by Tim Cahill
“I didn’t want to take it,” Jacobson told Hachmeister. “He said, ‘Take it. The end is coming. These guys are going to kill me.’ “
Gacy was driving fast, recklessly, and he spun into a ditch, then screeched back onto the blacktop. He pulled up to his house, stayed for half an hour, then drove a few blocks to the home of his friend Ron Rhode.
Rhode was a forty-seven-year-old cement contractor, a married man with four children and a reputation as a tough, no-nonsense guy. He’d poured a few jobs for John Gacy and gotten friendly. The two pals had taken their wives to Las Vegas on a vacation once.
The John Gacy whom Ron Rhode knew didn’t take drugs, hated homosexuals, and was good with Carol’s kids. John always brought Rhode’s wife a gift for Christmas.
At nine-fifty on the morning of December 21, Rhode’s wife told him Gacy was at the door and wanted to see him. John was “ragged,” unshaven, “shabby-looking,” and he asked for a Scotch and water. Rhode had never seen John drink in the morning.
Gacy took a seat, and while he drank, Rhode said he could understand how a police tail could make a man nervous.
“Why don’t you sit here and we’ll talk about it,” Rhode said.
Gacy couldn’t be still. “I got to go, Ron,” he said. “I’ve got to go to the cemetery.” Gacy wanted to visit his father’s grave. “I really came to say good-bye to my best friend for the last time,” he said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Rhode said.
“Them sons-of-bitches out there are going to get me.”
“John,” Rhode said, “there’s no way a police officer can pull a gun and shoot you.”
Gacy didn’t seem to be listening. He walked up to Rhode, put his hands on his “best friend’s” shoulders, and began crying. “Ron,” he said, “I’ve been a bad boy.” Gacy was crying “like a ten-year-old.”
“Aw, c’mon, John,” Rhode said. “You haven’t been that bad.”
John Gacy put his head on Rhode’s shoulder. He was sobbing uncontrollably. “I killed thirty people,” he said, “give or take a few.”
Rhode later testified that he “didn’t know what the hell to say. . . . I asked him who the people were. He said they were just bad people. They were blackmailers.”
Rhode looked at Gacy and said, “Okay, John, you’re full of shit.”
“Remember,” Rhode said later, “I’m knowing John approximately five to six years and I thought I knew this gentleman very well. And I mean, it would be like somebody’s best friend coming up there and giving you a shot right between your eyes . . . you really don’t know how to handle it.”
Gacy grabbed his jacket, like he was leaving, and a rosary fell out, onto the floor. Rhode had never seen John in any church. “Hey, you son-of-a-bitch,’ he said, “when did you turn so religious?”
Gacy picked up his rosary, started for the door, and Rhode grabbed the back of his jacket. He pulled his friend back into the house and shook him.
“John,” he said, “you just gave me a shock. I want to talk to you. For once in your life, tell me the truth. Do you know the Piest boy?”
Gacy swore he didn’t. If Piest walked through the door, John said, “I wouldn’t know him.”
John was trying to say good-bye to his “best friend,” and Rhode was asking about the Piest kid. No one was concerned with him, with his health, with what the police were doing to him. Even his best friend wanted to know about Piest.
John pulled himself away from Rhode, who stood at the front door trying to get Gacy to come back to talk. The police could see tears in Gacy’s eyes as he walked to the car. He had one hand in his pocket, on the rosary. He couldn’t stay, couldn’t talk with the living. He had to visit the Old Man one last time. Had to get to the cemetery.
Gacy drove back to the gas station, talked with Lucas a second time, and cashed a fifty-dollar check.
“I’ve just about had it,” Gacy said. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying. “I don’t think I can take it much longer.” Lucas thought John Gacy looked exhausted: a “very nervous, very tired, very drained” person. “You’ve been good to me,” Gacy said, “always gave me good service. I want to thank you.” To the intense embarrassment of the station owner, Gacy embraced him. Lucas looked over Gacy’s shoulder at the surveillance team. He rolled his eyes as if to say, “The guy’s gone around the bend.”
Suddenly Gacy broke the embrace, clutched at his chest, and began gasping, audibly. He bent over the counter, bowing in respect to some intense internal pain. When the attack was over—when everyone had finally seen what the police were doing to him—Gacy stumbled back to his car.
John prayed on the expressway at seventy-five miles an hour, with the surveillance cars dogging him, pulling alongside for a better look at his misery.
Albrecht, who was abreast of him in a chase car, saw Gacy mumbling over the beads of his rosary. The man was driving crazily, weaving in and out of traffic, drunk on Scotch and Valium, on prayer and fear.
Gacy pulled up to David Cram’s house. Michael Rossi was standing out front. Gacy jumped out of the car and asked Rossi to come into the house with him. He needed to talk to his two employees, his two closest friends, in private. Rossi didn’t want to go anywhere with Gacy, not without a couple of cops present.
“Please,” John begged, and his voice was broken, pitiful. “This may be the last time you’ll ever see me.”
Rossi reluctantly followed Gacy into the house, where they met Cram. Rossi thought his boss “was very emotionally disturbed . . . very nervous.” Gacy was “breaking into tears,” Rossi later testified, and he “proceeded to tell myself and David about confessing to his lawyers the night before to over thirty killings.”
As David Cram recalled the conversation, Gacy said that he had spent the entire evening in his lawyers’ office and that he confessed to thirty Syndicate-related killings. Today he “wanted to go around, saying his last good-byes.”
“This is the last time you will see me,” he said again. Tears streaked his face, and a clear mucus ran from his nose. Rossi left the house: he didn’t want to hear any more, didn’t want to be involved.
“Syndicate-related killings,” Gacy tried to tell Cram, but he was breaking down completely, hardly able to talk. “I swear,” he said, “with God as my witness"—and he was crying freely, tears running down his cheeks, the words wet in his mouth—“I never had anything to do with this boy being missing.”
Gacy clearly was in no condition to be behind the wheel, and Cram agreed to drive. John stopped to see James Vanvorous, the heating contractor who cosponsored the annual yard party—another good-bye—and then it was time to meet his lawyer LeRoy Stevens at a North Side restaurant. Cram parked while Gacy went into the restaurant. It was just noon, and the day surveillance team came on shift.
With Gacy inside the restaurant, Cram had a chance to talk privately with the cops. Schultz thought the young man looked dazed. Gacy, Cram said, was depressed. It was crazy bad. Gacy was eating Valium like popcorn and babbling about his father, about going to the cemetery. The guy had been up all night, Cram said, at his lawyers’ office, where he’d confessed to killing “over thirty people.”
He was going to talk with his lawyer LeRoy Stevens, then visit his father’s grave. It seemed to Cram that this visit to the cemetery was the terminal trip, the last good-bye.
“I’m really afraid the guy might try to kill himself and kill me with him,” Cram said. “When we leave here, don’t lose us. Please.”
Gacy came lurching out of the restaurant about fifteen minutes later. He told Cram to drive him to Maryhill Cemetery, where John Stanley Gacy was buried. John gave Cram a ten-dollar bill. “He wanted me to go to McDonald’s and pick him up a hamburger or something like that,” Cram said, “and then I was to meet him back at his father’s grave.”
If Gacy was going to kill himself, it looked as if he’d make the attempt at the cemetery, over John Stanley Gacy’s grave.
Gacy had cracked.
That much was clear, and the entire surveillance team was on hand: Hachmeister and Albrecht, Schultz and Robinson along with supervising sergeant Wally Lang. Hachmeister had the marijuana that Gacy had given Lance Jacobson at the Shell station. Lang, after consulting with Kozenczak on the radio, made the decision. They weren’t going to let Gacy off easy. They weren’t going to sit by and watch him commit suicide—if that’s what he had in mind. They’d take him down for “delivery of marijuana,” a felony.
At the point where Elston crosses Milwaukee, they boxed the car—just cut Cram off, with one chase car slicing over from the left front, and one on the rear bumper. The entire surveillance team surrounded the car, and it was Hachmeister who jammed his pistol in Gacy’s ear.
“We got you now, you jag-off,” he said.
Terry Sullivan finished up what he knew was an airtight search warrant as John Gacy was being processed on the marijuana charge. At about the time Judge Marvin J. Peters signed the warrant, steel bands began tightening around John’s chest. It was a heart attack, just like the one John suffered before the fight at Anamosa, like the stroke that put him in the hospital because of all the unfair accusations Carol’s mother had flung at him.
Paramedics rushed Gacy to Holy Family Hospital. At the same time, a dozen law officers arrived at the house on Summerdale, where evidence technician Daniel Genty plugged in the sump pump and waited for a foot or more of water to drain out of the crawl space.
Doctors at Holy Family carefully examined Gacy and found that there was nothing to suggest that he was having a heart seizure. Nothing at all. If the guy said he was having a heart attack, he had to be “bullshitting.” There was nothing physically wrong with John Wayne Gacy.
Daniel Genty, meanwhile, had dropped into the darkness and mud of the crawl space. It was there, in the southwestern corner of the house at 8213 Summerdale, on the first experimental excavation, that Genty’s trenching tool hooked the skeletal remains of a human arm. There were bits of white flesh on the bones, which hung from the blade of the shovel by an elbow joint. Genty shouted up to Joseph Kozenczak: “Charge him! Murder!”
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CHAPTER 23
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THE COPS USED THE good guy/bad guy technique on John, who saw through it right away. The psychologists used their tests: crazy shit where you’re supposed to tell them what color your stools are or whether people are always following you, as if they didn’t know that the police had followed and harassed John Gacy twenty-four hours a day for eight days before they finally arrested him. The cops had their “confessions,” the lawyers had their strategies, but it seemed to John as if everyone wanted to play psychiatrist, even his lawyers. As his trial approached, the pressure became more intense. Dr. Morrison called and told John to stop lying, that she couldn’t help him, either medically or on the stand, unless he told the truth.
John could see through that one: she had called from his lawyers’ office, so it must have been Sam who put her up to it. They simply didn’t believe that he could remember only five of the victims and that even those memories were necessarily “rationalizations.” To find out about the other murders, they were going to have to talk to Jack. No one seemed to have been able to meet or talk to Jack, and that worried John, because he knew Jack was there, seething, raging, a killer lurking just under the surface of consciousness, hiding in the synapses, alive and laughing in one of those lobes Freedman showed him on a chart of the brain.
As the trial date approached, John begged for more time. The psychiatrists, the lawyers, his entire defense team were all pushing him, insulting him, getting tough with him. The defense team needed to meet Jack to save John’s life—and if Jack was there, he was lurking in John’s mind like the mists of half-remembered dreams. John remembers that time well; he remembers how they demanded that he “take them cruising.” It was just another game they played, the lawyers playing psychiatrist, the psychiatrists playing lawyer. They sat him on a chair and insisted that he pretend he was behind the wheel of his big black Olds.
“Just tell us how you picked them up.”
“How should I know? I was just an observer.”
“Do it right-hand, left-hand. You’re on the left, Jack is on the right. Tell us what Jack is doing. You be the observer, you tell us how Jack killed.”
“Jack doesn’t come out like that.”
“Let the son-of-a-bitch out!”
They wanted him to relive a killing—any killing—just so it wasn’t a reprise of his standard story, not his “rationalizations” about the five victims he vaguely remembered. They wanted him to start from the moment when drugs or drink or weakness put him in the big black car and sent him spinning down to Bughouse Square.
“What the hell,” John said at Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois, “I took ‘em cruising with me.”
In the conference room at Menard, years later, John remembered how he took them cruising, how someone sat next to him, to his right, facing in the same direction, as if in the passenger seat of a car. Sitting in a chair at Cermak Hospital, he played their game. He drove an imaginary car down to an imaginary park and hoped he’d be able to pick up an imaginary kid. Maybe the kid would be a greedy little bastard, a hustler, and maybe that kid would meet Jack. He’d know what to do with a kid like that, Jack.
It was less than a month before the trial, and John needed more time. He was scared, and he could feel the pressure on his chest. He tried, he really tried: he played their half-ass game.
In his ankle irons, with handcuffs loosely connected to his waist chains, John hobbled around his chair, demonstrating how he took some members of his defense team cruising there at Cermak, before his trial. He is no mime, but his clowning experience has served him well, and his actions are entirely self-explanatory. John just opens the door, slides into the seat—which is really a chair in a prison conference room—puts the key into the ignition, looks out the back window, stomps on the accelerator, and goes roaring back out of the driveway.
Spin the wheel. Hit the brake hard—John’s body rocks back in the chair as the inertia hits him—shift into drive, stomp the accelerator, and go tearing up Summerdale, right out to the expressway. It’s the park, Bughouse Square this night.
“They got me to go cruising,” John said, “and they tried to piss me off.”
He imitates a voice, a high-pitched voice that is perhaps a woman’s. He gives a silly, grating intonation to the voice.
“John, there’s a stop sign.”
“No, there isn’t.”
“Yes, there is.”
“Who’s driving, you or me?”
“You, but there’s a stoplight. Stop!”
John plays both parts, himself and the antagonist sitting beside him there in Cermak.
“There’s no goddamn stoplight. I know how to drive.”
“There is a light,” the high-pitched voice grates, “a stoplight and you just blew it, you asshole.”
Some part of John Wayne Gacy loves to perform, and he is performing now, getting into the part of John Gacy at Cermak: John the victim, pushed too far, rebelling, angry. It is difficult to figure out who is sitting beside him because this is only a supporting role—no need to change position, turn his head, show us the configuration of his antagonist’s face—it’s just a silly, grating voice that is pushing him. Pushing John. Forcing him to react. It is odd watching John’s angry face but hearing this earnest, high-pitched, indefatigable voice coming out of his mouth.
“Don’t tell me you know how to drive,” the odd voice insists. “You don’t know how to drive. You can’t drive. You just blew a light. Shit. You oughta let Jack drive. . . .”
“Jack don’t . . .”
“Look! Over there. Look at that guy. Tight pants. What is he, maybe sixteen, seventeen? Let’s pick him up.”
“Not my type.”
“Shit, just look at him. Young, nice ass, tight pants, blond hair . . .”
/> The whole game made John mad, really mad; you can see it in his face, in the tremble of his hands on the imaginary wheel of the imaginary big black car.
“Kid’s cock isn’t big enough,” he says, a naughty boy, trying to shock.
And the pushy, grating, insistent voice comes back: mean, sexy, insinuating, knowing. “Maybe not for you, you faggot, but Jack would like him. Jack would . . .”
Now it’s hard to tell if John is still performing, because his anger is intense, entirely real. “I’m not a faggot, you asshole.”
The woman’s voice is calm and soft but cuts like a blade, it is so knowing, so irritating and assured: “Yes, you are,” it purrs. “You’re a faggot. Jack told me. . . .”
John’s eyes are glazed, but he keeps his hands on the wheel, keeps staring off into the middle distance, like a man driving at night. “I told you, goddamn it, I’m not a faggot. I’m a bisexual. Not a faggot . . .”
“Oh, yes, you are.” A woman’s mysterious taunting voice. “Sure you are. You’re a fruit-picking faggot. Jack told me all about you. Just ask him.”
John is not going to ask anyone anything. His face is red, curiously swollen, and the eyes are deep as sin and shame, dark and empty as an open grave. Looking into John’s eyes now is like staring into a hole so deep that darkness swallows the light.
This is rage beyond performance, and John—or is it Jack? —rises from his seat, the imaginary car forgotten. His face is now devoid of expression, but there is a growling noise that seems to emanate from deep in his chest. It is guttural and continuous. Jack’s fingers are hooked like talons. His elbows are bent stiffly, but his arms are stretched out before him. Jack takes a step forward, unsteady on his feet. Then his eyes roll out of focus and he steps back, falling onto the chair in a rattle of chains.