Buried Dreams (46 page)

Eliseo found that Gacy was “of superior intelligence and about the top ten percent of the population.” The neurological testing, where a client is asked to arrange blocks on a board while blindfolded, to copy designs, discriminate rhythms, and perform seven other tasks designed to isolate instances of organic brain damage, indicated that John Gacy did not, in fact, suffer from brain damage.

On the ten-card Rorschach test, Gacy gave only eighteen responses, about half what a psychologist might expect from a man of his age and intelligence. Gacy’s interpretation of the inkblots “consisted primarily of animals and flowers, which again is unusual.” He gave only one response that included people. Eliseo thought Gacy “seemed to be holding back, a very guarded sort of person” who felt he had to “keep himself in control at all times.”

In the draw-a-person test, where a client is given a plain sheet of paper and simply asked to draw a person, Gacy “stated he didn’t know how to draw . . . and all he would draw would be the head of one of his attorneys.” Gacy refused to draw a picture of a woman. “One of the impressions you can draw from that,” Eliseo said, “is that he is being somewhat guarded and evasive, not wanting to show much about himself. . . .” Because Gacy drew only a head and avoided “the rest of the human body from the neck down—and in connection with all the other test material and he clinical interview—you wonder what his idea about the body might be, whether it is something bad or disparaging hat you have to avoid.”

In the thematic apperception test (TAT), the client is given twenty pictures “and the person has to tell a story . . . just make up a story about who the people are and what they are doing . . . again Mr. Gacy did not reveal much about himself.” On one card, number thirteen, Eliseo said Gacy showed “inappropriate feelings.” The photo shows a woman lying in bed while a man stands in front of the window with his arm shading his eyes. One popular response to the picture, Eliseo said, is that the man “has gotten up in the morning and opens up the blinds and the light is shining. Mr. Gacy interpreted that: first he said he might have had sex with her. Then he changed it to maybe he killed her. And then he laughed inappropriately, talking about killing her and saying it is too late now and seemed to be upset about it, but trying to cover it up.”

The Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI), Eliseo said, is “based on five hundred sixty-six statements that somebody answers true or false . . . an example is, I like
Mechanic
magazine.’ “ The basis of the test is that people differ and will respond to the questions differently. A librarian, Eliseo said, probably wouldn’t be found sitting at a bar reading
Mechanic
magazine, while a truck driver might. The answers a client gives in the MMPI are compared “with people who are in psychiatric hospitals . . . and a normal group so you come with nine different scales on how you compare with people with different psychiatric disorders.”

Gacy’s responses to the MMPI, Eliseo said, indicated “that he is an extremely disordered person, that his thinking is confused, that he resembles to a large extent people who would be classified as schizophrenic, classified as paranoid. . . .”

There is a lie scale on the MMPI, a list of a dozen questions designed to indicate whether a person is trying to look good. One of the statements on the lie scale, for instance, reads, “When I was a child I would sometimes try to sneak into a movie theater if I thought I wouldn’t get caught.” Most people, Eliseo said, answer “true.” Those who answer “false” may be “trying to look good.” The higher the score on the lie scale, the more indication there is that “someone is trying to look good.” John Gacy scored zero on the lie scale: he was, Eliseo said, not lying to look good.

Based on the tests and a clinical interview, Eliseo diagnosed Gacy in two ways. The doctor testified that Gacy was “a borderline personality, a person who on the surface looks
normal but has all kinds of neurotic, antisocial, psychotic illnesses.” The personality structure underlying Gacy’s apparent normality, Eliseo said, was paranoid schizophrenia, which Eliseo described as “the viewpoint of a person who basically sees the world as a place where you have to be constantly careful, very suspicious, very guarded. That there are constant dangers out there and feeling at times people are out to hurt you. And also the feeling that you are better than other people.” Eliseo said that the paranoid schizophrenic will exhibit “grandiosity . . . he feels that he can do things and that he is justified in doing these things, and feels they are right. It is in contrast to what he says openly. What he says consciously.”

Paranoid people, Eliseo said, “are usually paranoid most of their lives.” He thought Gacy had been suffering from the disease since “his midtwenties . . . and I would hypothesize after the death of his father in 1969 is when it began.”

John was “on a high.” Eliseo great. Paranoid schizophrenic. John felt like he “passed the test.”

The prosecution wanted to show that Gacy was never out of touch with reality and did not fit the legal definition of insanity because he was able at all times to appreciate the criminality of his conduct and conform his actions to the requirements of the law. Kunkle, on cross, bore down hard on Eliseo. Kunkle threw his powerful bulk into the questions: an aggressive, angry man who demanded to know how the psychologist could give an opinion as to when the condition started.

“Are you telling this judge, Mr. Eliseo—”

Motta objected. “It is ‘Doctor.’ “

“It is whatever I choose to call him.”

“
It is Dr. Eliseo, counsel, and I will ask the court—”

“
Mr. Witness—”

“Just one moment. I will ask the court to admonish the state’s attorney to give this witness the proper respect.”

“Some people don’t call me ‘Judge,’ “ Garippo replied. “He may be referred to either way.”

“Mr. Witness,” Kunkle said, “are you telling this court that an individual could be in a psychotic state, paranoid schizophrenic, as you say—a quite serious mental disease—from his twenties?”

“Yes, sir,” Eliseo replied.

“Through the time of this hypothetical person’s arrest, which would be almost twenty years later . . . that he would be psychotic for seventeen years and would never be hospitalized, never diagnosed, would never be treated?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kunkle seemed to rattle the psychologist with his aggressiveness, his lack of respect. “How many cases like that have you seen?” Kunkle demanded.

“Few.”

“Would you name those?”

Eliseo, resonating with Kunkle’s palpable anger, replied: “Particularly with paranoid schizophrenia, I don’t want to name—Richard M. Nixon.”

Kunkle was amazed and impressed. “You have treated President Nixon?”

“No. From what I have read and seen, King George the Third, of England.”

On further direct examination by Motta, Eliseo said again that Gacy’s paranoia, his schizophrenic condition, started in his twenties and was continuous and uninterrupted from that time. “That does not mean he was psychotic overtly all of the time, but the condition was there, and probably he looked good, like most people do.”

“Objection,” Kunkle said. “Either it’s continuous or it’s not.”

It was the first of what were to be many similar exchanges. The defense was anxious to show that Gacy was suffering from a mental disease characterized by the appearance of normality—an illness that erupted into full-blown “florid” psychosis at odd intervals.

The prosecution would push the defense doctors, trying to counter their testimony that Gacy was psychotic or mentally ill only at the time of the murders. It was an argument, the prosecution felt, that was offensive to common sense, that seemed a little too convenient for the defendant—he was only legally insane while committing murder. In a related argument, the prosecution wanted to suggest that Gacy feigned mental illness to escape punishment.

Since Dr. Eliseo had based much of his diagnosis on the results of the MMPI, Kunkle asked if the test couldn’t have been faked. Was there a scale that corresponded to the lie scale, only one that measured malingering, one that measured
people who wanted to look bad, who were faking illness?

“There is a malingering scale,” Eliseo said. “That is a scale developed in the Army, a military situation where they have much more malingering than we have in civilian occupations. . . .”

Kunkle pointed out that when you subtract the MMPI’s K scale from its F scale “and get a number of eleven or higher, it gives a high probability of malingering or faking. . . . Do you know what Mr. Gacy’s F score was?”

“Twenty.”

“And what was his K score?”

“Nine.”

“And what is twenty minus nine?”

“Eleven.”

Eliseo admitted that if Gacy did malinger, if he had lied to simulate mental disease, it would affect the test.

Kunkle hammered away at the cornerstone of the defense argument, the idea that while Gacy appeared normal, he was psychotic at the times the crimes were committed. “Well, Doctor, after he had killed the first person he had killed and he buried and hid that body underground, is that an indication to you that he did not appreciate that he had committed any criminal act?”

“Afterwards, he would not be aware.”

And the second murder, was he not aware of the criminality again?

“At the moment that he did it, he was not aware of the criminality.”

“Or the third?”

“Yes, I think all of them he did not.”

“Right through thirty-three?”

“Yes, sir, that he was in a state where he was psychotic or that period and all he thought was to kill this person.”

“He was psychotic for the whole period and all he could do was kill people?”

“No, not for the whole period, but during the time he actually went around and committed the act, not for the whole eight years. . . .”

William Kunkle, it appeared, was having a hard time believing this testimony. “Was he psychotic for eight years olid, or wasn’t he? Yes or no.”

“Yes, but.”

“
‘Yes but'?”

“Yes.”

And Kunkle dismissed Dr. Eliseo with a grand gesture of contemptuous disbelief. “But for thirty-three bodies. I have nothing further.”

The second doctor to testify in John’s defense was Lawrence Z. Freedman, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose accomplishments, honors, and published articles took twenty pages of trial transcript to detail. Freedman was presently chairman of the Institution of Social and Behavioral Pathology, had been chairman at the conference on Rage, Aggression, and Violence at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He had published many scholarly articles, and he was the author of the chapter on forensic psychiatry in the
Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry.

Freedman testified that he spent “about fifty hours” interviewing John Gacy. It was, the doctor said, an unusually long period of time to spend in direct examination but that “Mr. Gacy is a very complex man.” In fact, Freedman testified that “I found Mr. Gacy one of the most complex personalities I have ever tried to study.”

During that time, Freedman noticed that Gacy “would contradict himself.” He said that “Mr. Gacy is a man who isn’t quite sure who he is and from time to time would manifest different aspects of his personality, which sometimes contradicted previous aspects demonstrated in our conversations.”

Jack Hanley was not some alternate personality, but Dr. Freedman did think the name had “various levels of significance. It is very common for middle-class men to protect their reputations when they solicit boy prostitutes, to use a false name. In my opinion, however, it goes beyond that. I believe Mr. Gacy is, in fact, troubled, uncertain about the two aspects of his personality: the driven aspects and the one which expresses such extraordinary aggression and sexual perversion.”

Gacy, Freedman said, is a man who is psychotic at the core but whose defense mechanisms resemble neurosis. A
neurotic, Freedman said, “is a person who has some kind of incapacity or compulsion which disturbs him or makes him unhappy and offends others but is not serious enough to totally incapacitate him.” The neurotic, Freedman said, lie between normalcy and psychosis, which is “the most several
form of mental illness.” Schizophrenia is a form of psychosis characterized by distortion in the thinking process and by dissociation, “a separation between ideas and acts and the feeling which would normally accompany them.”

Freedman said that Gacy’s history showed a pattern of “at least neurotic and psychosomatic illness from very early childhood. And my impression is that the shift from a serious neurosis to the beginnings of psychosis probably occurred about the time of Christmas of 1969, when he was at a very low point in his life, an inmate at Anamosa, a failure as his father had always predicted. His father died on Christmas. He had wanted to present his father with a painting. He asked one of his friends at the prison to make a painting. He was unable to go to the funeral. I think that triggered the difference between serious neurosis to the development of a psychosis.”

Freedman said that “Mr. Gacy, from the time of his birth, according to his mother, has always been considered to have had physical problems. I think this preoccupation with physical problems was, in a sense, taught to him. His mother believed that when he was born, he had respiratory distress because of congestion of fecal matter in the womb. Year after year, Mr. Gacy—John, I suppose, as he was called when he was a youngster—would be told that he had heart diseases, so his anxieties, which were very great, tended in part to be translated into physical concern, preoccupation with himself.”

Gacy, Freedman said, shows “an extraordinary dissociation. . . . Mr. Gacy described to me, as he did to others, the conditions under which Robert Piest was killed, in great detail. At the same time, his Uncle Harold . . . was dying. In his description of the boy and his strangulation and his death, there was an extraordinary absence of ordinary manifestations of human feeling. There was no feeling for this boy” or for any of the other victims in “his descriptions of other such episodes.