Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  Somehow the arrest was never registered with the Iowa Board of Parole. Gacy was released from parole on October 18, 1971. First-time offenders in Iowa routinely earn back their rights as citizens, and on November 22, 1971—less than forty-five days before Gacy’s first victim was to die—the governor of Iowa granted Gacy full restoration of citizenship.

  The cooking job was a real dead-ender, and John wanted to start his own business. One thing he knew how to do was paint, and he thought he could talk his way into some jobs in his off-duty hours. He and Ma came up with a name for the business: PDM Contractors, painting, decorating, and maintenance. Or you could call it Polish Daily Maintenance. Or Pretty Damn Messy Contractors.

  John had to be in at 10:00 P.M., but he had so much faith in his vision of PDM that the parole officer allowed him to work nights. This is how he slipped into another bisexual episode. It wasn’t his fault that it happened; he was working at the time.

  It was a year after he’d been paroled, and one of the chefs, Roger,* wanted his apartment painted. John thought Roger was “kind of effeminate,” but he would be painting the apartment while Roger was working his second job, teaching dance. There was no danger of the two of them “getting into it.”

  So John was working in the apartment when Roger’s roommate, this Latin guy called Manny,* comes home.

  The guy says, “Who’re you?”

  John told him and the guy says, “I’m Roger’s roommate. I’m gay.” It was weird to have a guy just come right out and admit something like that, but John said, “Hey, that’s your thing.” Because John had always had liberal ideas about sex.

  A few nights later, this guy Manny shows John a picture of himself all dressed up like a broad and asks John, “Can I blow you?”

  The way John looked at it, there was no love thing there, no affection. It was just like masturbation. Then, when they got talking, Manny told him a whole shitpile of things he never knew. Manny told him how you could go down to the Greyhound bus depot and pick up boys. He told John that the corner of Clark and Broadway was a big gay area where you could pick up hustlers and pay them to have sex anytime you wanted it.

  It “floored the shit out” of him, that’s what John told the docs up there in 3 North. Imagine; hustlers at the bus station.

  Except that he had been arrested four months earlier for “assault on a sexual deviate” he’d picked up at the bus station.

  About a month after meeting Manny, around late July 1971, at Clark and Broadway John approached a young man named Mickel Ried. Ried was new to the city, from Ohio. They talked a bit: mostly about construction and John’s business and how much money a guy could make that way. Ried said he needed a job. The two of them ended up at the condo on Kedvale, where they talked some more and, according to Ried, had sex. John paid for it.

  They met a few more times and talked more about forming a partnership in PDM. The work was going along pretty well now, and John thought he might need more help.

  “He had a nice growing business there,” Marion Gacy recalled. “He started from the condominium. He had boards and everything, painting in my storeroom. And they wouldn’t allow that, so that’s why we bought the home, so he would have his business.”

  The Old Man thought he’d been smart paying off the condo, but John had a hell of a time selling a place with no assumable mortgage. John Stanley outsmarted himself, with money, in death.

  John and Ma finally found a place at 8213 West Summer-dale, in Norwood Park township. It was a solidly constructed tract home built in the 1950s. There was a garage for John’s tools, and a low crawl space under the house that could be used for storage if the Gacys could find some way to keep it from flooding. John, as co-owner, made monthly payments to his mother who, along with Karen and JoAnne, owned the rest of the house.

  Ma and John moved out to the house on Summerdale on August 15, 1971. Mickel Ried helped them move, and because he was new to Chicago, John offered him a room. There was another guy living there, some guy from Bruno’s named Roger, Manny’s ex-roommate, whom Ma thought was “gay.” John’s Aunt Florence also moved in a little later, for three months. Everyone paid rent.

  Mickel Ried stayed for a couple of months, and during that time he had sex with John Gacy “once in a while.” Together they did several jobs: painting, house maintenance, little things. Sometimes they argued, mostly about money. Ried remembered a lot of quarrels about money.

  Money was tight in the early days of PDM, and Gacy was able to save on landscaping by stealing shrubs from a local nursery. Once, after a money-related argument, Gacy took Ried to a desolate area, where he said they would break into a house. Ried got out of the car, and when he turned, he saw Gacy coming at him with a tire iron. Gacy stopped, the tire iron dangling from his right hand. It was, according to Ried, a “desolate” area, no one around, and he asked Gacy why he had the tire iron.

  “In case there’s trouble,” Gacy said.

  Ried was confused. It was dark. There was no one there. What kind of trouble could there be? Gacy went back to the car. Suddenly he didn’t want to break into the house anymore.

  Not long after that, Ried and Gacy went out to the garage to unload some equipment. “It was dark,” Ried recalled, “and we got out of the car and the lights went out in the garage and John told me to get some fuses under the workbench. So, as I was doing that on my hands and knees, I got hit on the head. With a hammer.

  “I stayed down a couple of seconds and I stood up and I saw that John was looking like he was going to hit me again. I put my hand up to stop his hand from coming back down, and at the same time I asked him what he was doing or why he wanted to hit me.”

  Gacy, Ried said, had a “strange look in his eyes,” and they stood like that for a moment, the boy holding the man’s arm, until Gacy’s expression softened and he put the hammer down.

  Just as he had done in Iowa after stabbing Edward Lynch, Gacy became very apologetic. Ried said “He patched up my head. He said he was sorry he did it.” They went into the house and talked for an hour, or at least Gacy talked, apologizing profusely while Ried listened.

  The boy couldn’t think how he might have provoked the attack. He and Gacy fought frequently over money, that was true, and sometimes the arguments turned into wrestling matches, a kind of horseplay with some serious intent behind it. Ried was living in the house, he was eating with the Gacys, and there was some infrequent sex, but they were supposed to be partners, and Ried said, “I never got that many payments.”

  That’s what the fights were about, every single one of them. Ried thought there might have been one of those arguments just before John Gacy hit him with the hammer. Some argument about money, with just a little bit of sex wrapped up in the core of John’s anger.

  The next day, Mickel Ried moved out of the Gacy house.

  Carol Lofgren had just gone through a divorce, and the later months of 1971 were not good ones for her. She had two daughters—Tammy, who was one, and April, who was three. It was tough making ends meet, frightening being out on her own, and she visited the Gacys often. She had gone to school with Karen and “became very good friends with the family. I felt like one of the family. I was at the house quite a bit when I was fifteen, sixteen years old.”

  John Gacy “felt like a brother” to her, but they did have one date when Carol was sixteen, and the two of them went to a drive-in.

  Later, after her divorce, when Carol would visit at the condo and then the house on Summerdale, she found John to be “a very warm, understanding person, very easy to talk to, knew a lot of things. It was very easy to just listen to him. I always felt he knew what he was talking about. And I met a lot of interesting people through John.” John knew hockey players and could get free tickets. He knew a dozen cops: he never introduced Carol to any of them, but he talked a lot about the police officers he knew, how they worked, cases he had heard about.

  He was good with the girls, especially Tammy, the baby. Carol remembered that they called J
ohn “Daddy,” even before she and Gacy were married. He had a soft, gentle way with the kids.

  Later, Carol would say, “He swept me off my feet. I don’t think I loved him, but I was still mixed up about my first marriage, and he treated me well.”

  For a while, there was a lot of mutual comfort in the relationship: Carol just coming off a bad divorce, John just out of jail. But when it seemed as if they were getting serious about each other, John told her about what had happened in Iowa.

  “He told me,” Carol said, “he did spend time in Iowa for pornography dealing with younger boys. He didn’t go into too much detail about it. He said he served sixteen months and got out on good behavior.”

  Because it looked like they might marry, John felt a moral obligation to tell Carol one more thing about himself. “He told me he was a bisexual. At first I didn’t understand what a bisexual was. So he explained it to me and I just kind of looked at him. I said, ‘How do you know you’re a bisexual? How can you just say, “This is what I am"?’

  “He said, ‘Because I am.’ “

  Carol “took it as a joke. I really didn’t believe it.”

  Bisexual. Wasn’t that something you studied in sophomore biology, like with earthworms?

  John was intelligent, industrious, charming. Carol thought he was “just talking” about being bisexual. He certainly didn’t act like a homosexual. In fact, he seemed to despise flagrant gays.

  John Gacy, Carol saw, was manly, tough in his business, but not so macho he couldn’t cry. The first time Carol saw him lose control was on Christmas Day 1971. John just let himself go, and he cried on Carol’s shoulder, telling her that he couldn’t stand the idea that he had let his dad down “because he did not make the funeral when his dad died. He was in Iowa at the time and they wouldn’t let him come to the funeral.” John said “it bothered him that he wasn’t able to attend and see his father for the last time.”

  Carol recalled that every year she knew him, John would go out to Maryhill Cemetery, in Niles, and visit his father’s grave during the Christmas holidays. Every year he’d come home upset. The first year, Christmas 1971, was the worst one. John just couldn’t stop crying. He was totally out of control.

  Just over a week later, John Gacy killed the first of his thirty-three victims.

  *Name changed.

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  CHAPTER 10

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  PATHOLOGISTS CLOSELY EXAMINED WHAT remained of each of the thirty-three victims attributed to John Wayne Gacy. All of the bodies, according to Dr. Robert J. Stein, Cook County’s chief medical examiner and one of the country’s foremost forensic pathologists, could be described as “markedly decomposed, putrefied, skeletalized human remains.” Ten of the bodies were in such a state of decomposition that no certain cause of death could be determined. Six of the bodies were recovered with ropes dangling from the spinal column in the region of the neck. Others, more recent and less skeletalized, were found with wads of cloth stuffed far back into the throat. All this is consistent with Gacy’s pretrial statements, explanations, and “rationalizations.”

  He said the boys “killed themselves” with the rope. At other times, in the early statements, Gacy said “Jack” must have strangled them with the rope. He said he could only guess at this because that is the way “John” found them in the morning. He found them where they lay, found them dead, with ropes wrapped tightly around their necks. He could only “rationalize” as to the cause of death. He said that if he did, in fact, commit the murders, then he might have stuffed rags down their throats to prevent the leakage of certain fluids when he moved them. Gacy didn’t know this for sure, but it was a good rationalization.

  The conclusions reached by Dr. Stein’s team were consistent with John Gacy’s statements. All the victims could well have died of strangulation or suffocation. There is only a single inconsistent instance: One victim was certainly stabbed to death.

  The body was never identified, but since it was the ninth one recovered from the boneyard under John Wayne Gacy’s house, the victim was named for the order in which his body was exhumed. Dr. Stein personally examined body number nine. He was dealing, for the most part, with bones.

  Dr. Stein, along with a radiologist and an anthropologist, found that the fifth rib “had an incised area on the upper portion compatible with a stab wound. Also the left lateral or side aspect of the sternum had two areas which were also compatible with an incised or stab wound.” Within a “reasonable degree of medical and scientific certainty,” Dr. Stein concluded that the individual referred to as body number nine died from “stab wound, multiple, of the chest.”

  The boy known as body number nine died in an entirely different, but no less horrifying, manner than the other thirty-two known victims. This was a fact of special and intense interest to many of the psychiatrists and psychologists who studied John Wayne Gacy. Why did this boy die differently? Was there a special significance in this one stabbing? The doctors studied Gacy just as the pathologists studied the remains he had left behind. Body number nine became known as “the Greyhound bus boy.” He was the first one whom John Wayne Gacy killed.

  Everyone wanted to hear about the first murder. The psychiatrists, the psychologists, they were all interested in the first time, as if some special knowledge to be gleaned there would explain everything. The puzzle merchants were so goddamn interested in the first one it was almost funny. You could see them working it over, this first murder, trying to get down to the marrow of it, like a dog with a bone.

  They were after the “why” of it, and the sense of their questions was this: If we can understand the first one, then it will explain all the others, every one; if we can only dig to the root of this one, then we should be able to see a pattern, see the entire dark flower whole. They seemed to think that all the rest of the murders grew from this first one and that once they grasped it, grasped the full meaning of it, the dark flower would unfold as flowers do in time-lapse photography. The first was the pattern, the genesis of the murders to follow.

  This was absurd. John didn’t know why they wanted to concentrate on the first one and on the last one. Both of them didn’t fit the pattern. They were anomalies. He told them so. The first one was self-defense. Anybody who knew the facts would have to agree. Anyone, confronted in his bedroom by a man with a knife, would have done the same thing. Why couldn’t they see that the first one didn’t fit?

  John told the story over and over. He told it the same way every time: clear and detailed right up to the episode with the knife. Then the story got hazy around the edges. It rippled and broke until the final ghastly scenes were wispy and without substance.

  He always told them that he wasn’t particularly depressed, though it happened just after New Year’s Day 1972, and the doctors reminded John that the Christmas holidays had been a bad, unsteady time for him ever since that Christmas Day in 1969, when his father died without a son by his side to comfort him.

  Sometimes, on Christmas Day, John would go out to the cemetery on the North Side of Chicago to stand by his father’s grave. He said that those were times he had to talk to his father, but John’s words burned inside his throat, and the graveside monologue became emotional, cathartic. His ex-wife Carol saw him sobbing helplessly by his father’s grave on one of these holiday visits.

  But no, John wasn’t particularly depressed during the Christmas holidays of 1971. Out of prison, he was strong now, building a new life, working to became a new man, working to become successful. He had some things he needed to prove to the memory of his father. He wasn’t depressed at all.

  No matter that his Aunt Pearl, his father’s sister, had died on New Year’s Eve just as 1971 became 1972. The psychiatrists and psychologists could go ahead and assume that he was down. It always amused John that the doctors knew what he was thinking or feeling at any given time. He’d tell them one thing, and they’d go right ahead and figure the exact opposite.


  So it was Christmas 1971, then his aunt died on New Year’s Day, and the doctors insisted on seeing some sinister emotional pattern. John told his story often enough; and no matter what his father thought, John wasn’t dumb and stupid. He watched the doctors as intently as they watched him. And he knew what these doctors thought: They figured that the Christmas holidays preyed on his mind, that they reminded him of his culpability in his father’s death. John could see it quite plainly: The doctors thought that all that Christmas music, all the cheer and laughter, all the parties and toasts to peace on earth conjured up images of death in his mind, visions of shame and retribution, of dark secrets and inevitable punishments.

  On New Year’s Eve, as his aunt was dying, John was working a private party at Bruno’s. Carol’s mother took the kids so that Carol could join John at Bruno’s at about eight. John remembered that he paid for the cab. He always remembered little details like that. You could check them out, these little details, and see that John was telling the truth. He had nothing to hide.

  John kept working, and he joined in the party when he could. It broke up at about 3:00 A.M., and John drove back to the house in Norwood Park where he and Carol fell exhausted into bed. They slept approximately four hours, rising at about eight in the morning. John had to drive Carol to Kennicott, where her mother was staying with the kids.

  “I won’t be able to see you for a few days,” John told Carol when he dropped her off. He had just gotten word that his Aunt Pearl had died.

  John drove back to his Summerdale house and slept until about 3:00 P.M. Then he got up and drove to his Uncle Harold’s, where his mother had spent New Year’s. From there they drove to Aunt Ethel’s—a holiday with the family.

  John told the doctors that there wasn’t much talk of death that night: Aunt Pearl was on his father’s side, Aunt Ethel was his mother’s sister. It was just another holiday party, the end of a hectic week, and they drank and talked and played cards. Aunt Ethel mixed a stiff Scotch and water. John hadn’t intended to get drunk, but he had worked hard the night before and he was tired and the drinks snuck up on him. It was Aunt Ethel’s fault, really. She was one of those hosts who grabs your glass and fills it right back up again when you’re only half done. Still, it was always a good time at Aunt Ethel’s house. Everyone was talking a mile a minute—John and his mother and Aunt Ethel, all of them motormouths—and you had to watch the drinks. In a way, everything that happened that night and the next morning could be traced to those drinks. Nothing would have happened except that John got drunk. He sure wouldn’t blame Aunt Ethel for what happened to the Greyhound bus boy. It was just the way she kept pouring all those drinks. . . .