Buried Dreams (39 page)

The police left, and Gacy talked with Rossi for another half hour. John didn’t remember what they talked about, though. His thoughts were spinning off into the mist. Rossi knew that Kozenczak was certain that John had killed both Rob Piest and John Szyc. Did Rossi tell him that? John didn’t remember, he said.

Gacy stormed out of Rossi’s house just before midnight. Gacy seemed almost crazy with rage and fear. The surveillance team followed him, hitting a hundred miles an hour on the way to Sam Amirante’s office in Park Ridge.

“I went in there to talk about the suit,” John said years later. “I had taken a lot of Valium because I was under so much stress. Sam had a bottle of Scotch in his office, and I remember I drank what was left. Maybe half, three quarters of the bottle.”

After that, John’s memory drifted into the fog, and it must have been Jack who talked to Sam that night. So John “rationalized.”

Albrecht and Hachmeister came on at midnight, waiting for Gacy outside Amirante’s office, in their cars. Two hours later, the lawyer invited them inside. The officers could sit in the hallway just outside a glass wall that looked into the office reception area. Would the officers like coffee, a drink? Amirante, in the midst of preparing a harassment suit, suddenly wanted cops inside the building. What had Gacy told him?

At 3:30
A.M.
the officers, who were sitting behind a glass wall, saw Amirante and Gacy’s other lawyer, LeRoy Stevens, lead John to a couch in the reception area. Gacy flopped down and fell into an exhausted sleep.

Amirante and Stevens talked with the officers. Whatever Gacy told the lawyers was privileged material, but instead of asking the police to call off surveillance, as they had done repeatedly in the past, Amirante and Stevens were practically begging Hachmeister to arrest their client.

Amirante suggested that the officers block Gacy’s car with their own vehicles so he couldn’t leave. Shoot out his tires. Both lawyers seemed stunned, afraid of their own client.
Whatever Gacy told them had shaken them badly. LeRoy Stevens was taking deep drags off an unlit cigarette.

Terry Sullivan had one day to produce a proper search warrant. It was Thursday, ten days after the death of Rob Piest, and the eighth full day of surveillance. Gacy’s harassment suit was due for a hearing early the next day. A restraining order to halt surveillance was almost a certainty.

Officer Schultz came into the Des Plaines police station at daybreak and talked with Larry Finder and Lieutenant Kozenczak. That smell, that bad smell that had come belching up out of the heating duct in Gacy’s house? Schultz had been thinking about it all night. He knew what it was. The realization had hit him just before he went to bed and had kept him up all night. It was the smell of death, of human remains. Schultz knew the odor. As a police officer, he had made over forty trips to the morgue. The odor was unmistakable—it just wasn’t something you expected to come wafting up, sickly sweet, from someone’s basement.

Sullivan, Bedoe, and Larry Finder began drafting a search warrant for Gacy’s house. They would use Kim Byers’ photo receipt to place Rob Piest in Gacy’s house. The odor that Schultz described was the backup Sullivan needed to show probable cause.

They had less than twenty-four hours to draw up a warrant that a judge would sign. After that, Gacy’s harassment hearing would be the end of it. If the warrant wasn’t perfect, if a judge refused to sign it, Gacy could walk away from the investigation without a scratch.

That same morning, John woke up in Sam Amirante’s office at about eight-thirty, hung over and unshaven. John’s memories of his last day of freedom are hazy.

He recalls leaving Amirante’s office and pulling into the Park Ridge Shell station, where he usually bought gas. Hachmeister began shouting in his face, cursing him for speeding through a school zone, putting kids in danger.

The officer dug the worst one he could think of out of his mental file on Gacy: he used the word the man’s ex-wife said might move him to violence. “You . . . jag-off!” Hachmeister screamed.

The words seemed to hit like a double hammer blow to
the heart. Gacy apologized profusely. He seemed confused and looked terribly hurt.

John Lucas, the owner of the station, saw Gacy walk by Lance Jacobson, a young employee who was checking the car’s oil. Gacy very obviously slipped something into the young man’s pocket. Lucas asked what was going on. Jacobson reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag containing three marijuana cigarettes. The police were fifteen feet away, watching the whole thing. It looked as if Gacy wanted the police to arrest him on a drug charge.

What the hell, did jag-off John think that his pal Dave was going to be satisfied with a minor drug bust, that he’d forget about Rob Piest and John Szyc, about John Butkovitch and Greg Godzik if he could bring John Gacy down for three joints? Hachmeister stayed behind at the gas station and picked up the joints anyway, for evidence.

“I didn’t want to take it,” Jacobson told Hachmeister. “He said, ‘Take it. The end is coming. These guys are going to kill me.’ “

Gacy was driving fast, recklessly, and he spun into a ditch, then screeched back onto the blacktop. He pulled up to his house, stayed for half an hour, then drove a few blocks to the home of his friend Ron Rhode.

Rhode was a forty-seven-year-old cement contractor, a married man with four children and a reputation as a tough, no-nonsense guy. He’d poured a few jobs for John Gacy and gotten friendly. The two pals had taken their wives to Las Vegas on a vacation once.

The John Gacy whom Ron Rhode knew didn’t take drugs, hated homosexuals, and was good with Carol’s kids. John always brought Rhode’s wife a gift for Christmas.

At nine-fifty on the morning of December 21, Rhode’s wife told him Gacy was at the door and wanted to see him. John was “ragged,” unshaven, “shabby-looking,” and he asked for a Scotch and water. Rhode had never seen John drink in the morning.

Gacy took a seat, and while he drank, Rhode said he could understand how a police tail could make a man nervous.

“Why don’t you sit here and we’ll talk about it,” Rhode said.

Gacy couldn’t be still. “I got to go, Ron,” he said. “I’ve got to go to the cemetery.” Gacy wanted to visit his father’s
grave. “I really came to say good-bye to my best friend for the last time,” he said.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Rhode said.

“Them sons-of-bitches out there are going to get me.”

“John,” Rhode said, “there’s no way a police officer can pull a gun and shoot you.”

Gacy didn’t seem to be listening. He walked up to Rhode, put his hands on his “best friend’s” shoulders, and began crying. “Ron,” he said, “I’ve been a bad boy.” Gacy was crying “like a ten-year-old.”

“Aw, c’mon, John,” Rhode said. “You haven’t been that bad.”

John Gacy put his head on Rhode’s shoulder. He was sobbing uncontrollably. “I killed thirty people,” he said, “give or take a few.”

Rhode later testified that he “didn’t know what the hell to say. . . . I asked him who the people were. He said they were just bad people. They were blackmailers.”

Rhode looked at Gacy and said, “Okay, John, you’re full of shit.”

“Remember,” Rhode said later, “I’m knowing John approximately five to six years and I thought I knew this gentleman very well. And I mean, it would be like somebody’s best friend coming up there and giving you a shot right between your eyes . . . you really don’t know how to handle it.”

Gacy grabbed his jacket, like he was leaving, and a rosary fell out, onto the floor. Rhode had never seen John in any church. “Hey, you son-of-a-bitch,’ he said, “when did you turn so religious?”

Gacy picked up his rosary, started for the door, and Rhode grabbed the back of his jacket. He pulled his friend back into the house and shook him.

“John,” he said, “you just gave me a shock. I want to talk to you. For once in your life, tell me the truth. Do you know the Piest boy?”

Gacy swore he didn’t. If Piest walked through the door, John said, “I wouldn’t know him.”

John was trying to say good-bye to his “best friend,” and Rhode was asking about the Piest kid. No one was concerned with him, with his health, with what the police were doing to him. Even his best friend wanted to know about Piest.

John pulled himself away from Rhode, who stood at the front door trying to get Gacy to come back to talk. The police
could see tears in Gacy’s eyes as he walked to the car. He had one hand in his pocket, on the rosary. He couldn’t stay, couldn’t talk with the living. He had to visit the Old Man one last time. Had to get to the cemetery.

Gacy drove back to the gas station, talked with Lucas a second time, and cashed a fifty-dollar check.

“I’ve just about had it,” Gacy said. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying. “I don’t think I can take it much longer.” Lucas thought John Gacy looked exhausted: a “very nervous, very tired, very drained” person. “You’ve been good to me,” Gacy said, “always gave me good service. I want to thank you.” To the intense embarrassment of the station owner, Gacy embraced him. Lucas looked over Gacy’s shoulder at the surveillance team. He rolled his eyes as if to say, “The guy’s gone around the bend.”

Suddenly Gacy broke the embrace, clutched at his chest, and began gasping, audibly. He bent over the counter, bowing in respect to some intense internal pain. When the attack was over—when everyone had finally seen what the police were doing to him—Gacy stumbled back to his car.

John prayed on the expressway at seventy-five miles an hour, with the surveillance cars dogging him, pulling alongside for a better look at his misery.

Albrecht, who was abreast of him in a chase car, saw Gacy mumbling over the beads of his rosary. The man was driving crazily, weaving in and out of traffic, drunk on Scotch and Valium, on prayer and fear.

Gacy pulled up to David Cram’s house. Michael Rossi was standing out front. Gacy jumped out of the car and asked Rossi to come into the house with him. He needed to talk to his two employees, his two closest friends, in private. Rossi didn’t want to go anywhere with Gacy, not without a couple of cops present.

“Please,” John begged, and his voice was broken, pitiful. “This may be the last time you’ll ever see me.”

Rossi reluctantly followed Gacy into the house, where they met Cram. Rossi thought his boss “was very emotionally disturbed . . . very nervous.” Gacy was “breaking into tears,” Rossi later testified, and he “proceeded to tell myself and David about confessing to his lawyers the night before to over thirty killings.”

As David Cram recalled the conversation, Gacy said that
he had spent the entire evening in his lawyers’ office and that he confessed to thirty Syndicate-related killings. Today he “wanted to go around, saying his last good-byes.”

“This is the last time you will see me,” he said again. Tears streaked his face, and a clear mucus ran from his nose. Rossi left the house: he didn’t want to hear any more, didn’t want to be involved.

“Syndicate-related killings,” Gacy tried to tell Cram, but he was breaking down completely, hardly able to talk. “I swear,” he said, “with God as my witness"—and he was crying freely, tears running down his cheeks, the words wet in his mouth—“I never had anything to do with this boy being missing.”

Gacy clearly was in no condition to be behind the wheel, and Cram agreed to drive. John stopped to see James Vanvorous, the heating contractor who cosponsored the annual yard party—another good-bye—and then it was time to meet his lawyer LeRoy Stevens at a North Side restaurant. Cram parked while Gacy went into the restaurant. It was just noon, and the day surveillance team came on shift.

With Gacy inside the restaurant, Cram had a chance to talk privately with the cops. Schultz thought the young man looked dazed. Gacy, Cram said, was depressed. It was crazy bad. Gacy was eating Valium like popcorn and babbling about his father, about going to the cemetery. The guy had been up all night, Cram said, at his lawyers’ office, where he’d confessed to killing “over thirty people.”

He was going to talk with his lawyer LeRoy Stevens, then visit his father’s grave. It seemed to Cram that this visit to the cemetery was the terminal trip, the last good-bye.

“I’m really afraid the guy might try to kill himself and kill me with him,” Cram said. “When we leave here, don’t lose us. Please.”

Gacy came lurching out of the restaurant about fifteen minutes later. He told Cram to drive him to Maryhill Cemetery, where John Stanley Gacy was buried. John gave Cram a ten-dollar bill. “He wanted me to go to McDonald’s and pick him up a hamburger or something like that,” Cram said, “and then I was to meet him back at his father’s grave.”

If Gacy was going to kill himself, it looked as if he’d make the attempt at the cemetery, over John Stanley Gacy’s grave.

Gacy had cracked. That much was clear, and the entire
surveillance team was on hand: Hachmeister and Albrecht, Schultz and Robinson along with supervising sergeant Wally Lang. Hachmeister had the marijuana that Gacy had given Lance Jacobson at the Shell station. Lang, after consulting with Kozenczak on the radio, made the decision. They weren’t going to let Gacy off easy. They weren’t going to sit by and watch him commit suicide—if that’s what he had in mind. They’d take him down for “delivery of marijuana,” a felony.

At the point where Elston crosses Milwaukee, they boxed the car—just cut Cram off, with one chase car slicing over from the left front, and one on the rear bumper. The entire surveillance team surrounded the car, and it was Hachmeister who jammed his pistol in Gacy’s ear.

“We got you now, you jag-off,” he said.

Terry Sullivan finished up what he knew was an airtight search warrant as John Gacy was being processed on the marijuana charge. At about the time Judge Marvin J. Peters signed the warrant, steel bands began tightening around John’s chest. It was a heart attack, just like the one John suffered before the fight at Anamosa, like the stroke that put him in the hospital because of all the unfair accusations Carol’s mother had flung at him.

Paramedics rushed Gacy to Holy Family Hospital. At the same time, a dozen law officers arrived at the house on Summerdale, where evidence technician Daniel Genty plugged in the sump pump and waited for a foot or more of water to drain out of the crawl space.