Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  Donnelly testified that Gacy had raped him. Then “he took me by the arm and led me through the house to the bathroom . . . he turned my face to the wall of the bathroom and . . . pushed my head against the wall. And then he reached around my neck and he pulled something around my neck, and he started twisting it.”

  Donnelly testified that Gacy had said, “My, aren’t we having fun tonight?”

  Gacy banged Donnelly’s head against the wall several times and “then he tripped me down onto the floor and then he got down and picked me up by what was around my neck. The bathtub was filled with water, and he stuck my head under the bathtub and I started fighting it and I was just squirming and moving and holding my breath and then . . . I passed out.”

  Sullivan asked, “Now, when you went into that bathroom, was that tub already full with water?”

  “It was.”

  John couldn’t help it, he had to laugh again. Crazy, unbelievable shit. Like he’s going to fill the tub before he goes out to pick up someone. Like it was all premeditated or something, drowning the little bastard. The kid looked at john then, just once, and there was something different about him. He didn’t seem so frightened anymore.

  Donnelly testified that when he came to on the bathroom floor Gacy “stuck my head under the bathtub a second time. . . . I was really weak, and I could barely struggle. I first tried to hold my breath . . . and I couldn’t and I started breathing water and I passed out again.”

  The kid was talking about being weak, but his voice was getting stronger.

  “What is the next thing you remember?”

  “I was awake on the floor again.”

  “What happened next?”

  “He did it again.”

  John looked over at the jury and shook his head, smiling sadly, the way you smile when somebody real dumb and stupid fucks up in front of everybody. Some of the jurors were looking back—the guy with the moustache, the blond-haired guy John figured was “liberal” because he was blond, the heavy-set woman—and John couldn’t read anything in their hard, blank expressions. He wanted to tell them that the John Gacy he knew could never torture anyone. That John Gacy was a “gentle individual.” He tried for a gentle, forgiving smile, to show them that. He felt the grin waver weakly on his face.

  “Did you pass out again?” Sullivan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When you came to the next time, did you see where Gacy was?”

  “I looked up and he wasn’t in the doorway. . . . I started to look around and he said, ‘Are you looking for me? Here I am.’ “

  Gacy was sitting on the toilet, with the lid down. “He got up, and he"—Donnelly was stuttering again—"he, he unzipped his pants and he started pissing on me.”

  John laughed too loudly this time—it was more than a gentle man’s whispered chuckle—and Garippo glanced over at him. He thought the judge might admonish him. Why the hell would you piss on somebody? John wanted to scream What sense did that make?

  “What happened after that?” Sullivan asked.

  Donnelly said Gacy “brought over a magazine, one of those nude magazines, and he showed it to me and he asked me if I liked the girls and I said ‘yes’ and he said, ‘You’re sick.’ “ Then “he punched me and then he grabbed me and he stuck me under the bath water one more time.”

  When Donnelly came to, “I was on the bathroom floor and he picked me up and he led me into . . . a bedroom and he tripped me onto the floor and then he sat down like he first had on the couch, like sideways on me, and he said ‘You’re just in time for The Late Show.’ And he turned on projector and I didn’t look up and he grabbed me by the hair and he held my head up and made me watch the movie.” It was “a gay porno flick.”

  The movie lasted about ten minutes. Gacy had Donnelly sit against the wall. “I, I, I rolled over and I got myself against the wall.” He was still cuffed.

  Gacy left the room and came back with a dining-room chair. He sat in the chair, Donnelly said, and “put his foot right in my stomach.” Gacy had a gun in his hand and “he told me we were going to play Russian roulette.”

  Gacy said, “ ‘Aren’t we playing fun games tonight? Aren’t these good games?’ “

  John, sitting at the defense table, looked back into the courtroom and noticed that “Harold Piest was getting hyper.” The families were so filled with hate they’d believe anything. God didn’t put people on earth to hate one another. John rollled his eyes to the ceiling and sighed audibly. He chuckled a bit, but he really didn’t know how to act now. Was it smart, laughing in court? The kid’s voice wasn’t quavering anymore: it was like he was getting stronger on the stand. Feeding off of John’s forced laughter and confusion. The kid could look right at John anytime he wanted.

  Donnelly testified that Gacy aimed the gun “at my head . . . and he said, ‘Look at me’ and he slapped me on the face again and I was looking up there and he pulled the trigger and nothing happened. . . . Most of the time, he just clicked it once. A couple of times he clicked it twice, and then after about ten, fifteen times, it went off. . . . I realized it must have been a blank because I was still alive.”

  After testifying that the gun went off, Donnelly said, “I was shaking and he reached down and he grabbed my throat with his hands and he just started twisting my head and he was, he was choking me and I passed out because . . . the next thing I realized, I wasn’t on the floor anymore, I was on bed. . . . I was still handcuffed, but there was something around my feet, right above my ankles.” Donnelly’s legs were spread and he was naked and his hands were cuffed behind is back. “I, I, I had a gag in my mouth and it was like stuffed in my mouth . . . he rolled me over . . . then he took something, I don’t know what it was, and he started shoving inside of me. . . . I was feeling extreme pain and I started to get dizzy and I passed out.”

  John tried another snorting laugh, because now the guy kid he’d passed out, what, five times, six times in one night. It wasn’t believable testimony, but John couldn’t get the laugh to sound right. The kid looked right at John and he wasn’t afraid anymore.

  Donnelly testified that when he came to, the object was still in his anus. Gacy started taking the gag off and said, “ ‘Don’t scream,’ but as soon as he got it out, I screamed . . . he pushed my head down into the bed and punched me in the side, . . . I was terrified and I said, ‘Look, you are going to kill me. Just kill me now. Get it over with.’ He told me my time was coming and to shut up and he slapped me and he put the gag back in my mouth.”

  The kid was talking about wanting to die, but he glanced over at John just then. Like John was the one who was going to die.

  Donnelly said that when it started to get light out, Gacy made him take a shower and—John made an effort to laugh at this part—drove him to work.

  In the car Donnelly said Gacy asked him, “ ‘How does it feel knowing that you’re going to die?’ and I just didn’t answer.” Gacy pulled up in back of Marshall Field, where Donnelly worked. “He told me that he was going to get me and kill me later and he told me to lean forward and he took off the handcuffs and as he was taking off the handcuffs he told me, he said, ‘You’re going to die later, but don’t tell, don’t go to the police or anybody and don’t tell them because they are not going to believe you.’ “

  Donnelly did, in fact, go to the police, and he found that Gacy was right. “They didn’t believe me.”

  John snorted again, real loud, so the jury would know they shouldn’t believe Donnelly, either. The kid gave him another one of those death looks and it was very hard for John to force the laugh out of his mouth. Later, walking back through the bullpen, John was pretty sure the smiling and head shaking hadn’t been a good idea. He got the feeling that one of the guards assigned to him, Stanley, had suddenly started to hate him. Stanley had acted pretty neutral before John knew then he shouldn’t have laughed. Especially when Donnelly broke down, he shouldn’t have laughed. The jury might think that he liked to see young men cry and shit. They
might think that suffering amused him.

  And then it hit him. Maybe Voorhees had outsmarted him a second time. Fucked him over by making it look like John Gacy had destroyed his entire life. Influencing the jury with emotion instead of the law.

  The high—that soaring Rappaport high—collapsed. Suddenly, John was afraid. If the defense docs were any good at all, he wouldn’t testify, because then he wouldn’t have anyone to blame for losing. He’d read where you could win a new trial on appeal if you can prove that you didn’t agree with the plea. John figured he could say he was against the insanity plea from the first. Say he wanted to go with a straight “not guilty.”

  That’s the way he’d play it if the defense docs were any good.

  A. Arthur Hartman, for twenty-eight years the chief psychologist of the Psychiatric Institute of the Circuit Court of Cook County, conducted about twenty-five hours of interviews with John Wayne Gacy over a period of two months. Testifying for the state, Hartman said he agreed with Dr. Heston: Gacy was “a psychopathic or antisocial personality with sexual deviation” who showed “minor symptoms or characteristics of paranoid hysterical reactions.” He thought Gacy was capable of understanding the criminality of his conduct and that there was no evidence that he ever had “a mental breakdown or mental illness of the type that we consider a psychotic condition.”

  Hartman said that Gacy’s statements, in twenty-five hours of interviews, were marked by “contradictions, indications of marked evasiveness, variation in what he would say at one time or another, attempts to rationalize or excuse.”

  Gacy gave only fourteen responses on the Rorschach, but Hartman saw no indication of bizarre or peculiar responses, “no indication of schizophrenic-type responses. . . .” The doctor thought that Gacy’s responses to the inkblots, all those bees and flowers, indicated that “he knew what was appropriate and conventional. . . .”

  In the sentence-completion test, Hartman said he was struck by “the general normality and conventionality” of Gacy’s responses. “He presents himself . . . in almost an idealistic, altruistic way. For example, a sentence like, ‘The happiest time’ he answers, ‘is when I am helping others.’ “

  Hartman said that such altruistic responses are typical of antisocial personalities who, classically, “mislead people,” lie.

  Hartman, in answer to Amirante, said the fact that Gacy was a complex person and a difficult case didn’t preclude a diagnosis of antisocial personality. “The antisocial personality can be particularly complex. In fact, one of the frequent definitions is that he presents a complex picture. He may seem . . . bright, even charming, and yet have . . . strong antisocial attitudes, an aggressive lack of feelings, lack of remorse or guilt about acts of aggression against others. . . .”

  Hartman suggested that John was a liar. The next expert witness for the state came right out and said it. Dr. Robert A. Reifman, the director of the Psychiatric Institute of the Circuit Court of Cook County, had conferred often with his colleague Dr. Hartman. Both men had experience with prisoners who had tried to cop an insanity plea, who feigned mental illness, who were pulling what the convicts called a “bug stunt.”

  Reifman spent sixteen hours with John Gacy. “It was my diagnosis,” Reifman testified, “that Mr. Gacy suffered from a personality disorder, specifically narcissistic type,” which “is not considered a mental disease.”

  The finding of narcissistic personality did not exclude a diagnosis of antisocial personality, Reifman said. “Antisocial personality is a subtype of narcissistic personality. I didn’t think it would be completely fair to call Mr. Gacy an antisocial personality, because it excludes the other aspects of his personality in which he’s well accomplished.” The doctor cited Gacy’s success in business as one example of those other aspects.

  Reifman didn’t think Gacy fit the profile of a borderline personality because “in my experience . . . they do not function very well. They are occupationally very poor; they can’t hold jobs. Their lives are chaotic.” Gacy, on the other hand, was efficient and successful. He ran “a very successful contracting business.” He was a “reasonably successful politician . . . a reasonably successful clown. He had lots of friends, and he was, generally speaking, a very efficient, successful person. Even with respect to the crimes, he was extremely efficient.”

  For the same reason, Reifman disagreed with Dr. Freedman’s diagnosis of pseudoneurotic paranoid schizophrenia, because then “it would be impossible for him to function in a socially acceptable . . . way. Mr. Gacy functions extremely well . . . a pseudoneurotic schizophrenic is a frightened, constricted person who is teetering on the brink of psychosis and can’t function.”

  Reifman found “no evidence that Mr. Gacy was psychotic” and “no evidence to support a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.” The hallmarks of schizophrenia, Reifman said, are “delusions, hallucinations, and loss of contact with reality.” Gacy, Reifman testified, did not exhibit these symptoms.

  The murders, Reifman said, were not thirty-three brief psychotic episodes. “I don’t believe that you can have thirty-three cases of temporary insanity.”

  Gacy’s descriptions of the murders proved that he was never out of touch with reality. “A person who gets some people to put handcuffs on has to talk to them. First of all, he has to gain their confidence, and he has to talk to them in a calm, rational way.

  “Now, Mr. Gacy told me that he would put the handcuffs on himself, show how easy it was to get the handcuffs off . . . he literally conned them into putting the handcuffs on. A person who . . . was out of touch with reality cannot function in that kind of goal-directed behavior . . . . If he is angry or disturbed, I think it would have been unlikely that anybody would have gone along with him.

  “Secondly, when he used the rope trick, it’s a very intricate operation: You tie knots, you twist. . . . On that basis there’s no evidence he was out of contact with reality when he performed these crimes.”

  Reifman said that while Gacy “seemed to be candid and forthcoming,” he was actually “evasive,” and, at first, denied any guilt. “He told me,” Reifman testified, “that he was four persons: he was John Gacy the clown; John Gacy the politician; John Gacy the contractor; and a fellow named Jack Hanley, who, it was suggested, went ahead and did these crimes.” Gacy said he had no memory of the murders and “did not know about Jack Hanley.

  “Well, it became very clear that most of the murders were committed with no witness and that the only information we have about the murders is information given us by John Gacy, and the information was considerable. So, therefore, the idea that Jack Hanley was a person who functioned in this way without Mr. Gacy’s knowledge was not true. He had very good recall. . . .”

  Reifman said he did not find any evidence at all to support a multiple-personality theory and added that “no other psychiatrist or psychologist subsequent to myself did either.”

  If the murders weren’t brief outbreaks of psychotic behavior or the workings of an alternate personality, neither were they the products of irresistible impulse, in Reifman’s opinion. As an example of such an impulse, Reifman postulated a “person who has to vomit . . . in front of their family and company . . . the urge to vomit becomes very strong and they struggle with it. Finally . . . they vomit in spite of the social connotations. They cannot resist the urge to vomit . . . it’s truly an impulse a person cannot resist.”

  Reifman didn’t think Gacy even struggled against his homicidal impulses. “In fact, if we regard the testimony of Cram and Rossi, who dug graves underneath the crawl space for the purposes of burying bodies: I don’t think a person who plans to have an irresistible impulse in the future could be having irresistible impulses.”

  Under cross-examination by Amirante, Reifman said that “Mr. Gacy likes to talk, and when he talks, he just talks everything. So I felt it was a good source of information.”

  Amirante asked if Gacy’s effusive stream of talk didn’t demonstrate loose association, a characteristic of s
chizophrenia. “When Mr. Gacy says on one hand . . . he killed somebody and on the next hand he says he didn’t do it, is that loose association?”

  “I think that’s lying,” Reifman said flatly. “I think he doesn’t remember what he says from one day to the next because he lies.”

  “You said he was lying,” Amirante said. “What was he lying about? That he didn’t do it, or that he did do it?”

  “My impression,” Reifman said, “was that he was lying when he said he didn’t do it.”

  Was that conjunction of truth and falsehood consistent with logical thinking? Amirante asked.

  “A person who lies in what . . . is their best interest may be functioning logically.”

  Amirante asked if there weren’t “patchy blocks” in Gacy’s recollections of the murders he talked about. “You are assuming patchy blocks,” Reifman said. “. . . There were things that he said he didn’t remember, and I didn’t believe him. I believe he has an excellent memory.”

  In fact, Gacy’s claim that he couldn’t recall the moment of the murders, Reifman said, indicated to him that the man was malingering, trying to feign insanity.

  Amirante asked if Gacy hadn’t told the doctor he thought it was stupid to act crazy and that he was not crazy.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “But on the other hand, you are saying that he was trying to fake being crazy.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Reifman disagreed with his colleague Dr. Hartman, with Dr. Freedman and Dr. Rappaport, who all thought Gacy was not malingering. “He was trying to fake a multiple personality,” Reifman said. “. . . There is no doubt in my mind when he came in for the interview he was trying to fake a double personality.”

  “Isn’t it probable,” Amirante asked, “that a person who does such a horrible thing would try to blame it on somebody else, or another part of him? Isn’t that possible?”