Buried Dreams (37 page)

Gacy still had business to attend to: He had to go get some lighting district checks signed. Rossi met him afterward, back at the house, at about eleven o’clock. John recalls dropping a Valium, having a couple of beers, and smoking a joint. They decided against trying to find any Christmas trees that night. Just after Rossi left, the drugs and drink went to work on John. There he was, sitting in the black recliner chair, grieving over his uncle, and the thought hit him, “Shit, the little bastard’s still in the attic. Gotta dump it tonight.” It was like some light that snapped on in his head, the way John
explained it. “I thought, Boy, I really would have been up shit creek if Asshole searched the house.”

Even though John was “exhausted” from working all day, he went up to the attic, “got Piest, wrapped it in a blanket: I carried it through the kitchen and out to the driveway.” He put the body in the trunk of the Olds, dropped Rob Piest’s clothes in a Salvation Army box somewhere, then drove south on I-294 to the bridge on the Des Plaines River.

On the CB, John heard a warning about an “unmarked Smoky” on the bridge, and he made several passes, back and forth, until he decided that someone had figured the black Olds for a police car. When the bridge was clear—no vehicles approaching from either side—John hoisted the body over the rail and let it drop into the river that Rob Piest had planned to clean for the merit badges that would make him an Eagle Scout.

It was a cold night after a warm day, and the ice-covered roads were hazardous. John was late for his talk with Asshole and was speeding north toward Des Plaines when the big Olds spun out on I-294. Dennis Johnson, working for the Illinois tollway system, spotted the disabled car at the twenty-nine-mile marker, about twelve miles north of the bridge over the Des Plaines River. It was two-thirty in the morning of December 13.

The car had spun about six feet off the road, broken through a thin crust of ice, and settled into the mud below. Johnson stopped and asked the man if he wanted a tow truck. The driver said he’d get the car out himself. He jacked up the back end of the Olds, put his spare tire under the right rear wheel, and tried to drive out. It was no good. The car was stuck, and the driver asked Johnson to call a tow truck.

On any such call, Johnson was required to note the license. This one was PDM 42.

The driver, Johnson said, was coherent, normal in every way. The guy just seemed to be in a big hurry. He said he was a police officer and that he had to get to Rockford. There was a murder up there.

The tow-truck driver, Robert Kirkpatrick, arrived twenty minutes later and winched the Oldsmobile out of the mud. The driver tried to get Kirkpatrick to charge the tow to “the Cook County Lighting District.” There was a brief argument, and the guy finally paid for the tow in cash.

*
*
*

At 3:20
A.M.,
John Gacy walked into the Des Plaines police station and asked for Lieutenant Kozenczak. He was late, he said, because he’d had an automobile accident. The watch officer told Gacy that Kozenczak had waited for him and gone home at about one o’clock. He noted that Gacy seemed nervous and that his pants and shoes were muddy.

Later that morning, Gacy called Lieutenant Kozenczak and told him that he had been unable to keep last night’s appointment because he’d gotten stuck in the snow.

“Where?” Kozenczak asked.

“The corner of Cumberland and Summerdale,” Gacy said, a few blocks from his home.

“You still interested in talking to me?” Gacy asked.

“Yeah, I am.”

“I’ll be right in.”

Gacy arrived at the Des Plaines police station just before noon, and while he sat in a conference room telling Detective Pickell that he never even talked with Rob Piest, Kozenczak was next door talking with Terry Sullivan, the supervising state’s attorney for the northwestern side of Cook County. The Gacy thing looked like serious business—a kidnapping at the very least—and, if a bust came down, the lieutenant wanted to make sure it was clean.

Kozenczak gave Sullivan a brief rundown on the case: the sodomy conviction, the evidence of violent behavior. Worse, there wasn’t much time. It looked like Gacy was holding Piest captive. The family was frantic—they wanted police to storm the house.

Sullivan; his chief investigator, Greg Bedoe; and Kozenczak began drawing up a search warrant on the basis of unlawful restraint.

Gacy, meanwhile, had made a written statement and was discussing his million-dollar-a-year business with James Pickell, who was trying to keep him in the station until a judge signed the warrant. Gacy dropped a few names, and Pickell acted as if he were impressed. A personal friend of the mayor, of Rosalynn Carter’s—wow! Director of the Polish Day parade. No kidding? Norwood Park precinct captain. Geez.

Pickell was an appreciative audience, and Gacy talked for nearly four hours. The warrant was signed at three-ten. Informed that the police were about to search his house, Gacy grudgingly gave Kozenczak a set of keys. The search
team pulled up in front of his house at about four o’clock. They would be looking for anything that would show that Rob Piest had been in the house: clothing, blood samples, hair. Anything else in plain sight was fair game.

In two and a half hours, police and evidence technicians found:

In the master bedroom: a large quantity of varied pills that looked as if they had come directly from some pharmacy; a stash of marijuana, some pornographic films, a small Motorola television set, and, in a dresser drawer, a Maine West High School ring bearing the initials “JAS.”

In the second bedroom: a pair of handcuffs, and a two-by-four with holes drilled on either end that looked like a restraining device.

In the hall in front of the bathroom: a bloodstain on the carpet.

Officers searching the attic rolled away the insulation and found several police-type badges hidden in company with a large dildo. Downstairs, evidence technicians found a starter pistol, a bag of blank shells, and an empty brown bottle that smelled of chloroform.

Gacy’s books were varied:
It’s a Good Life
by William Brownfield;
Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution;
a biography of Cardinal Cushing;
Neurosis and Human Growth
by Karen Horney; a biography of Abraham Lincoln;
Criminal Law and Its Practices; Principles of Salesmanship; Laws of Illinois; Birth Control and Catholics; How to Increase Your Self-Confidence; How to Work Under Pressure;
a Bible; and a Sunday missal.

Several of the books had been stolen from the library at the Anamosa men’s reformatory.

There were other books, hidden in the attic:
The American Bi-centennial Gay Guide; The Rights of Gay People, 21 Abnormal Sex Cases; The Great White Swallow; Heads & Tails; Bike Boy; Pederasty: Sex Between Men and Boys; Tight Teenagers.

In the kitchen trash basket, Lieutenant Kozenczak found a photo receipt from the Nisson Pharmacy: number 36119. Beside that was an eighteen-inch length of nylon rope.

Two officers used a flashlight to look down into the crawl space. There was a thin crust of lime evenly spread over the dirt below and no evidence of fresh digging. Rob Piest wasn’t buried in the crawl space.

*
*
*

John Gacy was still at the Des Plaines Police Department. He had called his attorney, LeRoy Stevens, who advised him to sign the Miranda waiver since, John insisted, he had nothing to hide.

Kozenczak got back to the station at about eight o’clock and told Gacy that both his car and his pickup had been impounded. A young man named David Cram had driven the PDM truck into the drive while the police were searching the house, and he had given them the keys. Gacy exploded. “How am I going to get home? Why am I being treated this way?”

LeRoy Stevens cut the interrogation short, and Gacy left the station.

David Cram had been doing a painting job for Gacy at the Democratic headquarters, and he had simply been returning the PDM pickup when the officers confiscated it.

After Gacy left the station, he picked Cram up in his third vehicle, the PDM van. Over cheeseburgers at a restaurant, Gacy told Cram that the cops were looking for some kid who disappeared. John didn’t even know what the hell they were talking about.

Gacy was nervous, Cram thought, actually afraid to go back to his own house. He almost begged Cram to come with him. Just inside the front door of the house, Gacy found a clot of mud that might have come from the crawl space. It seemed to frighten him badly. He told Cram to “turn off the lights in case anybody’s watching.” They moved through the house with flashlights, like burglars.

“You think anybody’s still down there?” Gacy asked Cram.

“I doubt it very much,” Cram said.

“Why don’t you go down there and see.”

Cram, who was wearing his good shoes, said he didn’t see any sense in that.

Gacy opened the hatch over the crawl space and dropped down into the lime and mud himself. Cram could see him down there, turning in a circle and shining the flashlight into the darkness. Apparently satisfied that nothing was amiss, Gacy climbed back out and put the hatch cover back in place.

“I wonder what they were looking for down there?” he said.

Cram thought Gacy seemed “kind of shook up about it.”

John Gacy left and drove to his sister’s house, where he
spent the night. It was as though he was afraid to sleep in his own house.

The next day, December 14, Kozenczak and Sullivan decided to put John Gacy under surveillance twenty-four hours a day.

Terry Sullivan’s investigator, Greg Bedoe, went to the intersection of Cumberland and Summerdale, where Gacy said he’d gotten stuck the night he was supposed to talk with Kozenczak. There were no ruts in the mud. Gacy was obviously lying. Hiding something.

Michael Rossi was brought in for questioning. He said he just worked for John Gacy. That was about it. The police asked Rossi to give them a call if he thought of anything that might help them in their investigation.

The next day, Friday, police called John Gacy’s ex-wife. Carol said she could come in on Saturday. No, she told police, John wasn’t violent. The only time she’d been afraid of him, seen his anger out of control, was the time she’d called him a jag-off. It was officer David Hachmeister who put that one in his special file, for use as a psychological ploy. Jag-off, John didn’t like to be called a jag-off.

If the police wanted to interview any employees about John, Carol said, they might talk with an employee named John Butkovitch. He and her ex-husband had been very close, but they might have some trouble finding the boy. He’d disappeared three years ago. Probably a runaway.

Late that afternoon, Rossi called back with some information. If the cops were looking for missing persons, there was a kid named Greg Godzik, a PDM employee who’d disappeared around Christmas a couple of years ago.

Two missing employees?

Meanwhile, Greg Bedoe had tracked down the owner of the Maine West High School ring: the boy’s name was John A. Szyc, and, like Butkovitch and Godzik, he was missing. John’s mother, Rosemary Szyc, told police that her son disappeared on January 20, 1977. She mentioned that a small TV set was missing from his room. Later that year, she said, the police advised her that her son had sold his car, a white Plymouth Satellite.

An officer named Rafael Tovar recalled that Mike Rossi drove a white Plymouth Satellite.

Police obtained a copy of Rossi’s title on the car. He owned it free and clear. The previous owners were Michael Rossi and “John Grey,” who lived at 8213 Summerdale. “Grey” and Rossi had bought the car, so the title showed, from John A. Szyc, whose high-school ring was found in John Gacy’s dresser.

It was four days after the disappearance of Rob Piest. Kozenczak and Sullivan now feared the boy had been murdered. It was possible that three other missing boys—Butkovitch, Godzik, and Szyc—were also dead. The entire Des Plaines Police Department was working on the case, everyone putting in sixteen- to twenty-hour days.

Terry Sullivan wanted to be very careful with Gacy. A few months back, higher courts had reversed the convictions of serial killers Juan Corona and Elmer Wayne Henley. When Gacy was arrested, Sullivan wanted the charges to stick.

As Sullivan and Kozenczak built their case, the surveillance teams were told to make themselves obvious, to let him see them. Maybe the son-of-a-bitch would crack under constant pressure.

On the morning of Saturday, December 16, police interviewed Richard Rapheal, who said that Gacy had been acting irrationally since Wednesday, the day after his house was searched. Gacy, Rapheal said, was scared, almost incoherent.

David Cram, who was working the job with Rapheal, told police that Gacy was running around like “he was afraid of his own shadow.”

If Gacy was nervous in the presence of his employees and business acquaintances, he was putting on a good front for the public. It was Saturday night, and John Gacy was out having a good time. At about midnight, he stopped into the Moose lodge.

Instead of waiting outside, as they had done in the past, Gacy’s tail, two plainclothes Des Plaines police officers—Michael Albrecht and David Hachmeister—followed him into the club. The officers took a seat at a table and watched Gacy move through the room, glad-handing, smiling, laughing, drinking.

A waitress stopped by the officers’ table and gave them two drinks they had not ordered. “Mr. Gacy,” she said, “wants to take care of his bodyguards.”

John talked with a number of people, then swept by the
officers’ table, moving toward the door. “I’m leaving,” he said.

The caravan—Gacy in a rented car, Hachmeister and Albrecht in a pair of wheezing beaters they usually used for stakeouts on drug cases—drove to a nearby restaurant. Gacy invited the officers to sit with him at a table in the back of the restaurant. He wanted to talk.

“Why are you guys following me?” Gacy asked. “Exactly who are you?”

“Des Plaines police officers working on a missing-person case,” Hachmeister replied.

Gacy thought that was “bullshit.” Two teams of cops following him everywhere, every day. They had to be “feds,” because, okay, sure, John would admit it, he worked in drugstores. He “got into” a few drugs.