Buried Dreams (50 page)

Of course, the end could be Steiger walking out of the mental hospital in ninety days. He’d look into the camera—a real big close-up shot—and say, “Gacy outsmarted you again.” And that would be the end of the movie. Fade to black right there.

Or . . . or maybe the movie should end with a close-up of Steiger looking out at the world in complete triumph, and then, slowly, he’d start to laugh. Not say anything. Just laugh. And it wouldn’t be any crazy, out-of-control laugh, either.

CHAPTER 28

THE DEFENSE RESTED
after Rappaport, and the first witness to testify for the state in rebuttal was Donald Voorhees, then twenty-seven. John could see that the past dozen years hadn’t been good to the kid “who blackmailed” him and “fucked ever” him, who had “outsmarted” him in Iowa. Voorhees. The kid looked like shit.

He was wearing these little round hippie glasses. Watery yes swimming around behind the glass: eyes that didn’t seem to see what they were looking at. John noticed that the kid was
shaking pretty badly. Voorhees. Looking to outsmart him one more time. But—John could see it now
—
Voorhees was so fucked up to testify. Voorhees: the kid whose blond hair and muscular body and trick innocence were models for each and every one of the thirty-three boys Bad Jack murdered.

The little bastard was so scared he told the defense he
felt he was not “competent” to take the stand. He had to be examined outside the presence of the jury.

Judge Garippo asked Voorhees if he had made a statement to the effect “that you felt incompetent to testify.”

There was no response, and Egan for the state asked, “Did you say that, Don?”

A minute dragged by. Voorhees wet his lips and looked about, seeing nothing. “You have to answer the question,” Garippo said finally. “What did you mean by that?”

“Let me think,” Voorhees said, and the words lay dry as sand on his tongue. What do you mean when you say things? “I am totally bent out of shape,” Voorhees said finally. It seemed as if the witness wanted to say more. He mouthed the words once, twice, then whispered brokenly, “You know?”

Motta asked Voorhees if he was seeing a psychiatrist.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“How long have you been seeing him?”

Voorhees couldn’t answer that and he stared blankly at the walls, the ceiling, looking for help. “For a while?” Motta prompted.

There was no answer to the question anywhere in the courtroom. The witness’s eyes rolled helplessly, pleadingly please stop this.

“All right,” Motta said, “we will . . .”

But Voorhees had finally found the answer—how long had he been seeing a psychiatrist? a psychiatrist? how long—and he said, “Ever since I heard Gacy was out of
prison Yes, I have had problems.”

Garippo ruled that Voorhees could testify, and, in the presence of the jury, he fell completely apart. The witness said that he had worked for Gacy for about a month, spreading gravel on the driveway. The man had given him liquor and “he came on to me sexually.” Voorhees couldn’t elaborate, couldn’t say just what it was that Gacy had done to him.

The answers Voorhees gave were lifeless things, dragged painfully up out of some interior depth, some dark and unhealthy place where there was mud and excrement and kind of death before death. The witness took a minute or more to
respond to each question, and the state finally mercifully, withdrew him as a witness.

John knew it was important not to show emotion, and so he didn’t smile, didn’t laugh aloud. A credible witness Voorhees? He testifies that he wasn’t on medication but then
he drank beer for breakfast. When John took the stand in his own defense, he’d really destroy Voorhees. Tell the jury “Voorhees didn’t want to testify on account of he was involved in blackmail,” See who outsmarts who in the end.

The state continued with all these witnesses who testified about the sodomy conviction in Iowa. The last Iowa witness was Dr. Leonard Heston, a professor of psychiatry who had examined John in 1968. The diagnosis then, Heston said, was “antisocial personality . . . a personality who comes into repeated conflict with society and social norms.” Heston testified that the antisocial person is not considered to have a mental disease or defect but a “defect in personality.” A character flaw.

Heston agreed in part with Rappaport—the antisocial part—but said that he disagreed with the borderline diagnosis because “it virtually precludes a psychotic condition. Once that is achieved, then you are out of the borderline and then into some other diagnosis, usually schizophrenia.”

Right away, John could see how he’d “destroy” Heston on the stand. He’d tell the jury that this was the same “superficial diagnosis” Heston made in Iowa, and if John had gotten the treatment he needed twelve years ago, there wouldn’t have been any bodies down there in the crawl space. The first thing John was going to do when he was acquitted, he was going to sue the state of Iowa for what they had done to him. He’d been made “a victim” in Iowa.

He was still soaring on the Rappaport high, but something about the testimony of Donald Voorhees was weighing him down and he didn’t know why.

John wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing during Robert Donnelly’s testimony. “Just being cool and laughing”: it might have been a mistake. “The jury looked over at me and I’m smiling and laughing while this guy is talking about how I supposedly fucked him over. Stuff he was saying was just crazy as shit. Totally unbelievable.”

Just like the prosecution tried to make Donnelly look like “another goody-goody”: twenty-one years old, scholarship student in law and gov-ernment at the College of St. Francis. He said John picked him up around midnight on December 10, 1977.

Donnelly had a speech impediment
—
he stuttered slightly
—
and words came painfully to him, like razors in his throat. At
first John thought he was going to be another Voorhees. The kid could barely look at him long enough to point him out in court.

Donnelly said that Gacy, posing as a police officer, had stopped him on the street, demanded to see some identification, then pulled a gun on him and handcuffed him. Once inside his house, Gacy threw him on a couch. Donnelly testified that Gacy spoke in an authoritative manner, “like a police officer would talk . . . he appeared to be quite sober and in control of all his senses.”

In court, John, listening to this bullshit, snorted audibly, as if smothering a laugh of total disbelief. The kid talked like Elmer Fudd. He was funny. Real dumb and stupid.

Donnelly said Gacy “was talking to me and he was mentioning that he was an important person and still he didn’t get the respect he deserved.”

Donnelly said that when he refused a drink—he was still handcuffed—Gacy “came out from behind the bar and he picked it up and he walked over to me and he just tossed it on my face.”

John, sitting by his lawyers, shook his head, smiling. Like he’s going to throw a drink on somebody and mess up his couch and rug? John Gacy, Mr. Compulsive Neat, who gets pissed when some doc’s books are out of order? That John Gacy throws a drink? Real believable testimony.

Donnelly refused a second drink and Gacy said, “You’re a guest, you should accept my hospitality.” And then, Donnelly testified, “he reached down and he took my face and he held my mouth open and started pouring the drink.”

The witness testified that Gacy “took my pants and undid them. He started pulling down my pants and my underwear. . . .”

Donnelly was having a hard time talking about this, John could see. The Elmer Fudd voice was cracking, the razor were ripping the flesh in his throat, and there were tears in Donnelly’s eyes “because,” John said later, “he was lying under oath.”

Terry Sullivan asked, “What did he do after he pulled your pants down?”

“He went and he got on top of me and I could tell that he didn’t have any pants on because I could feel his knee and he, he put his knees between my legs and he grabbed onto my shoulders. . . .”

Donnelly couldn’t go on. Judge Garippo said, “Let’s take a recess.” Donnelly, sobbing, said, “This is hell.” He was crying so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. “This is hell,” he said.

John laughed aloud so that everyone would know what a phony-ass actor the kid was. He glanced over at the jury: can you believe this shit?

After the recess, Donnelly said that he had gotten the support he needed from his girlfriend. He was like some football player shaking off an injury, acting brave for the jury. John nodded to him, but he made the gesture real sarcastic. Nice act, asshole, but no one here’s buying it.

Donnelly testified that Gacy had raped him. Then “he took me by the arm and led me through the house to the bathroom . . . he turned my face to the wall of the bathroom and . . . pushed my head against the wall. And then he reached around my neck and he pulled something around my neck, and he started twisting it.”

Donnelly testified that Gacy had said, “My, aren’t we having fun tonight?”

Gacy banged Donnelly’s head against the wall several times and “then he tripped me down onto the floor and then he got down and picked me up by what was around my neck. The bathtub was filled with water, and he stuck my head under the bathtub and I started fighting it and I was just squirming and moving and holding my breath and then . . . I passed out.”

Sullivan asked, “Now, when you went into that bathroom, was that tub already full with water?”

“It was.”

John couldn’t help it, he had to laugh again. Crazy, unbelievable shit. Like he’s going to fill the tub before he goes out to pick up someone. Like it was all premeditated or something, drowning the little bastard. The kid looked at john then, just once, and there was something different about him. He didn’t seem so frightened anymore.

Donnelly testified that when he came to on the bathroom floor Gacy “stuck my head under the bathtub a second time. . . . I was really weak, and I could barely struggle. I first tried to hold my breath . . . and I couldn’t and I started breathing water and I passed out again.”

The kid was talking about being weak, but his voice was getting stronger.

“What is the next thing you remember?”

“I was awake on the floor again.”

“What happened next?”

“He did it again.”

John looked over at the jury and shook his head, smiling sadly, the way you smile when somebody real dumb and stupid fucks up in front of everybody. Some of the jurors were looking back
—
the guy with the moustache, the blond-haired guy John figured was “liberal” because he was blond, the heavy-set woman
—
and John couldn’t read anything in their hard, blank expressions. He wanted to tell them that the John Gacy he knew could never torture anyone. That John Gacy was a “gentle individual.” He tried for a gentle, forgiving smile, to show them that. He felt the grin waver weakly on his face.

“Did you pass out again?” Sullivan asked.

“Yes.”

“When you came to the next time, did you see where Gacy was?”

“I looked up and he wasn’t in the doorway. . . . I started to look around and he said, ‘Are you looking for me? Here I am.’ “

Gacy was sitting on the toilet, with the lid down. “He got up, and he"—Donnelly was stuttering again—"he, he unzipped his pants and he started pissing on me.”

John laughed too loudly this time
—
it was more than a gentle man’s whispered chuckle
—
and Garippo glanced over at him. He thought the judge might admonish him. Why the hell would you piss on somebody? John wanted to scream What sense did that make?

“What happened after that?” Sullivan asked.

Donnelly said Gacy “brought over a magazine, one of
those nude magazines, and he showed it to me and he asked me if I liked the girls and I said ‘yes’ and he said, ‘You’re sick.’ “ Then “he punched me and then he grabbed me and he stuck me under the bath water one more time.”

When Donnelly came to, “I was on the bathroom floor and he picked me up and he led me into . . . a bedroom and he tripped me onto the floor and then he sat down like he first had on the couch, like sideways on me, and he said ‘You’re just in time for
The Late Show.’
And he turned on projector and I didn’t look up and he grabbed me by the hair
and he held my head up and made me watch the movie.” It was “a gay porno flick.”

The movie lasted about ten minutes. Gacy had Donnelly sit against the wall. “I, I, I rolled over and I got myself against the wall.” He was still cuffed.

Gacy left the room and came back with a dining-room chair. He sat in the chair, Donnelly said, and “put his foot right in my stomach.” Gacy had a gun in his hand and “he told me we were going to play Russian roulette.”

Gacy said, “ ‘Aren’t we playing fun games tonight? Aren’t these good games?’ “

John, sitting at the defense table, looked back into the courtroom and noticed that “Harold Piest was getting hyper.” The families were so filled with hate they’d believe anything. God didn’t put people on earth to hate one another. John rollled his eyes to the ceiling and sighed audibly. He chuckled a bit, but he really didn’t know how to act now. Was it smart, laughing in court? The kid’s voice wasn’t quavering anymore: it was like he was getting stronger on the stand. Feeding off of John’s forced laughter and confusion. The kid could look right at John anytime he wanted.

Donnelly testified that Gacy aimed the gun “at my head . . . and he said, ‘Look at me’ and he slapped me on the face again and I was looking up there and he pulled the trigger and nothing happened. . . . Most of the time, he just clicked it once. A couple of times he clicked it twice, and then after about ten, fifteen times, it went off. . . . I realized it must have been a blank because I was still alive.”

After testifying that the gun went off, Donnelly said, “I was shaking and he reached down and he grabbed my throat with his hands and he just started twisting my head and he was, he was choking me and I passed out because . . . the next thing I realized, I wasn’t on the floor anymore, I was on bed. . . . I was still handcuffed, but there was something around my feet, right above my ankles.” Donnelly’s legs were spread and he was naked and his hands were cuffed behind is back. “I, I, I had a gag in my mouth and it was like stuffed in my mouth . . . he rolled me over . . . then he took something, I don’t know what it was, and he started shoving inside of me. . . . I was feeling extreme pain and I started to get dizzy and I passed out.”