Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  If drink and drugs set loose the killer, it would explain one thing that John said puzzled him. Looking back on his life, trying to recall the crimes, was almost like waking up with a bad hangover and knowing that you must have done a lot more last night than you remember.

  With Butkovitch, John could see only broken fragments of the time he lost in a darkening mist. It was so goddamn crazy, he told the docs, because an image came up, a flashback maybe, but it wasn’t at all as if he was seeing it out of his own eyes. During these flashbacks, he seemed to be standing off to one side, like a ghost or something that couldn’t talk, couldn’t even be seen. One of the figures he saw was a boy, some kid who looked like Butkovitch, but he couldn’t really be sure because there was a hazy fog in the room, a glittering mist that flickered like a failing light in a storm. What gave him the creeps was the other figure. “It was me,” John told the docs. “Or similar enough in build to be me.” When the rope came out, the fog would purple down into blackness, and John never saw the image of himself committing the crime.

  He’d been having these flashbacks even before he was arrested, John told the docs, but the witness in him wouldn’t go to the cops and confess. How could you turn in an image of yourself seen through a darkening haze? “You’d look dumb and stupid.” They’d think you were nuts. So you keep your mouth shut about it. Out of fear.

  Same thing with the images John saw in flashback. Same fear. That’s why he buried the bodies in his own crawl space, where no one would ever find them. Out of fear.

  John told the docs that looking into the fog like that, searching for a motive, was like working on a jigsaw puzzle. The problem was, he had only a few of the parts. There was a smooth, white piece you could label “compassion,” and a dark, jagged one you could think of as “outsmarting the other guy.” Then you had John Gacy the alcoholic drinker, and John Gacy the drug taker.

  There were other pieces, and John began isolating them for the docs. He sat in his room in 3 North, ripping his personality into little shreds he called characters. The first one was “John Gacy the workaholic,” the top dog of them all. Other characters included the person who was naїve, the religious person, and the lonely man; there was the guy with the sex drive, the sick person, the politician, and the criminal who was always stealing. You had Pogo, who split into the compassion clown and the hatred clown. Many of the characters John developed contradicted one another: On one side you had Gacy the miser, the tightwad. On the other there was Gacy the do-gooder, the selfless, community-minded man.

  It took weeks to break John Gacy down, but eventually there he was, scattered all over the yellow legal pad, his whole life spread out like a puzzle ready for assembly. And he came to see soon enough that there was a split in the single person he knew as John Gacy: all these contradictory characters were battling with one another, right there on a lined sheet of paper.

  You could divide these ill-fitting pieces on two sides—call them right-hand and left-hand. On the right was his mother’s side, and the pieces that belonged there were the religious person; the do-gooder; the softhearted person; Pogo the Clown; and the trusting, naїve person. Put sex drive on Ma’s side, too, but make it the good, wholesome kind of sex that involves love between a man and a woman.

  The left was John Stanley’s side. Most everything over there was a contradiction of the Old Man, and John told the docs that in what he was doing in his life, he must have been trying to “destroy the father image.” You only had to look at the left-side character pieces to see that. The Old Man hated politicians, so John became a politician. Dad didn’t like being an alcoholic, so John became an alcoholic drinker. John Stanley despised drug takers and criminals, so his son took drugs and became a criminal.

  There were some good aspects on the left, though. John could be a tightwad, just like the Old man, but in its best light, you could think of that as being thrifty. The distrustful John Gacy could be a con man, sure, but “by the same token, most people are bent on fucking over you,” and it’s dumb and stupid to imagine that they aren’t. Thinking the worst about anyone—it was only being “smart.”

  When John thought he had the pieces pretty well divided between the right- and the left-hand sides, he took the Bible a visiting priest had given him and sketched in all the characters on the flyleaf. The drawing looked like a big tree with branches on either side. The top dog, the workaholic, was the trunk, and he nourished everyone on both sides of the tree.

  John told the docs that the workaholic “derived from never being accepted, never being good enough.” And when John thought about it, he realized “I was a slave to myself, constantly striving for acceptance.” Little John Gacy yearning for one kind word from the Old Man.

  Talking with the docs, John was able to add a few more characters. Pogo was on the right, with Ma, but that was Pogo as a compassion clown. When he was a hatred clown, Pogo belonged over on the left, with John Stanley. And then, sitting there talking with one of the docs, John had another revelation. There was a split in the sex-drive piece! Because, okay, you had sex between a man and a woman, and that was like a sacrament, done with love. But over on the left side, sex could be had coldly and without emotion. On John Stanley’s side, sex could even be a hatred drive.

  John Gacy on the right-hand side: He wanted to have loving sex with a woman, but goddamn it, the workaholic didn’t have the time. Still, there was a physical need, a drive, and the fastest way for “the motor-driven John Gacy to get his rocks off” was to pay for it. Relieve himself and get back to work. But even with a whore John said he felt emotion slipping in there. That and the infuriating thought that he had to waste his time actually trying to satisfy her. He kept slipping over to Ma’s side with a woman.

  The part of him that simply needed sex and no more, wanted it cold, hard, and fast: sex “reduced to an animal status.” The workaholic, with no time to waste, “came down to the point where he could just relieve himself with a male.” Some kid on the street, you don’t have to satisfy him. There’s no “fondering”: you don’t make love. And you never go back to the same one twice: too much danger of emotional attachment, which is the very thing you’re trying to avoid.

  That was how John rationalized it, sex on John Stanley’s side. He could even put a name on the sex-drive character over there. The guy who went cruising for animal sex with males was named Jack Hanley.

  Police reports on his arrest said that John Gacy had drawn a map of the crawl space, dropped his head, as if asleep, and then looked up and said, “Did Jack . . . I see Jack drew a diagram of the crawl space.” Well, that was bullshit. John couldn’t recall ever drawing such a map. The cops probably drafted it themselves in “a self-serving” effort to make him a “scapegoat.” Also, to the best of John’s recollection and with God as his witness, he never said anything about someone named Jack. Jack Hanley was just a name he used when he was out cruising for animal sex.

  The docs, however, took that seed, Jack Hanley, and let it grow. Freedman was even asking to meet him, like Hanley was actually the Other Guy Gacy found himself fighting during the divorce with Carol. Like the Other Guy was his own person, “a whole other personality” lurking inside, raging against the person he knew as John Gacy. The way John saw it, the docs actually planted the Jack seed in his mind. They brought it up. Now they were going to have to convince him they were right, that Jack was the Other Guy John saw in his flashbacks.

  At first John wouldn’t accept any of this crazy crap. He told the docs he didn’t want to apply that Jekyll and Hyde shit to himself. He didn’t even want to think about it because “that’s running away from reality.” John was committed to honesty in analyzing himself, and he hoped the docs could see that. He told them he wasn’t going “to blame somebody else” for something he did. The problem was that none of the docs had been able to convince him he had committed “the crimes,” which forced him to examine seriously their split-personality theory. What if there really was someone else inside who killed pe
ople and left John to shoulder an unearned guilt?

  So, okay, since the docs made the suggestion, he’d consider the possibility that he had “a dual personality.” The personality tree, with all the characters branching out on right and left, was a first step in helping the docs pry the Other Guy to the surface.

  Even so, it sure was hard to conceive of two people living in the same body. The whole concept was a real brain buster. John told the docs that he had never caught himself actually going from one person to another. Then again, there were long periods of time—hours upon hours—when he couldn’t recall anything at all. Every time that happened, the return of consciousness brought him another boy to bury. And then, in flashbacks, John could see the image of himself with some boy he knew was dead, a boy already buried in the crawl space. But the kid was alive in the misty vision, and the two of them, man and boy, were laughing, drinking, arguing. John could see the rope dangling from his hand, see the hammer handle, and then the mist became an opaque fog, thick and black.

  Looking for the Other Guy:

  Examine the tree, right-hand side, left-hand side. If death was a gift, it was given out of compassion, but the killer clearly couldn’t split from John Gacy the do-gooder. The Other Guy didn’t belong on Ma’s side at all. John concentrated his search on the Old Man’s side of the tree.

  And it kept coming back to the sex-drive guy, Jack Hanley. Through the haze, John said he could see elements of the drug taker and the alcoholic drinker, the con man, the tightwad, and the criminal. But these characters, in and of themselves, weren’t “strong enough or smart enough” to split off into the Other Guy.

  Which left Jack Hanley standing alone over there on the Old Man’s side. But Hanley was nothing more than a convenient name John Gacy used to hide his identity when he went cruising for animal sex. Like everything else in John’s life, though, the name had a double meaning.

  John Gacy told the docs he knew all about Jack Hanley. When John got drunk or stoned, Jack came out and went down to the park because John Gacy, sober, didn’t have the courage. Jack was just a braver, more aggressive version of John. So how could he split off into someone John didn’t know? How could he become the Other Guy?

  It was like following a path that kept doubling back on itself, a trail that eventually disappeared somewhere in the fog. That’s how John saw it. And then he had another revelation: It seemed as if he had actually been, well—it sounded crazy—fighting with Jack Hanley from the time he invented the name. It was almost as if Jack was a real guy, sort of a semipersonality on the left who had set himself in opposition to everything that was good on the right-hand side. John followed that trail all the way down into the mist, and he used a car he’d bought in 1977 to get there.

  “I bought my first black car after the divorce from Carol,” John said. A new Oldsmobile Delta 88 that John had stripped of any extraneous attachments except for a red spotlight on the driver’s side, a white light on the passenger’s side, and the pair of CB antennae on the trunk. The vanity license plate read “PDM 42” for John Gacy’s business and his year of birth. The cops were saying that he had tricked the black Olds out to look like an unmarked police car. They said he posed as a cop to pick up boys, intimidate them, kill them.

  Not true. First of all, the car looked official, almost presidential, and he could use it for parades and shit. John told Cram that Norwood Park picked up part of the cost because the Olds could be used as “the township car.” There were more “double meanings” here: John told the docs, “When I bought the black car, I was fighting the Jack Hanley side.” He had been battling the Other Guy about Carol, and after the divorce he was fighting Jack, trying to outsmart him with an Oldsmobile that looked like something a police detective might drive. A cop car.

  “I figured,” John said, “that no hustler is going to come up to a car that looks like an unmarked police car. That way, if I woke up and found myself cruising the park, I wouldn’t be able to pick anyone up. I thought, ‘I’ll fix the son-of-a-bitch.’ “

  Look at it in that light: Any doc could see that John Gacy never had that much control over the Jack Hanley part, anyway. Why would you be constantly fighting with yourself?

  The black car didn’t work as well as John had hoped, however. “Some of the hustlers were awful damn bold,” John said. “How do you figure it: prostitutes coming up to a black car like that?”

  The workaholic John Gacy, who needed his time, came up with another way to “make it hard for Jack to go down to the park.” Gacy stopped carrying cash. There were double meanings here, of course. The boys who worked for him were forever whining about money, asking for advances on their salaries. John didn’t like to lie, he said, and he didn’t like to pay for work that hadn’t been done. The solution was simple: Don’t carry money. If John Gacy needed gas—if he wanted to pay for a dinner out—he had his credit cards. You made big purchases by check.

  “But see,” John said, “on the same token, I was fucking over the Jack Hanley side. Because prostitution is a cash business. Some of them want to see the money up front. You can’t show them a credit card or a check.”

  This is where a second aspect of Jack Hanley came out. “This guy, Jack number two, he figured a way around it,” John said. Without a dime in his pocket, the second Jack Hanley could talk a hustler into the big black car with only a promise. But this Jack Hanley, the second aspect of Jack, even outsmarted John Gacy because he used the car as a prop to get sex free. “See, this guy,” John said, “he’d have the kids thinking he was a cop.” John had bought the car to fuck over Jack, but Jack was so smart, the car actually made it easier for him to outsmart hustlers. “Jack didn’t even have to tell them he was a cop,” John said. “He just planted seeds.”

  Jack was so smart he could even deny being an officer in such a way that the seed erupted like a jungle in a boy’s mind. It was a good way to “dominate” hustlers, to “have the master control” over them.

  The second Jack Hanley was a tough, streetwise homicide cop who could track down homosexuals, then “cunningly trap them.” He was “a genius at what he did,” but he “wasn’t such a bad guy”: certainly not a killer. Jack just “outsmarted them” and discarded them.

  There was a third Jack that John knew about, another character that split off the second Jack. He was still a cop, the third Jack Hanley, but he wasn’t “bent on outsmarting” the boys who hustled their bodies down at the park. He was a good cop, the third Jack. Just like John Gacy on the right-hand side, he admired police officers. It was a tough job with a lot of character roles to play. You had to be a violent person sometimes, and you had to be smart. A good cop, the best sort of officer, has “humanity” he has compassion for the people he deals with every day, even the scum. A cop can be like an understanding father figure to young boys. He can help them straighten themselves out.

  The third Jack was like that. He was a compassion cop.

  John could recall bringing boys out to the house on Summerdale and not having sex at all. Sometimes he’d just talk to the kid. If the boy told a genuine hard-luck story, the third Jack might even give him a few bucks out of compassion. But sometimes John Gacy lost the third Jack Hanley in that fog. Sometimes, John told the docs, the boys who came home with the compassion cop died.

  In the darkness of the fog, during the time lost to John Gacy, the Other Guy split from the third Jack. John told the docs he was sure of it. But who was he, the fourth Jack? John was blundering around in the flickering darkness of the fog, looking for the killer, and he was armed only with “suppositions” and “rationalizations.”

  They gave him pictures of the victims, and John spread them out on his bunk up in 3 North. He recognized Butkovitch, Godzik, Szyc, and the last one killed, the one who got him caught, Piest. The rest of them were ciphers.

  The only way to think coherently about the boys in the pictures, John thought, was to catalogue their similarities and build a composite picture of the typical victim. One thing, mos
t of the dead boys were of a single physical type. The typical victim was slender, muscular, short. Seventeen of them had been between 5 feet 2 and 5 feet 9, and all had weighed less than 150 pounds. The composite victim was young—twenty of them were under twenty, and the youngest was fourteen; the rest were under twenty-two. The overwhelming majority of them, nineteen of the victims, had light-colored hair: sandy blond, red or light brown. Six had brown hair.

  Picture some kid who was young and muscular-looking, with light-colored hair and blue eyes. Why did the composite victim remind John of someone? Who the hell. . . ? It came to him one day, John said, in a flash of insight: Donald Voorhees looked like that! Voorhees, the boy who had outsmarted him in Iowa, who blackmailed him, whose testimony before a grand jury sent him to prison on a ten-year rap for sodomy.

  Voorhees had been young, fifteen at the time, and he was short, muscular, with brownish-blond hair and blue eyes. A clean-cut kid—no beard or moustache, none of that dirty hippie shit—Voorhees had this cunning air of innocence about him.

  The dumb-looking, dewy-eyed ones, John knew, were the most dangerous. They could use it, the naїve act, to outsmart you. Greedy little bastards with “deviate minds.” Healthy boys who wore tight-fitting clothes on a small, tightly muscled frame. Trick minds hiding behind innocent baby faces.

  John examined the pictures of the victims, working rapidly through the large stack, shuffling them like a deck of cards. Butkovitch looked a lot like Voorhees. The Stapleton kid, the fourteen-year-old, John couldn’t remember him, but he had that dangerous, baby-faced Voorhees look: an innocent, naїve-looking boy with blond hair falling across his forehead. The rest of them didn’t look exactly like Voorhees, but every one of the little assholes had something of Voorhees in his face. The eyes, the hair, a smile, the sense of being lost or lonely or troubled—every one of them had that look.