Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  At about five that morning, the officers followed Gacy into the Golden Bear Restaurant, where all three sat at the same table.

  “C’mon,” Gacy said, “you guys are feds working on a drug bust, right?”

  Gacy, with six or seven drinks in him, started getting tough. He was suing the city of Des Plaines, Kozenczak, Sullivan, and a few others: a big goddamn harassment suit that would ruin reputations and put the city in hock. His lawyers, Sam Amirante and LeRoy Stevens, were in the process of preparing it.

  The suit would go through the courts like shit through a goose: John told the officers he was “one of the heavies” in North Side Democratic politics. His cousin was another heavy: Gacy mentioned the name of a notorious Chicago underworld figure. Gacy let the cops know he wasn’t going to take this shit: he was going to come at them from both sides of the law. See how long Kozenczak could stand up to that kind of pressure.

  And the surveillance teams should watch their asses, too. Gacy said he’d hired a real “bodyguard,” a guy named Nick who “carries a three fifty-seven magnum and wouldn’t think twice about wasting you.”

  John didn’t seem to be striking much fear into Dave Hachmeister’s heart, though. “You get back to your bodyguard, John,” he said, “and advise him to look over his shoulder because there may be more guys on our surveillance team than he knows about.”

  John went off on another tack. “You guys sure you’re not feds?”

  “Just Des Plaines police officers on a missing-person case,” Hachmeister explained for the second time that night.

  Gacy suddenly wanted to be pals again—it was all on a first-name basis now: John and Dave and Mike having breakfast after drinking all night. About the kid, John said, he was just as concerned as Mike and Dave were. He himself hired young boys: they were good workers, energetic, and they’d do the work the way John wanted it done. They weren’t set in their ways. Oh, sure, he had to browbeat them, but that was only so the work would get done on time. He paid them well, and it was intricate work, the drugstore stuff where you constructed the shelving so the impulse-buy items were at eye level, trick stuff like that. It was a good business, John said, and he’d fixed it so that all the money was in PDM. He himself wasn’t worth much, but his companies were worth a small fortune.

  Gacy talked for an hour, with no prompting, and went home at six in the morning. It had been a remarkable performance. The guy babbled incessantly, and he was firing all his guns, all at once, in every direction. It looked as though John Gacy was beginning to come apart at the seams.

  The next day, December 17, was a Sunday, but no one at the Des Plaines police station was taking the day off.

  Rafael Tovar confirmed that Gacy’s employee John Butkovitch had been missing since July 1975. A set of trained police dogs were given articles of Rob Piest’s clothes for scent, then set loose in the police garage where Gacy’s truck and car were arranged among fourteen other vehicles. Terry Sullivan, in Killer Clown, a book he cowrote about the Gacy investigation, said, “I got a chill down my spine” when one of the dogs got in Gacy’s black Oldsmobile” and lay down on the seat. That was the “death reaction.” Rob Piest—the officers almost felt as if they knew the boy—was dead.

  Meanwhile, officers Bob Schultz and Ron Robinson, the day surveillance team, spent the afternoon drinking beer with John Gacy at a restaurant bar and then a bowling alley, where Gacy made a point of grabbing the women he bowled with and feeling them up. “Nice tits and ass,” John confided to the officers, “and that one’s an easy lay.” Later, Gacy took Schultz and Robinson to dinner at a North Side restaurant.

  “Would you answer a question honestly for me?” Gacy asked Schultz.

  “Depends on the nature of the question.”

  “Why are you guys following me?”

  Schultz said it had to do with a missing boy, but Gacy felt it “had to be bigger than that.” His guess was that “the FBI put you onto me for narcotics.”

  Schultz denied that, but John was already off on another subject. Babbling. He’d actually hired his own detective to find the Piest kid and get this bullshit out of the way.

  “What caliber guns do you guys carry?” Gacy asked suddenly. Did their guns carry as much stopping power as, say, a .357 magnum? Because John had hired a bodyguard who carried a .357. It would be nothing for a guy like that to blow away a couple of cops, anytime.

  Not that John was a bad guy. He was pals with a mayor, a good friend of Rosalynn Carter’s, and he clowned for sick children in hospitals. Clowning in parades was fun. You could run along the sidelines, walk up to some broad, feel her up, and she’d just slough it off. Okay, it was a little naughty, but a clown could get away with shit like that.

  Gacy looked directly at Schultz. “A clown can get away with murder,” he said.

  At midnight, when Hachmeister and Albrecht took over, John took them back to a restaurant, where he talked about his marriage to Carol, and Hachmeister thought, just for a moment, that John Gacy might break down and cry.

  The guy was definitely losing control.

  * * *

  * * *

  CHAPTER 22

  * * *

  * * *

  ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 18, one week after the murder of Rob Piest, Rosemary Szyc gave police her son’s papers, which included a warranty for the small TV. Officer Tovar recalled that Gacy had a small Motorola TV in his bedroom.

  Pickell and Adams had traced the Nisson Pharmacy photo stub that had been found in Gacy’s garbage to Kim Byers, and they were attempting to contact her.

  Gacy spent the day racing the rented car all over the North Side of Chicago. Had the police talked to Richard Rapheal? Gacy had to get up to Glenview, quick. Were they talking to Rossi? Cram? Gacy was now running a step or two behind the police, trying to find out who they’d talked to, what they knew. He drove like a man on fire, and the surveillance team ran more than one car into the ground chasing him around Chicago. They wouldn’t cite Gacy for speeding, though, wouldn’t harass him, give him ammunition for a possible suit. Rob Piest was dead, and they wanted him for murder.

  That evening, at his house, Gacy, who had been trying to elude officers all day, suddenly wanted to be buddies again. Schultz and Robinson were invited inside for dinner. John said he’d been a chef for the Chicago Black Hawks. He had a lot of pals who were hockey players. Tough guys who got in fights and went out with lots of women.

  The officers were given a tour of the house. John pointed out pictures of himself with the mayor, with Rosalynn Carter. He explained how the collected clown photos made him feel warm inside. Jesus Christ, why the hell were officers following him, anyway? He was a good guy, with political connections: the kind of man who hung out with hockey players.

  Why did the cops want to harass a man with leukemia? They were killing him, killing him, destroying his business, his reputation, everything. Even his closest friends were beginning to wonder if maybe he didn’t actually have something to do with the Piest boy. Guys asking him over drinks and shit about a kid he never met. Wondering if maybe he wasn’t queer or something. Him, John Gacy.

  On Tuesday, December 19, while Gacy was meeting with one of his lawyers, Kim Byers told police that she had left her photo receipt in Rob Piest’s jacket the night he disappeared. Sullivan and Kozenczak knew that Rob was dead. Now they could place him in Gacy’s house.

  There had to be something they missed on the search of the house, something that would tie Gacy irrevocably to the death of Rob Piest, of John Butkovitch, of John Szyc, of Greg Godzik. They desperately needed to search the house again, but getting a judge to sign a second search warrant on a complaint of murder, even multiple murder, was extremely difficult in the absence of a body. Sullivan thought he could use Kim Byers’ photo receipt as the basis for the warrant, but he wanted more than that. He needed a strong backup. The procedure had to be clean all through this one. Irreversible.

  Once again, the day surveillance team of Schultz and Robinson were
invited into Gacy’s house. Schultz asked if he could use the bathroom. Robinson kept Gacy talking—no very difficult task—while Schultz went into the bedroom to get the serial number off the Motorola TV. Later, police would see if it matched John Szyc’s warranty number. There was a faint, sickly sweet odor in the hallway.

  After copying the number, Schultz went back to the bathroom and flushed the toilet. As he did, the central heating system forced warm air up out of the vent beside the toilet. The odor Scultz had noticed in the hallway was stronger now, here in the bathroom. Whatever it was that made the house smell had to be coming from the basement. There was probably a break in the ductwork down there, and the forced-air system was pumping that sick, damp basement smell all over the house. It was a nauseous odor, not seepage exactly, and Shultz thought it was familiar, something he’d smelled before, somewhere else: an odor that didn’t belong in a guy’s house. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

  On Wednesday, Gacy’s lawyer Sam Amirante gave Terry Sullivan a copy of a $750,000 suit that had already been filed in Federal District Court and was set for hearing on Friday. The complaint named the city of Des Plaines, Kozenczak, and several other officers. Gacy, according to the suit, had been subjected to unreasonable search of his home, unreasonable seizure of his vehicles. The surveillance was ruining his business.

  Sullivan thought Amirante was likely to win a temporary restraining order on Friday. The police would have to cease and desist. No more surveillance. If there was evidence inside the house that tied Gacy to the death of Piest or anyone else, it would surely be destroyed while Des Plaines and Sullivan were occupied defending the suit.

  Sullivan had one more day to put together an ironclad search warrant. He needed a backup for the photo receipt that placed Piest in Gacy’s house.

  At noon, when Schultz and Robinson relieved Hachmeister and Albrecht, Gacy ran out of a store he was inspecting and began taking photos. Four officers, four disreputable-looking cars; the photos could be used in a harassment complaint.

  Later that afternoon, Gacy shifted gears again and offered Schultz and Robinson—his friends Ron and Bob—the services of a hooker. It looked like a blackmail situation, but Gacy backed out of the deal, claiming that the woman he had in mind wanted too much money.

  No doubt about it: Gacy was beginning to crack. Police interviews with Cram or Rossi seemed to piss him off even more than the surveillance. Every time the officers talked to one of his employees, Gacy exploded. He pushed his rental car to a hundred miles an hour, speeding through residential areas to get to them. To find out what they told the police. Kozenczak and Sullivan decided to tighten the screws.

  Rossi and Cram were asked to report to the Des Plaines police station, one after the other. From the outside, it must have looked as if the cops had put something together. Like they were tying up a few loose ends. Like they had stumbled onto a nice little secret. By playing a hunch.

  Kozenczak leveled with Rossi, trying to shake something out of him. John Szyc probably was dead, Kozenczak said, and you’re driving his car. The lieutenant was going to put Rossi on the polygraph. Did he want to say anything first? Michael Rossi, according to Terry Sullivan in his book, broke down in tears. Rossi admitted to having sexual relations with Gacy and said that he thought Szyc’s car had been stolen. That’s what Gacy told him. On the polygraph, Rossi swore that he knew nothing about Rob Piest. Kozenczak told Sullivan he thought that Rossi was “basically truthful” but that the “test results were hard to interpret.”

  Sullivan and Bedoe talked with Cram. They told him about Szyc, the sodomy conviction, everything they had up to that point. David Cram was cooperative.

  “You been in the crawl space, David?”

  Cram said he’d been down there a couple of times, spreading lime and digging.

  Digging?

  Cram told them about the trenches he’d dug for the pipes that Gacy was going to lay to drain the crawl space to get rid of his seepage problem. Cram drew a diagram of where he’d dug. The trenches didn’t go to the sump pump. No, Cram had never actually seen any pipes.

  How big were they, these trenches?

  About two feet by two feet. Really long.

  Trenches that didn’t go anywhere, that were too deep and too long for pipe that didn’t exist, anyway.

  They knew now. The son-of-a-bitch was burying them in the crawl space!

  John was waiting outside Rossi’s house when Rossi got home from the Des Plaines police station. Gacy was smiling, but Rossi didn’t want to be alone with him and asked Schultz and Robinson inside. As he had done with Russell Schroeder in Iowa, Gacy told Rossi he’d get him a lawyer. He wasn’t to talk to the cops again, John said, not without a lawyer present.

  The police left, and Gacy talked with Rossi for another half hour. John didn’t remember what they talked about, though. His thoughts were spinning off into the mist. Rossi knew that Kozenczak was certain that John had killed both Rob Piest and John Szyc. Did Rossi tell him that? John didn’t remember, he said.

  Gacy stormed out of Rossi’s house just before midnight. Gacy seemed almost crazy with rage and fear. The surveillance team followed him, hitting a hundred miles an hour on the way to Sam Amirante’s office in Park Ridge.

  “I went in there to talk about the suit,” John said years later. “I had taken a lot of Valium because I was under so much stress. Sam had a bottle of Scotch in his office, and I remember I drank what was left. Maybe half, three quarters of the bottle.”

  After that, John’s memory drifted into the fog, and it must have been Jack who talked to Sam that night. So John “rationalized.”

  Albrecht and Hachmeister came on at midnight, waiting for Gacy outside Amirante’s office, in their cars. Two hours later, the lawyer invited them inside. The officers could sit in the hallway just outside a glass wall that looked into the office reception area. Would the officers like coffee, a drink? Amirante, in the midst of preparing a harassment suit, suddenly wanted cops inside the building. What had Gacy told him?

  At 3:30 A.M. the officers, who were sitting behind a glass wall, saw Amirante and Gacy’s other lawyer, LeRoy Stevens, lead John to a couch in the reception area. Gacy flopped down and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Amirante and Stevens talked with the officers. Whatever Gacy told the lawyers was privileged material, but instead of asking the police to call off surveillance, as they had done repeatedly in the past, Amirante and Stevens were practically begging Hachmeister to arrest their client.

  Amirante suggested that the officers block Gacy’s car with their own vehicles so he couldn’t leave. Shoot out his tires. Both lawyers seemed stunned, afraid of their own client. Whatever Gacy told them had shaken them badly. LeRoy Stevens was taking deep drags off an unlit cigarette.

  Terry Sullivan had one day to produce a proper search warrant. It was Thursday, ten days after the death of Rob Piest, and the eighth full day of surveillance. Gacy’s harassment suit was due for a hearing early the next day. A restraining order to halt surveillance was almost a certainty.

  Officer Schultz came into the Des Plaines police station at daybreak and talked with Larry Finder and Lieutenant Kozenczak. That smell, that bad smell that had come belching up out of the heating duct in Gacy’s house? Schultz had been thinking about it all night. He knew what it was. The realization had hit him just before he went to bed and had kept him up all night. It was the smell of death, of human remains. Schultz knew the odor. As a police officer, he had made over forty trips to the morgue. The odor was unmistakable—it just wasn’t something you expected to come wafting up, sickly sweet, from someone’s basement.

  Sullivan, Bedoe, and Larry Finder began drafting a search warrant for Gacy’s house. They would use Kim Byers’ photo receipt to place Rob Piest in Gacy’s house. The odor that Schultz described was the backup Sullivan needed to show probable cause.

  They had less than twenty-four hours to draw up a warrant that a judge would sign. After that, Gacy’s harassment hearin
g would be the end of it. If the warrant wasn’t perfect, if a judge refused to sign it, Gacy could walk away from the investigation without a scratch.

  That same morning, John woke up in Sam Amirante’s office at about eight-thirty, hung over and unshaven. John’s memories of his last day of freedom are hazy.

  He recalls leaving Amirante’s office and pulling into the Park Ridge Shell station, where he usually bought gas. Hachmeister began shouting in his face, cursing him for speeding through a school zone, putting kids in danger.

  The officer dug the worst one he could think of out of his mental file on Gacy: he used the word the man’s ex-wife said might move him to violence. “You . . . jag-off!” Hachmeister screamed.

  The words seemed to hit like a double hammer blow to the heart. Gacy apologized profusely. He seemed confused and looked terribly hurt.

  John Lucas, the owner of the station, saw Gacy walk by Lance Jacobson, a young employee who was checking the car’s oil. Gacy very obviously slipped something into the young man’s pocket. Lucas asked what was going on. Jacobson reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag containing three marijuana cigarettes. The police were fifteen feet away, watching the whole thing. It looked as if Gacy wanted the police to arrest him on a drug charge.

  What the hell, did jag-off John think that his pal Dave was going to be satisfied with a minor drug bust, that he’d forget about Rob Piest and John Szyc, about John Butkovitch and Greg Godzik if he could bring John Gacy down for three joints? Hachmeister stayed behind at the gas station and picked up the joints anyway, for evidence.