The Man Who Killed Boys (20 page)

The chunky contractor talked about other shady dealings he was supposedly involved in, but wasn't specific, although he claimed that he had been questioned by the FBI and local police. Gacy told some of the younger boys that he was a hit man for the Mafia, and offered to take care of anyone who was giving them trouble.

Zielinski said that he was threatened during one of their quarrels after demanding payment for photo work. Gacy reputedly sent word that he had friends who would put Zielinski in a hospital if the photographer didn't back down. "I do a lot of horrible things, but I do a lot of good things too," Gacy once told him.
¹⁶

Apparently, one of the bad things that Gacy did got him into trouble in the late summer of 1978 when he was beaten and kicked in the groin. He was taken to Loretto Hospital by Cicero police at about 1:15
A.M.
, and admitted with injuries to his groin, chest, and face. He told police he was mugged, but his doctor said Gacy claimed he was beaten after getting into a quarrel in a tavern. When regulars at the Good Luck Lounge heard about it they chuckled and told each other between beers how the big fellow had made the mistake of propositioning a karate instructor. Gacy's friends in Norwood Park township heard still a different story, that he was beaten by Rossi and another teenager during a quarrel. Whatever version of the incident might be true, if any, Gacy remained in the hospital four or five days.

Earlier he spent a longer period of time in a north-side hospital after making a nude dash across his back lawn to put out a fire in the playhouse he had built for Carole's daughters. It was a snappy, cold November day when officers in a passing suburban police car noticed smoke coming from the outbuildings and alerted the Norwood Park (township) Fire Protection District.

Gacy was taking a shower when the policeman pounded at his door. Without waiting to dress, he sprinted across the lawn, covered only by a towel clutched around his hairy belly, and began battling the flames. The fire was extinguished before firemen arrived, but Gacy was hospitalized for treatment of smoke inhalation and bronchitis.

During one of his hospital stays he gave his business card to a nurse and asked her to refer young men to him for construction jobs. She never sent him any prospects, but he had no trouble finding willing young workers elsewhere. He contacted some of the boys who worked for him by posting a notice on a bulletin board at a supermarket at Harlem and Lawrence Avenues near his home. One boy who took his girl friend along when he asked for a job was rejected. Gacy told him he was too skinny.

Robert Gilroy was the son of a Chicago police sergeant who worked at the city's central auto pound, and lived near the supermarket where the notice was posted. On September 15, 1977, the youth left home to join about fifty other young people who belonged to an equestrian club and were going to be bussed several miles for a day of horseback riding. A student at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus, which Zielinski attended, he was an outdoorsman who often went camping with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. Gilroy, and their policeman friends. The active eighteen-year-old never showed up for the bus ride. After waiting for a while, friends contacted his parents and told them he was missing.

Robert's father and some other policemen began looking for the youth, who had been talking of possibly earning some money to help pay for a transfer to school in the East where he could study animal husbandry. An official at the Blue Ribbon Riding Center in Northbrook said he hadn't attended his lessons for weeks.

He had been scheduled to check into the Potomac Horse Center in Gaithersburg, Maryland, for a special class on September 29—exactly two weeks after his disappearance. Sergeant Gilroy telephoned the center on September 27 and confirmed that his son had not checked in. The boy's riding gear was still at home in Chicago. Gilroy filed an official missing-persons report. It had been almost two weeks since he had seen his son.

The official probe of Robert's disappearance eventually filled a forty-four-page report, including twenty follow-up investigations by police and additional information gathered by his father. The elder Gilroy's search turned up a report by the doorman of a luxury high-rise apartment building on North Lake Shore Drive that the boy may have accompanied a resident of the building inside on November 6, nearly three weeks after he presumably left home to meet his equestrian friends. No workable leads materialized from that report. Other reports indicated that the youth spent some time around the three-way intersection of Clark, Diversey, and Broadway in New Town. Nothing turned up in the investigations specifically linking him to Gacy. And nothing in the investigations led his father or other policemen to the boy.

Barely two months before Robert was last seen by his family, eighteen-year-old Matthew Bowman of Crystal Lake, some thirty miles northwest of Chicago, disappeared.

On September 25, nineteen-year-old John Mowery was seen alive by his family for the last time. John's disappearance was especially alarming to his family because his only sister, Judith, had been savagely murdered five years earlier. John, then fourteen, had discovered the body.

The twenty-one-year-old woman had been released early from her job as a clerk typist with the Cook County Assessor's office the previous afternoon because it was an election day, and returned to her apartment about a block from her grandmother's home. She had moved into the modest three-room walk-up only two months earlier so that she could keep pets.

She was in the habit of visiting her grandmother nightly and when she didn't show up for two nights in a row and couldn't be reached by telephone, John was sent to her apartment to look for her.

He found his sister sprawled fully clothed on the living-room floor, stabbed nine times in the chest and back with a knife that was long enough to have punctured her lungs. Three frightened eight-week-old puppies were huddled against her body. The killer was never caught and the case remains open in the files of the Chicago Police Department.

The family of Johnny Mowery, which included one older brother and one younger, closed around each other in support and he survived the trauma of finding his only sister murdered. By early 1977 he was discharged after serving eighteen months in the Marines and was taking his first steps toward a possible career in accounting.

He had returned to his family home only briefly after completing his military service, before moving into an apartment with a friend that his family knew only as "Mike." One night not long after that, he told relatives that he was going out for the evening. He didn't say where he was going. He wasn't in the habit of doing that. They never saw or heard from him again.

Early the next year on February 16, Mary Jo Paulus said good-bye to her boyfriend for the last time. William Wayne Kindred had telephoned and gone to see her every day or night since the previous July when he had given her and her girl friend a ride as they were hitchhiking on the north side.

They were talking about getting married as soon as the muscular nineteen-year-old youth could find a good job. In the meantime, he supported himself by doing odd jobs. Friends said the youth they knew as "Shotgun" also knew how to make money on the street and was a familiar figure at hangouts in New Town frequented by street people.

He didn't telephone his girl friend on February 17, and he didn't stop to see her at her home. When she looked for him at his apartment, he was gone but had left his clothes and other belongings behind.

Mary Jo reported to police that he was missing. For many nights, after getting off work as an office clerk, she drove and walked around New Town and other areas of the city looking for him.

While Mary Jo Paulus was continuing her fruitless search for her boyfriend. Sergeant Gilroy was passing around pictures of his missing son. Questions were being asked about John Mowery in areas of the north side he was known to frequent. Jon Prestidge's friends had given up combing Chicago bars and hanging "Information Wanted" posters in New Town with his picture on them. In Michigan, however, his mother and stepfather, Alan Cassada, had in desperation consulted a psychic. The psychic told them that Jon was dead but couldn't pinpoint his location or the manner of his death. The Cassadas began sending Jon's dental records to different communities in Michigan where the unidentified bodies of young men were found.

Gacy, meanwhile, was busily continuing to build his reputation as good neighbor, good Democrat, and community worker.

He posed for photographs in 1978 while shaking hands with Mrs. Rosalynn Carter, wife of the President. The First Lady later autographed one of the pictures taken by a White House photographer: "To John Gacy. Best Wishes. Rosalynn Carter."

The occasion was Chicago's Polish Constitution Day Parade on May 6, marking the 187th anniversary of democratic government in Poland. It was the third consecutive year that Gacy had been director of the parade, which in 1978 consisted of fifty-four floats, twenty bands and some ten thousand marchers.

Ed Dziewulski, a spokesman for the Polish National Alliance, said Gacy was recommended for the job by Colonel Jack Reilly, Chicago's special-events director under Mayor Richard J. Daley. Reilly was credited with promoting the contractor for the task because of the excellent job Gacy had done on one of the Democratic Day parades in Springfield during the Illinois State Fair.

Gacy wore a lapel pin bearing the letter "S" while he and about fifty other people shared the parade-reviewing stand in Chicago with Mrs. Carter. The pin indicated he had been cleared by the Secret Service, which guards Presidents and their families. The Secret Service was provided with the names, addresses, birth dates, and social security numbers of Gacy and three assistants, among those of others expecting to share the reviewing stand or attend a reception for Mrs. Carter in the Daley Center during her near four-hour stay to participate in the festivities and to work at improving relations of her husband's administration with Chicago Democrats.

Prior to the parade, the Secret Service sent the "S" pins to the Polish National Alliance for distribution to the people whose names were on the list. A Secret Service check of the backgrounds of the people recommended for clearance should have turned up information about Gacy's sodomy conviction in Iowa. Before issuing clearance, the agency is known to consult with the FBI, the National Crime Index, regional Secret Service agents, and local police. Gacy's sodomy conviction record followed him when he was paroled and became available to Chicago police when he left Iowa. However, the Secret Service did not learn of his felony conviction.

About the same time his picture was taken with Mrs. Carter, Gacy also posed for a photograph while shaking hands with Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic at a ground-breaking ceremony for a senior citizens' facility near Resurrection High, not far from Norwood Park. Both photos, with pictures of Gacy dressed as Pogo the Clown, were prominently displayed in the office in his home.

Martwick's advice to become involved in community and Democratic party activities was being followed to the letter. Gacy was becoming a familiar figure in local Democratic party circles, and in 1978 his name appeared in six ads, four of them full page, in the Norwood Park Township Democratic organization's dinner-dance program. The ads identified him as being among "community leaders," listed PDM Contractors, Inc., showed him posing with other members of the street-lighting district, and extended best wishes to Martwick from Pogo the Clown.

Gacy introduced himself as a Democratic precinct captain when he approached Loop attorney James E. Noland with a young man who had been given a traffic ticket. Gacy explained that he often did favors for constituents, and during a subsequent two-year period he referred about forty people who had picked up tickets for speeding and other offenses to the attorney. Gacy usually paid the legal fees himself.

Several times young men referred to Noland by Gacy appeared for one or more court hearings and then failed to show up at others. Gacy himself was arrested for speeding on a Chicago area expressway at 4
A.M.
on January 5, 1978, and Noland helped him to obtain an acquittal.

If Gacy's neighbors heard about his speeding arrest, they probably weren't surprised. If he had any obvious fault that bothered Lillie Grexa, it was his habit of tearing out of his driveway with the Oldsmobile's tires squealing and its motor roaring as if the devil were after him. Many of the families on the block were young and she worried about their children.

After Carole moved out, Gacy's neighbors noticed that a heavy-set woman occasionally came to his house. He said she was his bookkeeper. But the appearance of a younger, slimmer woman was more surprising. The woman, who appeared to be in her late twenties, moved in with him.

Some time after that when Lillie saw Gacy he grinned and asked: "Guess what?" He answered his own question before she could reply. "I'm getting married again."

The Grexas had been busy with other things and hadn't met their neighbor's new girl friend yet, but Lillie told him that it was "nice" that he was going to settle down again with a wife. Gacy was pleased. He said he had already given his fiancé an engagement ring.

When Lillie again saw her neighbor a few weeks later, he casually mentioned that he was going to take Carole to some party or business function.

"I thought you were engaged?" Lillie asked, puzzled.

"Oh, I kicked her out," Gacy said. "She was such a slob. She didn't even clean up after herself." The Grexas never saw the woman again. He told his friends, the Czarnas, that she had given his ring back before she left.

A similar motive for severing a relationship was cited when Zielinski once asked what had happened to a young man who had been living in Gacy's house, and suddenly wasn't seen there anymore. Gacy said he had evicted the boy because he was dirty and was drinking all the liquor in the house.

Gacy continued to see his former wife Carole for months after they broke up. The last time they were together was on Memorial Day, 1978, when they journeyed to Paddock Lake to visit some of his sister's in-laws. On his way to drive Carole home, they stopped at his house so he could show her how he had remodeled the kitchen. It looked good. But one thing about the kitchen bothered her.