Buried Dreams (49 page)

“He also begins to recognize that he has feelings which are different. At times he feels at peace . . . and other times he feels distressed. So he’s beginning to differentiate himself from the outside world. . . .

“In the normal individual, as he develops, he should have the ability to fuse these concepts. To recognize that mother sometimes answers his needs and sometimes doesn’t. It’s the same mother.”

In borderlines, Rappaport said, “there is a defect at this point. . . . He’s unable to recognize and to comprehend and to allow himself to feel hate and anger toward the same person that he loved.” The person could be the mother or the father, and, in Gacy’s case, Rappaport thought “it was both” but “predominately the father.” Young John Gacy “was unable to metabolize the feelings . . . so he split them off and capsulated apart these two feelings. . . . At various times he was in touch with one or the other, but never both at the same time. It would produce too much anxiety. It would be overwhelming and could cause a full-blown psychosis, a personality state [Gacy] could not withdraw from if he had not used this particular defense mechanism.”

Gacy, Rappaport said, “could not see himself or another individual as having a combination of qualities.” In conversation, Rappaport noticed that John would present one idea followed quickly by the opposite idea and “never put them together. [He] sees himself as a peaceful, calm, easygoing individual. At other times, he sees himself as totally rageful [and has] almost no memory or no realization of the other side of him, and that’s where the big split comes in.”

Gacy split off “the negative qualities . . . the things he didn’t like about himself . . . the incestuous idea . . . homicidal feelings toward his father . . . embarrassment feelings he had about his homosexuality . . . rage toward his parents. These feelings he wants to get out of his self. The recognition internally that these feelings exist built up . . . tremendous rage inside him. He has a need to discharge these feelings, to get them outside himself. So he creates a scenario.”

In the scenario, “he brings . . . young boys to his home,” where he can star in a play scripted by himself, and the play itself is an example of the second primitive ego defense common to borderlines: projective identification. “First,” Rappaport said, “he begins to act as a father to them . . . acts tenderly . . . tries to show them that he has a fatherly instinct and they are boys he can take care of. As I mentioned, these are . . . young men and boys who are at the height of the Oedipal themselves, who have the characteristics of the developed
phallus . . . they are boys . . . he can identify with, who he recognizes as having qualities that he feels. . . .

“Now, he’d get these boys and he would begin to project onto them the qualities that he had inside himself and that he didn’t like. . . . He could say that they are selling themselves, as he sold himself to try and impress his father. He could say that they were degraded . . . dehumanized as his father made him.” He begins to feel it is not himself he is hating, but the young men.

At first, Rappaport said, Gacy would have been at least unconsciously aware that the familiar hatred he sensed in the boys actually existed within him. But “at some point in the scenario that he goes through” Gacy would progress from simple projection to projective identification. “He then feels that these qualities . . . exist in the other person. They are no longer a part of him. They are in this other person and he feels expunged or cleansed. . . . Now he sees these persons as . . . bad . . . homicidal . . . threatening. . . .

“He is then the father in identifying with the aggressor, and these victims, these boys, are then himself. He can . . . kill them . . . and in a way rid himself forever of these qualities that are inside of himself: the hostile threats and frightening figures that pervade his unconscious. He is so convinced that these qualities exist in this other person, he is completely out of touch with reality . . . and he has to get rid of them and save himself . . . he has to kill them.”

Gross denial, the third of the primitive ego defenses common to borderlines, according to Rappaport, allowed Gacy to live with the horror of what he had done. “This is a way,” the doctor testified, “that the borderline has of disengaging himself from the consistency of what he does. He’s able to see the dead body there somewhat as if it were a cocoon, an empty shell from a butterfly. It’s only a representation of the bad part of him. It’s a shell. It’s flimsy. It has nothing to do with humanness. He’s able to grossly deny the fact that there is any human quality there, and basically, he has to just get it out of sight and get rid of it so that he has no more connection with that bad quality in himself.

“In another sense, under necrophilia . . . and fetishisms, there’s a need to maintain some association with these representations of a once loving animate object.

“The basement plays a part in this because he’d been able to be like his father in making a basement very important.
The father . . . stored his junk down there. John was able to . . . identify with his father in throwing his own junk . . . down in the basement. And that’s where he buried all those bodies representing himself.”

In answer to Amirante’s question, Rappaport said that John Gacy did in fact suffer from a mental disease: “I believe,” the doctor testified, “that he has a personality disorder called a borderline personality organization with a subtype of antisocial or psychopathic personality manifested by episodes of an underlying condition of paranoid schizophrenia.” As a result of that disease, Gacy “did lack substantial capacity to control his behavior at the time of each of those crimes . . . and to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.”

Rappaport thought “the seeds in the source of the borderline condition and the pathological condition . . . started in early childhood. However, typically the borderline doesn’t really exist in its full state until sometime during adolescence. I would imagine at the time that he . . . ran away to Las Vegas, worked in a mortuary, I think about that time he was definitely borderline.” The level of Gacy’s illness was intensified by the crucial happenings of his life, “the loss of his father and loss of his second wife through divorce.”

Kunkle, on cross, tried to make the psychiatric testimony look tortured, too complex to explain something very simple. Burying the bodies—"these former love objects,” as Kunkle kept referring to them—in the crawl space had been, in fact, a very successful means of concealing evidence. It didn’t “require some great psychiatric theory to support it. It would simply be a rational idea.”

“It might be irrational, too,” Rappaport said.

“But it could be?”

“It could be rational, yes.”

Under further questioning, Rappaport admitted that Gacy’s psychosexual disorders—the fetishism, sadism, and necrophilia—exist “separate and apart” from the borderline diagnosis but that “by the time you get to the sadism and necrophilia, it is pretty sure you have a personality disorganization. . . .”

Rappaport, in answer to Kunkle’s intense questioning, said Gacy wasn’t necessarily psychotic every time he engaged in sadism but that he was psychotic when he was killing.

Kunkle asked the doctor to assume “that lots of people have every bit as tortured . . . a childhood as this defendant, would they all become multiple murderers?”

“No,” Rappaport replied.

Kunkle then tried to suggest that Gacy had attempted to fake mental illness, specifically a multiple personality.

“Are you familiar with the police reports . . . wherein the defendant “would inject into the conversation . . . the name of Jack or Jack Hanley? . . . Did that indicate to you a multiple personality?”

“At one point I considered that,” Rappaport said. “However, he told me so many different stories about it that I didn’t believe it existed . . . there was no other evidence that a multiple personality existed.”

Rappaport even consulted Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, an authority in the field of multiple personalities, who confirmed Rappaport’s conclusion.

“Well,” Kunkle demanded, “would the name Jack or Jack Hanley: could that have been inserted into those conversations by the defendant for the purpose of lying to the police officers, just as you felt he might have been lying to you?”

Rappaport didn’t think so. Gacy, he said, used the name to disguise himself, to masquerade as a police officer: “He had many ideas as to what the name meant.”

Yes, Rappaport said in answer to Kunkle’s question, he believed that Gacy was psychotic at the time of each and every one of the thirty-three murders.

“How about specifically Robert Piest?” Kunkle asked.

“Same thing.”

“Psychotic?”

“Yes.”

“Floridly psychotic?”

“Yes.”

“Certainly floridly psychotic when he strangled him to death?”

“Thinking he is the father and Piest the son: it was a psychotic delusion.”

“How about when he laid him down on the floor and went on and answered the phone call? . . .”

“I think he was under the same delusion and was able to handle the phone calls, but he was under the delusion.”

“And what about when he handled the phone call from the hospital about his uncle: still floridly psychotic?”

“Yes.”

“What are the symptoms of psychosis?”

“A person out of touch with reality, a person who has thinking, mood, and behavior disorder. . . .”

“. . . And the defendant was in florid psychosis when he was handling his business on the phone with this Piest body in the other room?”

“Yes.”

John was “on a high” again. Rappaport was the best yet: he talked about the split, talked in terms the jury could understand, and Kunkle couldn’t break him.

The doc even nailed Kunkle: wiped that smug bisexual smile off his face. Reversed the chunky fairy right there on the stand and got everyone
—
the jury, the judge, even the families—laughing at him. Laughing at Kunkle.

The chief deputy state’s attorney was hammering away at his old theme, the idea that if John were psychotic, it should have shown up sometime in a social situation or something and not just when the crimes were committed.

“
Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder, is it not?” Kunkle had demanded. “It is a serious mental illness?"

“
Yes,” Rappaport had said.

And then Kunkle fucked up. “Every psychiatrist in this country would probably agree that psychiatry is a very serious mental illness?"

For the first time at the trial, there was laughter. The whole courtroom went up for grabs, and they were laughing at Kunkle. John was careful to keep a straight face
—
"psychiatry is a very serious mental illness"
—
but he was cracking up inside.

Rappaport, smiling slightly, said, “That’s called a Freudian slip, and it comes from the unconscious.” The doc was saying that Kunkle had fucked up, from the unconscious. Just like John fucked up, from the unconscious. It could happen to anyone.

Kunkle was rattled. The prosecution didn’t bring him any cigars, and John suddenly knew
—
it was like a revelation from God
—
that the jury was going to acquit: not guilty by reason of insanity. The state would have to put John in some institution, okay, but he knew what would happen; he could see it in fantasies bright as sunlight. A mental hospital: you can’t keep someone in a mental hospital if he can prove he’s sane. They gotta review you every ninety days or something.

After listening to the psychologists, John knew he could
“control those tests.” In the inkblot, you come up with all kinds of crazy things, not just bees and flowers. You got to say you see at least forty things in there. Include some people in the blots and put a little violence in there, but not too much. The Minnesota multiphasic would be a snap. John took the thing so many times he had a good idea of which questions “I shouldn’t answer true to, even if the answer is true in my own mind.” He would “fuck up some of the pictures instead of putting them in exact order. And on the drawings: draw two full figures, man and woman, whether they look good or not. And slim down the women so they don’t have fat arms. Make sure the women don’t have no apron strings hanging down by the crotch. Draw a full body, always a full body, and give it enough room on the paper. And if I make a mistake, don’t let the doc see it. Don’t change nothing, don’t erase nothing.”

Of course, John wouldn’t depend entirely on the tests. He had committed “the crime of the century” and turned himself into a “multimillion-dollar property.” On the opening day of the trial, he counted over seventy reporters. There’d be books and movies. John would control the rights, and he’d “manipulate the docs with money, control the Illinois State Board of Health” with the millions his crimes would earn him.

Jesus, he was so high after Rappaport. Really silly with happiness and plans and jokes. Just like if there were books and movies, well, shit, why not patent the handcuff trick? The rope trick. It was an idea that made him laugh aloud. Sell Pogo the clown suits to kids on Halloween. Make an 8213 Summerdale dollhouse for little girls. Comes complete with twenty-nine bodies. Have a full bathtub in there and a plastic boy doll kneeling on the side with its head in the water. Make more money “on optional bodies.”

That was all just joking, but John knew there was money to be made. Joseph Wambaugh could write the book. John respected the guy ‘cause he’d been a cop and he had a sense of humor. The movie should be really classy. John didn’t know who could play him as a youngster, but as an adult, he was leaning toward Rod Steiger. The guy was a powerful actor who had a lot of John’s “colorful charisma,” and, like John, he could be really deep at times.

John could just see Steiger dominating the press conference after the trial. Some reporter would ask him how it feels
to win, and Rod Steiger would have this really deep, sad expression on his face and he’d say, “I don’t think anyone wins when thirty-three die.” A great line.