on “PDM 42,” then called Chicago police headquarters and asked for the rap sheet on John W. Gacy. He learned that Gacy had been convicted of sodomy in Iowa a decade earlier.

Gacy’s record showed an arrest in June 1972. A man named Jackie Dee said that Gacy had picked him up on Chicago’s North Side, tried to handcuff him, hit him from behind, and attempted to run him down in the car when he fled.

Six years later, in July 1978, Gacy had been arrested for assault on Jeff Rignall. Pickell reported to Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak. It looked bad: This guy Gacy had a record of sodomy involving teenage boys, he seemed to be violent, and he was, in all probability, the last person to see a boy who was missing.

Ronald Adams told Kozenczak that the Piests were genuinely worried. He had checked out Rob’s friends at school: no way the boy was a runaway. It was time to talk to Gacy face to face.

Lieutenant Kozenczak and three other officers drove over to the Summerdale house. They were standing at the front door when a van pulled into the Gacy driveway. A young man who identified himself as Michael Rossi said he and John had planned to get Christmas trees that night. The police told Rossi to wait outside.

At nine-thirty, John was in the family room, watching TV, when “Asshole Kozenczak” knocked on the door. “He came in with another officer,” John said, “and there were two more outside.”

The more John thought about Joseph Kozenczak, the more he realized what an absolute, gaping “asshole” the man was. “He played a hunch,” John said years later, “and he got lucky. Big, smart cop. You know what he was wearing? Kozenczak? A brown suit. How can anybody wear a brown suit? Brown is the color of shit!”

John sat in his reclining chair, imperious, while Asshole kept pushing about the missing kid. And John told him the truth: same thing he told Adams on the phone earlier. He hadn’t talked to anybody about any job.

Kozenczak took it all in calmly, almost smiling, and
asked John if he could come down to the Des Plaines police station and fill out a witness form.

It was out of the question at that time: John was busy arranging his uncle’s funeral. He had to call Ma in Arkansas. Kozenczak said, “Call her now.”

So John had to talk to Ma about her brother’s death while these two cops sat there, listening and waiting. It pissed him off enough to really bark at Asshole when he got off the phone.

“I haven’t got the time to come down now,” John almost shouted. Jesus Christ, his uncle had just died, and Ma was upset.

Asshole kept pushing it. “When can you come down?” he wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” John said. “Maybe in an hour.” He was exasperated. “You guys are very rude. Don’t you have any respect for the dead?”

Years later, John explained what was going through his mind when he said that. “I was pissed because here I had a death in my family and Kozenczak didn’t give a shit. All he was interested in, he wanted to know about some missing kid. See, things come and go in my head, and at that time, I had completely forgotten that Robby was up in the attic.” The prosecutors wanted to make it look as if John had tried to manipulate the cops with death.

Anyway, the comment and John’s promise to come to the station in an hour finally got Asshole out of the house. Rossi came in, and John told him the cops were asking about some missing kid. He didn’t know anything about it. Rossi wanted to borrow some Christmas tree lights. They were in the attic and John said, “I’ll get them.” He acted as if he didn’t want Rossi to go up there, and he handed the three boxes down from the darkness of the attic.