Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  All the victims, John told the docs, were Voorhees.

  The composite victim was a key piece of the puzzle, and it fit neatly into its spot on the personality tree John had drawn on the flyleaf of his Bible; it slid right in there next to the breakdown of the various Jack Hanleys. The edges of the composite-victim piece matched those of the piece John was calling the fourth Jack Hanley. Bad Jack. The Other Guy.

  The compassion cop picked them up because they were young and innocent. He wanted to help them. But then the “Other Guy switched on.”

  John’s rationalization:

  “Remember what happened in Iowa?” Bad Jack says. “Remember how you wanted to help the kid out and he blackmailed you? Remember how he outsmarted you and fucked over you? Remember Voorhees?”

  John said he could hear the Other Guy screaming, “This is the son-of-a-bitch who destroyed you in Iowa. Get the motherfucker, now.”

  That scenario made sense to John, and he began to “theorize” about “a trigger” that caused Bad Jack to split from the third Jack. Maybe the victim said something that Voorhees had said and that caused “the switchover.” It could have been something as simple as money. Maybe the kid tried to take advantage of the compassionate cop, tried to outsmart him for money. Then the fourth Jack took over and outsmarted the kid with death.

  Another theory: Maybe Bad Jack was still a cop, but not a cop who was “bent on getting his rocks off,” like the second Jack. He may have been a cop who hated homosexuality because he knew what it had done to him in Iowa. What if the sex act itself switched on a cop who was “bound and determined to exterminate homosexuals,” a cop who wanted to punish boys for prostituting themselves, for tempting him, a cop who killed to reassert his own “manlihood"?

  John told the docs he was bringing more and more pieces of the Other Guy in, out of the fog. Even in the fourth Jack, John was beginning to sense some deep well of compassion. This guy could actually have given his victims the gentle gift of death because they were lost, because they wanted to die just the way John Gacy wanted to die when he was their age. This was crazy in a way, because that meant he was killing himself, committing a kind of suicide, except that a stranger, some boy he’d picked up on the street, had become young John Gacy.

  John couldn’t get the new pieces organized. How could the victim be Voorhees and John Gacy at the same time? The Other Guy, what the hell, he could be as complicated as John Gacy himself. Maybe he had a dozen or more characters in his breakdown, too; maybe he split off into different aspects. Just like there was an aspect of Bad Jack that John began calling “Stanley.” No reason. There was just some hazy quality to the Other Guy that John thought of as “Stanley.”

  When someone pointed out that Stanley was his father’s middle name, John said he almost slapped his forehead like a dumb Polack in one of those jokes. Of course: the Old Man! He’d been telling the docs all along that he suspected that there was a lot of John Stanley in the Other Guy.

  But if the victim became young John Gacy, and if the killer was the Old Man, then maybe Bad Jack had a father’s interest in teaching hustlers right from wrong. Just like John Stanley thought punishment was teaching. And John Gacy, when he took a word-association test the docs gave him, “correlated punishment with teaching.” Follow it through: death was the ultimate punishment, the final lesson. You kill someone, now you’ve taught him: he won’t do that again.

  This new guy: John told the docs that he didn’t think Stanley was another personality. He was only a character part of Bad Jack, just the way Pogo was a character in John Gacy.

  Stanley, Hanley—they were the same guy. They were both Bad Jack.

  The puzzle was coming together, but John still couldn’t see the whole picture. These character aspects of the Other Guy wouldn’t fit together in an organized pattern. Did he kill for different reasons? Did he give one boy the ultimate lesson and another the gentle gift? Were boys murdered because they said something that reminded Jack of Voorhees? What if all the character aspects came together in one compulsive bundle at the moment of the rope?

  It was almost done, the thirty-seven-year puzzle of John Gacy’s life. There were only two things left to do to complete the picture. John had to work with the docs to “find the trigger that makes the Other Guy split off of Jack number three.”

  If one of the docs could find that switching mechanism, isolate it, he would be able to talk to Bad Jack. Then you could do a breakdown of Jack Hanley, just like the breakdown of John Gacy. The docs could analyze that, the killer’s personality, and use it to help John, with therapy. They could take the breakdown to his trial and explain murder to the jury with science. Docs sitting up there in the witness stand saying something like, “After an exhaustive search and with the help and complete cooperation of John Gacy himself, we find the defendant to be suffering from a type of mental illness that involves a dual personality, and we emphatically recommend that he be found innocent by reason of insanity.”

  Before that could happen, though, the docs would have to find the trigger and pull it. The trial was bearing down on him now, and John knew the prosecution would surely ask for the death penalty. He began a frantic search for the trigger.

  Releasing Bad Jack so the docs could talk to him: it was worth John Gacy’s life.

  * * *

  * * *

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 6, 1978, Chicago police investigator Ted Janus, who worked the homicide and sex detail in Area 6, the North Side of the city, pulled near the house at 8213 Summerdale, spotted the Oldsmobile in the driveway, and noted the license number: PDM 42. Janus went down two houses and parked by the curb, motor running and lights off as he called for a backup unit. Suddenly a portly man came out of the house, got into the big black Olds, and began backing out. Janus put his own car in gear and blocked the driveway. He got out, told the man in the Olds to put his hands on the dash, and placed him under arrest for kidnapping and deviate sexual assault.

  The man, John Gacy, listened to Janus read him his rights, then said he knew nothing about a kidnapping and invited the investigator into the house for a drink. Instead, Janus took Gacy to Area 6 police headquarters, where they went into an interview room. Gacy was again advised of his rights and agreed to talk. No, Gacy said, he didn’t need a lawyer.

  What happened last week, early on the morning of December 31, John Gacy explained, is that Robert Donnelly, this nineteen-year-old kid making the complaint, was walking along Montrose Avenue a little after midnight. Gacy pulled over, offered the boy a lift, and as they were driving, a sexual bargain was struck: They would perform a kind of slavery-sex thing, and Donnelly agreed to a certain price for his services. It was all “consensual.”

  The “slavery sex” took place inside the house on Summerdale. Gacy said they bound one another with handcuffs and chains and committed various sexual acts using chains and dildos. The slavery continued through the night, about seven hours, and at eight that morning, Robert Donnelly took a shower and Gacy drove him to work. That must have been when the kid got the license number off the Oldsmobile.

  Gacy planted an important seed. “I didn’t pay the kid,” he told the investigator.

  Janus had interviewed Donnelly previously, on the day after the incident, when the boy’s wrists were still bruised from the handcuffs. The investigator had written up a “basic summarization” of Robert Donnelly’s statement.

  Donnelly himself recalls that he told Janus and other law-enforcement officials the whole story: how Gacy had impersonated a police officer and pulled a gun to get him in the car, how he was immediately handcuffed. There was no talk of money: Donnelly was neither a hustler nor a homosexual. At the house, Gacy threw a drink in the boy’s face, then poured another down his throat. Donnelly said he was raped in various painful ways, that Gacy tied something—he couldn’t see what it was—around his neck and choked him. The boy said that Gacy pointed the gun at him and told him there was
one live shell in the chamber. Gacy pulled the trigger more than a dozen times until there was a loud report, obviously the sound of a blank. Donnelly said that Gacy, using only his hands this time, choked him until he passed out. When he came to, he was still cuffed, and there was some sort of gag in his mouth. He remembers telling the officers that his head was thrust into a bathtubful of water until he passed out. Donnelly said the man held his head underwater, nearly drowning him like that, four times. The man, John Gacy, kept him on the brink of death all night long. Donnelly, in fact, was in so much pain he had begged the man to kill him.

  A lot of this wasn’t in the “basic summarization.”

  After listening to Gacy’s version of events, Janus called in assistant state’s attorney Jerry Latherow, who talked with both Robert Donnelly and John Gacy in separate interviews. Janus asked that charges of kidnapping and deviate sexual assault be brought against John Gacy, but Latherow refused.

  One witness said the “slavery sex” was a matter of mutual consent.

  One said he was viciously sodomized, terrorized, nearly killed.

  The state’s attorney noted that Gacy had, in both versions of the story, first offered the boy a drink. He had driven him to work in the morning. Gacy was too “nice.”

  Donnelly, by contrast, appeared to be mentally unstable. Actually, he had recently completed therapy designed to relieve stress after his father died. Donnelly, the eldest of eight children, had to take care of the family by himself. He entered therapy because his doctor “noticed I was having a stress buildup.” He was still in shaky condition when he met John Gacy.

  Worse, Donnelly spoke slowly, with a kind of stutter.

  Gacy, on the other hand, was intensely fluent, the owner of a prosperous business, and a respected—indeed, an influential—member of the community in which he lived. The man had political connections.

  Latherow found evidence of Gacy’s sodomy conviction. Still, it would be impossible, the assistant state’s attorney thought, to get a felony conviction on the latest incident. In his summary report, Latherow found “too many difficult matters to believe in Donnelly’s story.” Gacy was a “better” witness. “Even though Gacy had a sex-offense conviction several years ago,” Latherow concluded, “he was much more credible than Donnelly.”

  If Bad Jack—or whatever you wanted to call the Other Guy—felt like torturing some boy nearly to death, then releasing him, he couldn’t have chosen anyone more suitable than Robert Donnelly.

  Call it Bad Jack’s little trick on Asshole John: Release the bad witnesses; let the space cadets complain to the cops. John Gacy would have to outsmart the police to save himself. Just a little message from Bad Jack to John: “Don’t fuck with me, asshole.”

  The way John was beginning to see it, 1978, the year he was finally arrested, was a time of conflict: John against the Other Guy, each out to outsmart the other, each one looking to take over.

  The Other Guy knew John. Asshole John, the goody-goody, could plant seeds, pull “a reverse” when he needed it.

  Just like a few years before, driving back from Schaumburg a little drunk with his mother, John was doing a hard seventy miles an hour when a cop pulled up behind and started beeping. A state trooper in an unmarked car: John would have seen him five miles back if he hadn’t had a few J&Bs. The only thing to do was bluff it out.

  Bad Jack probably remembered that reverse as well as John, who could recall the conversation with the cop nearly word for word. “I waved him on,” John explained. “Moved over a lane so he could pass. Guy stays right on my ass. I step on it, go on up to seventy-five to get out of his way. The guy puts on the revolving light, and he’s beeping like crazy. So I start waving over my head like, ‘Go on by, ya son-of-a-bitch.’ We must have gone fifteen miles like that: he’s got the red light going on his dash, and the siren’s screaming. I turns to Ma, I says, ‘I think he wants us to stop.’ “

  Just before the place where 90 runs into the Kennedy, John pulled over. The cop walked over to the car, steaming. John looked up and said, “Damn, I got to get my mother here to the hospital.”

  The cop said, “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. She’s got a heart condition. I’m taking her to Resurrection, right down on Talcott. I don’t get her there on time, anything happens to Ma, it’s your fault. You want to stand around, you better give me your name.”

  John laughed, remembering the whole thing. “Shit, I reversed the whole thing on him. I says, ‘I want your name and your badge number, because if anything happens to my mother, I want to know who to sue.’ “

  The cop walked over to Ma’s side of the car and asked her if she was all right. John’s Ma is fair, and she can find excuses for bad behavior, like the tumor that pressed on her husband’s brain when he was drinking, but Ma is straight-out honest and doesn’t lie. Fortunately, John had been driving with the window open, and Ma was half frozen, so she said, “I’m just so cold, I feel numb.”

  John explained how the feeling came over him then. His mother was sick, and he needed to get her to the hospital. The poor woman was numb, for Chrissake, and this cop wanted to stand around and bullshit. John exploded.

  “That’s it, damn it!” he shouted, righteously angry. “I’m taking my mother to the hospital RIGHT NOW!”

  The cop walked around the car, grabbed John’s arm, and said, “You better watch your mouth, buddy.”

  John said, “Now you’re putting your hands on me? Do you know who the fuck I am?” In Chicago—more than any other city in America—that question can give a cop pause. He looked at John, then looked at the new Oldsmobile with custom plates.

  “Just lead me to the hospital,” John said, backing off, giving the cop an out, using psychology.

  “I can’t do that without authorization.”

  “Well, just let me get my mother to the hospital. Can’t you see how sick she is?” John recalled how he felt the tears beginning to burn in his eyes then. His Ma: her heart. How he loved her.

  “Yeah, okay,” the cop said, “just drive a little slower on the way. You’re almost there.”

  John turned off, on his way to Resurrection, in a hurry to get medical attention for his mother, and when he was sure the cop had gone, he pushed the big Olds up to eighty and started laughing. Almost gave Ma a real heart attack. “I feel numb,” she says. Shit.

  Reversed the whole damn thing on that cop.

  Just like in Cermak, John reversed a priest there. John asked to see the first one, but he sure felt like an asshole because he had to ask, “Father, can you confess to something if you don’t even know you did it?” John recalled that the priest told him the Church didn’t “require a confession if you have no knowledge of the sin.”

  “God knows what’s going on,” the priest said, and John didn’t make a confession.

  That priest didn’t give John any pressure, but the next one they sent him, when he got sick in April 1979, John had to show him his place. “By the time he left,” John remembered, “he was asking me to forgive him. I told him he was overstepping his bounds as a priest.”

  “I says, ‘Do you believe in God?’

  “He says, ‘Of course.’

  “I says, ‘Why do you think I need God just because I’m down and out right now? Don’t you think about God when you don’t need him for nothing? That’s the trouble with the world. People only think about religion when they need it. You should thank God for the good days and he’ll be there in the bad ones.’ “

  John said that “I switched the conversation around on him. And he actually did, he asked me to forgive him. Because he wasn’t sure he was being Christian.”

  John told this pushy priest that God is around all the time; anyone can feel him. “I had this priest second-guessing himself,” John said years later. “He thought I needed him just because I was in that situation, and I told him, ‘Bullshit, I got God around me all the time.’ “

  John told the priest that his religion was something he lived every day, not
something he turned to in hard times only. If that was why the priest had come, John said, “Then I don’t need you.” John “proved that I had stronger faith than him. And he left feeling like an asshole, I think.”

  To “work a reverse” with the psychiatrists was a little tougher, though.

  John recalled one of his sessions with Doc Freedman, “when we were trying to get the Other Guy out, and I jumped his ass because we weren’t spending enough time. I said, ‘You have to get me going, and that takes time. Especially because the Other Guy don’t come out unless I’m taking Valiums or drinking. He don’t come out in the day. He don’t come out until after midnight.’ I says, ‘You’d have to get me drunk, get me mad to have the Other Guy come out and then he could tell you about all those assholes in the crawl space.’ “ If the rules said they couldn’t look for Bad Jack with Scotch and Valium, John thought, then they had to put in hour after hour: they’d look for the Other Guy using time.

  John said, “Doc, I come all the way over here to your office in chains, and you been late twice. What is this shit? You got no reason to be late. We can’t get the Other Guy out because we don’t spend enough time and then you’re late.”

  John recalled that he looked around at Freedman’s office and saw that it “was totally disorganized.” The whole place needed to be remodeled for efficiency, and John explained to the doc how work is done. “First of all,” he said, “in any job, you are not late. Because you’re getting paid. If I was doing this office, I would not be late.” John felt his mind going so fast that he skidded right by his point, and he was off, motormouthing about work. “And if you came in and told me to do the shelves before the floors, I’d tell you to get the hell out. Of your own office. Because when I do my work, we do it my way. That’s just how I am. Then later, if you don’t like what I did, or you want it done some other way, then we can talk about it. But don’t try to tell me how to do my job when I’m doing it.”