The Last Victim (11 page)

“Hey,” I called out to him, “I want to talk to you about something.”

“What did I do now?” he asked, only half joking. By my tone of voice, he thought he might be in trouble.

“Gacy has been asking about you,” I said.

“What do you mean he’s been asking about me?” he choked out.

“I think he has some sort of interest in you.” For a moment, I wondered if I should have said anything. Jarrod looked sick.

“It might be innocent,” I continued, “but I’m getting the impression he’s going to want to get to know you better in the future.”

“Jason,” he begged, “please don’t get me involved in this stuff. That guy’s a freak. He
kills
people for a living!”

“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “I’ve been thinking. What if I had you copy a letter to Gacy in your own handwriting so I—”

“No way. I’m not gonna—”

“Jarrod! Listen to me! You don’t have to do anything except copy a letter I’m going to write. It needs to be in your handwriting.
That’s all you have to do. Nothing else.”

“No way,” he said, more firmly than I’d ever heard him.

I knew, though, that I could win him over if he’d just get into the spirit of the game.

“Listen to me,” I pleaded. “I just want to play with him a little. If he thinks it’s you writing, he’ll tell you things he
wouldn’t tell me. It would give me two different sources of information I can cross-check.”

Jarrod looked very skeptical but I could see he was listening.

“Besides,” I said with a smile, “it’ll be fun to fool him together.”

I vowed to be very careful with Jarrod because I didn’t want him to get hurt in any way. Such was my naiveté at the time that
I figured I could control Gacy—send him like a rat through a maze in search of cheese. I thought of my brother as being like
a silent partner, one with no real involvement or exposure.

Looking back on it, I think I was also partly in denial. Already, just from having had limited contact with Gacy, my sleep
had been disrupted, my schoolwork was suffering, and I was weighed down by secrets that left me feeling alone and isolated.
By recruiting Jarrod, even in this limited role, I probably hoped to lessen the isolation.

I showed my brother just a few of Gacy’s letters, ones that were free of the most blatant sexual references, especially anything
related to homosexuality. It’s amazing how many people assumed—then and later—that I must be gay to be able to play this role
so authentically; I didn’t want Jarrod to think that, too.

Once my brother signed on, I worked out a plan whereby I’d write Gacy two sets of letters, one from me, the other from my
brother. I’d compose Jarrod’s letters and then have him copy them in his own handwriting. Eventually, when the content of
the letters flying back and forth became
really
weird, I told Jarrod to tell Gacy he was learning to type. That way, I could just do the letters myself on the computer and
have Jarrod sign them without reading.

Of course, I never allowed Jarrod to read any of the letters sent directly to him. In fact, I wish that somebody else could
have screened them so I wouldn’t have had to read them either. But I have to admit: for a while, deceiving Gacy was sort of
fun.

O
ne afternoon I was sitting in the bleachers at the university softball field, watching the last half of the women’s game with
my friends. As usual, we were talking about which girls on the field were the “hottest” and bitching about our families.

“Man, I hate living at home,” said my friend Randy.

“Yeah, me too,” Josh added.

Randy continued, “I can’t even bring my girlfriend home or my parents will give me shit for having someone in the house.”

“Yeah,” Josh agreed, “my mom is always on my ass.”

Sitting there next to these guys I’d known for almost ten years, it occurred to me that they really knew less about me than
Gacy did. There we were, watching girls running around in their skimpy outfits, and bullshitting with each other. Yet it felt
like I had almost nothing in common with them.

I’d confided to Gacy not only some fabricated fantasies I thought he wanted to hear but also some very real feelings I had
about life and the future. I’d shared with him my frustrations at home, my feelings of isolation, my hopes and aspirations.
It felt weird to think that, in a strange way, he was actually becoming my
friend.

At this point in our relationship, Gacy and I were relating to each other in a casual, relaxed manner. He was still feeling
me out, testing what my limits were, and I was still trying to gauge how he viewed me, not knowing if he was as hesitant about
me as I was about him.

I noticed one trend for certain: the more naive and confused I acted, the more confident and controlling Gacy became. It bolstered
my opinion that he truly believed the character I was presenting was real.

In my letters to him, I’d taken great pains to present a family pattern that would seem very familiar to his own—I told him
I had an overbearing mother and a very passive father. While this depiction was somewhat exaggerated, it was close enough
to the truth to make me sound convincing.

Gacy frequently played psychologist, offering me his sage insights. In one letter, he observed:

So it sounds like your dad is the passive one so maybe thats why you like to be dominated by older women. You ever think of
that? I don’t know the age of your parents but in the 40’s your mother will go through a change of life so maybe thats what
is happening now. Just be kind to her. Your dad has the right idea of just being passive.

I fabricated a family situation in which I was suffering abuse at the hands of my parents, both emotionally and physically.
Attempting to echo as strongly as possible Gacy’s own background, I blamed this on the weakness of my father. Likewise, I
invented scenarios in which my father had beaten me in much the same way I knew Gacy had been mistreated. I figured: if Gacy
is able to relate to my suffering, he might give me insight into how these situations affected him. The other reason for spinning
these tales was that it created an impression I could shortly be homeless—banished by either my father’s or my own decision.
I suspected that Gacy would seize on this as an opportunity to instruct me in novel ways to earn money. And he didn’t disappoint.

He coached me on how to sell myself on the streets and how to make my body my most important tool. He described how interested
“buyers” would act and how I should act with them. Basically, he was giving me a tutorial in how to be the perfect victim.

Although he claimed sympathy for my abusive situation, he insisted that being passive was a good quality. The fact is, he
wanted
me to become overwhelmed by those who were strong and could break me down. Right from the beginning, he set the tone for
me to enter the world of submission to his authority. Key to this was getting me to see that being passive, or even humiliated,
was okay—that sometimes it was necessary.

Of course, many of my hypotheses, assumptions, analyses, and explanations as to what happened and why were formulated after
the events occurred. I wasn’t operating quite as deliberately and systematically as it might seem.

I did have a general plan, but it wasn’t nearly as well developed as it now might sound, with the luxury of years to reflect
on my behavior. While it’s true that I spent hundreds of hours analyzing every word Gacy sent me, and every word I sent back,
I sometimes wasn’t fully conscious of what I was doing.

Years later, after taking a dozen psychology courses, reading everything ever written on the subject of serial killers, consulting
with the FBI, doing an internship with the U.S. Secret Service, and writing an honors thesis on this experience,
then
I could look back on what happened with some clarity. At the time Gacy and I were exchanging letters, though, I was mostly
shooting from the hip, trying things out, experimenting to see what would work even if I couldn’t exactly explain why.

Sex is what Gacy wanted to talk about in every letter. He continuously interrogated me about my own experiences, trying to
get a handle on what my inclinations were so he could determine the best way to play me. At first, I found his perversity
disgusting. But after a while, I stopped dwelling on the images and viewed his off-the-wall approaches as, well, like a chess
game or a mathematical problem to solve.
If he says this, I should say that.

Since he kept badgering me to tell him about what I’d done previously, the first fantasy I offered up was one I could easily
relate to: being seduced by an older woman. I knew that he’d had a similar experience in his youth, the difference being that
his was with an older
man.
Even so, the similarity between the two experiences seemed likely to forge a point of connection. When I actually sat down
at my desk to construct the scenario, I smiled with satisfaction as I thought about a twist in the story I could create—one
that would feed Gacy’s obsession with bisexuality. The excerpt from my letter reads as follows:

One night I was at a Christmas party and this pretty woman came up and started talking to me. The conversation went well,
and we decided to go into a room of the house where we could have some privacy. One thing led to another and we started kissing
passionately. I asked her if I could go down on her, and she said yes. After working my way up her thighs she pulled away,
and stopped me. She then laid me down on the bed and performed oral sex on me, and gave me the best orgasm of my life. I was
very happy with her. After a few minutes, she told me she was a man, a transvestite, and if I was still interested I could
call her the next day. I never called her again.

Saying a prayer that my parents and friends would never stumble across this balderdash, I told Gacy I was very excited about
the whole incident—that it prompted me to masturbate for the next three days. While I didn’t say explicitly that it was the
woman’s true gender that got me all hot and bothered, the message was clear.

I’d studied Gacy’s ideas about sexuality at length and knew he was in great denial about his homosexuality. Like so many serial
killers, he was the type of person who tries to destroy in others the part of himself he most wishes to disown. His theory
was that everyone is bisexual and wants to act on those tendencies, given the opportunity. He also believed that most older
men are inclined to seduce younger ones, whether they’re enlightened enough to do so or not.

Since Gacy considered me attractive, he assumed men were hitting on me daily. I came to realize that some of the places where
he thought I
should
have been approached were actually ones where he’d begun to fantasize I’d
be
approached. “Never been hit on being in sports?” he asked me. “That’s hard to believe.”

Gacy believed it was virtually impossible for me to have played sports for so many years and not have been seduced by a coach
or a parent. I eventually concluded that, if I didn’t come up with a story regarding a seduction during my athletic career,
my overall credibility would be in doubt.

It seemed clear that, after having spent fourteen years in prison, Gacy was even more sadistic, perverse, and sexually driven
than before he arrived. Even in his fifties, he appeared to be more dangerous and aggressive than ever. Without a way to vent
his twisted desires, the pressure of his fantasies was building to extreme levels.

He wanted me to see how innocent and natural homosexual encounters actually were. In his letter of December 28, 1993, he described
his first
voluntary
experience since being sexually abused as a child.

Regarding my first encounter, I was 22. He and I went to dinner after work. His conversation was about sex, I assume feeling
me out. He said that when he goes out he has a 100% chance of finding something while I only have 50%. I asked him to explain.
He said if I went out and couldn’t find a female then I would go home and jack it off, whereas with him if he doesn’t find
a female, he finds a guy to get him off.

Then the drinks came faster and by the time we left I was high, but I drove him to his place. He asked me in for coffee, instead
we had another drink or two. I passed out on the sofa, but awoke like in a dream with something wet down between my legs.
In the dark room I could see his head, but didn’t move as he had all seven inches in his warm wet mouth going up and down
and under the crown of my cut head.

He seemed to know all the right spots as he had me lifting my hips as I fed his mouth until it went off like a firecracker,
and flooded his mouth, and dripped from the sides. He continued to lick it clean, returned my pants up and went off to bed.
I awoke in the morning never saying a word. Had coffee and went home and took a shower and jacked it off again. Never has
any girls gotten me off as well. It was nearly a year before I encountered it again and then it was mutual and while drinking.
But that’s an excuse anyway just like your doing it with a TV [transvestite] even not knowing you liked it and that’s all
that counts.

Besides the obvious—Gacy’s fondness for graphic sexual imagery—the other thing that struck me about this letter and others
that followed was that they were grammatical disasters. Despite his background—Gacy had been a well-off community leader prior
to being incarcerated—he churned out pages of botched prose that showed him to be basically uneducated. It was yet another
example of his presenting a certain face to the world while being something else entirely.

Before signing off, Gacy mentioned something that would change the course of our relationship from that point onward. He jokingly
wrote, “Too bad you don’t have a phone, as I could call collect sometime where you can ask your questions during the story.
Ha ha.”

I thought to myself,
Wow! This is incredible! The guy wants to talk to me on the phone.
I couldn’t believe my luck. If I could get this much out of him via letter writing, what could I do using a phone! Of course,
the thought of actually speaking to someone like this—where I’d truly have to act out the role I was playing—caused some trepidation,
but the novelty value alone was too high to pass up. How many people could say they received phone calls from a serial killer?