When Gacy says that he knows nothing about the murders, it’s impossible to tell if he really has no memory of them or is just saying that he doesn’t. He says that twelve people—a cleaning woman, some friends, a bookkeeper, and some carpenters who worked for the small contracting company he owned—had keys to his house and could have buried bodies in the crawl space while he was travelling on business. All the murders took place in his house, nearly all between three and six in the morning. A neighbor said that now and then she heard screams from the house in the middle of the night; she called the police, but whenever they knocked on Gacy’s door he told them that nothing was wrong. They never heard anyone screaming. After Gacy was arrested, he said that he had paid a hundred and fifty boys for sex. Sometimes he only brought them to his house and took off his clothes and talked to them and gave them advice and drinks and something to eat. He killed the ones who raised their prices after striking an agreement, and those who he thought might tell his neighbors how he obtained his sexual satisfaction. Boys who seemed to feel bad about having had sex with him fell into the second category. The boy from the bus station was stabbed, the others were strangled. Some were hustlers from an area of Chicago called Bughouse Square, some worked for Gacy, and some had run away from home to Chicago and encountered Gacy and agreed to service him for money. Saying that he was going to show them a trick, he persuaded them to allow him to loop a rope around their necks. He tied three knots in the rope and inserted a stick between two of them, then tightened the noose by turning the stick. Once, as he was turning the stick the phone rang. When he left the room to answer it, the boy was still standing. The person on the other end of the line was a contractor calling about a job. Gacy discussed the job, and when he returned the boy was dead on the floor and had lost control of his bladder. A few times, Gacy killed two boys in one night. Sometimes he kept a boy’s corpse in his closet for a day before burying him. He poured acid on some of the corpses and lime on others, then buried them in graves about a foot deep. He buried one of the boys in his yard and another beneath the floor of his garage. The bodies in the crawl space were buried so close together that when the police dug up the first one they found the head of another at its feet. In some of the graves, the bodies were buried on top of each other. When no room was left in the crawl space, Gacy thought for a while about keeping corpses in his attic. The last four bodies he dropped at night off a bridge above the Des Plaines River, about seventy-five miles south of Chicago. He thought that one of the bodies might have landed on a barge. On the way to the bridge with a body in the trunk, he once picked up a hitchhiker. The hitchhiker said that he would exchange sex for money, but Gacy decided not to.
Gacy lives on death row at the Menard Correctional Center, near Chester, Illinois. Chester is on the Mississippi River, about eighty-five miles southeast of St. Louis. The part of the prison where Gacy is confined sits on a hill above the river, but he cannot see the river; he has no windows in his cell. He was thirty-six when he was arrested; he is fifty-two now. He is five feet eight and weighs two hundred and thirty pounds. Confinement has left his skin pale. His hair has turned white. His face is broad and round. He had a mustache when he was arrested, but he doesn’t anymore. His eyes are small and remote and measuring. His hands are delicate. He has no tattoos. The guards call him J.W. or John Wayne or Gacy or, sometimes, Chester Molester.
For twelve years following his conviction, while his lawyers filed appeals, Gacy said no to anyone who asked for an interview. The requests were constant. Oprah Winfrey sent a handwritten letter. So did Truman Capote. Two years ago, Gacy spoke with a television reporter from Chicago, and then fell silent again. His reticence has mainly to do with his feeling that the press has portrayed him as a monster, and that the bulk of what has been written and broadcast about him is “theory and fantasy.” He often says that he has “no ego for fame.” He is, however, by no means reclusive. Since he arrived at Menard, he has answered approximately twenty-seven thousand letters. He talks on the phone with a number of people, whom he calls collect, and he receives visitors more often than any other inmate of the prison. Some of the people who visit have written to him for a while and believe from the avuncular and benevolent tone he strives for in his letters that he cares about them; some are law students interested in his case; some are opponents of the death penalty; some believe that he is a great man; some are curious about him for sexual reasons; some feel themselves to be outcasts and think that they have something in common with him; some have read about him or seen his picture and believe that he resembles the sympathetic idea they have formed of him in their minds; and some think that he is innocent, and are trying to help him prove it.
Over the winter, I received a call from an acquaintance who said that Gacy was willing to be interviewed. She asked if I was interested, and I said I guessed so. What I hoped was that I would meet someone who had arrived by reflection at an acceptance of his past and was preparing to meet his end with dignity.
Visiting Gacy is like spending time with a person who is pretending to like you in order to separate you, violently, if necessary, from something you possess. A haughtiness in his manner suggests that he thinks he is smarter than anyone he is talking to, but it is unlikely that if he were not also capable of charm in the service of deception so many of those boys would have got into his car in the middle of the night. He appears to have no inner being. I often had the feeling that he was like an actor who had created a role and polished it so carefully that he had become the role and the role had become him. What personality he may once have had collapsed long ago and has been replaced by a catalogue of gestures and attitudes and portrayals of sanity. In support of his innocence, he often says things that are deranged in their logic, but he says them so calmly that he appears to be rational and reasonable. He has concealed the complexity of his character so assiduously that a person is left to imagine the part of him that carried out the murders. Three other killers had visitors on days when I was talking to Gacy, and they gave me an impression of anxiety and violence. Compared with them, Gacy seemed tranquil. If I saw him among a crowd, I might take him for a truck driver or an autoworker, or maybe the warden of a prison.
Talking to Gacy requires patience. He doesn’t listen to what you say, and consider it, and then respond. He merely defends himself. It is difficult to ask him a question that a detective or a prosecutor or a defense attorney or a psychiatrist has not already asked him and that he does not have an answer for. He goes over the same ground again and again. His voice rarely changes pitch; when he is excited, it is the result of uneasiness or apprehension, not enthusiasm. He is fond of the phrase “knowingly knew,” as in “He knowingly knew I was out of state at the time.” He uses it when he wishes to emphasize an injustice he believes he has suffered: “He knowingly knew I was innocent, but he still claimed I killed the boy.”
He seems to have no capacity for intimacy or friendship. Another person makes no impression on him at all. One day, he and I looked through a scrapbook of photographs. There were pictures of his father and mother, his two sisters, his two wives, his son, his daughter, and people who visit and write letters, but there was not a single image of anyone he described as a friend. He says that he has no friends in the prison, either. A doctor who interviewed him after he was arrested wrote that he “conducts his life as if he possessed a complete and sensitive emotional capacity, which he has not.”
After it had been arranged for me to visit Gacy, I began to feel obscurely anxious about what effect he might have on me. He struck me as someone who was overwhelmed by his interior life, and, since I have never felt anything like control over my own, I was afraid that spending time alone with him might cause something damaging to rise from my unconscious. The night before I met him, I dreamed, in a motel in Perryville, Missouri, that I was being chased at night across a desert by a huge hooded figure riding a black horse. The figure had a crossbow. Once I had met Gacy, I realized that I was nothing like him, and my fears subsided, but I continued to have dreams in which he seemed to figure as a violent and malevolent presence.
I saw Gacy on six occasions during February and March. Two visits lasted a little more than an hour, and the others lasted five or six hours—more time, he pointed out, than any other writer had ever spent with him. Occasionally, his company was so dreary that I would take off my watch, so I couldn’t see how slowly the time was passing. Now and then, he struck me as being like a boor you start a conversation with in a bar and then realize you can’t get rid of. Other times, the context of our conversation was so peculiar that I didn’t know how to respond. Gacy seemed unaware that he was in prison because he was a criminal. He seemed to think that I had come to see him because he was famous. I never had the feeling that he heard voices or saw things that I didn’t, but he was delusional in that he believed himself to be someone else: an innocent person. He seemed to feel that if he behaved as if he were, then I would have no choice except to take him as one.
If Gacy is executed on the tenth of May, he will die on the anniversary of the first time he was arrested—in 1968, for sodomy, in Waterloo, Iowa. He was twenty-six. He and his wife had moved to Waterloo not long after Gacy graduated from Kentucky Fried Chicken’s K.F.C. Chicken School, in Louisville. In Waterloo, Gacy helped run three Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises owned by his father-in-law.
The following account of Gacy’s background is based on conversations with Gacy and with his lawyers, and on his confessions, the records of his psychiatric interviews, newspaper stories, Gacy’s writings, his correspondence, the record of his trial, and the books “Buried Dreams,” by Tim Cahill, and “Killer Clown,” by Terry Sullivan. A grand jury in Black Hawk County heard testimony from two boys. One, a sophomore in high school, said that he had been spreading gravel in Gacy’s driveway the summer before when Gacy asked him into his house. Gacy’s wife was visiting friends in Illinois. Gacy showed him blue movies, then persuaded the boy to let Gacy go down on him. Then the boy did the same for Gacy. Gacy, he said, had also tried to bugger him. On a few occasions during the fall, Gacy paid him for sex.
The second boy washed floors and cleaned up in the kitchen at one of the restaurants, and sometimes he cooked. He said that after work one night Gacy offered to drive him home. They ended up at Gacy’s house. Gacy’s wife was in the hospital, giving birth to their second child. Gacy served the boy whiskey. They watched stag films, then Gacy attacked him and strangled him until he nearly passed out. When the boy revived, Gacy said that he hadn’t meant to hurt him. He drove him home, and a few days later he fired him.
Word of the boys’ stories spread through town in the days before the indictment was returned. The County Attorney’s office found other boys who said that they had been to Gacy’s house and that Gacy had asked them to go down on him or had tried to convince them to allow him to go down on them. Gacy asked to be given a lie-detector test, and he failed it. He asked to be given another, and he failed that one, too. In the County Attorney’s office, it was said that the only answer he got right was his name.
In August, 1968, Gacy engaged a high-school senior to intimidate the boy who had been spreading gravel, and keep him from testifying at his trial. The senior drove the younger boy into woods outside town and sprayed Mace in his eyes, then beat him up and told him not to testify. The boy broke free and hid in a cornfield. When he got back into town, he went to the police and gave them the name of his attacker. The senior told the police that Gacy had provided the Mace and had promised to pay off his car loan.
Gacy pleaded guilty to sodomy. He expected to receive probation and to be allowed to move back to Illinois. Instead, he got ten years at the Iowa State Reformatory for Men at Anamosa. The judge said that the severity of the sentence was intended to make certain that “for some period of time you cannot seek out teenage boys to solicit them for immoral behavior of any kind.” While Gacy was in the reformatory, his wife divorced him. His father died. Gacy wanted to attend the funeral, but the warden wouldn’t let him.
Gacy proved to be an exceptionally coöperative prisoner. After serving eighteen months of his sentence, he was paroled, in June of 1970, and went to Chicago. There he moved into his mother’s apartment and got a job in a restaurant as a cook. He often told people he met there that his ex-wife was the daughter of Colonel Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
When Gacy was a child, his father spent hours by himself in the basement of the house where they were living, in Chicago. His wife and son and two daughters were prohibited from going down there. Through the floor they sometimes heard him talking in different voices. When he emerged, he was often drunk and likely to be violent. One evening, he struck his wife so hard that he knocked out some of her teeth, and then he chased her into the street and beat her some more.
As a teen-ager, Gacy was preoccupied with his health. He had fainting spells, and he believed that he was born with a defective heart. He was not particularly attracted to girls. He considered becoming a priest. His father thought that he was effeminate. Occasionally, late at night, Gacy would have thoughts of embracing his friends. He believed that his father could tell what he was thinking. When Gacy was arrested for the murders, his mother told the police that if her husband had known that his son had had sex with men he would have killed him.
Gacy ran away from home when he was twenty. He wrote the following account, for his own purposes, a few years ago. It is part of a manuscript composed of a series of entries, usually a page or two long, but sometimes longer, covering nearly every year of his life. He gave it to me one day as I was leaving the prison. I have made a very few changes for the sake of clarity.
“In the first three months of 1962, I hadn’t been working and I had my dad on my back about everything. There wasn’t nothing I could do that was right to him. I had to pay him $100.00 a month as part of the money he put up so that I could get a car and by March I had fallen one payment behind. By April, he was threatening to take away the car, so on the sixth or ninth of April, I decided to run away. I knew I had a cousin out west; the last known place where she lived was Las Vegas. She was a high priced hooker, not married but with a child. She had run away from home two years before me. Uncle Ray made an attempt to talk her into coming back by making a trip out there, but she refused, since she enjoyed what she was doing and had a home of her own, with a maid. She became the black sheep of the family. In any case, I watched enough TV to know that Route 66 went out west, and that’s all I had going for me when I left.
“One morning after everyone was gone from the house, I loaded the car with the personal things that I was going to take with me. Then the phone rang—mother was calling, to ask me to pick her up from work at noon, as she wasn’t feeling well. I went out to Dor-O-Matic and brought her home, dropped her off and told her I was going to get the car gassed up. Then I just left. Irving Park to the Tollway, then south to Route 66, towards Springfield, Illinois. That first evening I got as far as 100 miles north of St. Louis. I pulled over to the rest area and slept in the car. The next morning, I took off across the rest of Illinois, all of Missouri, stopping to see some caves on the way, then the southeast corner of Kansas and into Oklahoma, where I spent the night in a motel. I had to watch my money, as I left home with $136.00, all I had to my name. The next morning west out of Oklahoma City, down 66 across Texas, upper part, to New Mexico. I stopped for the night in Albuquerque, again sleeping in a motel. Then across the rest of New Mexico, into Arizona, through Kingman, and on to Nevada. By late afternoon I hit Hoover Dam and was in time to go on the last tour of the day. After that Las Vegas. It’s a great sight to see all those lights coming in from off the plains. There were so many motels. I couldn’t believe it.
“I was so tired from the driving all I could think of was finding a place to shower and go to bed. I paid for one night at a place, and it left me just a little more than $35.00. I woke around noon, checked out, and went sightseeing, ending up in a downtown casino. Whereby, I went through $25.00 with no luck on my side. In three short hours, I had gone through two-thirds of all I had. I walked to my car, which was parked in the sun. Of course, coming from Chicago, I had the windows up and no way for the air to get out. I had a lot on my mind, wondering what I was going to do next, where could I get more money, wondering what was going on at home, since this was the first time I had thought of my family since leaving three days before. I got in the car, closed the door, and just sat there with the windows up; the heat got to me so fast I didn’t know that I had passed out. The next thing I remember was a police officer pulling me out of the car, and hearing an ambulance coming up the street. I kept saying that I was all right, but he said that I had to go to the hospital (another expense I did not need). I told the doctors I didn’t have any money, couldn’t afford it, but they said the county would pay their bill. The ambulance ride cost $34.00 and wasn’t covered. I got back to my car around 10 that night, had about $7.00 to my name, so drove north out to the desert, pulled off the road, and sleeping in the car again.
“Next morning I stopped in a gas station and after cleaning up in the rest room got a city map, as I wanted to know where the ambulance company was. I had decided I would just go and be honest, telling the owner I would work it off, had no money. I went into the office and told him my problem and that I would wash his ambulances, or anything else he wanted to pay the bill. He said that he liked my honesty and wondered if I would want a steady job. I told him I would, but had no place to stay. He said I could grab one of the bunks in the ambulance room. I agreed and had a job.
“The first day off I got, I found my cousin’s name in the phone book and went looking for her. The third time I went to her house, I happened to pull up just as she was just going into her driveway. She was surprised to see me and asked me in. She talked honest and frank about her business in front of the maid and her little girl. She talked about the money, $200 a trick, and wondered if I was offended by what she was doing. I told her, hell it was her body and I guess she could do what she wanted. She had a new home, new Cadillac convertible, a maid full time, and she would get up at noon and have breakfast. It was a new enlightenment to me, so open about sexual conversation, as if nothing was wrong with anything. She worshipped the child and wanted the best of everything for her, and by the way she was living was doing all right. I would meet many of her friends, and she said that she would fix me up with any of them I wanted, meaning sexually, but I turned her down. I told her I would find my own. I felt funny doing that with her knowing.
“After working nearly two months, I was told that I would have to get a work card, since the ambulance company had city contracts. In order to get a work card in Las Vegas you have to be 21, I was not. The owner said that he thought he had a job for me at a mortuary, being their night man and picking up remains from the hospital and sometimes from the homes.
“Again I was able to live right there. The room where I stayed was known as the call room, right next to the embalming room. During May the mortuary had 86 funerals and over two months I was pall-bearer for some 75, never knowing the person or family.”
Gacy told me that he grew homesick and went back to Illinois in the beginning of July. Other accounts say that one night in the mortuary he climbed into a coffin containing the body of a boy whose manner of death had left him with an erection, and arranged the body on top of him. He grew frightened and jumped out and, the next day, called his mother and asked if she thought that his father would allow him to come home.
In Chicago, Gacy took classes at a business college. Then he got a job as a shoe salesman. The company he worked for sent him to Springfield, Illinois, to superintend the sale of its shoes in a department store. He traded shoes for clothes with salesmen who came into the store. “The Jockey man would come in and get a pair of $40 shoes at cost,” Gacy wrote in a letter he gave me a copy of. “I would get a dozen briefs and Jockey T-shirts, sometimes more. It was the same with shirts, nothing but the best. Manhattan french cuff white shirts, some silk, some the finest cotton Van Heusen shirts the same way—shoes for shirts. . . . You talk about men’s jewelry, hell again I had the best of Swank cuff links, tie pins. I had a collection of stones of the world in cuff links. I liked large flashy cuff links, as women would always remark about my dress. Psychologically, I got recognition from the customers, always remarking about my cuff links, or ties, and never the same. I enjoyed the attention . . . and it made a good impression on the customer, not only would they know I was the manager, but just by looking at me, you knew I had to be the boss. . . . I dressed and looked like an owner or a millionaire even when I was young. . . . I never wore brown because a man from Hart Shaffner and Marx said I didn’t look good in brown. . . . I liked rich dark blues, blacks, burgundy, grays, olives; some wool but I stayed with shark skins and silks because of the richness.”
In Springfield, he lived with an aunt and uncle. He met Marlynn Myers, and they married in September of 1964. Around that time, he had his first homosexual experience. He was drinking at a friend’s house and he passed out, and when he woke up the friend had Gacy’s penis in his mouth. Gacy felt that he couldn’t ask the man to stop, and, besides, he enjoyed it. For months, though, recalling the experience depressed him.
In February of 1971, eight months after Gacy was released from the reformatory, a boy in Chicago told the police that Gacy had picked him up and tried to force him to have sex. Gacy was arrested for assault. He said that the boy had been hitchhiking and had propositioned him and that he had thrown him out of the car. In any case, the boy did not show up to testify. The charges were dropped; the parole board in Iowa never learned of them.
While cooking at the restaurant, Gacy double-jobbed at painting and renovation, mostly for people who lived in his mother’s building and occasionally for people he met at the restaurant’s bar. He and his mother came up with a name for his sideline: P.D.M. Contractors, for Painting, Decorating, and Maintenance. He needed a place to store the lumber and paint cans and ladders he used, and his mother’s apartment was too small. She sold the apartment, and she and John bought a house on West Summerdale Avenue, in Norwood Park, a suburb near the airport. They moved in during August of 1971.
The first boy Gacy killed was the boy he picked up at the Greyhound bus station during January of 1972 and brought back to the house. His mother was spending the night at her sister’s. He made the boy a few drinks with grain alcohol. He and the boy went down on each other, then the two of them went to sleep, in separate rooms. Early in the morning, he woke and saw the boy in the doorway of his room with a kitchen knife in one hand. Gacy charged the boy. They wrestled. Gacy got control of the knife and stabbed him several times. For a while, the boy made a sound as though he had fluid in his windpipe. Gacy left the room and did not go back until the sound had stopped. He dumped the body into the crawl space through a trapdoor in the floor of his closet, and a few days later he buried the boy there. For years after Gacy’s arrest, no one learned the boy’s name. Whenever the police spoke of him, they referred to him as the Greyhound Bus Boy.
In July of 1972, Gacy married Carol Hoff. As a teen-ager, Carol had been a friend of Gacy’s sister Karen and had often been at the Gacys’ house. She and Gacy had gone on a date when she was sixteen. Carol felt that Gacy was like a brother. Toward the end of 1971, after Carol and her husband divorced, she often visited Gacy and his mother. Gacy was kind to her two daughters, and she liked listening to him talk. When Gacy’s mother heard that Carol was having trouble paying her rent, she suggested that Carol and her daughters move in with her and John. Before Carol and John were married, he told her about the trouble he had been in back in Iowa, and he also told her that he was bisexual, but she thought he was kidding. A few months before the wedding, Gacy’s mother rented an apartment and moved out of the house.
Carol and John were married on the first of July. Nine days earlier, Gacy had been arrested again. Somehow, he must have kept her from knowing about it, or convinced her that it was a mistake and he was innocent. The police said he had told a boy that he was a deputy sheriff and ordered the boy into his car. He forced the boy to go down on him. Afterward, the boy jumped out of the car, and Gacy tried to run him over. For some reason, the charges were dropped.
Throughout the summer of 1972, Carol noticed a smell that seemed to come from something decaying in the crawl space. In a back room was a swarm of flies, which she thought might be feeding on whatever was down there—maybe dead mice. Gacy said the odor was the result of a runoff from a broken sewer pipe, and he spread lime in the crawl space to try and control it, but the odor got worse. Carol left on a trip, and when she got back Gacy told her that he had poured concrete over a section of the crawl space to get rid of the smell. The flies disappeared, but the smell remained, only fainter. Sometimes she saw Gacy drop into the crawl space carrying a fifty-pound bag of lime, to spread over the damp ground.
In the summer of 1973, Gacy took over the garage for his contracting business and told his wife and stepdaughters to stay out of it. He was often gone most of the night. When Carol asked where he had been, he said visiting stores and construction sites that he hoped to bid on, and talking to people about work he might do. Late at night, he said, he could see more places and have more conversations than he was able to during the day. Beneath the sink in the kitchen, Carol found some magazines featuring naked men. One of the pictures was of a young man who appeared to have blood on his body. She and John made love less and less often and finally not at all.
Early in 1975, Gacy’s mother moved to Arkansas, to live with her daughter. During the summer, she broke her hip, and Carol went out there to help care for her. While she was away, Gacy strangled a boy who worked for him and buried him beneath the floor of his garage. In October, Carol told John that she wanted a divorce. They lived together, though, until the following February. Gacy had continued to pick up boys and pay them for sex, but he did not kill any of them until April. By the end of 1976, he had killed six more.
Around this time, Gacy began performing at hospitals and parades and store openings as Pogo, a clown. Pogo had a white face, bat-shaped red lips, and wide blue eyes in the shape of beehives. “I took up the name Pogo,” Gacy wrote in the account he gave me, “and the reason was based on, one, that I was Polish, so that’s where the Po, for Poles, and since I was on the go all the time, I took go and added it to it.”
In 1977, Gacy was briefly engaged. His fiancée moved into his house in April. They argued often, though, and after a few months he told her he was leaving for a week on business and wanted her gone by the time he got back.
In January of 1978, a nineteen-year-old boy told the police in Cook County that he had been walking a little after midnight when Gacy pulled his car to the curb in front of him. Gacy pointed a gun at him and said he was a cop, and told him to get into the car. Then he handcuffed him. At his house, Gacy raped the boy. He held a gun in front of his face and, spinning the chambers as if he were playing Russian roulette, pulled the trigger a number of times before a blank cartridge fired. He caused the boy to lose consciousness several times by choking him and by holding his head under water in the bathtub. The boy said that he had been in such pain that he begged to be killed. In the morning, Gacy drove him to work. Gacy told the policeman who arrested him—for kidnapping and deviate sexual assault—that he had picked up the boy and made a deal for sadomasochistic sex. He implied that the boy had gone to the police because he had not paid him. The assistant State’s Attorney decided that in court Gacy would appear more believable than the boy, and the charges were dropped.
In May, a civil warrant was issued for Gacy. A twenty-six-year-old man said that Gacy had offered him a ride to a bar. As he was driving, Gacy suddenly covered the man’s face with a rag soaked in chloroform, and the man passed out. He said that Gacy took him home and tortured and raped him for several hours, while he drifted in and out of consciousness. He woke the next morning at the base of a statue in a park near where he’d been picked up. His pants were unzipped, his rectum was bleeding, and his face was burned from the chloroform. In the hospital, he learned that the anesthetic had worked severe damage on his liver. The man identified Gacy’s picture among a collection the police showed him, but the police didn’t pursue a charge. Gacy settled with the man for three thousand dollars.
No one testified that they had ever seen Gacy with any of the boys he was about to kill. Since most of their bodies were under his house, no one could be sure what had happened to them. On the few occasions when a parent reported to the police that his son was missing, and said that the boy had a job with a contractor named Gacy, the police would visit the Summerdale house, and Gacy would shrug and say that he would do anything he could to help but he hadn’t seen the kid for several weeks. Runaways are what the police assumed they were dealing with. Gacy was finally caught when he killed a boy who had told someone that he was on his way to see Gacy about a job. This was on the evening of December 11, 1978. When the boy didn’t come home—it was his mother’s birthday, and the family had planned a party—the police turned their attention to Gacy. Eventually, they got a warrant to search his house. While one of the policemen was using the bathroom, the hot-air furnace forced air from the crawl space through the room’s heating vent. A day or so later, it was borne in on the policeman that the smell was the same as the one he recalled from the morgue.
Of the thirty-three boys Gacy is convicted of killing, only twenty-four were identified. The names of some became known from dental records brought to the police by parents who had heard about the excavation and thought that their son who was missing might have crossed paths with Gacy. The nine boys who were unidentified were buried in various cemeteries under headstones with the inscription “We Are Remembered.”
In June of 1978, Gacy was found to be syphilitic. Not long before, he’d had the idea that he would fill in the crawl space completely with concrete, and that he and Carol could get back together and leave Chicago for a small town where he could open a fried-chicken franchise. One night, a few days after his arrest, he wrote a letter to his mother and family that began, “Please forgive me for what I am about to tell you. I have been very sick for a long time.”
At night, I would take Gacy’s manuscript to the Park-Et Restaurant, in Perryville, and sit in a booth and drink coffee and eat pie and read. Here is the first of two entries concerning his childhood:
“Background incident, age 5, John W. Gacy, sexual bewilderment, 1947.
“Back then, in the summer, after dad was off to work, and mother had things in order at the house she would visit some of the neighborhood woman friends with children. Anyway, this particular time we had all went down to another family’s house which was in the next block south on Opal. We would usually stay for lunch, and get back home by 3 pm.
“The family’s kids were all older than the three of us, and except for two which were our age. From what I could remember several of their children were slow learners, and one was mental retarded, so she stayed close to home. While the rest of the kids were either playing or taking a nap after lunch, this older girl said that she would watch over me and we went upstairs. She was mentally retarded, and 15 at the time. While playing house in one of the bedrooms she took off all my clothes and was fondling me and tickling me, me being too young to know what was going on. Downstairs, both their mother and Mom thought that the kids were too quiet and went to investigate, and starting to account for them. When they came upstairs, walked into the room where we were, they saw her playing with my ding a ling. And their mother while yelling came in and grabbed the girl, and hit her several times, while yelling about what she was up to. My mother came over to me, asked me what I was doing with my clothes off or something to that nature, and got me dressed and took me downstairs. I was scared, as I thought that I would get hit too. I was told not to be taking my clothes off with girls and to sit down there by them until they left. I had told them that the girl said it was all right for her to take my clothes off.
“While I never did understand what we were doing that was so wrong at the time, it left a profound feeling on me in my thinking about taking off clothes in front of others, even my sisters, thinking that I was going to get hit for doing it. As at the time I was told that what we were doing was dirty and wrong. I think now all it was was curiosity, me not knowing, and her for her age, even being retarded.”
The second entry reads:
“1950, age 8, Sexual incident with contractor.
“In the late spring of 1950, we lived at 3536 North Opal, in Chicago, Ill., at that time there was an empty lot next door on the right. And word was that a new house was to be built. After the foundation was poured, a contractor came around and was looking at the lot, since it was a Saturday my dad was in the yard trimming hedges. The contractor spoke with my dad and one thing led to another and dad offered him a beer, and they sat in our yard and talked. Mother came out so he met her too. I was playing in the yard, and was interested in the conversation about building. Several weeks passed, and the contractor was back to see how progress was going on his building (weekday). He seen me in the yard as we kids were home for spring vacation. He asked me if I would like to go and see some other building sites, and have some ice cream. I asked mom and she said it was alright. (I must add at the first visit with my parents, they talked about wrestling on TV.) I went with the man in his car and after the second stop, he asked me if I had seen last week’s wrestling show, I said yes, and then he said that he wanted to show me a new hold in the car. He moved out from behind the steering wheel, closer to me, and told me to bend down and put my head under his leg, which I did, he held me between his legs for several minutes, tightly so that I could not move, and in fact I had tears in my eyes. When he seen that, he let me go, and said let’s go get that ice cream I told you about. After that I returned home, never mentioning anything about it. Couple weeks went by, he came back, seen me and asked if I would like to go again with him to get ice cream, again went. After several stops he was talking about wrestling, and again he wants to show me a new hold, so we did it again in the car, only it was the same hold, with a little more grabbing of me between the legs. Ice cream again and I was dropped off at the house. After a fourth time of the same thing each time when I seen him coming down the street, I ran and hid from him. Later mother in the yard told me that the contractor was looking for me. I told her I didn’t like that man, and didn’t want to go with him. She said he wanted to take me for ice cream for watching over his building. I told her I didn’t care. When my dad came home that night, mom told him what happen, and dad came to me and asked me about it. I told him what was happening each time, and he told me that he didn’t want me going with him no more. The next time he came around on a Saturday, my dad was home, I stayed in the house. Dad went over and talked with him, and from what I can understand from hearsay, Dad told this man to stay away from me or he would call the police. With that he was around a few more times to see his building finished, but never came near our house again. That’s all that happen, but I have never forgotten it from the age of 8 ½. I still remember the man wasn’t too tall, middle aged, semi bald, dark heavy glasses, with a mustache, a little over weight, two door car, light blue, I think it was a new Chevy, it was newer than my dad’s, as in 1950 he had a 46 Chevrolet four door.”
Gacy and I would meet in the prison in a room that was small and had no windows. Against one wall were a table with a Formica top and three chairs. On the other side of the wall was death row. To arrive at the room, I would first take off my shoes and my coat and pass them across a counter to a guard, who put them in an X-ray machine. I asked him if anything interesting had ever appeared on the screen, and he said not really, but that he was hoping to find a cat to examine. Nothing can be taken into the prison except twenty-five dollars, to buy food from the vending machines in the visitors’ lounge, so I would empty my pockets of everything. Then I would be patted down, and then I would walk through a metal detector. The metal detector was sensitive enough so that one morning it registered the metal in the buttons on the fly of my bluejeans; to get into the prison that day, I had to drive to the Dollar Store in Chester, and sit around in the parking lot waiting for it to open, then buy a pair of sweatpants. Sometimes other visitors arrived at the same time I did, and we were signed in and searched and taken into the prison together. One day, I went in with a short, heavy woman making a sympathy call on behalf of a local church. The next time, I went in with a tall, thin man wearing glasses. While we were waiting for a door to be unlocked, I asked if he had a ministry of some kind. “I know the Lord,” he said, “but I don’t have a ministry.” He asked if I knew the Lord, and I said, “Not as well as you appear to,” and he said, “Yeah, I guess I should be more humble.”
That day, Gacy said, “I go to bed and say three Hail Marys and the Our Father. I dream about the life I used to have. I dream about being in construction. I dreamt one night that my daughter was getting married and of all the things that I would do for her. For a while, I would tape newspaper pictures of the victims to the wall beside my bed and go to sleep seeing if I would dream about them or if I could recall if I ever met them. I would look at them and say, ‘Who the hell are you, and how did you die?’ I don’t have fantasy-type dreams, and I don’t ever have nightmares.
“I arrived here March 14, 1980, nine-fifteen in the evening, with a five-car caravan and a helicopter overhead. (You can move your chair over here, I won’t bite you.) State car in front, I’m in a van, and then there’s another state car behind me. Both cars had Thompson machine guns. I didn’t see them—this is from what I was told, maybe to scare me. Behind us was two troopers’ cars, and the whole caravan doing seventy-five down Interstate 55 from Chicago. Instead of pulling into the prison where I thought they would, they turn off the lights and go down this gravel road. And I’m thinking, Oh, no, they’re going to kill me now. But they brought me around to the back of the prison. They couldn’t bring me in the front, because there was a whole stack of reporters. And there were a whole bunch down at the main prison, too, because they were waiting for me there, also.
“I’m the first man to arrive on death row at Menard. I opened the place up. There was nobody else here. Now there’s sixty-one of us, twelve on my cell block—three black and nine white. At the time, there was nineteen men on death row in Stateville, the other prison in Illinois where they have executions. The State decided that the first guy who got the death penalty after the beginning of the year in 1980 they were going to send here, and that was me. When they brought me down here, the press came out with how I was scared to be with the prison population, so they put me here by myself. Like the State was going to be concerned with my feelings.
“I was greeted by the warden and the assistant warden, who’s a big monster dude. They walked me up to the third floor and marched me down the tier to the last cell. Not a sound in the place except what the chains on my feet were making. Everyone had white shirts. I didn’t even see any gray shirts until the second week. Everyone had white shirts, because they were all lieutenants. I was supposed to be superhuman—I was supposed to be some kind of monster—so they gave me all lieutenants.
“The first thing one of them did was bring me two ham sandwiches, an apple, and a pitcher of orange juice, because I had been on the road all day and hadn’t had anything to eat.
“They assigned a guard to watch me, because I’m the only one here. Every fifteen minutes, he has to write down what I’m doing—Gacy’s on the toilet, Gacy’s lying down, Gacy’s pacing the floor, talking to an officer, Warden So-and-So was here. Every time somebody came near the cell, he had to make a note. How’d you like to have that job? Some people would just come by and look at me. They wouldn’t say that—they’d pretend they were giving a tour or had to check on something—but there’s only nine other cells and they were empty, and I’m in the tenth one down at the end of the hallway, and they walk all the way down there, what the hell you think they were looking for? They wanted to see what Gacy looked like. Three times a week, they’d put handcuffs on me and walk me down to the shower with a towel around my waist.
“Prison life has been the doldrums, same goddam thing day after day. You can have a cell six and a half by seven and a half, which has a window, so you can see the barges going up and down the river, but you only get let out an hour a day, or you can have a cell eight by nine, with no window, and you are let out only three days a week but three hours at a time. I have one of the larger cells, so no window. I don’t know if it’s night or day. I can’t tell you if it’s raining. Being in prison is like being in Las Vegas, where you’re gambling and you don’t know what’s going on outside. I was a workaholic outside anyway, so time meant nothing to me then, either.
“I go to bed late—two-thirty, three o’clock, four. I get up at five and look at the food they’re serving for breakfast—who the hell wants to eat at five in the morning? I don’t sleep much. I like to make my time work for me. I don’t believe in that macho thing of lifting weights and getting all muscular—I’ve got strong legs and a tight ass, and I carry all my weight on my chest and in front of me. When I get out of my cell, I go to the rec room and play cards. Otherwise, I answer my mail. Personally, if I was on the outside I’d never write someone in prison. I’ve had people send me paintings of clowns, figurines of devils, T-shirts—all declined. You’re not allowed to receive anything except books, but no novels on homosexuality, bestiality, or incest. They say it stimulates you. They allow photo books like Penthouse and Playboy, they show lesbian films on the late-night in-house channel—two women getting it on, that’s not supposed to incite you. The other stuff, I guess they think it might incite you to attack guards. We’re not on the farm down here, so I can’t understand where the bestiality comes in.
“When I first walked in here, I was scared to death. I didn’t know how to think like a con: it wasn’t part of my nature, and I still can’t do it. I didn’t realize men could be bitches. Women sit at home and gossip, but in prison I’ve learned that as soon as you walk away they’ll talk about you. Everybody who doesn’t say a word when you’re standing there will put in his two cents when you’re gone. They get bigger balls when you’re not around.
“If somebody threatens you, that’s not the guy you have to worry about, because he’s warning you—it’s the rattlesnake theory. The guy who’s dangerous is the one who asks about some small thing he heard you told someone, and you say you don’t know what he means, and he says, ‘You’re lying to me, you’re making me look like a fool.’ Now you’re in trouble. People say the worst weapon in prison is a homemade shank. That’s not the worst weapon in prison. You know what the worst weapon is in prison? A pen. Or a regular No. 2 lead pencil. You got one of those, you hear someone’s got a visit, you arrange to have a visitor at the same time. We could be friendly, he could have his arm around my shoulder, we’re talking, and he jabs me in the eye and says, ‘That’s for stealing my pack of cigarettes two months ago.’ The other day, we were playing cards during rec time. One of the guys at the table got up to get something. A few days before, another guy had overheard him make some remark about him in the cells. He came up now and said, ‘What you say about me, motherfucker?’ and beat him and slapped him around and kicked him until he felt he had had enough, and meanwhile another guy just sat down at his place at the card table and everyone looked out the window. Then somebody said, ‘Your deal.’ When the guards asked the guy who had got beat what had happened, he said he slipped on a wet place on the floor. Even if someone came in now and stabbed you while we’re talking, even if the security camera above us showed me looking straight at you, no way I would ever say I saw anything. ‘I don’t know, it all happened so fast, I didn’t see nothing,’ I’d say.
“Down in the Pit, the main part of the prison, you’re on tiers, and, even though you’re assigned a cell and don’t come out, it’s gang territory. They’ll take everything you got, and when you’re out of everything they’ll say you got to pay them rent. They know you have money, because they know what you have on account at the commissary. And even if you’re in for just, say, car theft—a year and a half, simple—they’ll rape you, do all kinds of things to degrade you, and you might think you’ll fight off one guy, but how you going to fight off three or four? They’ll have you giving blow jobs up one side of the tier and down the other. You’ve only got a year and a half to serve, but you’re not going to let yourself get killed over something like that—you have to put up with it. Sooner or later, you’ll have to give it up. When I got here, my attorneys said it would take three years for an appeal, and I said, ‘I don’t know if I can take it.’ ”
Gacy insists that he never confessed to the murders. He has written an account of his trial, called “A Question of Doubt,” which has been privately published. In it he says that there are two sides to every story. He describes himself as “the thirty-fourth victim.” After he finished “A Question of Doubt,” he wrote a manuscript called “A Questionable Case and Conviction,” which contains his answers to a hundred and forty-seven questions. Toward the beginning of the manuscript he writes:
It is true that there is no copy of Gacy’s confession. The State’s Attorney decided that he would not have the confession taken down by a court reporter; doing so might have offered Gacy the opportunity to put on record aspects of the murders which he might call on in his defense. Also, the police were afraid that Gacy might become uneasy at the sight of a tape recorder or someone taking notes, and stop talking. His confession exists only in the form of accounts the officers wrote afterward of what they heard Gacy say.
A signal document of Gacy’s claim of innocence is the Victims Book, a collection of newspaper stories, interviews, photographs, and legal papers. A few years ago, Gacy began exchanging letters with a man, who has asked me not to use his name, because he is still gathering information and doesn’t want to alert the people who are the subject of his interest; I will call him Chris Lewis. Gacy wrote Lewis that he didn’t know who had murdered thirty-two of the boys he had been convicted of killing, nor did he know who most of the boys were or where they had come from.
“I wanted to know who the hell these guys were,” Gacy says, “because, keep it in mind, at the trial they were all Boy Scouts and altar boys, and I was the monster that came along and swatted them like flies. Jesus, I didn’t even want to run into myself the way they described me.
“My idea is, if I didn’t kill them, and I had no knowledge of them, then who did they know? If I didn’t do the murders, then we have to find out who did them by finding out about the victims and cross-referencing them. Did any of them know each other? If you can’t find the who, what, and why, where are you going to go with it?”
Every time Lewis found the name of a relative of one of the victims, or someone who knew one of them, he wrote to the person or called him. When he learned of a place where one of the boys had worked, or a club where he was known, he went and took a photograph of it. The information he has collected he put between the covers of a folder, and then gave a copy of the folder to Gacy. It is now larger than the Manhattan telephone book. On the cover are the words
Victims
Research
Confidential
The Victims Book has thirty-three sections, one for each victim; the victims are numbered according to the order in which their bodies were discovered. When Gacy leafs through the book, he refers to the victims as “Boy No. 12” or as “Victim No. 26” or as “Body No. 7.” He never refers to the victims by name.
Each section begins with a photograph of the boy. In some cases, the photograph portrays the reconstruction that the police made of the victim’s face from the structure of his skull. Beneath the picture is a description of how he was killed and where his body was found. In at least one case, there is an autopsy report. Then there is a description of what Lewis has been able to learn about the boy’s past. He has included photographs and excerpts from the high-school yearbooks of some of the victims. One entry includes the names of pets that the boy’s family owned. There is a color photograph of the house or apartment building where a victim lived, and in many cases there are color photographs of the graves. “We know where they lived,” Gacy said, “and we know where they are now.” There are newspaper pictures of the parents of some of the boys, and in one case there’s a story about how the murder of their son caused a couple’s marriage to dissolve. A hand-drawn design in the form of a red spoked wheel on the first page of a boy’s report means that Gacy was out of town on the day the authorities selected as the approximate one on which the murder took place.
The Victims Book includes charts labelled “Victims Calendar Breakdown.” The charts record the days of the week on which the boys disappeared. They are compared with days when Gacy was out of town. When Gacy explained the charts to me, he began speaking of himself in the third person. “Gacy went out of town,” he said. “When did Gacy leave? Gacy generally went out of town on a Sunday.”
When some of the families found out that Gacy was collecting information about them, they were indignant.
One day, Gacy placed the book between us on the table. When I asked if I could look at it, a smile crossed his face and he said, “If you’re so interested, maybe we’ll have to save this for later.” He started to put the book aside, but then he gave it to me. “This isn’t a toy,” he said as I opened it. “This is years of solid research, chasing down leads. Everybody wants this. I’m not leaving it to anybody. I’m giving it to my sister with instructions to destroy it.”
He went on, “People ask what would I do if I got free, and I tell them I’m still obsessed with this case. They say, ‘What the hell, why do you care what happened to them?’ and I say, ‘Because I want to know what happened as much as anyone else. If I don’t get justice, then how will the victims?’ ”
When I had read some of the entries, Gacy said, “How can a guy who is family-oriented kill somebody, anyway? There’s no motive here. I figured if I was going to be put to death for killing somebody I’d like to know something about them, thus we did the research. God damn, if you’re going to kill me, let me know what it’s for. Even if I didn’t kill somebody, I want to know what the hell happened. If I’m going to kill somebody, why did I kill them? The why, the when, and the how. What happened on Summerdale? Right now, we don’t know what happened on Summerdale.”
In assembling the book, Chris Lewis turned up a coincidence that Gacy believes proves he is innocent. Gacy mainly suspects two young men who worked for him, David Cram and Michael Rossi, of killing the boys and burying their bodies under his house. Cram and Rossi were questioned by the police when Gacy was arrested, but the police found no reason to believe that they had taken part in Gacy’s crimes. In 1977, Cram and Rossi had asked Gacy to hire a friend, a young man I’ll call Tom Peters. (Lewis asked me not to use his real name.) Peters had an alliance with a man I will call Lester Tompkins, who operated a business that supplied boys to older men. Lewis says that Tompkins is now in prison in Colorado for molesting a child. Gacy says that the boys were killed because they were members of Tompkins’ prostitution ring and wanted to quit, or had become involved in drug deals that soured. He says that movies were made of some of their murders. It does not seem to occur to him that Peters was hired after a number of the boys had already been killed.
Before I met Gacy, I exchanged a couple of letters with him. He asked me to fill out a form he had drawn up. The form had “Bio Review” written at the top of the page, and underneath were questions asking where did I live and was I married, did I have brothers and sisters, and what kind of car did I drive. Then there were questions such as “Childhood Hero,” “Most Treasured Honor,” “Favorite Song,” “Favorite Singers,” “Perfect Woman or Man,” “Nobody Knows I’m . . . ,” “I View Myself As . . . ,” “Friends Like Me Because . . . ,” “If I Were an Animal I’d Be . . . ,” “Behind My Back They Say . . . ,” “I Consider Myself (Conservative, Moderate, Liberal),” and “Thoughts on Sex.”
He mailed me a copy of his answers:
In the prison, on the first day, he had my answers in front of him. I had written that I considered myself liberal.
“How liberal?” he asked.
I assumed he was asking about my political views, but I wasn’t sure. I said, “What do you mean?”
“Any homosexual experience?” he asked. “None as a child? No fondling? You have any brothers? Three? Nothing there? No masturbation? No circle jerking? What about when you were in school? Gym class? Anything in the showers? You ever see other boys naked? I didn’t. I never took gym classes, because of my health, so I never saw boys naked. No ever thinking about men when you masturbate? Nothing? You never get hit on? What did you say when that happened? You never took anyone up on it? Never? Not even once? Damn, I hate these handcuffs; I’m used to talking with my hands. I’ve been married twice, engaged two other times, and shacked up a few times, but they always try to portray me as homosexual. I’m bisexual. I never turned down a chance to take part in a threesome, and I never passed up the opportunity to get a blow job, but no man has ever got anything from me above the waist. So why do they call me a homosexual? I think sex is overrated. My mother told me about sex, my father never did. She said try to make it an act of love and never force yourself on anyone. And I never have.”
Another day: “I was stabbed on February 12, 1983,” Gacy said. “By Henry Brisbon, the I-57 killer. He killed a number of couples on the interstate—shoot the man and take the woman into the woods and rape her, then shoot her, too—then he killed another inmate, so they gave him the death sentence.
“Henry was going to the law library with two or three other guys, and he got out of his cuffs. You used to be able to take a pop-top from a soda can and file it down so it fit into the keyhole of the cuffs. He was on the first floor and he pushed the guards out of the way and went running up to the third floor and down the tier and stabbed this inmate he had a grudge with. He had taken the bar off a typewriter that holds the paper in place and sharpened it. Then he took a swipe at the officer on the tier. I was on the second floor, picking up trash, for my work. Henry came down the stairs and ran into three officers and he said, ‘You can move, or get stabbed, your choice’—Henry’s a bodybuilder—and they backed away, so he came running toward me through the tier. He and I had just been talking about betting on a football game fifteen minutes before. He pushed me up against the wall, and when he did he hit me on my arm with the shank. Then he ran over to one of his buddies and said, ‘Get rid of this.’ They never did find the weapon. Meanwhile, I was kind of sliding down the wall, because I was off balance, and one of the other inmates standing there said, ‘John, you’re bleeding.’
“The newspapers made it up like it was something between me and Henry, him making some kind of statement about my case. Within two months after, though, him and me were talking. He said, ‘You know, John, I never meant to stab you.’ I was an afterthought. But it taught me never to trust these guys.
“Last time I seen Henry was 1988. I don’t know what they did with him, if he’s dead or still in prison. They took him somewhere else, I know that.”
Gacy turned then to look at a black man in leg irons and handcuffs being led past the door of our room.
“That looks like Henry now,” he said.
“Bring me some of those prison cigarettes,” the man said to a guard. (One of the industries at Menard is making cigarettes sold in the prison.) “I don’t want no menthol, now. I want the kind with the red label. Hurry up.”
“That is Henry,” Gacy said.
He looked down at the table and shook his head. Then he raised his voice and said, “Henry, where you been?”
“I was up north enjoying myself,” he said. “Pontiac. Till I wore out my welcome.”
A guard unlocked a storeroom in the hallway and gave Brisbon several packs of cigarettes. Brisbon went and sat in a room across the hall with his visitor, a big white man in a coat and tie. Gacy started talking again. When I turned to see if Brisbon was still in his chair, Gacy said, “Are you worried about him? I got your back covered.”
I said I wasn’t worried. I didn’t say that it was slim comfort to hear Gacy say he had my back covered.
“He’d kill you anyway,” Gacy said. “Even when he’s friendly with me, like now, I still remember ‘You stabbed me for no reason.’ ”
The next day, Gacy said, “I’ve been thinking about your answers to the Bio Review. They bothered me. You never had any homosexual experience? Nothing at all? Kinsey says that eighty per cent of all men have had some kind of homosexual experience. The way you look, you know, and me in here for what I am, the guards are thinking you’re a homosexual. If I was to lean over and lick your ear, or put my cuffs around you, they’d be in here fast to kick me out.”
“What difference would it make if you were a homosexual?” I asked. “No one cares about that kind of thing anymore.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to the victims,” he said.
I asked what he meant.
“It would portray them as sexual,” he said, “and that wouldn’t be fair to their reputations.”
I asked about his father.
“My dad has been butchered,” he said. “The media made an image out of him like he was an alcoholic monster. O.K., my dad drank, and he was Jekyll and Hyde when he drank. If he came up from the basement and said the walls were pink, you said the walls were pink, but you learned to stay away from him and keep your mouth shut at the dinner table.”
I said that, as far as I could tell, the description of his father as crude and menacing seemed accurate.
“This is my first pair of Levi’s,” he said. “When I grew up, my father always said that corduroys and khakis were the proper way for a man to dress. If you were wearing jeans, you were making sexual gestures. I went to school in flannel shirts and corduroy pants. But I never hated my father. He was a strong man, an immigrant born in Poland. He married my mother when he was forty-one. We didn’t get along. I thought I could never please him, but I still love him. If we went fishing, though, like we did for a week every summer, and I rocked the boat, or my line got tangled, or it happened to rain, Jesus, it was all my fault.”
His father, I said, struck me as a coward and a bully, a drunk who beat his wife and terrorized his children.
“I learned values from my father,” Gacy said.
I said that you could learn values from a book. Gacy said that it pleased him that flagstones he had hauled on his bicycle were still in place in the yard at the house where he lived with his parents, and that a tree he had planted still stood, whereas nothing was left that his father had done. “My way to remember my dad is not to be like him,” he said. “That’s my way of getting back at the son of a bitch.”
Some days when I was driving to and from the prison, I would hear on the radio a country song with a refrain that made me think of Gacy. It went:
Gacy told me more than once that he couldn’t have buried any of the bodies in the crawl space, because his heart was weak and he weighed too much to maneuver in such a close space, especially with a corpse.
“It was thirty-eight inches in the crawl space,” he said one day. “That’s about how much room there is under this table.” He got on his knees. “Then don’t forget the floor joists.” To demonstrate the amount of room they took up, he held a piece of paper against the edge of the table. “Right now, I weigh two-thirty; when I was arrested, I was from between two-thirty to two-thirty-five. If you look at where the edge of that paper is to the floor, can you imagine me bringing a body down there, in that little space, with my bulk, and being agile with it?”
“You’re forgetting one thing, John,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“You did it once before, when you buried the first body.” He stood up.
“Very true statement,” he said, without resentment. “But you’re going back six years earlier. You’re talking about 1972, and what was my weight then? A hundred and seventy-six pounds. So it’s not a contradiction.”
I didn’t mean to argue with Gacy, but I didn’t seem able not to. When I asked about the confession he gave at the police station, he said that he remembered nothing about talking with the police on the night he was arrested or on the days after. “I was arrested on December 21st,” he said, “and I took a hundred and thirty milligrams of Valium, and I woke up on December 26th wondering why I was tied to the bed.” Another time, he surprised me by saying, “I remember them asking me the night I was arrested, ‘Are you a night person or a day person?’ Simple question. What would you answer?”
“Night person.”
“Well, how would you feel if they said then, ‘Do you always stalk the streets at night?’ That’s what they said to me.”
“You’re describing moments of your interrogation,” I said. “You can’t have it both ways. Either you remember nothing or you recall confessing.”
“You’re getting semantical with me about the words.”
“What do you mean?”
“I read it in the court transcripts.”
One day, he said something that remained in my mind. He had been talking about how he couldn’t have murdered anyone, because he was nonviolent, a coward, someone who would walk away from a fight. Furthermore, he said, he had had all the sex he needed, so there was no reason for him to have sex with the boys he was said to have killed.
“Why would I want to kill these boys, anyway?” he said then. “I’m not their father.”
The next day, when I asked what being the boys’ father had to do with murdering them, Gacy didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. Then he said, “I didn’t say that.”
“You did, John.”
“I didn’t say it.”
“I wrote it down.”
“We covered so many things,” he said. “I don’t know if I said it or not.” Then, “If I said it, I was saying it because I feel like a father to these boys.”
“Even so, fathers don’t kill their sons.”
Another pause. Then he said, “I wasn’t afraid of anything in the basement of the Summerdale house. If I was afraid of something, how come when the basement flooded three times I called the plumber in there? How come I would have had boys digging drainage trenches for me down there?” Gacy had once had Rossi and Cram dig trenches in the crawl space—for drainage, he told them. The prosecution said they were graves. “If I was afraid of being caught, don’t you think I wouldn’t have wanted anybody down there?”
“What if I said you had Rossi and Cram dig trenches in the basement so they’d find the bodies?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because then the nightmare would be over.”
“What nightmare?”
“The killing. Finally, it would stop. The part of you that was horrified by what had been going on could then find some kind of peace.”
For a moment, he said nothing. Then he said, “I’d like to know what we were talking about yesterday.” Then, “I didn’t believe in the State’s theory of the case, but the more we started studying the victims, the more I started feeling like a father. Just like what I do with people I write letters to. I feel like a father to them. What am I always doing—you’ve read some of my letters—I’m always giving them advice.” Then he closed a folder he had opened on the table. The folder, he said, had more information to prove his innocence. “I think you’ve got your mind made up,” he said, with a sudden sharpness, “and I don’t think you want to see where we’re coming from.”
I was going to say that that wasn’t true, but a guard in the hallway called, “Gacy,” and John got up and went to see what he wanted. When he came back, a few minutes later, we talked instead about Robert Piest, the last boy he killed.
“The State tried to assemble this case against me,” he said. “They tried to say, ‘You were in the store, Piest was in the store.’ ”
Piest worked at a drugstore. Gacy had stopped in to see one of the owners about some renovations. He told the police after he was arrested that he had spoken to Piest in the store about a job. As he was pulling away from the curb in front of the store, he said, Piest ran up to his car and asked about work. Gacy told him to get into the car and took him to his house. Piest was the boy Gacy had been strangling when the telephone rang.
“All right, I’ll give you all of that,” Gacy went on, “but you show me one person who puts me in the car with Piest. That saw him coming to my house.”
I said that it didn’t really matter whether someone actually saw the boy in his car. The boy’s jacket and a receipt that someone who worked in the store had put in one of the jacket’s pockets were found in his house.
“That’s the State’s story,” he said. “But you show me one person who says they saw me with Piest.”
“Forget the State’s story, John. Let’s say Robert Piest took a taxi to your house, he hitchhiked to your house, he walked to your house, a guy in a helicopter gave him a ride to your house, and no one saw him do it. It doesn’t make any difference how he got to your house—that’s irrelevant. That’s not part of the story, don’t you see? He was in your house, that’s all that counts. He was in your house the night he died, and no one ever saw him anywhere else again.”
Gacy said nothing for a moment, then, “Michael Rossi brought him there.”
“You’re telling me that by chance, out of all of Chicago, Michael Rossi, your employee, happened into that drugstore at that moment and met the same boy you are convicted of killing and brought him to your house and he’s the one who killed him?”
“Rossi got his prescriptions there.”
“So?”
“Don’t you think that’s strange? He didn’t live anywhere near there, but he still went to that drugstore to get his prescriptions. We found this out.”
“So what?”
“We were going to meet there to talk about a job,” Gacy said. “We had jobs on opposite ends of the city, and the drugstore was halfway in between, so we decided to meet there.”
“Did you ever tell Rossi that you had buried a body under your house?”
“No.”
“Then you mean to say that there happened to be a house in Chicago—well, actually, let’s say anywhere in the world—where two different people were burying bodies, neither of them aware of the other doing the same thing?”
“I know I didn’t put those bodies there. In my heart, as God is my witness, I never killed anyone.”
“Two different people?”
“Yeah.”
I started laughing. “That’s crazy, John. That’s the craziest thing I ever heard. That’s a lunatic idea. Do you understand the probability of something like that happening?”
“It was the perfect place for him and Cram to bury them.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It wasn’t their house. They weren’t going to get caught.”
“That’s ridiculous. They wouldn’t bury bodies there, because they couldn’t have any control over who might find them, they didn’t control who came and went from your house.”
“If anybody found those bodies, who’s going to get blamed?” he said. “Me.”
“It makes much more sense that you would do it.”
“I told Rossi I buried the bodies there.”
“What?”
“I got drunk one night and told him, and that’s how they were able to do this—he had this holding over me. People say, ‘Why didn’t you fire the guy?’ and I say, ‘I couldn’t, because he knew about that first body.’ ”
I gave him a skeptical look.
“How come the body I buried is under concrete and the others are not?” he said. “It breaks the pattern.”
I thought of saying that this was absurd. Then I realized that it wouldn’t make any difference. He would have a reply.
“Talking to you is like talking to a wall,” I said. “You never actually answer a question.”
“I answer.”
“You’re being disingenuous.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Not straightforward.”
“Just because these things fit, it don’t mean that I’m the one that fits them together,” he said. “Because I own the house, I have to take responsibility, sure, but how the hell am I supposed to know what’s going on there when I’m in fourteen other states? The police found that receipt from Piest’s jacket in my trash. Michael Rossi probably went through his pockets to rob him and found the receipt and threw it in the garbage. I had nothing to steal from him. I made seventy grand that year. I didn’t kill the kid. What do I have to do, give a pound of blood to prove it?”
I made no reply.
“It looks bad for me, I know,” he said. “I’m not trying to simplify it. But I’m not their father, why do I have to be responsible for them? If I’ve left you confused, then that’s the way it’s got to be, but we are going to continue to look at all the avenues.”
“Tell me something,” I said.
“Yes?”
“What do you think of the people who committed these murders?”
“I can’t even begin to fathom how they thought,” he said. “Even to try to think of how they could do something like this is completely foreign to me.”
Leaving the prison that day, I said to the guard who walked me to the gate, “May I ask you a question?”
He nodded.
“Do all of them swear that they were somewhere else?”
“I never heard one of them yet say that they done it,” he said.
“They all say they want to know as bad as anyone else who’s responsible?”
“Yup.”
On the river, a tug was pushing a line of barges against the wind.
“Tell you what,” the guard said. “I believe he don’t even know himself he did it.”
“Same with the others?”
“Yes, sir.” He took a cigarette from his pocket and spit on the ground and said, “I believe it’s a syndrome.”
On the next-to-last day that I saw Gacy, he said, “If I was to confess to you, you know, they could make you a witness against me, if I ever got a new trial.”
Most people feel that Gacy should die. Even people who feel ambivalent about the death penalty often feel that the kinds of ambiguities and complexities that give them pause are absent in Gacy’s case. Or they simply relax their concerns when Gacy is the subject. He is sometimes cynically referred to as the poster boy for the death penalty.
Gacy is an outcast, a lonely and isolated man who has had experiences unlike those of a civilized person. He has failed again and again to restrain homicidal impulses that might occur to other people but that they manage to stifle or defuse. He has caused profound suffering and harm and sadness. He lives with the knowledge of having done something horrible by refusing to live with it. He is like someone who inhabits a parallel world, which is unreality. At his trial, his lawyer defended him by entering a plea of insanity. Psychiatrists who examined Gacy for the defense were prevented by legal maneuvering from describing the afflictions and disturbances he suffers. In the reports that the psychiatrists wrote of their interviews with him, they most often described him as a paranoid schizophrenic, but the prosecution portrayed him as a man who ran a profitable business; if he was insane on the thirty-three occasions when he murdered, the prosecution said, then it was a convenient form of insanity.
Gacy resents any suggestion of psychiatric complications in his personality, and he especially resents being described as insane. The more firmly he can maintain an impression of sanity, the more firmly he can dismiss the suggestion that he is a killer. He never endorsed the plea his lawyer entered for him, and he particularly didn’t care for it when he learned that it contained an admission of guilt. Gacy’s case strikes him as uncomplicated. He is not guilty. He wasn’t there. He has been too trusting. Other people have taken advantage of him. What the doctors say about him has no meaning for him. “I’m like a chess game they played,” he says. “Thirteen of them, and they couldn’t come to an agreement about me.”
Iwent one afternoon to a printshop in Perryville to have a copy made of the manuscript Gacy had given me. The young man working there saw Gacy’s letterhead, which says, “Execute Justice . . . Not People.”
“You should have talked to my dad,” he said. “He died a few months ago, but I guess he knew Gacy as well as anyone. He was thirty years a guard at the prison, the last fifteen of them on death row a lot of the time.”
I asked if his father had ever talked about Gacy.
“My dad would say how much it cost to keep him there,” he said, “and he thought maybe him and the other guards should have just left his cell door open and turned their backs for fifteen minutes. Save everyone a lot of money.”
I asked Gacy one day what he believed the end might be like. He said that he never thought about it. He was on a “positive mental kick,” he said, and he refused to consider anything negative. Then he said that people often ask if he’s scared, and he tells them he’ll start worrying when the needle is put in his arm—he is to die by lethal injection—because then he’ll know that the State is serious.
“If I’d been a hell-raiser—if I’d killed a guard or another inmate, or if I was a threat to the world outside—I could see it,” he said. “But what is to be gained by killing me, except revenge? There’s not a thing I can do about it, though. If I get off somehow, I get sent down to the Pit to do the rest of my time, and I don’t want natural life in that animal kingdom.”
Another time, he said, “I’ll tell you what—I’m not going to make no damn Ted Bundy last-minute confessions. None of that shit. I’m not going to put my family through the media circus. And I’m not going to be buried with my mother and father, like some people have written, because I don’t want no one desecrating their graves.
“The prison won’t let me have my family there—I hear the victims’ families can come, but I can’t have my own family. I don’t know. And I’m not going to invite anyone else, either. I got all these people that tell me they want to be there, and they say, ‘I’ve known you for eight years, you’ve got to let me come,’ but I spent my life as a workaholic and a loner and I’ll go out that way, too.”
A few weeks before I began visiting Gacy, my wife gave birth to our first child, a boy. The last time I saw Gacy, he asked how my son was doing. “When he’s about a year old, get him a turtle,” he said. “Put the turtle down on the floor, and he’ll chase it and that’s how he’ll learn to crawl—it’ll make him crawl faster—but you have to watch out, because if you don’t get there in time he’ll put the turtle in his mouth. That’s what we did with my son, and we think it made him walk sooner.”
I shook his hand and said goodbye. When I reached the end of the hallway, I turned and looked over my shoulder, expecting to see him. The hallway was empty; he had disappeared back into his obsession. ♦
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