by Tim Cahill
***
John woke up in his own bed. He had one of those vague hangovers where you don’t quite recall what happened or exactly where you are, and he had to look around to orient himself. He was in his own bed, alone.
It was still early and he had a sense that he’d been up late. After going to the bathroom, he wandered into the kitchen, looking for something to eat. A normal morning. There was a light still burning in the living room, and John thought, Son-of-a-bitch, who left that on? John fell asleep in his chair so often that waking up and finding a light on wasn’t unusual. Had he been in the living room last night?
He thought: Butkovitch. Little John is still here. John Gacy thought: Might as well wake him up, fix breakfast for him. That’s what John told the docs. He told them he was going to fix breakfast for a dead man. John Gacy still thought Butkovitch was alive.
He padded, barefoot, into the living room to get the light, and, as he came through the doorway, he could see some feet, legs to knees, on the floor; and then . . . then . . . there he was: Butkovitch, lying on his back, hands cuffed behind his back, just the way John Gacy had left him.
Except there was a rope around his neck, and the front of his pants was wet where he’d lost control of his bladder. Little John’s “eyes were closed but his face was red, that kind of blue-red, and his mouth was wide open.”
“I knew he was dead,” John said later, “because the rope was so tight around his neck.” John knelt by the boy, and the first thing he did was take the rope off. He tried to make himself believe “he’s only unconscious.” John put his head on the boy’s chest, listening for a heartbeat. There was nothing, no sound of life, but he couldn’t pull his head away, and he listened for several minutes. John massaged the boy’s neck where the rope had been, and he thought about applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before he realized he wasn’t thinking clearly. Little John was dead.
He turned him over and took the cuffs off, noticing then that the body was rigid but not completely stiff. John knew, from his experience working at the Palm Mortuary, that Butkovitch hadn’t been dead very long. Rigor mortis hadn’t fully set in.
John looked around in the early-morning stillness of the house. At least there was no blood to clean up this time.
***
How do you explain it?
John never put the rope around the boy’s neck, never pulled it tight, never watched him die. But there was no one else there that night, so he had to be the one. But why didn’t he have any recall? Why couldn’t he remember a thing?
And why were there no feelings? Here was a boy who had helped build his business, who ate dinner with his family, who played with his daughters, and now he was dead and John couldn’t picture him alive anymore. The death of John Butkovitch, however it had happened, was now something that was over, and no one had to talk about it again. That’s how Big John felt about the body.
There was, of course, work to be done. John went into the garage and got a rubber tarp. He brought the tarp into the house, rolled the body into it, and took it out to his private workplace in the garage. “I had to drag it,” John explained. “I couldn’t hoist him up onto my shoulder because of my heart.”
He did not understand why he had no feeling about the body. It was like a dog that had died: a pet that had passed on and there was nothing you could do for it anymore. You felt bad for it, but it happens. John left the body in the garage, wrapped in the rubber tarp for a day or so, just as if a pet had died. He would bury it when he had the time.
You’d think a man would be frightened—bury the damn thing right away—but John just left the body there, and then Carol came home that Sunday or Monday. Now he had a body in the garage and no way to get it in the house, into the crawl space. Carol was always in the kitchen, near the window that looked out at the big double doors of the garage.
When John thought about it later, he realized if he had actually committed the murder then—and he emphasized this to the docs—it couldn’t have been sex-related. “Why,” John argued, “would you put your thing in someone’s mouth if he wants to kill you? Guy could bite it off.” John told the docs he found Butkovitch fully clothed, so whoever killed the boy hadn’t violated him. John was adamant: there was no sex with Butkovitch. If you were looking for motivation, John theorized, you had to rule out sex. The killings weren’t any sex thing.
John had no time to think about motivation immediately after the fact, however. John Butkovitch’s body had to be disposed of, and it was a problem in logistics. John looked at his garage: it was in a low-lying area, and the houses across the street were built up higher, so water ran downhill into the garage as well as into the crawl space in the house. John had put up cement walls around his garage, which meant that it held up to a foot of water in the spring, but John had planned for the flooding. When he poured the cement, he’d blocked off one area, leaving just a small square of dirt, where he intended to dig a drain so he wouldn’t have to go wading through his garage to get his tools.
Short of taking out the cement, a two-day job with a sledgehammer, the only place John had to dig was this hole, which was really too small, only three feet by a foot and a half. The first thing he would have to do would be to dig it deeper.
Carol could see him dumping a couple of wheelbarrowsful of dirt in the backyard and could never figure what they were for. John was always “puttering,” and it wouldn’t pay to ask him what he was doing this time. A woman could take only so many lectures about how hard her husband works.
John said, “I took his clothes off, there in the garage, so there would be no identification. I thought I should bury him there. So I dug the hole and put him there, but I had to dig under the foundation because a three-foot hole is not big enough for someone who’s five-five or five-six. Whatever. And it was hard to get the hole big enough. So I had to bend him over, and by this time he was stiff as a board. I just barely got him in the hole and I had to jump up and down on him to bend him over and get him deep enough in there.”
Then Big John poured cement over the hole, smoothed it over, and he didn’t have to think about Little John anymore.
Marco Butkovitch found his son’s 1968 Dodge—"very special” to Little John—parked near the corner of Sheridan and Lawrence. Little John always put the car in the garage, and finding it out on the street with the keys still in the ignition meant something was very seriously wrong. Marco phoned the police and mentioned that the night before, his son had intended to confront his boss, a man named John Gacy, about a check. Marco didn’t touch the car for fear of damaging whatever evidence it might contain.
The police came out right away and found several items in the car: the keys, a checkbook, a jacket, and John Butkovitch’s wallet with forty dollars in it.
Gacy remembers that the police came out to talk with him about Butkovitch and that he told them exactly what happened: The boy had come out with some friends and they had argued about money for a while, until everything was settled. Butkovitch left with his friends. You could check with the friends on that one.
John Gacy spent hours thinking about Butkovitch, putting together the pieces of his life, the things he didn’t understand. It wasn’t until he was up in 3 North, at Cermak, that he remembered picking Butkovitch up the night the boy died. He probably wouldn’t have told the police that anyway, but at least he remembered it. Things were coming back to him slowly, like images floating out of a fog.
The police told the Butkovitch family that their son probably was a runaway. At any rate, according to Illinois law, John Butkovitch, at seventeen, was no longer considered a juvenile but a minor entitled to leave home if he wished.
The family argued that even if John had left legally, the circumstances were ominous. Who leaves home without their car, their checkbook, their wallet? No, John Butkovitch was not a runaway, and the family feared for his life. Marco called Gacy, who said he was willing to help in any way; he was sorry Little John, a good worker, had run away.
> The Butkovitch family phoned the police every week, urging them to go out to Norwood Park to talk with Gacy one more time. After two years and over a hundred conversations, the police refused to take any more calls from the Butkovitch family.
After John Gacy was arrested and charged with thirty-three counts of homicide, the police were severely criticized, and they were quick to point out that about 20,000 missing-person reports are filed in Chicago every year. Three quarters of the missing are minors, and a little less than half of these are juveniles: almost 7,000 boys and girls under the age of seventeen missing in Chicago alone. Most of the missing juveniles and minors turn out to be runaways.
Nationally, nearly 180,000 persons under eighteen are reported missing to the FBI.
In 1984, the Justice Department proposed setting up a Violent Criminal Apprehension program as part of the department’s Juvenile Justice office. Of the 20,000 homicides a year in the United States, over 5,500 go unsolved. The program proposed by the Justice Department would review these unsolved cases, looking for patterns that would identify serial murderers who most often prey on juveniles and minors.
Research on the phenomenon suggests there could be as many as thirty-five serial killers operating in America in the spring of 1984. “And that’s a conservative estimate,” said Robert Heck of the Juvenile Justice office.
James Stewart, head of the National Institute of Justice, said, “This is like trying to identify and cure a new disease. We’ve had it for a long time, but it’s been overlooked for years and years.”
The way John Gacy was beginning to figure it, up in room 318 in 3 North, a serial killer was born in the summer of 1975. It didn’t matter what you called him—Jack, or Jack Hanley, even Stanley—he was the Other Guy, the one John didn’t know, and he lived inside, skulking, hiding, waiting for his chance. And then he killed.
John told the docs he could really only recall five of the deaths, five burials actually. The first was self-defense, and it was John all the time, all through that. Then came Butkovitch, and the morning he found the boy’s body in his living room, dead, for no reason. John had no recall, no idea how the boy died. For John Gacy, the world wavered and went completely dark when the Other Guy took over; he told the docs he had no memory of the thing inside him that killed.
It was like that with the other three he could remember: Greg Godzik, John Szyc, and finally Rob Piest. John could recall certain small details and then the boys were dead, hands cuffed behind their backs, the ropes tight around their necks.
* * *
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CHAPTER 13
* * *
* * *
TO CAROL, THE ARGUMENT leading up to the divorce was “a little thing”: she was just trying to balance the checkbook, save John some work. “I thought I was fixing it,” she said, “and I did mess it up.”
There was a fight then, one of the times John threw something. He’d throw a telephone or a glass, even a chair. Never at her—but he’d break things when he got mad, and this time he broke his marriage and it was irreparable.
When John looked back on the final fight he could see, in a way, that he really wasn’t the sweetest guy to be around all the time, not the way he acted with Carol. He treated her like she was dumb and stupid: dense, naïve. He could see how he was acting just like the Old Man, denying “acceptance” to his wife. No one, man or woman, can live without acceptance.
John’s attitude didn’t have anything to do with the body buried in the basement, the body buried in the garage. Carol couldn’t know about them. No one knew about them. They were just nice little secrets, their lives were over, and no one had to think about them anymore.
No, the arguments with Carol were common, garden-variety domestic disputes. Just like, Carol went through the credit cards like army ants through an orchard, and John had to take them away from her. He put a lock on the phone so Carol couldn’t make outgoing calls. He even put a lock on his office door.
Then she was so dumb and stupid she didn’t know how to buy anything. In shopping, John tried to explain to Carol, it’s best to be on the offensive from the start. The thing about life is that the most anyone can do when you make a fuss is to say “No.”
John told Carol how you can outsmart salespeople, make them give you discounts that don’t even exist. Like when he wanted the bike for Tammy’s birthday: no reason to pay full price for it, not if you’re smart. Kids’ bikes are just like cars. They put the base model on sale, and the extras cost like a son-of-a-bitch. John told Carol how to handle department-store clerks, using Tammy’s new bicycle as an example.
“I just walked over to the bike that was loaded and told the salesgirl, ‘This is the one on sale.’ “
John went through the whole process so Carol could see how it was done.
“What did it say in the ad? It said the bike on sale has all this optional equipment, didn’t it?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“Get the manager over here. The one on sale, it’s got the horn and basket, the saddlebags, it’s got the special handlebars.”
The girl said, “No, the saddlebags . . . I know the ones with saddlebags aren’t on sale.”
John said, “Well, you’re wrong. Get the manager over here.”
“I don’t think I am wrong, sir.” John imitated the sound of the dumb girl’s voice. “Besides, we don’t even have any of the sale items in stock. We’re sold out.”
“Get the manager,” John said with calm authority. “Because when you advertise something and you sell out, then the sale applies to the more expensive model.”
“I don’t think that’s our policy,” the girl said.
“Then you better either get the manager over here or give me your name.”
When the manager arrived, John told Carol how he let him have it, good. “What’s going on here? You guys advertised bikes for sale, I come in here to buy one for my daughter’s birthday, this girl tells me you’re not going to have that model in here for two weeks. My daughter’s birthday is tomorrow, not in two weeks. What am I supposed to do, give her a sales slip? Tell her she’ll get a present in two weeks? I do a lot of business in this store, and you’re telling me I can’t have this bike instead of one you don’t even have in stock?”
The manager—John described him as some clerky guy in a shit-brown sport coat—said, “No, I’m not saying that.”
“Well, isn’t it a practice that when you don’t have a sale item, the next one up goes on sale?”
“On some items.”
“In this case, it should be the same. If you haven’t got the power to do it, get someone over here who does.”
The guy straightened his tie and said, “I have charge of this whole department.”
“Then get me the one in charge of the whole store.”
By this time he’d been arguing with these two assholes for twenty minutes, and they finally just caved in: he got the loaded bike for the sale price.
And that, John told his wife, is how you shop. Call it boldness, call it arrogance, John said it was just being “smart.” But Carol—goddamn it!—wouldn’t listen. She’d go around treating salespeople like they were doing her a favor selling her shit at full price. Paying full price for anything: it just infuriated John. It was dumb and stupid.
That sort of thing was bad enough, but the everyday problems really got on John’s nerves. Just like the goddamn groceries she brought home: Carol was forever wasting money at the supermarket, buying center-cut pork chops when he told her—he told her—she could buy a whole pork loin and John would cut it down for her. That way the chops cost about half of what they did at the store. He had all the proper knives to cut down large chunks of meat, but Carol couldn’t understand the simplest rules of shopping and thrift.
With his restaurant experience, John knew how to shop for a family of four and save money, but Carol wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t do it his way: the right way. Pretty soon, on top of everything else, John had
to do the grocery shopping, too, because Carol said every time she brought something home, he bitched about it. Carol would care for the kids, clean the house, do the cooking, but she wouldn’t shop.
Carol begged John to quit PDM, go back to working forty hours a week. They wouldn’t have to pretend that the business was going great guns and he wouldn’t be so tired, so crabby when he came home, and John said, “Do you think that’s going to make it for us? You go out and spend two hundred and fifty dollars for Christmas presents for Tammy and April, it’s stupid. What you do, you buy them a favorite toy, then you get them clothes, shoes, shit they need. You got to be practical. Two hundred and fifty dollars, we aren’t making that kind of money for Christmas presents.”
She didn’t even know how to shop for Christmas. Looking back, John could see that he was acting more and more like the Old Man. Locking shit up; hollering about shoes for the kids.
“What the fuck are these shoes you bought for April?”
“They’re pretty. She likes them.”
“They aren’t practical. She’s changing shoe sizes every few months.” John reminded Carol that he had once worked for the Nunn-Bush shoe company; if there was one thing he knew as well as food, it was shoes.
“Sure,” John recalled Carol saying, “you know everything, don’t you?”
And there was a moment there, just a moment, when the comment seized his heart. He did “sound just like my dad”: a fucking know-it-all.
But no, he was right. The shoes were a stupid buy. Of course he was right.
The way John saw it, looking back, it got so that Carol didn’t want to do anything around the house because—it must have seemed to her—there was nothing she could do right. Nothing.
Even before August 1975 and the disappearance of Little John, Carol was making noises about a divorce. She said John wasn’t giving her any money, nothing of her own, and the seeds her mother had planted made her angry and suspicious, ready for a separation. Before Butkovitch, John fought the idea. After he buried the body in the garage, it seemed as if he just didn’t care anymore.