The Man Who Killed Boys (10 page)

The year of the Western theme party was the year that Gacy went into business for himself, and started PDM Contractors, Inc. PDM stood for Painting, Decorating, and Maintenance. It was also the last full year of his marriage to Carole.

The marriage had begun going sour long before that. It wasn't that Gacy went out of his way to be unkind. But he had an erratic, volatile temper, and it seemed that he just didn't have enough time for her. He was always tired.

She once recalled that during the nearly four years of their marriage, her husband slept an average of only about two hours a night. He avoided sleep, as if his dreams swarmed with phantoms. He would get so tired that he sometimes slumped on the living-room couch, staring straight ahead, his eyes blank and his mind obviously lost in its own dark thoughts. She once sat down beside him to comfort him and he tensed, jerking away from her. Without turning to look at his wife, and speaking in a voice as papery and parched as a deathbed whisper, he asked her to move away and let him relax.

At other times his somber moodiness would turn suddenly savage. He was short-tempered, and when he was angry his powerful hands clenched into tight fists. Then his temper flared and he would scream and throw furniture. Ed Grexa works as a marble setter, and twice replaced broken marble in a coffee table after Gacy had picked the table up during one of his rages and smashed it to the floor. There was a lot of furniture broken during his outbursts, and Carole learned to watch quietly and as unobtrusively as possible while the anger swelled in her husband and he smashed their furniture into junk.

There were times when the rages stopped as abruptly as a stream of water from a shut faucet. One moment he would be raging and the next moment he would suddenly be in good spirits again, seemingly oblivious to his anger of a few seconds before and unconcerned about the broken furniture.

They had been married barely a year when he began leaving home at midnight or later and staying out until dawn. The couple's sex life became almost nonexistent. Carole remembered that during most of the marriage, her husband couldn't perform sexually. For a time she blamed herself. It was disturbing, and occasionally she let the bitterness slip out in front of other people.

There was the time that Ed Grexa saw her in the backyard a few months after the marriage, and called out jokingly:

"Hey, no little ones on the way yet, Carole?"

She turned, unsmiling, and replied: "You have to sleep with someone first."

She wasn't a complainer, but she occasionally let a hint of her troubles slip out in a remark to her sometime babysitter, Audree Grexa. Most of the time the two young women talked of other, more pleasant things, however. Audree was looking forward to her own approaching marriage and they talked of that, or of Elvis Presley. Audree was a Presley fan, and named her Norwegian elkhound "Elvis" after the superstar.

Along with the other problems that were developing in the marriage, there was the ever-present odor. The stench hung over the house summer and winter. If it wasn't the warm weather making it worse in the summer, it seemed that it was the heat in the house in the winter. But it was always there. It was increasingly bothersome and frustrating, especially considering the business that Carole's husband was in. As a remodeling contractor, it seemed that he could do something about it. But no matter how noticeable and disagreeable the odor became, he continued to dismiss it as a minor problem and said it was caused by the damp and darkness of the crawl space. When she complained too vociferously or other people began mentioning the odor to him, his solution was to haul in more quicklime.

When Carole walked outside one morning and found a huge mound of dirt piled at the far end of the backyard, she didn't suspect that it had come from the bothersome crawl space. She accepted without question her husband's explanation that he had ordered some sod and was going to fill in the backyard.

Marriage to John had its positive side. He was a good provider. No one could fault him on that. He worked long hours during the day, first at the restaurant and later at the construction job. Then he came home, had dinner and often worked far into the night. At times he puttered inside the garage or outside long after Carole and the girls had been lulled into slumber by their own soft breathing, the silence interrupted only by the occasional groan of a board in the silent house.

One day a week Carole and her husband bowled in a Sunday morning mixed league at the Monte-Cristo Bowl Alleys. Gacy was a powerful bowler with a deadly hook and was capable of regularly rolling lines in the 180s. He moved with surprising grace for a man of his bulk. He had taken naturally to the sport, something he had been unable to do with golf, which he had tried unsuccessfully during his Jaycee days in Waterloo. But he was good at bowling. He had trophies and a ribboned medal that announced he was the "World's Greatest Bowler" in his recreation room to attest to his skill.

Still, it was not the ideal marriage that Carole had hoped for. Within a year after the wedding she realized that eventually it would end in divorce. But she worried about the girls. They had already been through one broken marriage, and had quickly taken to John, calling him "Daddy" from the very beginning. The baby of the family considered him to be her natural father.

There was no denying that he got along well with her daughters and was considerate of them. He installed an oval above-ground swimming pool and built a playhouse in the backyard for them soon after the wedding. Not long after he suggested that the younger girl's bed be moved from the front bedroom. He said that he wanted to make it into a playroom for the girls and that they could sleep in the same room at the back of the house near his and Carole's bedroom.

That left the front of the house without bedrooms. The insulation was good, and Gacy was free to work in the front of the house as late as he liked without disturbing his sleeping wife or the children. On the nights that she went to bed ahead of him, which was almost every night, she seldom knew when he left and when he came home. The house was silent and not even the breathing of Patches, the family's pet Lhasa Apso that some of the neighbors referred to as a poodle, could be heard.

One day Carole found a billfold with identification belonging to a young man in her husband's late-model black Oldsmobile, which he had outfitted with a red light and radio scanner. When she asked him why the billfold was in the car, Gacy exploded in another of his rages. She learned when she found other billfolds and bits of identification belonging to young men not to ask any more where they had come from.

That was when he began openly bringing home magazines with pictures of naked males. Carole didn't quarrel with him about it, and there was an unspoken agreement that the material wouldn't be left around the house where the girls could find it. But then he never left anything out of place. He had a passion for neatness. In his house, magazines were stacked neatly, dishes were kept washed and beds were made when sleep was over.

Carole began confiding to a few intimates that her husband didn't need her any longer. He had already admitted to her that he preferred boys.

Gacy's social and professional life was progressing more favorably than his marriage. By 1975 he was becoming too old for the Jaycees. It was a young man's organization. But he missed the companionship and the ego-boosting attention and challenge of moving into a position of importance in an organization filled with vigorous imaginative men. He turned to politics.

In Chicago and in Cook County, politics is nearly synonymous with the Democratic party. There are few offices for Republicans or Independents. One of the few Republicans to win a major political office in Cook County in recent years is Bernard Carey. He was a thirty-one-year-old lawyer in 1972, running for his first elective office, when he upended incumbent Cook County States Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan. Carey was the only non-incumbent elected, and he was sworn into office on December 4.

Incumbent Cook County Coroner Dr. Andrew Toman, who participated in the Speck investigation, was sworn into office for the last time the same day as Carey. During his reelection campaign he had supported a referendum proposing abolition of his office and replacement by the county medical examiner system. The referendum was approved by a five-to-one margin, to become effective December 6, 1976.

It's doubtful if Gacy paid more than passing attention to either the Carey-Hanrahan contest for States Attorney or to establishment of the medical examiner system in Cook County. But the time would come when both incidents would be significant to him.

Gacy sought out Robert F. Martwick, a prominent Loop attorney who lived in Norwood Park and was the Democratic township committeeman. The portly contractor explained that he had just moved into the community and would like to make it a better place to live. Someday he would like to run for public office, he said.

His aspirations were admirable, even though the desire to seek election to public office may have been slightly premature. Martwick suggested that before Gacy became a political candidate he become better known locally and involve himself in projects to help his neighbors in the community.

Service projects were something that Gacy had learned about when he was a Jaycee, and he knew how to involve himself in community activities. He drove away from the meeting with Martwick in high spirits, with plans to make himself known to his Norwood Park township neighbors already germinating in his mind.

He designed clown outfits for himself, and selected a catchy name, "Pogo the Clown." His generous stomach provided natural padding to fill out the front, and he topped the baggy suits with a tassled hat and added oversize shoes and white gloves. He taught himself to paint pyramid-shaped eyes and to smear on a broad smiling mouth. Only professional clowns and students of the art of clowning would recognize him as an unschooled amateur because of the sharp corners at the edges of his mouth. Knowledgeable clowns paint rounded corners so they don't frighten small children.

Zielinski took photographs of him in the clown costume, and it wasn't long before Gacy was entertaining small groups of the children and grandchildren of bowling friends and at picnics or Christmas parties sponsored by Norwood township Democrats. He talked importantly of appearing at children's hospitals, but none of his friends ever witnessed the performances.

There were other talks with Martwick. The township committeeman was impressed and pleased when the beefy contractor volunteered to use his young construction workers to keep the party headquarters clean. There would be no charge. Martwick accepted the generous offer. People didn't volunteer free services like that every day.

The Chicago lawyer had no idea that one of Gacy's first ventures cleaning up the headquarters would lead to eventual accusations (but no criminal charges) that the chubby political hopeful had tried to sexually assault a sixteen year-old boy there.

In 1975 Tony Antonucci was a well-muscled, wiry six-footer who weighed 175 pounds and wrestled at Gordon Technical High School, a Catholic boys' school on the northwest side of the city. As the story was put together some three years later by Antonucci, Gacy made a pass at him while he and Gacy were cleaning the office. Antonucci told his boss to leave him alone, but Gacy got pushy, offering him money for sex. Antonucci said he had to pick up a folding chair and threaten Gacy with it before the man calmed down and tried to laugh off the episode as a joke.

Gacy tried again the next month. This time he came to the Antonucci apartment one night while the boy was home alone, carrying a bottle of wine and some heterosexual stag films. After they sipped from the wine and talked a while, Gacy said he wanted to show the youth a stunt with a pair of trick handcuffs he used in his clown act. He claimed there was a secret method of unlocking them and challenged his companion to figure it out.

Antonucci was agreeable and put on the cuffs. Unknown to his boss, he did not slip one of his hands all the way inside. He kept the free hand underneath him so that he appeared to be cuffed. As soon as Gacy thought that he was securely manacled he moved forward to begin undressing the boy.

Antonucci lurched suddenly forward and jerked Gacy's legs, dropping him onto his back. The young wrestler snapped the free cuff on one of Gacy's wrists, flipped him over and pressed a knee against the back of his head. Gacy squirmed helplessly face down on the floor while Antonucci took the key away from him, and a moment later both the man's wrists were pulled behind his back and cuffed. He was kept there, struggling and screaming threats, until he calmed down and Antonucci freed him.

"You're the first one to get the cuffs off—not only that, but you got that one on me," Gacy told his young employee.
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Gacy never tried to overpower or assault Antonucci again, although the youth continued to work for PDM Contractors, Inc. for another eight or nine months.

Martwick, of course, knew nothing about the incidents. He knew only that the husky contractor had become a dependable volunteer for the numerous jobs connected with operation of a party precinct headquarters. Gacy was unfailingly available and willing to run errands, re-hang a crooked door, wash windows, set up chairs for meetings, or fix a leaky faucet. Gacy appeared to be proving his worth to the organization and the sincerity of his desire to help better the community.

Martwick nominated him for a position on the Norwood Park Township Street Lighting District. It was the commission's responsibility to maintain streetlights in the unincorporated areas. Gacy became secretary-treasurer. In 1975 and 1976 he filed ethics statements, as required by Illinois state law of appointed and elected public officials. They disclosed that a sidewalk was installed by PDM for the Norwood Park Township Road and Bridge Department at a cost of $3,500.

Gacy's appointment to the lighting commission led to an acquaintance with Sam Amirante. Young and just a few years out of Loyola University Law School, Amirante was attorney for the commission. Despite Amirante's youth, Gacy was impressed by his quick intelligence and articulate grasp of problems.