Buried Dreams (51 page)

John tried another snorting laugh, because now the guy kid he’d passed out, what, five times, six times in one night.
It wasn’t believable testimony, but John couldn’t get the laugh to sound right. The kid looked right at John and he wasn’t afraid anymore.

Donnelly testified that when he came to, the object was still in his anus. Gacy started taking the gag off and said, “ ‘Don’t scream,’ but as soon as he got it out, I screamed . . . he pushed my head down into the bed and punched me in the side, . . . I was terrified and I said, ‘Look, you are going to kill me. Just kill me now. Get it over with.’ He told me my time was coming and to shut up and he slapped me and he put the gag back in my mouth.”

The kid was talking about wanting to die, but he glanced over at John just then. Like John was the one who was going to die.

Donnelly said that when it started to get light out, Gacy made him take a shower and—John made an effort to laugh at this part—drove him to work.

In the car Donnelly said Gacy asked him, “ ‘How does it feel knowing that you’re going to die?’ and I just didn’t answer.” Gacy pulled up in back of Marshall Field, where Donnelly worked. “He told me that he was going to get me and kill me later and he told me to lean forward and he took off the handcuffs and as he was taking off the handcuffs he told me, he said, ‘You’re going to die later, but don’t tell, don’t go to the police or anybody and don’t tell them because they are not going to believe you.’ “

Donnelly did, in fact, go to the police, and he found that Gacy was right. “They didn’t believe me.”

John snorted again, real loud, so the jury would know they shouldn’t believe Donnelly, either. The kid gave him another one of those death looks and it was very hard for John to force the laugh out of his mouth. Later, walking back through the bullpen, John was pretty sure the smiling and head shaking hadn’t been a good idea. He got the feeling that one of the guards assigned to him, Stanley, had suddenly started to hate him. Stanley had acted pretty neutral before John knew then he shouldn’t have laughed. Especially when Donnelly broke down, he shouldn’t have laughed. The jury might think that he liked to see young men cry and shit. They might think that suffering amused him.

And then it hit him. Maybe Voorhees had outsmarted him a second time. Fucked him over by making it look like
John Gacy had destroyed his entire life. Influencing the jury with emotion instead of the law.

The high—that soaring Rappaport high—collapsed. Suddenly, John was afraid.
If
the defense docs were any good at all, he wouldn’t testify, because then he wouldn’t have anyone to blame for losing. He’d read where you could win a new trial on appeal if you can prove that you didn’t agree with the plea. John figured he could say he was against the insanity plea from the first. Say he wanted to go with a straight “not guilty.”

That’s the way he’d play it if the defense docs were any good.

A. Arthur Hartman, for twenty-eight years the chief psychologist of the Psychiatric Institute of the Circuit Court of Cook County, conducted about twenty-five hours of interviews with John Wayne Gacy over a period of two months. Testifying for the state, Hartman said he agreed with Dr. Heston: Gacy was “a psychopathic or antisocial personality with sexual deviation” who showed “minor symptoms or characteristics of paranoid hysterical reactions.” He thought Gacy was capable of understanding the criminality of his conduct and that there was no evidence that he ever had “a mental breakdown or mental illness of the type that we consider a psychotic condition.”

Hartman said that Gacy’s statements, in twenty-five hours of interviews, were marked by “contradictions, indications of marked evasiveness, variation in what he would say at one time or another, attempts to rationalize or excuse.”

Gacy gave only fourteen responses on the Rorschach, but Hartman saw no indication of bizarre or peculiar responses, “no indication of schizophrenic-type responses. . . .” The doctor thought that Gacy’s responses to the inkblots, all those bees and flowers, indicated that “he knew what was appropriate and conventional. . . .”

In the sentence-completion test, Hartman said he was struck by “the general normality and conventionality” of Gacy’s responses. “He presents himself . . . in almost an idealistic, altruistic way. For example, a sentence like, ‘The happiest time’ he answers, ‘is when I am helping others.’ “

Hartman said that such altruistic responses are typical of antisocial personalities who, classically, “mislead people,” lie.

Hartman, in answer to Amirante, said the fact that Gacy
was a complex person and a difficult case didn’t preclude a diagnosis of antisocial personality. “The antisocial personality can be particularly complex. In fact, one of the frequent definitions is that he presents a complex picture. He may seem . . . bright, even charming, and yet have . . . strong antisocial attitudes, an aggressive lack of feelings, lack of remorse or guilt about acts of aggression against others. . . .”

Hartman suggested that John was a liar. The next expert witness for the state came right out and said it. Dr. Robert A. Reifman, the director of the Psychiatric Institute of the Circuit Court of Cook County, had conferred often with his colleague Dr. Hartman. Both men had experience with prisoners who had tried to cop an insanity plea, who feigned mental illness, who were pulling what the convicts called a “bug stunt.”

Reifman spent sixteen hours with John Gacy. “It was my diagnosis,” Reifman testified, “that Mr. Gacy suffered from a personality disorder, specifically narcissistic type,” which “is not considered a mental disease.”

The finding of narcissistic personality did not exclude a diagnosis of antisocial personality, Reifman said. “Antisocial personality is a subtype of narcissistic personality. I didn’t think it would be completely fair to call Mr. Gacy an antisocial personality, because it excludes the other aspects of his personality in which he’s well accomplished.” The doctor cited Gacy’s success in business as one example of those other aspects.

Reifman didn’t think Gacy fit the profile of a borderline personality because “in my experience . . . they do not function very well. They are occupationally very poor; they can’t hold jobs. Their lives are chaotic.” Gacy, on the other hand, was efficient and successful. He ran “a very successful contracting business.” He was a “reasonably successful politician . . . a reasonably successful clown. He had lots of friends, and he was, generally speaking, a very efficient, successful person. Even with respect to the crimes, he was extremely efficient.”

For the same reason, Reifman disagreed with Dr. Freedman’s diagnosis of pseudoneurotic paranoid schizophrenia, because then “it would be impossible for him to function in a socially acceptable . . . way. Mr. Gacy functions extremely well . . . a pseudoneurotic schizophrenic is a frightened,
constricted person who is teetering on the brink of psychosis and can’t function.”

Reifman found “no evidence that Mr. Gacy was psychotic” and “no evidence to support a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.” The hallmarks of schizophrenia, Reifman said, are “delusions, hallucinations, and loss of contact with reality.” Gacy, Reifman testified, did not exhibit these symptoms.

The murders, Reifman said, were not thirty-three brief psychotic episodes. “I don’t believe that you can have thirty-three cases of temporary insanity.”

Gacy’s descriptions of the murders proved that he was never out of touch with reality. “A person who gets some people to put handcuffs on has to talk to them. First of all, he has to gain their confidence, and he has to talk to them in a calm, rational way.

“Now, Mr. Gacy told me that he would put the handcuffs on himself, show how easy it was to get the handcuffs off . . . he literally conned them into putting the handcuffs on. A person who . . . was out of touch with reality cannot function in that kind of goal-directed behavior . . . . If he is angry or disturbed, I think it would have been unlikely that anybody would have gone along with him.

“Secondly, when he used the rope trick, it’s a very intricate operation: You tie knots, you twist. . . . On that basis there’s no evidence he was out of contact with reality when he performed these crimes.”

Reifman said that while Gacy “seemed to be candid and forthcoming,” he was actually “evasive,” and, at first, denied any guilt. “He told me,” Reifman testified, “that he was four persons: he was John Gacy the clown; John Gacy the politician; John Gacy the contractor; and a fellow named Jack Hanley, who, it was suggested, went ahead and did these crimes.” Gacy said he had no memory of the murders and “did not know about Jack Hanley.

“Well, it became very clear that most of the murders were committed with no witness and that the only information we have about the murders is information given us by John Gacy, and the information was considerable. So, therefore, the idea that Jack Hanley was a person who functioned in this way without Mr. Gacy’s knowledge was not true. He had very good recall. . . .”

Reifman said he did not find any evidence at all to support a multiple-personality theory and added that “no
other psychiatrist or psychologist subsequent to myself did either.”

If the murders weren’t brief outbreaks of psychotic behavior or the workings of an alternate personality, neither were they the products of irresistible impulse, in Reifman’s opinion. As an example of such an impulse, Reifman postulated a “person who has to vomit . . . in front of their family and company . . . the urge to vomit becomes very strong and they struggle with it. Finally . . . they vomit in spite of the social connotations. They cannot resist the urge to vomit . . . it’s truly an impulse a person cannot resist.”

Reifman didn’t think Gacy even struggled against his homicidal impulses. “In fact, if we regard the testimony of Cram and Rossi, who dug graves underneath the crawl space for the purposes of burying bodies: I don’t think a person who plans to have an irresistible impulse in the future could be having irresistible impulses.”

Under cross-examination by Amirante, Reifman said that “Mr. Gacy likes to talk, and when he talks, he just talks everything. So I felt it was a good source of information.”

Amirante asked if Gacy’s effusive stream of talk didn’t demonstrate loose association, a characteristic of schizophrenia. “When Mr. Gacy says on one hand . . . he killed somebody and on the next hand he says he didn’t do it, is that loose association?”

“I think that’s lying,” Reifman said flatly. “I think he doesn’t remember what he says from one day to the next because he lies.”

“You said he was lying,” Amirante said. “What was he lying about? That he didn’t do it, or that he did do it?”

“My impression,” Reifman said, “was that he was lying when he said he didn’t do it.”

Was that conjunction of truth and falsehood consistent with logical thinking? Amirante asked.

“A person who lies in what . . . is their best interest may be functioning logically.”

Amirante asked if there weren’t “patchy blocks” in Gacy’s recollections of the murders he talked about. “You are assuming patchy blocks,” Reifman said. “. . . There were things that he said he didn’t remember, and I didn’t believe him. I believe he has an excellent memory.”

In fact, Gacy’s claim that he couldn’t recall the moment
of the murders, Reifman said, indicated to him that the man was malingering, trying to feign insanity.

Amirante asked if Gacy hadn’t told the doctor he thought it was stupid to act crazy and that he was not crazy.

“That’s what he said.”

“But on the other hand, you are saying that he was trying to fake being crazy.”

“That’s correct.”

Reifman disagreed with his colleague Dr. Hartman, with Dr. Freedman and Dr. Rappaport, who all thought Gacy was not malingering. “He was trying to fake a multiple personality,” Reifman said. “. . . There is no doubt in my mind when he came in for the interview he was trying to fake a double personality.”

“Isn’t it probable,” Amirante asked, “that a person who does such a horrible thing would try to blame it on somebody else, or another part of him? Isn’t that possible?”

“Oh, I think he would try to blame it on anybody else,” Reifman said, “if he were smart, sure.”

Gacy was, Reifman said, “explicitly vague . . . he tries to obfuscate, or tries to present a picture that is not clear.”

On redirect examination by Kunkle, Reifman said that he thought Jack Hanley “was an attempt to use an insanity defense to avoid responsibility for the crime.” A bug stunt.

The day’s headline read, “Gacy Faked Insanity to Win Plea in Court: Doctor.” All they had on the television was “Reifman and the bathtub boy.” Like they believed that Donnelly’s story was true and that Reifman could really tell “when somebody is lying and when he isn’t.” Nobody can do that.

The prosecution kept giving him cigars, but they had another “ploy” working. They were trying to break him down. Investigator Greg Bedoe had sidled up to him and said, “Just keep laughing, John.” Like it was going to be the last time he ever laughed again.

And then prosecutors were putting PDM stickers that they had stolen from his house on their notebooks. There was one stuck on the wall beside the courthouse phone John used to call Ma. Kunkle knew it would piss him off. Maybe make him mad enough to take the stand where Kunkle would tear him apart with bisexual tricks. He couldn’t beat Kunkle. If John “cut him up with words” the jury would think he was
“too smart to be insane.” If he just sat there, acting dumb and stupid, Kunkle would “butcher me for breakfast.”

John could see how the state was “building a noose tighter and tighter around my neck.” They were “using emotion and not the law.” Mothers fainting on the stand. Voorhees. The bathtub boy. Rignall
—
John’s own witness
—
talking about fireplace pokers and then puking right in front of the jury. Reifman saying that John tried to baffle the docs with bullshit, “obfuscate,” “present a picture that is not clear.” Like John was trying to outsmart the docs with insanity.