Buried Dreams (45 page)

Jack kept the necessary implements on top of Asshole John s bedroom dresser: the trick requires a short length of nylon rope and a hammer handle. John must have wondered about Jack’s tools sitting there on his dresser day after day. Did they have some relation to the strangled bodies he found in his home all those bad, hung-over mornings?

“This is the last trick,” Jack says. He is a very sincere fellow, a little tired now, but this is a serious trick. “When we’re done, I’ll drive you back, okay?”

“Yes,” the boy says, and there is fear and abject submission in that one word.

“Lemme help you up,” Jack says, and he stoops, grabs the boy under the arm, and helps him struggle to his feet. “You going back to the Square?” Jack asks.

“I . . . no,” the boy’s voice is unsteady, and it is likely that he sways from side to side, a severely abused boy, almost a child, barely able to stand.

“Wait’ll you see what this rope does for you,” Jack says. There is a smirking and coarse sexuality in his tone, a nameless obscenity in his smile. “You’ll love this,” he says, his voice deep, not much more than a growl of excitement and anticipation.

And now Jack is making all the requisite motions: He is Wrapping the rope around the boy’s neck, he is tying the first knot—cross one end over the other and pull gently. It is the same knot Asshole John makes every morning when he ties his shoes, the simple crossover knot that begins a process that holds the tongue immobile.

“Noooooo?” A boy’s questioning plea: horror without hope.

“Aw, c’mon,” Jack says, breathing heavily now, “stand still. It’s just a trick, for Chrissake. Feel how loose I’ve got it. It doesn’t hurt at all.” And then, lewdly, “Wait’ll you see what this does for you.”

Jack, his breath coining in ragged gasps, places the hammer handle over the first knot, then carefully ties a second knot, precisely the same as the first, over the splintered wood of the much-used handle.

“Oh, God, don’t . . . don’t hurt me any more.”

“It’s okay. This is the last trick.”

Jack turns the hammer handle once, twice, three times. He lodges the end of the handle behind the boy’s head and steps back to examine his work. The boy’s hands are cuffed behind his back and the hammer holds the rope tightly, but not too tightly, around his throat.

It’s a game, the boy would have to think, only a game. He would believe this because no one dies when he’s eighteen; it’s just one of those sex games, one of those strange, bad sex games. That’s what it is, that’s what it has to be: one of those games people play, a sex-and-danger game. A game of fear.

Maybe the boy already knows the game. You play it with a rope and slipknot: just loop the rope around the neck and pull during masturbation; time the ejaculation or orgasm to the point of passing out.

But if the boy knows of the game—if he’s heard gossip about slipknots and ejaculations—there would be, in his mind, in his heart, a helpless explosion of hope. It’s just sex, and I won’t die. I can’t die: I’m only eighteen, and this is only a game, a trick, “the last trick.”

“Please,” the boy says, whimpering, “please loosen it a little.”

The man in chains takes a step forward. He grabs something—the hammer handle—and twists his hand as if turning on a faucet.

There is a choking gasp, a few strangled words: “Oh, God, please help me, God. . . .”

Jack turns the handle as if the motion costs him some effort. “God will help you,” he says, and there is, in his voice, the rumbling solemnity of an organ as played at solemn services.

“God is here,” the man says, but there is, in his voice, a religious or sexual mania so overwhelming that it is difficult for him to catch his breath, and he sinks slowly, slowly to his knees. He is moaning now, a sigh beyond love or life, and yet, out of the same mouth, at the same time, there is a strangled gurgling as well so that it is difficult to know if the sound is a rush of passion or the rattle of death. They merge now—the gurgling, strangled sighs, the ecstatic moans of extinction and release—so that one sound is indistinguishable from another and they both come from the same mouth.

Jack falls to his knees, his tongue loose inside a gaping mouth, the groan and gargle of his breath rattling in his throat until, finally, finally, with one last choking groan, it is over and they are both, man and boy, finally released.

The man in chains kneels silently on the hard, empty floor. His head is bowed, as if in fatigue and satiety. John Wayne Gacy kneels in a bare prison conference room: he kneels like a spent performer, center stage, alone and waiting. Soon the spotlight will shrivel about him until there is only a single ray, like a halo, very bright. And then there will be darkness, and a moment for the audience to absorb the power of his performance. A moment only before they burst into frenzied applause.

But there is no spotlight, and the man kneels silently, in his chains, his head bowed, as if in prayer.

CHAPTER 26

FIRST DAY OF
the trial, the prosecution’s got Robert Egan, some cocky young lawyer who had never lost a murder trial, standing in front of a jury saying that John Gacy was “rational and evil,” a premeditated murderer. John could hardly believe it. What did Egan think? Did he think John said to himself, “Who’s next?” The prosecutor showed “how nice and goody-goody” all the little shitheads were and how John sat around and figured, “You’re going in this grave, you in that one.” Jag-off Egan, the guy “could make a fortune writing fairy tales.”

One of John’s attorneys, Bob Motta, made the opening statement for the defense. Yeah, he said, Gacy did it. But take a look at his house. Twenty-nine bodies, he sleeps with ‘em. That’s not evil, that’s crazy.

Motta gets into this thing about how John’s sick and he oughta be put away in a mental hospital for the rest of his life.

John figured, on that first day of the trial, February 6, 1980, that Motta scored the most points. He wanted to correct the problem, help John. The state was bent on revenge. God didn’t put people on earth so they could go around getting revenge. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Revenge don’t solve shit.

Then, at recess, eating lunch by himself in the bullpen, the whole thing hit John. Both the prosecution and defense wanted to put him away for life. Sure, John knew that he’d never win on an insanity plea if the jury thought he was going to spend only a month, six months in some hospital, but Motta was so fucking convincing. John’s own lawyer really
wanted to put him away for life. It was like his attorneys, Sam Amirante and Motta, were on the prosecution’s side. There was no one on his side.

John felt dizzy then, and his nose began to bleed. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital, where the doctors said his blood pressure was a little high. They couldn’t find anything else wrong with him. They never could.

The next day, it was all parents of these kids. Just mothers, mostly. The state had them on for dramatics and shit. Mothers breaking down on the stand, some of them phony as the day is long. This one who fainted, all they did, they asked her for a death study
—
When did you see your son last?
—
basic stuff. Then they showed her this bracelet they found on the kid when they dug him up from under the crawl space. She picks it up, says, “That’s Sam’s bracelet.” She’s crying in this phony way, all doubled up, then she sort of falls forward, pretending to faint right there in the courtroom. You could hear her head clunk on the witness stand.

John hoped the jury could pick up on how phony the whole thing was.

There were some sincere ones. John could even get tears in his eyes listening to them. But the honest ones didn’t fucking faint and cry. They weren’t actors. Why didn’t his attorneys bring out that some of them were suing him? He had over fifty-five million dollars in wrongful-death suits on his hands. Phony-ass parents so concerned about their kids they could sue him for money.

The next week, the state had Rossi and Cram describe the trenches John had paid them to dig in the crawl space. Trying to make it look like all the killings were premeditated. John felt like jumping up, yelling at the jury. He’d point to Rossi or Cram and scream, “How do you know he’s not involved? Because I don’t even know if he was involved, and I was one of the witnesses!”

The jury would have to believe that he was crazy. Or that the state was lying about a conspiracy to kill these kids. And it would get the goddamn families, Piest and them, off his case. They were sitting together in the courtroom, the families, and John could feel the heat of their hatred burning into his back. If he could just get into a room with all of them for fifteen minutes, he could explain himself, let them see his side of the whole deal. Show them that he was a “scapegoat” and a “victim.”

Ron Rhode took the stand and testified that John had called him seven months ago and said, “You can take it to the bank. I’m walking at the end of the year. . . .” Rhode said that John “told me he had some doctors. They were on his side.”

Then the cops testified about the statements, these confessions John was supposed to have made after he was arrested. Nobody said he was exhausted and hung over and on drugs when he made the statements. Or that on one of them, his own lawyer Sam Amirante had advised John to talk to the investigators so the bodies could get a decent burial. Now the prosecution was using that statement, and all the others, against him. The confessions were all “hearsay.” They were “self-serving” on the part of the investigators: “Look what I discovered, look what I uncovered.”

Just like investigator Greg Bedoe came on and said that John told him he read the Twenty-third Psalm to one of his victims while twisting the rope tight around his neck. He said John confessed to doing “the ultimate number” on some kid who was into S&M. “For a masochist,” John had said, “the ultimate number is death.” Then Bedoe made it look as if John started bragging about “doing a double”: killing two kids at once. John had said he strangled the second one as they stood over the corpse of the first.

Assistant state’s attorney Larry Finder came on and said that in the middle of one confession John showed him the rope trick, using his rosary and a ball-point pen. “Pretend your wrist is a neck,” John had said, and he twisted the rosary tight around Finder’s arm. Later on, Finder described how John diagramed the graves on a pink sheet of paper, then—like he just woke up or something—asked if Jack Hanley made the diagram.

When chief deputy state’s attorney William Kunkle introduced that diagram in an enlarged version, John shouted, “Your Honor, I didn’t draw that drawing!” Planting a seed in the jury’s mind right there. The judge, Louis B. Garippo, admonished him for the outbreak, but it was a lovely seed to plant. If John didn’t draw it, who did? Self-serving cops? Bad Jack?

The state rested right after Finder and the rosary shit. John had to decide whether he would take the stand in his own defense. Sam Amirante told him, “John, it’s your decision,” which was a whole hell of a lot of help. Sam had a cigar
that prosecutor Terry Sullivan had given him for John. Like this prosecutor wanted to be buddies now. Make John think his pal Terry liked him. Fatten him up for the kill when he took the stand. Fuckhead. Next time John saw Sullivan, John said, “That was a good cigar, Terry. How come it didn’t say, ‘It’s a boy’?”

“Who writes your material, John?” Sullivan asked.

John thought he could handle Sullivan on the stand.
William Kunkle was another matter. The deputy chief state’s attorney was a big, chunky guy, and there were articles in the paper about how he rode around on a motorcycle and shit. Like some leather queen. Rough trade. Kunkle could take an argument “and just twist it around like a pretzel.” That was a bisexual trait
—
the trick mind—and John hated Kunkle so bad, he figured he was queer. Bisexual at least. How could you hate a guy so bad if he wasn’t queer?

John had to admit he was “afraid of Kunkle"
—
big, tough, fairy-ass Kunkle
—
and put off the decision about taking the stand. He wanted to see what the docs said about Bad Jack. It was like he’d just spent fourteen months taking a test, and now the results were coming in. He didn’t want to take on Kunkle until he heard what the docs had to say.

The defense led off with Jeff Rignall, who testified that John Gacy picked him up, chloroformed him, chained him into some sort of restraining device, raped him anally, and generally tortured him all night long. John didn’t show any emotion, but he was getting pretty pissed: “This is my defense?” Rignall said he had been receiving psychiatric treatment since the attack.

In answer to Amirante’s question, Rignall said that in his opinion John Gacy couldn’t conform his behavior to the requirements of the law or appreciate the criminality of his actions “because of the beastly and animalistic ways he attacked me.” Gacy was, in other words, legally insane at the time of the attack.

On cross-examination, Kunkle pointed out that Rignall had written a book on his encounter with John Gacy and tried to suggest that Jeff had testified for the defense to promote that book. He began taking Rignall over the various tortures he’d endured. The witness began to weep, softly at first, then he doubled over, sort of half fainting and hitting his head on the witness stand. He vomited—John thought, I got guys
puking in my defense?—and then, half hidden by the witness stand, began sobbing loudly.

John wasn’t sure the defense had scored any points with Rignall, because he thought the jury might be swayed more by emotion than actual legal argument or justice. John sure hoped the defense docs would be a little more help.

Thomas S. Eliseo was a Rockford, Illinois, clinical psychologist who had published a number of papers on schizophrenics and schizophrenic thinking in various professional journals. Testifying for the defense in the first stage of what was to be the kernel of the trial—the insanity defense—he explained to the jury that a psychologist, and in particular a clinical psychologist, uses “psychological testing, which is our specialty.”