Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  John hoped the jury could pick up on how phony the whole thing was.

  There were some sincere ones. John could even get tears in his eyes listening to them. But the honest ones didn’t fucking faint and cry. They weren’t actors. Why didn’t his attorneys bring out that some of them were suing him? He had over fifty-five million dollars in wrongful-death suits on his hands. Phony-ass parents so concerned about their kids they could sue him for money.

  The next week, the state had Rossi and Cram describe the trenches John had paid them to dig in the crawl space. Trying to make it look like all the killings were premeditated. John felt like jumping up, yelling at the jury. He’d point to Rossi or Cram and scream, “How do you know he’s not involved? Because I don’t even know if he was involved, and I was one of the witnesses!”

  The jury would have to believe that he was crazy. Or that the state was lying about a conspiracy to kill these kids. And it would get the goddamn families, Piest and them, off his case. They were sitting together in the courtroom, the families, and John could feel the heat of their hatred burning into his back. If he could just get into a room with all of them for fifteen minutes, he could explain himself, let them see his side of the whole deal. Show them that he was a “scapegoat” and a “victim.”

  Ron Rhode took the stand and testified that John had called him seven months ago and said, “You can take it to the bank. I’m walking at the end of the year. . . .” Rhode said that John “told me he had some doctors. They were on his side.”

  Then the cops testified about the statements, these confessions John was supposed to have made after he was arrested. Nobody said he was exhausted and hung over and on drugs when he made the statements. Or that on one of them, his own lawyer Sam Amirante had advised John to talk to the investigators so the bodies could get a decent burial. Now the prosecution was using that statement, and all the others, against him. The confessions were all “hearsay.” They were “self-serving” on the part of the investigators: “Look what I discovered, look what I uncovered.”

  Just like investigator Greg Bedoe came on and said that John told him he read the Twenty-third Psalm to one of his victims while twisting the rope tight around his neck. He said John confessed to doing “the ultimate number” on some kid who was into S&M. “For a masochist,” John had said, “the ultimate number is death.” Then Bedoe made it look as if John started bragging about “doing a double”: killing two kids at once. John had said he strangled the second one as they stood over the corpse of the first.

  Assistant state’s attorney Larry Finder came on and said that in the middle of one confession John showed him the rope trick, using his rosary and a ball-point pen. “Pretend your wrist is a neck,” John had said, and he twisted the rosary tight around Finder’s arm. Later on, Finder described how John diagramed the graves on a pink sheet of paper, then—like he just woke up or something—asked if Jack Hanley made the diagram.

  When chief deputy state’s attorney William Kunkle introduced that diagram in an enlarged version, John shouted, “Your Honor, I didn’t draw that drawing!” Planting a seed in the jury’s mind right there. The judge, Louis B. Garippo, admonished him for the outbreak, but it was a lovely seed to plant. If John didn’t draw it, who did? Self-serving cops? Bad Jack?

  The state rested right after Finder and the rosary shit. John had to decide whether he would take the stand in his own defense. Sam Amirante told him, “John, it’s your decision,” which was a whole hell of a lot of help. Sam had a cigar that prosecutor Terry Sullivan had given him for John. Like this prosecutor wanted to be buddies now. Make John think his pal Terry liked him. Fatten him up for the kill when he took the stand. Fuckhead. Next time John saw Sullivan, John said, “That was a good cigar, Terry. How come it didn’t say, ‘It’s a boy’?”

  “Who writes your material, John?” Sullivan asked.

  John thought he could handle Sullivan on the stand. William Kunkle was another matter. The deputy chief state’s attorney was a big, chunky guy, and there were articles in the paper about how he rode around on a motorcycle and shit. Like some leather queen. Rough trade. Kunkle could take an argument “and just twist it around like a pretzel.” That was a bisexual trait—the trick mind—and John hated Kunkle so bad, he figured he was queer. Bisexual at least. How could you hate a guy so bad if he wasn’t queer?

  John had to admit he was “afraid of Kunkle"—big, tough, fairy-ass Kunkle—and put off the decision about taking the stand. He wanted to see what the docs said about Bad Jack. It was like he’d just spent fourteen months taking a test, and now the results were coming in. He didn’t want to take on Kunkle until he heard what the docs had to say.

  The defense led off with Jeff Rignall, who testified that John Gacy picked him up, chloroformed him, chained him into some sort of restraining device, raped him anally, and generally tortured him all night long. John didn’t show any emotion, but he was getting pretty pissed: “This is my defense?” Rignall said he had been receiving psychiatric treatment since the attack.

  In answer to Amirante’s question, Rignall said that in his opinion John Gacy couldn’t conform his behavior to the requirements of the law or appreciate the criminality of his actions “because of the beastly and animalistic ways he attacked me.” Gacy was, in other words, legally insane at the time of the attack.

  On cross-examination, Kunkle pointed out that Rignall had written a book on his encounter with John Gacy and tried to suggest that Jeff had testified for the defense to promote that book. He began taking Rignall over the various tortures he’d endured. The witness began to weep, softly at first, then he doubled over, sort of half fainting and hitting his head on the witness stand. He vomited—John thought, I got guys puking in my defense?—and then, half hidden by the witness stand, began sobbing loudly.

  John wasn’t sure the defense had scored any points with Rignall, because he thought the jury might be swayed more by emotion than actual legal argument or justice. John sure hoped the defense docs would be a little more help.

  Thomas S. Eliseo was a Rockford, Illinois, clinical psychologist who had published a number of papers on schizophrenics and schizophrenic thinking in various professional journals. Testifying for the defense in the first stage of what was to be the kernel of the trial—the insanity defense—he explained to the jury that a psychologist, and in particular a clinical psychologist, uses “psychological testing, which is our specialty.”

  Eliseo found that Gacy was “of superior intelligence and about the top ten percent of the population.” The neurological testing, where a client is asked to arrange blocks on a board while blindfolded, to copy designs, discriminate rhythms, and perform seven other tasks designed to isolate instances of organic brain damage, indicated that John Gacy did not, in fact, suffer from brain damage.

  On the ten-card Rorschach test, Gacy gave only eighteen responses, about half what a psychologist might expect from a man of his age and intelligence. Gacy’s interpretation of the inkblots “consisted primarily of animals and flowers, which again is unusual.” He gave only one response that included people. Eliseo thought Gacy “seemed to be holding back, a very guarded sort of person” who felt he had to “keep himself in control at all times.”

  In the draw-a-person test, where a client is given a plain sheet of paper and simply asked to draw a person, Gacy “stated he didn’t know how to draw . . . and all he would draw would be the head of one of his attorneys.” Gacy refused to draw a picture of a woman. “One of the impressions you can draw from that,” Eliseo said, “is that he is being somewhat guarded and evasive, not wanting to show much about himself. . . .” Because Gacy drew only a head and avoided “the rest of the human body from the neck down—and in connection with all the other test material and he clinical interview—you wonder what his idea about the body might be, whether it is something bad or disparaging hat you have to avoid.”

  In the thematic apperception test (TAT), the client is given twenty pictures “and the person has
to tell a story . . . just make up a story about who the people are and what they are doing . . . again Mr. Gacy did not reveal much about himself.” On one card, number thirteen, Eliseo said Gacy showed “inappropriate feelings.” The photo shows a woman lying in bed while a man stands in front of the window with his arm shading his eyes. One popular response to the picture, Eliseo said, is that the man “has gotten up in the morning and opens up the blinds and the light is shining. Mr. Gacy interpreted that: first he said he might have had sex with her. Then he changed it to maybe he killed her. And then he laughed inappropriately, talking about killing her and saying it is too late now and seemed to be upset about it, but trying to cover it up.”

  The Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI), Eliseo said, is “based on five hundred sixty-six statements that somebody answers true or false . . . an example is, I like Mechanic magazine.’ “ The basis of the test is that people differ and will respond to the questions differently. A librarian, Eliseo said, probably wouldn’t be found sitting at a bar reading Mechanic magazine, while a truck driver might. The answers a client gives in the MMPI are compared “with people who are in psychiatric hospitals . . . and a normal group so you come with nine different scales on how you compare with people with different psychiatric disorders.”

  Gacy’s responses to the MMPI, Eliseo said, indicated “that he is an extremely disordered person, that his thinking is confused, that he resembles to a large extent people who would be classified as schizophrenic, classified as paranoid. . . .”

  There is a lie scale on the MMPI, a list of a dozen questions designed to indicate whether a person is trying to look good. One of the statements on the lie scale, for instance, reads, “When I was a child I would sometimes try to sneak into a movie theater if I thought I wouldn’t get caught.” Most people, Eliseo said, answer “true.” Those who answer “false” may be “trying to look good.” The higher the score on the lie scale, the more indication there is that “someone is trying to look good.” John Gacy scored zero on the lie scale: he was, Eliseo said, not lying to look good.

  Based on the tests and a clinical interview, Eliseo diagnosed Gacy in two ways. The doctor testified that Gacy was “a borderline personality, a person who on the surface looks normal but has all kinds of neurotic, antisocial, psychotic illnesses.” The personality structure underlying Gacy’s apparent normality, Eliseo said, was paranoid schizophrenia, which Eliseo described as “the viewpoint of a person who basically sees the world as a place where you have to be constantly careful, very suspicious, very guarded. That there are constant dangers out there and feeling at times people are out to hurt you. And also the feeling that you are better than other people.” Eliseo said that the paranoid schizophrenic will exhibit “grandiosity . . . he feels that he can do things and that he is justified in doing these things, and feels they are right. It is in contrast to what he says openly. What he says consciously.”

  Paranoid people, Eliseo said, “are usually paranoid most of their lives.” He thought Gacy had been suffering from the disease since “his midtwenties . . . and I would hypothesize after the death of his father in 1969 is when it began.”

  John was “on a high.” Eliseo great. Paranoid schizophrenic. John felt like he “passed the test.”

  The prosecution wanted to show that Gacy was never out of touch with reality and did not fit the legal definition of insanity because he was able at all times to appreciate the criminality of his conduct and conform his actions to the requirements of the law. Kunkle, on cross, bore down hard on Eliseo. Kunkle threw his powerful bulk into the questions: an aggressive, angry man who demanded to know how the psychologist could give an opinion as to when the condition started.

  “Are you telling this judge, Mr. Eliseo—”

  Motta objected. “It is ‘Doctor.’ “

  “It is whatever I choose to call him.”

  “It is Dr. Eliseo, counsel, and I will ask the court—”

  “Mr. Witness—”

  “Just one moment. I will ask the court to admonish the state’s attorney to give this witness the proper respect.”

  “Some people don’t call me ‘Judge,’ “ Garippo replied. “He may be referred to either way.”

  “Mr. Witness,” Kunkle said, “are you telling this court that an individual could be in a psychotic state, paranoid schizophrenic, as you say—a quite serious mental disease—from his twenties?”

  “Yes, sir,” Eliseo replied.

  “Through the time of this hypothetical person’s arrest, which would be almost twenty years later . . . that he would be psychotic for seventeen years and would never be hospitalized, never diagnosed, would never be treated?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kunkle seemed to rattle the psychologist with his aggressiveness, his lack of respect. “How many cases like that have you seen?” Kunkle demanded.

  “Few.”

  “Would you name those?”

  Eliseo, resonating with Kunkle’s palpable anger, replied: “Particularly with paranoid schizophrenia, I don’t want to name—Richard M. Nixon.”

  Kunkle was amazed and impressed. “You have treated President Nixon?”

  “No. From what I have read and seen, King George the Third, of England.”

  On further direct examination by Motta, Eliseo said again that Gacy’s paranoia, his schizophrenic condition, started in his twenties and was continuous and uninterrupted from that time. “That does not mean he was psychotic overtly all of the time, but the condition was there, and probably he looked good, like most people do.”

  “Objection,” Kunkle said. “Either it’s continuous or it’s not.”

  It was the first of what were to be many similar exchanges. The defense was anxious to show that Gacy was suffering from a mental disease characterized by the appearance of normality—an illness that erupted into full-blown “florid” psychosis at odd intervals.

  The prosecution would push the defense doctors, trying to counter their testimony that Gacy was psychotic or mentally ill only at the time of the murders. It was an argument, the prosecution felt, that was offensive to common sense, that seemed a little too convenient for the defendant—he was only legally insane while committing murder. In a related argument, the prosecution wanted to suggest that Gacy feigned mental illness to escape punishment.

  Since Dr. Eliseo had based much of his diagnosis on the results of the MMPI, Kunkle asked if the test couldn’t have been faked. Was there a scale that corresponded to the lie scale, only one that measured malingering, one that measured people who wanted to look bad, who were faking illness?

  “There is a malingering scale,” Eliseo said. “That is a scale developed in the Army, a military situation where they have much more malingering than we have in civilian occupations. . . .”

  Kunkle pointed out that when you subtract the MMPI’s K scale from its F scale “and get a number of eleven or higher, it gives a high probability of malingering or faking. . . . Do you know what Mr. Gacy’s F score was?”

  “Twenty.”

  “And what was his K score?”

  “Nine.”

  “And what is twenty minus nine?”

  “Eleven.”

  Eliseo admitted that if Gacy did malinger, if he had lied to simulate mental disease, it would affect the test.

  Kunkle hammered away at the cornerstone of the defense argument, the idea that while Gacy appeared normal, he was psychotic at the times the crimes were committed. “Well, Doctor, after he had killed the first person he had killed and he buried and hid that body underground, is that an indication to you that he did not appreciate that he had committed any criminal act?”

  “Afterwards, he would not be aware.”

  And the second murder, was he not aware of the criminality again?

  “At the moment that he did it, he was not aware of the criminality.”

  “Or the third?”

  “Yes, I think all of them he did not.”

  “Right through thir
ty-three?”

  “Yes, sir, that he was in a state where he was psychotic or that period and all he thought was to kill this person.”

  “He was psychotic for the whole period and all he could do was kill people?”

  “No, not for the whole period, but during the time he actually went around and committed the act, not for the whole eight years. . . .”

  William Kunkle, it appeared, was having a hard time believing this testimony. “Was he psychotic for eight years olid, or wasn’t he? Yes or no.”

  “Yes, but.”

  “ ‘Yes but'?”

  “Yes.”

  And Kunkle dismissed Dr. Eliseo with a grand gesture of contemptuous disbelief. “But for thirty-three bodies. I have nothing further.”

  The second doctor to testify in John’s defense was Lawrence Z. Freedman, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose accomplishments, honors, and published articles took twenty pages of trial transcript to detail. Freedman was presently chairman of the Institution of Social and Behavioral Pathology, had been chairman at the conference on Rage, Aggression, and Violence at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He had published many scholarly articles, and he was the author of the chapter on forensic psychiatry in the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry.

  Freedman testified that he spent “about fifty hours” interviewing John Gacy. It was, the doctor said, an unusually long period of time to spend in direct examination but that “Mr. Gacy is a very complex man.” In fact, Freedman testified that “I found Mr. Gacy one of the most complex personalities I have ever tried to study.”