by Tim Cahill
John led the handcuffed boy into the bedroom, but he really didn’t know why they went in there, and the mist had thickened into a fog that was beginning to obscure his recollection. “Why would I take him into the bedroom if I was going to let him go?” John wondered. “The only reason: I think the key for the cuffs must have been in there because I always kept it in the top drawer of the chest by the bed.” John—he figured the boy’s tears switched on the character John knew as the third Jack, the guy who felt sorry for them, the compassion cop—went into the bedroom with the full intention of taking the cuffs off Rob Piest. That’s what he told the docs.
The bedroom was dark, but light from the barroom streamed through the open doorway. In the darkening fog, Piest looked like one of those black cardboard silhouettes. Not even a human being. It was too dark to see if the cardboard boy still had tears in his eyes. The last thing John recalled before the fog filled the room with darkness, he was reaching around inside the drawer, looking for the key.
Then there was, John said, a sense of some time lost to the darkness—only a few minutes—and he must have snapped right out of it because the next thing he recalled, the phone was ringing insistently.
John Gacy was three hours late for the seven-o’clock meeting. Rapheal called Gacy so many times he doesn’t actually recall who placed the final call, but he does remember a phone conversation with John Gacy at about ten that evening.
“I asked him where he was,” Rapheal later testified. “I was perturbed because I had two other people sitting there. He elaborated on a number of excuses. He said he had a flat tire, then he had something about an uncle dying, and then he said he was tired and he was sleeping. . . .”
Rapheal later testified that John Gacy was entirely coherent and that he spoke in a normal tone of voice. The two men agreed to meet the next morning, at the house on Summerdale.
“When I came back into the bedroom after answering the phone call,” John said, “I found Piest lying on the floor with the rope around his neck.” The boy’s body was wedged between the bed and the wall, where he’d fallen, and John said he had “a hell of a time getting it out of there.” He put the body up on the bed, careful to “roll it over on the back because he’d already urinated his pants.”
The boy was dead, and there was a moment, John said, just a moment, when he felt a shaft of pure anger that seemed to come from outside his rational mind. He was disgusted with the kid. Because Rob Piest didn’t have to die.
It was the same knot: crossover, hammer handle, crossover. John figured what happened, he must have been looking for the key in the drawer, ready to let the boy go, when his searching hand fell on the rope and hammer handle. That must have been what switched on the Other Guy and brought the fog down on him, John said.
Looking at the rope around the boy’s neck, he could see that it had been twisted only twice. The hammer handle was turned a bit so that it rested behind the boy’s head. All Piest had to do, he could have ducked his head and lowered his shoulder. The hammer handle would have spun loose. It looked like Bad Jack had only just started with Rob Piest—two minutes lost in the fog—when the phone rang. It was like he escaped.
The docs kept pushing about the Piest kid, and John tried to help, but he couldn’t really explain it himself. Some doc’d have to get Bad Jack out, talk to him, before John himself really knew what the hell had happened in the bedroom. Otherwise, talking about how the Piest kid died was just a matter of “rationalization.”
As the trial date finally approached and the pressure to find Bad Jack mounted, John motormouthed through his speculations on what must have happened, in an effort to bring back the moment of the rope. Sometimes, during a long session with one of the docs, he’d say something—a sentence or two—and the words that came out of his mouth would have no meaning.
“I don’t know why the fuck I should feel sorry for them. It’s just a weakness, feeling sorry. They don’t deserve to live, so you don’t let them live. You fix ‘em. You fix ‘em good. What the hell’s to explain? You can outsmart somebody and fix him good. Make him trust you. They trust you, you can trick ‘em into doing anything. Anything you want. All you do is, you put the rope around their neck. Tell ‘em it’s just a trick, there’s nothing wrong with it.”
John would hear himself saying something like that, and it wouldn’t make any sense. He told the docs he didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. “I was just talking, but I don’t know what I said. It sounds crazy, talk like that.” Words with no meanings. Except that with John, the words would seem to have meaning when he said them; then they’d drift off into the mist.
When he first came to Cermak, John almost laughed in their faces when the docs asked him if he thought he had a dual personality. He told them they were full of shit. But then, when he broke his personality down and discovered the four Jacks, he began to sense a familiar hostility kicking at the weak parts of John Gacy’s mind. Jack in there. Fighting with John again. So the docs had been right all along. And maybe Jack was beginning to surface because the trial was coming up hard on him now, and John was nervous and frightened about it. Jack came out when John was “weak.” So it was John’s fear, his weakness, that allowed Jack to surface in short, garbled bursts.
He never stayed out for more than a few sentences, though. Nobody could really interview Jack. It was like he was experimenting with the docs, playing a game of hide-and-seek in there. Bad Jack, acting like some neighbor’s three-year-old boy visiting with his parents. First thing, the little kid ducks behind the sofa. He peeks out, you wave at him, and, bang, he ducks out of sight, giggling. About ten seconds later, there he is, peeking at you again: a little bolder this time. You know he really wants to come out and play, but the kid’s shy and you have to coax him.
That’s what Bad Jack was doing: He was peeking out every once in a while, experimenting with the docs. Bad Jack was looking for a doc who wanted him to come out and play. That’s the way John figured it. Why else would he hear himself say:
“They’re scared and they can’t get no erection. You just tell them that when the rope goes tight, they’ll get hard. Nothing wrong with it, unless you make it wrong in your own mind. No struggle. They put the ropes on themselves. They get excited: they kill themselves.”
John heard himself saying those words, and he had to think about them for days. Maybe Jack didn’t commit “the crimes” at all, and that’s why John could never bring back the moment of the rope. Why didn’t the docs jump on that? What Jack said sure sounded like a clue. Why didn’t they look into the idea that Piest, or any of the little bastards, actually killed themselves? By accident. Jagging off with the rope.
Every year, an estimated five hundred to one thousand Americans die from autoerotic strangulation. The victims range in age from nine to seventy-seven, and include both men and women, though the majority are teenage boys. The body usually is found behind a locked door, a noose around its neck. There is evidence of masturbation.
The use of near-asphyxiation to heighten solitary sexual pleasure is a dangerous gamble. Dr. Robert Litman, a Los Angeles psychiatrist who has studied the phenomenon, told The New York Times that “there is an extremely sensitive area of the carotid artery. Just turn the wrong way and you become unconscious. You may do it right forty times, but on the forty-first, you may make a wrong move and die.”
The folk myth about the hanged man’s erection, forensic pathologists say, is based on fact. The carotid arteries, located on either side of the neck, carry oxygen-rich blood from the heart to the brain. When these arteries are blocked, as in strangulation or hanging, the abrupt loss of oxygen to the brain can often cause erection and even orgasm in a dying man. There is no sexual pleasure in such a death: the victim is either unconscious or dead at the point of orgasm.
In Chicago, the Cook County coroner sees about thirty cases of masturbatory strangulation a year. It seemed unlikely that thirty-three boys had come over to 8213 Summerdale to have their autoerotic
accident.
John wished Jack had never opened John’s mouth, never mentioned the rope and erections. It was like Jack made some kind of bad slip that fucked them both up. Because now the docs thought there was something sexual in “the crimes.” John could imagine that thought festering behind the doctors’ eyes and noncommittal expressions. They might think that he handcuffed them and used the rope to make them hard. Against their will. But you can’t have an orgasm against your will. If you’re not into it. And even if some kid went and got hard under the rope, who’s he gonna tell? A young kid like that, he thought he wasn’t into it. Now he’s worried about his manlihood. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s actually a fruit picker in his own mind. Because if you have an orgasm, that means you’re into it.
You can let that kid go.
And then maybe every once in a while, Jack took it too far and there was an accident and someone died. Even so, if there was no struggle, then it was consensual. They wanted to die. Orgasm was proof of that. They were fruit pickers in their own minds, and they wanted to die.
That’s how someone could read it. It’s how John figured some of the docs rationalized the crimes. So how come that theory didn’t fit in at all with the four Jacks; or the gentle gift, given out of compassion; or the way Jack became the Old Man and punished the boys because they were young John Gacy and Voorhees combined?
If Bad Jack used the rope to get the little bastards hard, there was sex in there, right at the core of everything. That cheapened everything, the sex idea, and it just wasn’t true. John had already shown the docs—by going over the victims he could remember—how none of them were sexual. Just like:
The Greyhound bus boy was self-defense.
Butkovitch was about a carpet.
Godzik was about dope.
Szyc was about a car.
And Rob Piest was . . . what?
John didn’t know. Piest was a real puzzler, all right. One thing, though: The more he thought about the Piest kid, the more he began to like him. John told the docs he felt real affection for the dead boy. As the trial neared, John began referring to Piest as “Robby.” He heard later that it pissed off some of the prosecutors because the kid’s name was Rob and no one ever called him Robby. Never mind the assholes: John would call the kid what he liked.
Because Robby did what all the cops in Chicago couldn’t do: He stopped Jack.
A revelation here: It wasn’t just Robby who stopped Jack. You had to give John Gacy a lot of the credit. Ma’s side, the good side, had to be working in there, and that’s why the Piest thing didn’t fit in with the others. It was a totally different crime, committed, for the most part, by a totally different person.
First of all, John wasn’t drunk or stoned, which meant he wasn’t weak enough to let Jack out, anyway. Second, it all happened between nine and ten o’clock at night, well before the time Jack went cruising. Third—and this was the major difference right here—the crime itself was pretty dumb and stupid.
“Everybody saw me in the store,” John explained. “The kid goes out, says he’s going to talk to a contractor. Who else could it be?”
The Other Guy didn’t operate like that. He went cruising under cover of night. He carefully picked the little bastard he wanted, and he covered his tracks. Bad Jack was a “criminal genius.” With Piest, there was a trail that led right to the door of John’s house. So it was just as John thought all along: He had picked up Robby.
The puzzle was coming together now, and John had to put it in context so the docs could understand. John Gacy had been fighting with Jack for years, but after Carol remarried, Jack was gaining the upper hand. And then, with Christmas coming and Uncle Harold dying, Jack was coming out whenever he wanted. There was only one way to stop him.
What happened, John brought Piest home, then stepped aside and let the part of himself he couldn’t control kill the boy. There was a kind of tragic heroism here, as John saw it: he had purposely left a trail that led right to his door. He was going to sacrifice himself to stop Jack.
It may have been all unconscious in there, but John told the docs that it was almost like he sat back and waited for the coppers to bust him. Because killing Robby was so dumb and stupid, they couldn’t help but find “the perpetrator.”
John Gacy had finally outsmarted Jack, with stupidity.
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CHAPTER 21
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ELIZABETH PIEST SAT BY the candy counter in the Nisson Pharmacy, waiting for Rob to come back from his job interview. At nine-twenty, she asked Kim Byers to call if Rob came back, and went home to wait.
“Something’s wrong,” she told her husband, Harold. “I can’t find Rob.”
At nine forty-five, she called Nisson Drugs. Rob wasn’t there. Ten minutes later she called again to ask Phil Torf who “this contractor” was.
Phil Torf said, “John Gacy.”
Rob Piest was already dead.
John left the boy’s body on his bed. He showered, changed clothes, and drove to Northwest Hospital. Uncle Harold “wasn’t there,” John recalled, “and his bed was already stripped down.” It was eleven o’clock, during a shift change, but several nurses saw a man fitting Gacy’s description on the floor.
John’s aunt had already left, so he drove over to her house, even recalling the route he took: down Addison to Harlem, Harlem to Kullum. She was next door at a neighbor’s, and John visited with her for two hours. “I had two or three beers,” John said, “then left there about one-thirty.”
Back at his house, John phoned his older sister and told her that Harold had died. He wondered if he should call Ma, but John’s sister thought it would be best to wait until morning.
“I went into the bedroom,” John said. “The kid was lying on the bed. Well, it didn’t belong there. I pulled down the stair ladder to the attic. Went back to the bedroom, picked it up, put it over my shoulder, and carried it up the ladder to the attic. Closed the thing up, got undressed, and went to sleep.”
John insisted that he didn’t sleep with the body. Why would you want to sleep with some kid, he’s already dead?
While John Gacy was inquiring about his uncle at North-west Hospital, Elizabeth and Harold Piest were at the Des Plaines Police Department, filling out a missing-persons report on their son. The report contained a description of Rob and the clothes he was wearing, as well as the name of a man he had planned to ask about a summer job: John Gacy.
The police told Harold and Elizabeth to go home and wait. Des Plaines is a small suburban station, and the case would be handled by the juvenile division in the morning.
The Piest family couldn’t wait until morning. They felt Rob was in trouble. He could be hurt, unconscious somewhere out in the frigid night; perhaps he was being held by the contractor. They could find no “John Gacy” listed in any of several local phone books and decided to search for the boy themselves. Rob's twenty-one-year-old sister, Kerry; his twenty-two-year-old brother, Ken; and Harold Piest took their cars and began driving slowly down the empty streets and back alleys of Des Plaines. They gave the family’s two German shepherds, Caesar and Kelly, bits of Rob’s clothing to smell and set them loose in likely spots. Maybe the dogs could find Rob if he was unconscious. Elizabeth Piest stayed home by the phone to coordinate the effort and check off areas already covered.
The family searched all night while John Gacy slept.
John woke early, and he met with Richard Rapheal about the drugstore jobs a little after seven that morning. Gacy, according to Rapheal, seemed like the same old John, coherent and normal in every respect.
Sometime that morning, John called his younger sister in Arkansas and asked her to tell Ma that Uncle Harold died. He said he would call late that night about the funeral arrangements.
John put in his usual workday and arrived home about seven-thirty that night. He cleared the phone machine, made a few calls, and waited for Rossi, who was coming over later. Joh
n was going to take him out late and “look for Christmas trees.”
“See,” John explained, “the year before I had found some Christmas trees.” He was hoping to find some good ones this year, after midnight.
At eight-thirty that morning, the Piests went back to the Des Plaines Police Department and spoke with officer Ronald Adams. The family was exhausted, frantic with worry. Adams was an experienced youth officer, and this didn’t look at all like a typical runaway situation.
Adams called a phone number Phil Torf had supplied. John Gacy said, yeah, he’d been to the Nisson Pharmacy last night. He’d asked Torf about some fixtures and he hadn’t said anything about any job to any kid. Adams thought the whole deal stunk. He asked for investigatory help.
A detective named James Pickell checked out the number Adams called and found it was listed not to John Gacy but to PDM, a corporation at 8213 Summerdale, Norwood Park. He drove by the house and took the license off a new Olds 98 in the driveway. Pickell ran a registration check on “PDM 42,” then called Chicago police headquarters and asked for the rap sheet on John W. Gacy. He learned that Gacy had been convicted of sodomy in Iowa a decade earlier.
Gacy’s record showed an arrest in June 1972. A man named Jackie Dee said that Gacy had picked him up on Chicago’s North Side, tried to handcuff him, hit him from behind, and attempted to run him down in the car when he fled.
Six years later, in July 1978, Gacy had been arrested for assault on Jeff Rignall. Pickell reported to Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak. It looked bad: This guy Gacy had a record of sodomy involving teenage boys, he seemed to be violent, and he was, in all probability, the last person to see a boy who was missing.