by Gil Reavill
But Donoghue had already hung up.
Later on, about a week before the Back of the Yards job, I managed a sub-rosa visit to the Cook County morgue. My guide, who I will refer to only as “Mrs. O’Leary,” cheerfully conducted me through the whole of the premises, including a peek into the private offices of the medical examiner himself, the absent Donoghue.
I was more interested in the morgue proper. Off a well-lit hallway, three doorways led into a series of holding and autopsy rooms. The first room we entered was a large cold-storage facility, measuring forty feet by sixty, with twelve-foot-high ceilings. The air here was kept at around forty degrees—not cold enough to see your breath, but cold enough to need a jacket.
Along the walls were shroud-covered bodies (I counted fourteen) resting on metal gurneys that were slid into wooden-framed racks. For the entire length of the room the wooden shelving units stacked three levels high. Some of the slots were empty, and the rest seemed occupied randomly, with no discernible pattern. The final effect was pigeonholes indifferently filled.
“These are mostly unclaimed,” my guide said. “We’re waiting for families to come for them or to be contacted.”
“What if there are no families?”
“They’ll have a state burial,” she said. She stared around at the supine, sheeted figures punctuating the walls. “Some of these have been here for coming up on two weeks.”
One of the bodies attracted my attention because its sheet poked upward from underneath very awkwardly. My guide lifted the sheet to reveal an elderly male with a grizzled face and a deep crater where the back half of his skull should have been. The male’s arms were outstretched in a cocked, supplicating posture, as if he were pleading for grace.
“That’s not rigor,” my guide said quickly, dropping the sheet. “He was homeless, sleeping outside in the cold. He was murdered; his killer bashed the back of his head in with a rock when he was asleep. The temperature the night we found him was in the low teens, and he had frozen in that position. They brought him in here, and he still hasn’t thawed.”
Some die by ice, and some by fire. The bodies of two Chicago firefighters, killed when a floor collapsed under them, exhibited the full pain and trauma of their deaths. The disfigured corpses offered graphic evidence that extreme heat, when applied to human skin, brings out all the similarities between human flesh and pork. I felt revulsion and compassion at once. The skin of their faces was “alligatored,” shriveled by the flames into a patchwork steakhouse char.
The next room was smaller and not refrigerated. Two stainless steel autopsy tables stood side by side, both eight and a half feet long and two and a half feet wide. Autopsy tables, like subway seats and school desks, have had to be enlarged over the past few decades to accommodate the increasing girth of the population.
Generally, any surface that dead flesh touched within the morgue was stainless steel. Each table sported its own scale and a sink at one end. Goosenecked hoses rose from beneath, with convenient knee-operated hot and cold water controls. I wondered if the waste from Donoghue’s autopsies discharged into the communal sewage conduits. Was it treated first? Filtered? At the big water treatment plant in Skokie, did the gore mix promiscuously with sewage? Was it a case of shit and death?
There were bodies in this smaller room, too, not as many, under a half dozen, readied for cleaning, processing, and storage. Through a glass-windowed wall, I had seen a lab-coated forensic pathologist with an examination under way. Not an autopsy, at least not yet. But the tables in this main room were empty, glistening and receptive. I was fascinated by the accoutrements of the tables, used to prop the bodies up during an autopsy: stainless steel headrests, rubber neck supports, longitudinal body frames.
I hopped up and lay down on the nearest table, eliciting a nervous laugh from Mrs. O’Leary. “That’s probably not a good idea,” she said.
I told her that Sarah Bernhardt used to bring along a casket on her tours, and sleep in it backstage. I imagined my own guts spilled onto the autopsy table, poked and prodded by Edmund Donoghue.
The word coroner derives from the phrase custos placitorum coronae, “guardian of the rights of the crown,” and originally referred to an officer of the royal household in medieval England. When the various crows picked over the bones of the dead, the coroner was there to make sure the crown got its share. Suicides forfeited their possessions to the crown, so the coroner got involved in cause-of-death judgments.
In England and Wales, a coroner must be a solicitor or barrister, but as the function evolved in the United States, it became an elective office open to anyone, and as such famously corrupt.
The trend toward medical examiners in the last century represented an attempt to professionalize the office, and remove it from the possibility of political suasion and malfeasance. That’s probably what Donoghue thought he was guarding against, when he mentioned “conflict of interest.” In Cook County, historically the site of so much official larceny, the ME had to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.
“This isn’t the only autopsy room,” Mrs. O’Leary said, entering into her full tour-guide mode as I rose, Lazarus-like, off the table. “We handle four thousand five hundred autopsies every year, out of twelve thousand deaths that are referred to the ME. There are over a dozen pathologists and a whole crew of investigators.”
Next door a smaller, colder cold-storage room with its own autopsy table held the dozen remains of unattended deaths, bodies in various degrees of decomposition. This room was seriously chilled, its temperature hovering just above freezing, in an effort to quell the smell. My gorge rose. The stench of decay was stronger here, and I soon found out why.
“There’s one in here three, four weeks decomposed, and you can really smell it,” Mrs. O’Leary said.
She pulled the sheet off a decayed, partially mummified corpse that showed signs of both animal predation and the development of “grave wax,” adipocere, which meant the body had been exposed to damp conditions. I stared into the mottled, grease-caked visage, trying without much success to stir my own sense of empathy.
Exactly here was the genesis and foundation of the idea of power, according to Mahfouz: a live human being looking at a dead one. From that age-old, elemental tableau spun the webs of authority, supremacy, and control in which society was caught up. Looking at the face of death, the living human exulted, feeling a surge of omnipotence. Like passing a hapless pedestrian when driving in a car.
My own response turned out to be less perspicacious than that of the great Egyptian Nobel laureate, but it amounted to essentially the same thing. Underneath my anxiety about getting busted for trespassing in the Chicago morgue and my worried, busybody assessments about what kind of notes I needed to take, I detected a small thrumming interior voice repeating the same two words over and over.
Not me.
Or actually the phrase deserved an exclamation point. Not me! Maybe also caps. NOT ME!
I discovered that my pity for the dead was always underpinned by a craven sense of relish. Beneath the proper, culturally acceptable sadness lurked flashes of dimly lit emotions, furtive and unexposed, like far-off lightning punctuating a nighttime sky.
Relief, yes, and what the Germans call Schadenfreude, glee over another’s misfortune, and a coldhearted selfishness. As I brought my face close to the anonymous grave-waxed corpse I felt myself gripped not by grief but by mundane personal worries: that I would contract a disease, that I felt discomfort in the refrigerated cold, that I might be plagued at night by bad dreams. Bending a few inches from the dead man, “not me” morphed imperceptibly into “me, me, me!” My temporal concerns overshadowed his eternal ones. My hangnail, your cancer. A fundamental human equation.
How do we get used to it?
“Cast a cold eye on life, on death,” runs Yeats’s epitaph. I knew there existed among us people who had mastered the cold-eyed approach to mortality and fellow-suffering. Chicago, more than any other place in America, spawned som
e notorious examples.
On the evening of June 13, 1982, a seventeen-year-old African-American street prostitute needed a date to get off the street. The other girls on Chicago’s North Side trolling grounds called the seventeen-year-old “St. Louis,” because she’d just arrived from the East St. Louis whorehouse town of Brooklyn, across the river from the Gateway City.
“The police were hot that night,” she testified later in court. “They were picking up all the girls.”
She reacted with relief when a red Dodge Tradesman van bearing the logo “R & R Electric” cruised up next to her on Elton Avenue. Because of all the police heat, St. Louis would have gone along willingly with the shaggy-haired thirty-year-old driver, an electrical contractor and handyman named Robin Gecht. Instead, Gecht pulled a handgun and forced her into the back of the van.
Gecht bound her waist with a thin metal wire, fastening the other end to the aluminum shelving that lined both sides of the van’s interior. St. Louis remembered seeing a lot of evil-looking electrician’s tools on the shelves. Gecht raped her, but did not untie her when he finished.
“Don’t kill me,” St. Louis pleaded. “I’ll do anything you want me to.”
Still training his pistol on her, Gecht placed a six-inch hunting knife in her hand and told her to use it on herself.
“Stab into your tit,” he said. “The left one.”
Gecht dragged a white plastic bucket over and propped it under St. Louis as she did as she was told. The blood from the wound drained into the bucket. Gecht appeared transfixed, not by the blood but by the punctured breast. He poked his hand at the inch-long cut, tugging open the skin, first with his finger, then with a butcher knife. The mutilation excited him, and he sexually assaulted St. Louis once more.
St. Louis was one of the few lucky ones; she lived. That summer and fall, the electrician’s van became the object of street rumor among the working girls along North and Elton Avenues. If you see the red van, don’t get in.
Much deeper wounds could be inflicted if a young woman fell into the hands of Robin Gecht and his coterie of young employees. The tabloid Chicago Sun-Times would label the team killers “the Chicago Rippers,” for their Jack the Ripper–style mutilation murders of more than a dozen young women.
In the attic of Gecht’s rented two-story brick home at 2163 North McVicker Avenue, in a working-class neighborhood of the near North Side, a closet-sized room bore crudely painted black and red crosses on its walls. Baby-sitters for Gecht’s three young children were warned never to venture upstairs to the attic. When one did, she found a doorway heavily barricaded with plywood.
Tommy Kokoraleis, a twenty-two-year-old who played Ren-field to Robin Gecht’s Dracula, told police what happened in that attic room. As Gecht’s mutilation fetish became more and more unmanageable, he sent the feebleminded Tommy, Tommy’s brother Andy, and their co-worker Eddie Spreitzer to kidnap and kill victims. It is difficult to convince others to murder in your name, but Gecht was a rare, Manson-like figure who managed it, mainly by employing rough, impressionable street-kid males at his electrical contracting business.
With or without Gecht aboard in the Dodge Tradesman, the others trolled for street prostitutes, lone women, runaways. Gecht always specified large breasts. (In a letter to a journalist, Gecht would write from prison that well-endowed women “were a thing with my whole family,” and praised his wife Rosemary’s 38D bra size.)
Over the fall of 1981, into the summer of 1982, the attacks and mutilations became more and more extreme. Gecht had his cohorts would kidnap young women, rape them, drug them. They would often garrote one of their victim’s breasts with thin copper electrician’s wire, tightening the wire until it severed the breast completely. Tommy Kokoraleis testified that Gecht would sometimes “have sex” with the wounds, and with the severed breast.
Afterward, the gang of four would repair with their trophies to Gecht’s attic room with the red and black crosses on its walls. At a makeshift altar, in a perversion of the Eucharistic rites, each of the Rippers would eat a piece of “breast meat,” as Gecht called it, after which their leader would carefully preserve the remainder in a small decorated box.
I knew the story of the Rippers well. During the period when I spent time in Chicago with Tina Fishman and met her Bobby, local newspapers and newscasts were filled with lurid tales of Robin Gecht and his friends. I read the stories with a mix of fascination and stupefaction. This was also during the time of Tylenol tampering, with seven Chicagoans dead from cyanide poisoning, when it seemed as though the city, never a law-abiding paradigm to begin with, was going to wobble completely off its axis.
“Suspect linked to ‘cannibal gang’ gets life,” read the ChicagoTribune on September 8, 1984, after Judge John Nelligan of DuPage County Circuit Court sentenced Thomas Kokoraleis. The Ripper killings came hard after the homosexual-panic murders of John Wayne Gacy, a decade earlier, in the same Chicago neighborhood. There was the unsettling news that Robin Gecht had once worked for John Wayne Gacy. Had he apprenticed for something more than electrical contracting? Could serial killing be a virus, transmittable from one person to another?
The list of toddlin’ town monsters was actually pretty long. Dr.H. H. Holmes followed Jack the Ripper by only a few years, and killed most of his victims in Chicago. Another “doctor,” though not a medical one, Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, also hailed from Chicago, as did the nurse-killer Richard Speck.
“The long pig” translates a Maori word, pakeha, used by Micronesian cannibals to describe humans as food. Man as meat. Under the bad-moon influence of the Union Stock Yards (“over two billion served!”), and strengthened by stories of the Rippers, the long pig had become associated with Chicago in my mind long before I signed on to Aftermath.
I observed it in the obsessive nomenclature of area rock bands: Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack, Cannibal Corpse, Cannibal Ox, Cannibal Galaxy. The turf of Jeffrey Dahmer, the most infamous flesh-eating serial murderer of them all, was but a short Wisconsin death trip to the north, in Milwaukee.
I didn’t want to believe that I had anything in common with the whole cold-eyed lot of them—Dahmer, Gacy, the Rippers, the long parade of sociopaths that stalked the land where I was born. But looking at the rotted cadaver in Edmund Donoghue’s keep, or staring down at the lifeless Mr. Kamolinski, I found that I could locate in myself the same immoral, amoral attitude that transformed flesh into meat. The attitude of a Carib, gazing appraisingly at a long pig.
Did working at Aftermath encourage that attitude? Or lessen it? I had now been job-shadowing techs off and on for three months. Was I being transformed? I couldn’t decide for sure. No Jung-Myers-Briggs personality test existed to gauge my increasing (or decreasing) heartlessness. Would I finally become bored with the puzzle of mortality, which was, after all, insoluble? I worried that the more quotidian it became, the more death would be stripped of its mystery. And I couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or not.
As a kiss-off gift when we broke up, Tina Fishman sent me Bobby’s penis. She boxed and shipped her cadaver’s decollated sexual organ, glans to testicles, to my work address. When I opened the package, I found that Tina had carefully tucked the gray, shriveled penis into a hot dog bun and scattered ketchup and mustard packets around it. (“What kind of kid likes Armour hot dogs? Big kids, little kids, kids who climb on rocks! Fat kids, skinny kids, even kids with chicken pox like hot dogs!”)
The message, as I understood it back then, was something along the lines of “You’re a weenie,” a not-uncommon sentiment in breakups. But I had never encountered it expressed in quite so forceful a way. I tossed the dingus in the trash, bun, condiments, and all. Later on, I had second thoughts. Maybe Tina hadn’t really meant to insult me. She knew that I was just perverse enough to appreciate such a macabre gift. What I should have done, I considered afterward, was buy some formaldehyde, discard the bun, and keep the dog, showcasing it in a specimen jar on the mantel. A conversation piece.
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Even later in retrospect, I had third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. Word of Tina’s odd gifting got out in gossip around her medical school. She had to sit before a medical ethics panel, which briefly suspended her but decided against expulsion. The authorities, who might have charged Tina with “unlawful disposition of human remains,” were not notified. She went on to become a pediatrician in Vermont, her body-robbing days long past.
The long pig pokes its snout everywhere, into individual lives and into odd historical crannies. Henry Ford learned everything he knew about the assembly line from the Union Stock Yards.
“I believe that this was the first moving line ever installed,” Ford writes of the Chicago Yards in his autobiography. “The idea [for the Ford Company’s Detroit assembly line] came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef.”
The anti-Semitic Ford died just as revelations about the German extermination camps were coming to light, but he might have been heartened to know that his assembly-line ideas had been adopted by the Nazis to implement the Final Solution. An aerial view of the 425-acre Birkenau, the death camp at Auschwitz, with its branching lines of railroad tracks, bears an uncanny resemblance to the 475-acre Union Stock Yards. In both places, victims were delivered up in cattle cars.
“King Meat” Armour and Gustavus Swift to Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, and finally to Heinrich Himmler and Josef Mengele. Hogs to gas hogs to the long pig. Tinker to Evers to Chance—Chicago Cubs all. Connect the dots.
Numerous historical examples exist of pigs being prosecuted for the murder of humans. Hauling animals into court represented a common enough practice in the Middle Ages. In 1386, for example, a sow was convicted of killing a child. Authorities dressed the swine culprit in men’s clothing and held a public execution. But as a rule the reverse is never true. Humans are not criminally prosecuted for killing hogs.