Buried Dreams (47 page)

“There was a kind of concern of a sort concerning the death of his uncle, who was his mother’s last remaining brother, but in describing these events which resulted in the deaths of the people, it was as though he was describing taking a drink of water. There was a certain amount of pride in his being able to use his cunning to overcome the strength of these muscular youths, whom he called ‘dumb and stupid.’ “

Freedman described the “remarkable dissociation between emotion . . . between feeling and behavior” as “pathological.”

Freedman also described Gacy as compulsive, obsessive. Freedman’s books, for instance, were not in order, lying about his office, and that had irritated John. “Similarly, when he would describe cruising, he would want to make sure I knew which street he had gone to and at what time, and he has an extraordinary memory for these details.” Considering the “peril” that Gacy was facing, Freedman said the fact that these “obsessive, compulsive preoccupations override his concern” was “abnormal.”

Freedman said he “tried to figure out how Mr. Gacy could crowd in all the activities he did: the political activities, the social activities, the organizations of large parties, dressing up as a clown and going to children’s wards, his relationship with his wife and friends, his cruising.

“Only a man with profound drive and great organizational abilities could have done this . . . a driven man who is able to accomplish all these different things by extraordinary organization of his time and energy.” Freedman said that he believed “this was a more and more frantic effort to obliterate from his consciousness forms of behavior and feeling which he could not stand to face and so he worked harder and harder to relate to his business, to people, to clubs, anything that would keep him from looking into himself and being a lonely person, dumb and stupid, incapable, as his father often called him.”

The father, whom Freedman described as “a man’s man,” was “extremely disappointed in his son. He wanted his son to do the things that he did, and he found him inept. He was very brutal toward him, he gave him the feeling he was dumb and stupid . . . over time, Mr. Gacy developed serious concern, anxiety which he would deny about his sexual identification: how masculine he was, how feminine he was. The pattern of his life revealed that he made serious efforts to establish meaningful relationships with women.”

Gacy, Freedman said, “becomes very angry when the term ‘homosexuality’ is ascribed to him. He insisted that he is not homosexual, that he is bisexual, and that oral sex [with males] was a form of masturbation. He thinks a homosexual is a man who loves other men, and he had no such feelings for these people. They were trash whom he picked up. They were dumb and stupid.”

Clearly, Freedman said, Gacy was engaged in homosexual activity, but “by projecting his own homosexual feelings onto the partner whom he paid or tricked or persuaded, he was denying his own homosexual role and projecting it onto the other person.”

In describing the process of projection as it related to Gacy, Freedman went back to John’s youth, when “a contractor would come by and take John . . . to look at his construction. . . . He would get John to wrestle with him, and John would find himself with his head between the contractor’s legs.” Freedman thought this was a significant contribution to John’s sexual confusion, as was the fact that “every relationship he had with girls during this period was severely punished.”

Aside from sexual confusion in his youth, John’s family situation resulted in difficult and ambiguous emotional situations. A dramatic example of the mixture of feelings occurred when, as a teenager, John fought with the Old Man. “His father,” Freedman said, “began to curse him and say, ‘Hit me, hit me, you coward.’ And John replied, ‘I love you, I won’t hit you, I love you, I won’t hit you.’

“This mixture of aggression and love,” Freedman said, “indicates an enormous strain on the psychological structure of the individual. The next day, as typically happened in that family, nothing was said . . . it was as though nothing had happened.”

As John grew older, “he began having fights about other things . . . for example . . . he borrowed money from his father to buy a car and then his father began to berate him about paying the money back until he finally simply left home, drove the car to Las Vegas, and stayed away for approximately three months, during which time he . . . had a great fright during one night at the mortuary, finally became lonely and came back.” Freedman didn’t describe the “great fright” John experienced.

The psychiatrist believed that John was one of many homosexuals who “are afraid of . . . a program of public disfavor. . . . This does not necessarily lead to paranoia, but if there is a stronger-than-average trend in that direction which is . . . denied by him, there is projection: I’m not a homosexual, he’s a homosexual. And this . . . develops, through a series of psychological maneuvers, to ‘He hates me.’ And
then there is a defensive maneuver to defend one’s self against the other, hating person.”

Freedman testified that projection is a “psychological defense. It is not something that one decides to do. It happens to you.”

Another psychological defense, Freedman said, is repression. “We all have repression. As we mature and develop, there are things which children do which we must not: only stop doing but forget we ever did. That’s repression, and it occurs normally. Under very tortured circumstances, such as I believe characterized John Gacy’s childhood, the repression takes an abnormal turn. . . .”

Gacy repressed his murderous impulses, but when this psychological defense mechanism broke down, “then all the things he fears come out—when the stress is too great, when fatigue becomes overwhelming, depression becomes too great—the things which are being covered by other forms of activity, in a sense, explode.”

Alcohol or other drugs, Freedman said, can break down the defense mechanisms, but other things—stress, for example—could trigger a psychotic episode. “At the time of his accosting the Piest boy,” Freedman pointed out, “his uncle, who he once slipped and called his father, was dying. This whole relationship with the Piest boy was mixed up with this death in the family, which, perhaps meaningfully, was occurring just as the Christmas season approached, just as his father had died at Christmas. . . .”

The very acts of oral and anal sex that Gacy perpetrated on his victims may have been the causes of John’s murderous rage. “I think,” Freedman said, “that he projected his own frightened awareness that this was homosexual . . . and he thought of them as trash, to be put out of their misery by these methods: a projection of his own feelings—which might have been turned against himself—turned against them.”

Freedman also thought “it was very significant [that] these were muscular teenagers.” John had been “a flabby and inadequate teenager, and these boys represented what he had never been able to attain.” Freedman said that “the young teenage muscular boys whom he seduced through cunning and allegedly attacked reflected both the hostility he felt toward those who personified what he failed to achieve—at least in his father’s eyes—and toward himself.”

Only the Piest murder, Freedman said, did not follow a
pattern. “In fact, if one views the Piest tragedy in the context of what happened previously, it seemed to have violated all his measures of self-protection.” The Piest murder, in Freedman’s opinion, was geared toward apprehension.

Freedman testified that “Mr. Gacy suffers serious disturbances in his thinking, his mood, and his behavior. He has displayed severe ambivalence. That means contradictory feelings—love and hate—toward key figures in his family, beginning with his father and including his image of himself. . . . Mr. Gacy demonstrates . . . seemingly neurotic and psychophysiological symptoms. The compulsive work, the obsession with detail, the sexually deviate compulsions, the drug addictions and the antisocial aggressivities, the inappropriateness of his feelings and his actions all subsume a personality which is best described as pseudoneurotic schizophrenic paranoid. The most acute and dangerous paranoia apparently emerges during periods of great tension, often accompanied by a large intake of Valium, alcohol, or marijuana.”

The fact that John Gacy instructed employees to dig holes to be used as graves was not inconsistent with Freedman’s diagnosis, he said, “because there are numerous examples of paranoidal personalities who prepared for their deadly acts.”

In Freedman’s opinion, Gacy posed as a police officer for a combination of reasons: manipulation of others, and a kind of self-manipulation that helped “overcome his deep-seated feelings of inferiority.”

It was significant and contributed to the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, Freedman said, that Gacy could deny being a violent person one moment and in the next explain the rope trick in detail. The fact that he stored bodies under his bed and in his closets was a “profoundly pathological phenomenon” that further contributed to the diagnosis.

The fucking old man screwed him. John couldn’t believe it. Freedman, who asked to meet Jack Hanley
—
the one John figured liked him and understood him
—
said there was no big split, no Bad Jack. He wouldn’t even say John was legally insane, that he couldn’t appreciate and conform.

“The question,” Freedman had said, “goes to the legal and social thresholds of punishability . . . it is not a psychiatric question but a legal question. And I feel these questions are outside my level of competence.”

Fairy Kunkle, with his self-satisfied smirk, zeroed in on that right away. Hadn’t Freedman testified for the defense in the case of Simon Peter Nelson two years previous, and at that time did he not give such an opinion? Nelson was accused of killing his six children, Freedman said, and he “developed, as is not uncommonly the case, a total amnesia for those events.” Freedman examined Nelson during the course of a summer and “one day that amnesia was broken through.” Nelson, “in a dissociated state,” presented “a definite reenactment of the killings.
. . .
"

There were some elements in the Nelson case that were similar to the case in question: a complicated relationship with a hated father, a father who committed suicide on his wife’s birthday. Freedman, listening to Nelson’s reenactment, believed the man “thought he was committing suicide in three different ways.” There was “a splitting of his personality, the assumption of the personality of the father.”

Freedman testified, right in the middle of all this, that he had never seen John in a dissociated state. Like he didn’t believe that John really couldn’t remember the killings. The jury didn’t know it, but Freedman seemed to be saying that John had lied to him. That Bad Jack didn’t exist.

The fucking old man even came up to John afterward and said he was sorry he couldn’t help. The man was “a Judas.” This was one doc who had actually met Bad Jack. John was sure of it.

John had guys puking in his defense and doctors who were supposed to be on his side hinting that he was a liar. He was “down.”

The prosecution knew it, too. They gave him another cigar that day.

CHAPTER 27

So
FREEDMAN SCREWED HIM.
John wasn’t giving up hope. A quitter never wins, a winner never quits. There were more docs ready to testify for the defense.

Next up was Dr. Robert Traisman, a clinical psychologist specializing in psychodiagnosis, who examined Gacy in 3 North at Cermak for three and half hours on May 10, 1979.

On the Rorschach inkblot test, Traisman testified, Gacy offered only sixteen responses, whereas, Traisman said, “with an individual with his high level of intelligence, one would expect at least double that.”

In the draw-a-person test, Gacy first drew Traisman, which the doctor thought was “defensive on his part . . . reflective of his own uncertainty with his own body. I would imagine he needed somebody to play off of or use as a model. . . .” Traisman noticed that Gacy had carefully drawn the left hand and heavily shaded the wedding band there, while the right was “very small, almost mittenlike. . . .” Citing research on the test—"interpretations that have stood up"—Traisman said that the right hand is the power side, the masculine side, while the left “is thought to symbolize the more feminine side.” He thought “Mr. Gacy had difficulty in feeling a degree of masculine identity with himself.”

The second drawing Gacy identified “as a thirty-four-year-old washerwoman.” It was, Traisman said, “anything but a feminine woman. It was a very massive, masculine-appearing woman,” a woman with the “arms of a football player.” She wore a tight belt with two long loops over the genital area that the doctor thought were very obvious phallic extension
symbols, which “certainly suggested strong sexual anxiety . . . within him.”

When Gacy was asked to draw anything he liked, he drew his own house and “almost every brick was drawn in detail.” He drew in the lamppost, the garden, and the design on the aluminum door. “The drawing,” Traisman testified, “reflected a tremendous compulsiveness and perfectionism to him, as did other tests.”

Gacy’s responses to standardized pictures of the thematic apperception test, Traisman said, “reflected . . . marked feeling of sexual inadequacy, much sexual confusion, a great deal of hostility and rage, and an essential lack of feeling for other individuals.”

Based on all the tests, Traisman said he considered Gacy to be “a paranoid schizophrenic . . . an individual who has a great deal of difficulty in integrating his behavior or integrating his emotions or self in normal ways of living. . . .”

It was entirely possible, Traisman said, for a paranoid schizophrenic to appear normal on the surface. Such individuals, Traisman said, are “called ambulatory schizophrenics.”

Dr. Richard G. Rappaport, a psychiatrist in private practice with a special interest in forensic psychiatry, testified that he examined Gacy for a total of sixty-five hours over a period of about five months. There was some question in the doctor’s mind about whether Gacy was lying; however, he didn’t think John was malingering or feigning illness because “the entire picture in this individual is too consistent and too classical to believe he could in any way develop symptoms and signs and a history which would indicate that this illness is really contrived.”