by Tim Cahill
There were the bodies to consider, of course, and just after the Christmas holidays, in January 1979, John planned to pour about thirty yards of concrete in the crawl space. Cement one foot thick, covering everything, “but not,” John told the docs, “because I thought there was anything buried there.” The concrete floor would eliminate his seepage problems, and get rid of the musty odor, the bad, dead smell that rose out of the crawl space when it flooded; the faint, sickly sweet odor that filled the house on hot summer days. The concrete would strengthen the foundation so John could build a second story onto the house. Make the whole place into a recreational palace. John thought he might install a whirlpool and a sauna on the second floor. Just lie back in the Jacuzzi after a hard business day. And down below, under a foot of concrete, there’d be a nice little secret.
That way, with the concrete down there, he could start a new life. The past would be over and done. No one would have to think about it again.
On December 11, 1978, John Wayne Gacy killed his last victim, a fifteen-year-old high-school sophomore named Rob Piest.
The boy died between nine and ten o’clock at night, and witnesses who talked with Gacy slightly before the murder said he was neither drunk nor on drugs. Gacy even took two business calls while the boy was dying, and the men who talked to him said he seemed calm and rational.
John couldn’t understand why the Other Guy came out with Piest: it sure didn’t look like the same guy who had to get drunk and stoned to kill; the one who killed in the early-morning hours, who covered everything as he went along.
The murder of Rob Piest: it was dumb and stupid. Atypical. Not like Bad Jack at all. To get caught.
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CHAPTER 20
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ROB PIEST, A FIFTEEN‐YEAR‐OLD sophomore at Maine West High School, loved woods and rivers, all the wild places of the Midwest. He was two merit badges shy of becoming an Eagle Scout, and he planned to earn scouting’s highest award with a community service project that involved cleaning up a portion of the Des Plaines River. He was a good student—on the honor roll as a freshman—a passionate outdoor photographer, and a member of Maine West’s gymnastic team. Rob was a developing athlete, a boy of medium height with a gymnast’s trim, muscular build and supple grace. A good-looking young fellow with shaggy brown hair, Rob tended to date girls a year or two older than himself.
Rob’s mother, Elizabeth, regularly picked her son up at school after gymnastics practice and drove him to his part-time job at the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines. The drugstore was only eight blocks from home, but Rob’s schedule was so tight that his mother usually brought a dinner for him to eat in the car on the way to work.
The boy worked almost every night, often filling in for other employees when they called in sick. In only four months at Nisson, he’d managed to save nine hundred dollars, which he planned to use as a down payment on a Jeep. With a four-wheel-drive vehicle, Rob could get out into the wilderness more often, take more photographic safaris. It was going to be tough, though; he was making only $2.85 an hour at Nisson, not nearly enough to cover payments on the kind of vehicle he wanted. Worse, he’d just been turned down for a raise. Rob would be sixteen, old enough to drive, in three months. There wasn’t much time.
On December 11, 1978, Elizabeth Piest picked Rob up at about 5:00 P.M., a little early, and they had time for a quick dinner at home. It was his mother’s forty-sixth birthday and the family would wait on the cake and ice cream until Rob finished work at nine that night. He arrived at the Nisson Pharmacy a little before 6:00 P.M.
John Gacy was really running. It was another “drugstore day,” and he was checking out jobs all over the city, pushing his new four-door Olds 98 hard. The first black car hadn’t stopped Jack, and John never could explain why he hadn’t given up the stratagem, why he traded that car in for a second black Oldsmobile, a Royale, equipped, like the first one, with red and white spotlights and a CB antenna.
By three in the afternoon of December 11, John had already put in an eight-hour day. He knocked off for an hour to visit at Northwest Hospital his Uncle Harold, who had been so helpful to the family when John Stanley was sick. He was John’s favorite uncle, a goodhearted guy who “took the brunt” of John Stanley’s rages.
At Northwest, John learned that Harold had slipped into a coma and wasn’t expected to live through the night. It was two weeks until Christmas, the beginning of another hollow holiday season. The Old Man had died the day Christ was born: died of shame, John knew, without a son by his side to comfort him. Because of Voorhees. Now Uncle Harold was passing on and there was nothing John could do, nothing anyone could do about the dark season, about Christmas.
John left the hospital at 4:00 P.M. He felt “a little depressed.” Goddamn bells ringing all over the city, carols on the car radio: sounds of death and shame. Christmas.
An hour later, at five o’clock, Richard Rapheal talked with John Gacy on the phone. A Rafco business meeting was scheduled for seven that evening. Rapheal wanted to introduce Gacy to another superintendent and discuss a job that was supposed to start the next day.
Gacy said he’d be there, at Rapheal’s house in Glenview, at seven sharp. Rapheal said he’d order John a pizza.
Phil Torf, the co-owner of Nisson Drugs, Rob Piest’s employer, had called John Gacy that day and asked him to stop over and “give me an assessment of how my store was put together.” About a year before, Gacy had enlarged the store and “given it a general face-lift.” Torf wanted to do some “minor rearrangment.” Gacy wasn’t much of a craftsman in Torf s opinion, but he knew the pharmacy business—knew, for instance, which items to stock on the top shelves and how to funnel people through the impulse-buy aisles to the pharmacy counter in the back. Torf thought the contractor was ambitious and a bit of a braggart, but he got the work done fast.
Half an hour after his conversation with Rapheal, Gacy walked into Nisson Drugs. It was about 5:30 P.M. He made some measurements, then talked with Torf for over an hour. Gacy wanted sixteen hundred dollars for the job, but the pharmacist said he thought he could do the work himself. Maybe Gacy could just give him a little advice. The two men were standing by the pharmacy counter in the back of the store.
Rob Piest came in at about six, walking to the back of the store, near the pharmacy, where he sat down and began putting price tags on merchandise to be stocked.
“Looks like you got a new crew,” Gacy said. “A lot of new faces.” He was looking directly at Rob Piest, who was near enough to hear the conversation.
Torf said he hired “a lot of high-school kids,” but they usually went on to college or full-time jobs.
“I’ve been hiring a lot of high-school boys to work for me,” Gacy said. He glanced over at Torf's new stockboy.
Rob Piest didn’t say anything.
Linda Mertes, who worked at Nisson Drugs, remembered Gacy from the work he’d done there in 1977. She talked briefly with the contractor when he came in, did some work, then joined Gacy and Torf by the pharmacy in the back of the store. She stood just in front of Rob Piest.
Linda asked Gacy about Mike Rossi. “He’s doing much better now,” Gacy said. “I started him at two or three dollars an hour. Now anyone who works for me starts at seven dollars an hour.”
“Hey, Rob,” Linda said, “you want a job?” It was a joke, and neither Gacy nor Piest said anything. It would have been bad form with Phil Torf standing right there.
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“I never talked to the Piest kid,” John said. “I went in, measured the store. I was there for a couple of hours. And we were just bullshitting about old times.” There were some seeds dropped, though. “We started talking about money,” John said. “Okay, I know the kids were listening, but I never offered any one of them a job. The Piest kid, I never mentioned anything about a job. But I knew he was pissed off about what they paid him there.” John didn’t say how he knew that.
&nbs
p; After the seeds were dropped and Torf rejected his bid, Gacy left Nisson Drugs, at about seven. Torf noticed that John had left his appointment book on the desk behind the pharmacy counter.
Where the hell was Gacy? He’d never missed a business meeting before. It was after seven, the pizza was cold, and Rapheal had two other guys, just sitting there waiting for Gacy. There was no way even to get ahold of the contractor: every time he called the house, Rapheal got the phone answering machine.
“It was snowing,” John said, “so I went back to my house to change vehicles because I had to do some plowing. I cleared my phone machine and Phil Torf had called, said I left my appointment book there.”
Phil Torf told police that he never phoned Gacy about the book. He was adamant on that point.
John didn’t recall any messages from Rapheal.
“Nisson Drugs is on the way to Glenview,” John explained. “I figured I could pick up my book, then drive out to Glenview for my meeting.” This is the only reason he went back to the drugstore.
Sixteen-year-old Kim Byers was working Nisson’s checkout counter near the front door. It was a cold night and every time a customer opened the door, Kim caught a blast of frigid air. Rob Piest’s parka was draped over the counter, where he’d left it after taking out the garbage. It was a blue Pacific Trails parka, and Kim put it on against the cold.
At about seven-thirty, when business was slow, Kim took some photographic negatives out of her purse. They were photos of her taken at a homecoming dance. Kim wanted reprints and enlargements to give to her sister for Christmas. She tore off the top receipt—number 36119—and absent-mindedly put it in the pocket of Rob’s parka. She filled out the photo logbook with the date and put the envelope in the “to be developed” bag.
John Gacy parked his black Chevy pickup in front of the liquor store near Nisson Drugs. The plow on the front was pointing out, toward Touhy Avenue. It was a little after eight. When he walked into the store Phil Torf said, “Forgot something, huh?”
John said, “Yeah.”
Even though he was over an hour late to his meeting in Glenview, John began walking up and down the aisles, measuring shelving, examining the construction. “I thought I might work a deal with Torf,” John explained. “He could do the work, I’d supervise. He’d save some, I’d still make some.”
John figured he might be able to help Torf bring the job in cheaper if they used some of the leftover shelving from the last job. That’s what John said he was looking for in the back of the store at about eight-thirty. There was a door open and John could see the new kid, the one who was pissed off about his pay, kneeling in the snow and folding boxes. They were alone back there, and John asked the kid about the shelving. The boy didn’t know anything, and John swore with God as his witness that was the only time he talked to the kid. Just asked him about some shelving.
About ten minutes later, sometime around eight-forty, John Gacy left Nisson Drugs. He was almost two hours late for the Rafco meeting, but he sat out in the parking lot, by the liquor store, for at least ten minutes. John couldn’t recall “what the hell I was doing. I must have been writing down figures, which is a standard thing to do after you leave a client.”
While John Gacy was sitting in his truck, “writing down figures,” Elizabeth Piest arrived at Nisson Drugs to pick up her son. It was eight-fifty. Rob was on the register at the front counter and had ten more minutes to work. Elizabeth Piest began browsing to pass the time.
Just before nine, Rob asked Kim Byers if she could take the register for the rest of the night. He said he wanted to go “talk to that contractor guy about a job.”
Rob was now wearing his blue parka. Kim had entirely forgotten that her photo receipt was in the pocket.
A moment or two later, Rob found his mother walking down one of the aisles and said he would be a few more minutes. “Some contractor wants to talk to me about a summer job,” he said.
“No problem,” Mrs. Piest said, “I’ll browse around the store and I’ll wait for you.”
Elizabeth Piest noticed that Rob was wearing his parka.
The cops and prosecutors wanted to make it look like John talked to the kid in private, offered him a job, then waited for him outside in his truck. The truth was, John said, that he was writing down figures. Why would you sit there waiting for a kid you talked to once about some goddamn shelving?
John snapped his notebook closed and was about to pull out onto Touhy when Piest came running out and banged on the hood of the truck. Or maybe it was the window. John wanted to be totally accurate, not make anything up. He knows he rolled down the window. The kid asked if there was a summer job available. Some shit like that.
Ten seconds later, John would have been gone. But the kid came out to talk to him on his own initiative. Was that John Gacy’s fault?
“I ain’t got time to talk about it,” John said.
Still, the kid seemed ambitious and he looked so eager about the job you could almost feel sorry for him. “Well, hell,” John said, “get in the truck. I gotta pick up something at my house. Then I got a meeting in Glenview. I’ll drop you off on my way.”
It must have been John Gacy who picked up Piest, because John remembers the conversation pretty clearly. He told Piest that he couldn’t hire a fifteen-year-old, and the kid started getting “pushy.” Greedy. He kept after John, talking about what a good worker he was and shit. John finally said, “You need money that bad, you ought to hustle your body, make money that way.”
The Piest kid just let that one whiz right on by him. Didn’t even respond to it. He kept “pushing” about a job. But John had planted the seed, and the kid hadn’t actually said no, so maybe he was receptive. He could be one of the sneaky ones who had to be convinced with money. Or with tricks.
“John Gacy was with the Piest kid twenty minutes,” John told the docs. Then—and this was “supposition"—the Other Guy came out and “fucked over the kid.” But why did he come out so early, at nine-thirty in the evening, and when John was almost dead sober? It sure was hard to figure. Maybe it was “because Carol had remarried,” John said. “I think I felt torn apart by that, like I had nothing to live for anymore. And when we got to the house, I cleared the phone machine and learned that my uncle had died. I was upset about that.”
Even so, the Other Guy wouldn’t have come out unless Piest gave some indication that the seed was growing inside his mind, and John could see “he was into it.” That would bring out one of the three Jacks: either the guy who “just wanted to get his rocks off,” or the one “who tracked them down and tricked them,” or the one “who felt sorry for them.” There had to be a trigger somewhere: money, sex, something.
The kid didn’t say anything about how it was his mother’s birthday. That would have been a whole different trigger. It was “speculation,” of course, but “because of my respect for mothers and motherhood,” John figured, “I probably would have given him a present for her and taken him home.”
But the kid just wanted to talk about a job, and John figured Piest pulled the trigger on Jack during the conversation they had about money in the house. John recalls that they both had a drink. The kid drank 7-Up—wouldn’t touch liquor—and he sat at the bar. John had a Scotch.
He asked the kid if there was anything he wouldn’t do for the right price and Rob Piest said he didn’t mind hard work, that he’d do just about anything for money.
That sounded like a hint, and John planted a few more sex seeds, but Piest was “totally unreceptive.” The kid just sloughed off the sex talk and kept pushing about a job even after John told him PDM didn’t have any openings right then.
“You want to earn money, there’s good money in hustling,” John reminded the kid. Piest ignored that one, too. “He never responded to anything that involved sex.”
Piest asked about the clown pictures on the wall, as if he were trying to change the subject and get friendly all at the same time. The handcuffs were on the bar, near where the ki
d was sitting, and “he picked them up and started fiddling around with them.”
“What are these for?” Piest asked.
That was the question, John figured, that probably triggered the second Jack, Smart Jack, the guy who outsmarted boys for animal sex. Because, okay, you’ve just been talking about hustling, about making money that way, and now the kid wants to know about the handcuffs. One of the sly ones, pretending he doesn’t have a clue. A kid, you could tell by is build, by the color of his hair, what was going on in his mind. Acting naїve so he could earn more money. A trick mind behind the baby face. The Voorhees look about him.
That must have been the way it happened, John figured, because the next thing he knew, Smart Jack was showing Rob Piest a trick with the cuffs, telling him to put them on behind his back.
“Why,” John asked the docs, “if you had just been talking about sex, would you let a stranger talk you into putting on a pair of handcuffs? If you weren’t into it?” The docs and the cops and the newspapers could say that Piest was some kind of superstraight-arrow kid until “they’re blue in the face,” but John wouldn’t believe it. Not after the kid put the cuffs on himself.
“I’m going to rape you,” John heard Jack tell the kid, “and you can’t do nothing about it.” It wouldn’t really be rape, though, because there was no force involved and the kid put the cuffs on himself, which showed consent.
John would have gone with it that way—one of those consensual rapes engineered by Smart Jack—but there was a mist now, swirling in wispy shards around the images moving through his memory. He does recall unzipping the kid’s pants. “And I seen he wasn’t into it at all. He was scared at this point. He had tears in his eyes, and you can’t get no erection like that. Well, I had the meeting in Glenview and I had to go to the hospital about my uncle, so I thought, might as well take this kid back. We had just been horsing around with the cuffs, and if the kid told anybody, it would have been my word against his.”