Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  These Uptown kids: so many of them were the very kind of boy John could spot as a homosexual on sight. John Gacy, in his silver Oldsmobile station wagon with the contractor’s sign in the window, would cruise uptown during the day, recruiting the short, blond-haired boys for PDM.

  But after midnight, when the part of himself John called Jack liked to cruise, the streets of Uptown belong to the gangs, to the pimps, to young male hustlers who seem to outnumber female prostitutes. You see these male hustlers in faded jeans and T-shirts, on the corners, in the dark door-ways, waiting. They watch for the big cars, new ones not ordinarily seen in uptown, expensive cars with no dents and with suburban parking stickers in the windows.

  Business is done in the car, under the el tracks; it is done by the vacant lots, or parked at the curb under a streetlight that has been broken for months; business can also be done a few blocks away, in the park by the lake.

  Jack could do it that way, but he liked to take them home, to the Summerdale house. It wasn’t a very long drive, ten minutes or so, and Jack liked it best at home.

  John told the docs that Jack wasn’t some alternate personality. Forget what he told the cops after he was arrested. He didn’t remember any of that shit, anyway. Jack was nothing more than another version of John, like Pogo, and he was useful because he could be tough with potential jack rollers and shit. Just the way Pogo could be a compassion clown for sick kids, Jack could be a cop on the lookout for thieves, liars, jack rollers, homosexuals.

  He thinks the first time the name occurred to him, he was driving around Bughouse Square with one of these hustlers in his car, when he saw a squad car pull slowly by, the cops glancing at him. It came to him then, all at once, that if they arrested him, he could use the name Jack Hanley to get out of trouble. Jack, the cop buddy he used to drink with down at Bruno’s. The squad car pulled by, and John thought, But that’s who I’ll be, Jack Hanley. Because John Kennedy was called Jack, and John could be Jack, too. A street name, so that you wouldn’t have some little shithead running around telling the mayor, “Pogo the clown’s queer!” Jack Hanley—he would be a kind of fatherly cop. John had always been fascinated by police and police work. Being a cop came as naturally to him as being a clown.

  Everyone on the street used false names, anyway, all the greedy little hustlers. They’d say, “Hi, I’m Billy.” Get them home, say something like, “Want a drink, Bobby?” and the kid’d say, “Sure.” You could trap ‘em that easy, they were so dumb and stupid. Most of the people Jack had sex with—and by 1976 he was going down to the park twice a week, a hundred times a year—were dumb and stupid. The scum of the earth. That’s how you could tell the sex was all bisexual: there was no love, no “fondering.” Just blow me and get the fuck away from me, you filthy scum. That was Jack’s attitude.

  Sometimes he even picked up women, and it was the same deal: Blow me and get lost. Or go blind, die. Just like the one he picked up in Old Town, some Eastern European broad, hardly spoke English, and she blew him as he drove up Lincoln. The broad needed to get off at Irving Park, but John didn’t get off until Lawrence. He told her he didn’t have time to drive her back but that it was only a short walk away.

  Like a couple of miles. Talk about dumb and stupid.

  Jack was another character, like Pogo, and John knew him just about as well. He knew Jack mostly went for boys and didn’t like them dirty-looking; he hated hippy assholes with long, straggly hair. He wanted them young, clean-cut, but virile-looking. They should have blond or brown hair, with tight butts and short, muscular builds. He especially liked them young so he could “have the fatherly image over them.” Young, and “small enough so you wouldn’t have no trouble with them” if it came to that.

  Jack hated queens, though, shitheads dressed up like women, talking like girls. Sick motherfuckers. A man should know he’s a man: a boy has to know what he’s got between his legs. The ideal pickup shouldn’t be an actual homosexual: Jack liked a kid struggling to make the price of a meal and not really sure he “should get into it.” A first-timer.

  Sometimes they’d lie to you, and you’d get real homosexuals. Guys who weren’t bisexuals at all. But John could get into Jack as well as he could get into Pogo, and with these lying assholes he was a law-enforcement officer. He had to track down the homosexuals, like a cop. He didn’t even have to tell them he was a cop. It was just a way of acting that did it, a kind of natural performance that made it easy to outsmart them.

  John knew what Jack was doing. He’d bring them back to the house, get what he wanted, say he was going to give the kid his money when he dropped him off again at the park. But if the little bastard was a real queer, or if he raised the price on him—and they always did: so naïve and stupid they thought they could outsmart a streetwise homicide cop—if they raised the price, Jack could handle greed as well as Pogo. “Oh,” Jack would say, driving the kid to wherever he wanted to go, “wait, there’s a vending machine, I need a paper. Get me one, will you? Here’s a quarter.” And he’d pull up a few feet in front of the machine so that when the kid got out, Jack could speed away without the little asshole grabbing onto the door handle. No fight, no argument: Jack just outsmarted them, left them standing miles from anywhere with a quarter in their hand.

  Once he got into it with a kid for hours, some hitchhiker he’d picked up during the day, and Jack offered to wash the kid’s dirty clothes while they were doing it. Later, driving to that night’s bowling league, John gave the kid a few bucks and told him to go in a burger joint and get them both something to eat. As soon as the dumb little shit was out of the car, Jack hit the gas and was gone. He threw the kid’s clothes in the first trash dumpster he passed.

  Just like with Pogo, there was a split in Jack, too. Sometimes he’d pick up a good kid, real naïve, and he couldn’t bring himself to have sex with the boy. Jack’d be a good cop then, tell the kid about the jack rollers down at the park; tell him he could get himself killed down there, about how he was degrading himself, selling his body for money.

  So there was a split in Jack: He could be a good cop, or a cop bent on outsmarting the hustlers. None of the people Jack met, or had sex with, died. John knew that. But—and here was the central piece to the puzzle—what if there was another Jack? What if the Other Guy split off Jack? John didn’t know that Jack. He never met the killer.

  He tried to fit it together, up there in 3 North. All these characters came to the fore in 1975, after Butkovitch. Pogo could split off into a compassion clown or a hatred clown. Jack could be a compassionate cop or a smart cop, a real bad-ass cop. John could love Carol and still act enough like the Old Man to force her into a divorce.

  John thought about it, and he asked the docs, What if Jack split a third time, a time that John didn’t know about? Because in 1975 and 1976, when all the other characters were rising up out of John, the Jack Hanley part kept getting stronger and stronger. And 1976 was when the majority of the killings began. What if a part of Jack—say, Smart Jack, Bad Jack—split off into the Other Guy, the one who destroyed John Gacy’s marriage, the one whose silent voice said, “I want this house to myself"?

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  CHAPTER 15

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  JOHN DIDN'T REMEMBER THE boys of ‘76. There was an image—something seen through a shimmering, nearly opaque vapor—of a boy who had died near Christmas: Greg Godzik, an employee. The others: John couldn’t even recall disposing of their bodies. Most of them.

  The first known victim that year was Darrell Sampson, last seen alive on April 6.

  Five weeks later, on May 14, Randall Reffett disappeared. On the same day, a fourteen-year-old boy named Samuel Stapleton left his sister’s place to walk home. Home was one block away, and it was 11:00 P.M. Sam Stapleton and Randall Reffett, who disappeared on the same day, were found buried together in a common grave under the house at 8213 Summerdale. It looked as if they had been killed on the same night.

  Th
e body of William Carroll, who disappeared only twenty-seven days later, on June 10, 1976, was the twenty-second body exhumed from the crawl space under the house on Summerdale.

  Less than two months later, Rick Johnston, eighteen, never came home from a concert at the Aragon Ballroom in the uptown area. His was the twenty-third body exhumed.

  Then it was December, and John Gacy recalled some of the events leading up to the death of Gregory Godzik. John had a recollection of Godzik and had some knowledge of the death of John Szyc, who disappeared a month later, on January 20, 1977. Gacy could almost bring back the moment of the rope with the two of them, but he saw it only vaguely, in the way a man recalls the sharp, cutting edges of a bad nightmare, one of those dreams where you wake sweating in terror but can’t truly recall the horror you’ve seen in your sleeping mind. It was almost as if he’d been a witness to part of a pair of murders someone else committed. He could envision the boys alive in his house, and then there was a blank time several hours long.

  And in the morning, he found them dead. That’s the way John explained it to the docs.

  The psychologists gave him another IQ test: prison docs were big on IQ tests, as if the answers would prove you were dumb and stupid and that’s why you ended up in jail. Except that John wasn’t dumb and stupid and he got better on the tests; he got a lot better as he went along.

  Even up in 3 North, with all the pressure, the trial nearing, his life at stake, he kicked ass on the same IQ test he had taken in Iowa. On the Wechsler adult intelligence—a test that is given individually and considered by psychologists to be among the best, if not the best method of measuring intelligence—John Gacy scored a 119 in verbal abilities and 129 in the performance aspects. Dr. Thomas Eliseo, the clinical psychologist who administered the test, said the scores indicated that Gacy is “of superior intelligence and about the top ten percent of the population, very bright.”

  John used his intelligence to evaluate the docs, just as they evaluated him. Cavanaugh, the prosecution’s guy: every criminal he ever analyzed, John figured, turned out to be a sociopath. Happy personality disorder, and jail for you, asshole. Cavanaugh didn’t give a shit about John Gacy or helping anyone. He just wanted to advance his career, always trying to outsmart John with questions. Just like John remembered Cavanaugh asking him, “If you don’t remember these deaths, do you think you have amnesia?”

  Fucking amnesia! Actors have amnesia on silly-ass soap operas; people don’t have amnesia. At least John didn’t think he did. He thought Cavanaugh was just giving him some easy psychological bullshit excuse to cling to—amnesia—and then when the case got to court, Cavanaugh would show how you couldn’t have amnesia thirty-three times, selectively, or some shit. The guy was about as subtle as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. John wasn’t about to help Cavanaugh; this was one doc John would outsmart when he could. It would be easy enough.

  Morrison, for the defense, she was big on his youth; stealing, liking the feel of silk panties and shit, but one day she called him at Cermak and told him she couldn’t help him unless he quit lying. Morrison thought she could shake him up somehow: your favorite defense doc quits on you. She was looking to “outsmart” him. What was he supposed to do, make up a bunch of shit about things he knew nothing about? Tell her some fairy tale about how all those assholes who died and ended up in his crawl space?

  Either Morrison would come around, or he’d “outsmart” her, then “fuck over her.” You can’t shit a shitter. If the docs wanted to advance their careers studying the guy who was accused of killing more people than anyone else in American history (if they wanted information for their papers and scholarly reports), they would do it his way. Who did Morrison think she was? Life is a two-way street. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

  Rappaport, for the defense, was smart, able to draw correlations between things that made John think. This doc didn’t come right out with his theories, but John could tell, by the tone and push of his questions, where Rappaport’s mind was going. Just like if John really did hate the Old Man, which was still hard for him to admit, then maybe there was a kind of thing where he, John, became John Stanley, dominant over the hustlers, who were dumb and stupid. Then as the Old Man, he had to teach the hustlers, who were really him as a young man. Follow that one through—John took and expanded on Rappaport’s questions—to realize that the Old Man thought teaching was punishment.

  So what’s the ultimate punishment?

  And then where would you hide your secrets? If you were the Old Man? John felt puzzle parts slipping together with Rappaport. The Other Guy and the Old Man. Twist those pieces around. See how they fit together.

  Rappaport worked differently from Freedman, who was the most distinguished of the defense docs. John thought of Freedman as “that fucking old man,” but it was an affectionate nickname, because John liked him and thought he was tough. Freedman just took everything and picked it apart. “John,” Freedman once asked, “do you realize that the phrase you use, ‘dumb and stupid,’ is redundant?” The doc was right, of course, and John had to sit around thinking how dumb and stupid he sounded saying dumb and stupid all the time. The fucking old man knew a lot and he was closer to the disease, whatever it was, than anyone else. One day Freedman and John were sitting alone in the doc’s office, and this little fucking old man said, “Is Jack Hanley in? I’d like to speak to him.”

  Just like that, at 11:00 A.M. John had to explain that Jack Hanley was a name he used when cruising. The Other Guy might not be named Jack Hanley, if that guy existed, and John, after nearly twelve months in jail, thinking about it, putting the pieces together, was coming to the conclusion that yes, crazy as it sounded, there might be someone else living in his body. It was pretty nutty, but if the Other Guy existed, John didn’t know him, much less know his fucking name. Besides, whoever it was hiding inside—you could call him Bad Jack—if he came out, he came out at night, after midnight, when John was drunk or stoned on pills. Maybe you had to make John mad for Jack to come out. You don’t just ask to meet him, like you would some celebrity at a party. “Oh, my goodness, isn’t that the Other Guy, the one who is supposed to have killed thirty-three people? Could you introduce me to him? I’d like to have a little chat.”

  Jack didn’t come out like that. There were probably special circumstances that caused him to surface, that triggered him. Maybe it was a combination of alcohol and drugs, of fatigue and anger. Maybe the trigger was something the victim did or said, some wrong move that released the killer.

  The doc just filed that one away. No expression. He didn’t share his theories, and John was never sure what Freedman was thinking. John had to guess about Freedman's theories, but now the tough old fart was asking to meet Jack, and John thought the doc was closer to the truth than the others. Real close. John’d work on it, try to bring the murders in out of the fog.

  He warned the docs that he wasn’t talking about what he knew, what he really remembered. It was all what John called “rationalization” it was all “supposition.” Just like Butkovitch: there was a stretch of five, maybe seven hours he couldn’t recall. Then Gacy woke up and found Little John Butkovitch dead, the rope tight around his neck.

  But, John thought, maybe if he talked about how it “must have” happened, he’d just flow into the Other Guy’s thought patterns. With Rappaport and Freedman he’d be a real motormouth, rationalizing and supposing without even thinking about it. Because that’s how he remembered one detail he’d forgotten about the Greyhound bus boy. He’d forgotten about the sound of the boy’s breath bubbling up through the holes in his chest—"the gurgulation that went on and on"—and he’d gotten that just by going over the story. Telling it over and over again.

  Years later, John said that was his technique with the docs who really wanted to help. He tried to motormouth his way into something he’d forgotten, like the gurgulation. If it worked once, maybe it’d work again, maybe he could motormouth his way into the Other Guy’s personal
ity.

  Just like, if he found a body in the morning—and he couldn’t even recall burying some of them—but if he found a body and it was handcuffed and it had a rope around its neck, he’d try to visualize slipping the cuffs on, try to see the rope going around the smooth young neck.

  Start with the handcuffs. Okay, John Gacy, sometimes when he wanted sex, he handcuffed guys. You could say he raped them, but that was bullshit.

  The thing about rape, John explained, is that, in some way, it has to be consensual. Even if the guy does it because of force, it’s consent. If the kid has an orgasm, that’s proof of consent. When John got some dumb kid cuffed, on his knees, terrified, he had to be sure the kid wouldn’t bite it off if John stuck it in his mouth. No one ever tried, so that was consent: the proof was right there between his legs. No one ever bit it off. When they were done—the hustlers and the naïve first-timers—it was fun to belittle them, show them up as the lying little queers they were.

  “If you never done it before, how come you know what to do? Huh? How come you’re so good at it, you never did it before? Answer that.”

  Show them they were fruit pickers in their own minds and that they had consented to it.

  Later on, right in the same conversation, John would revert to the fatherly image he had over younger kids, offer them a drink, use his Jaycee chaplain voice to explain about morality: “Nothing is wrong unless you make it wrong in your own mind.”

  Before he got to that point, though, John Gacy had to get the cuffs on them. You couldn’t wrestle around with these little assholes, try to sneak the cuffs on, using force. Antonucci proved that in the summer of 1975.

  What you wanted to do, you wanted to “plant seeds” in their minds about sex, see how they responded. If the seeds seemed to be growing, the handcuffs came next. Some kids were straight. Antonucci, you could plant seeds all night long, the kid wouldn’t go for nothing. But John had learned from Tony Antonucci. There was a better way to get the handcuffs on them. You could trick them.