Buried Dreams

by Tim Cahill

  “What are you doing?” the kid screamed. Like he couldn’t understand why a man would want to protect himself from a kid with a knife. “What’s the matter with you?”

  John couldn’t stop looking at the blood pouring out of his hand. He remembered feeling “a surge of power from my toes to my brain.” He was no longer “the sick individual who was physically weak. I felt ten times stronger than I ever was before.” The power centered in his hands. The sense that his hands were extremely large and powerful was overwhelming. “I felt that I could grab this son-of-a-bitch and break him in half. I felt all the blood going to my face. It felt like my eyes were bulging out of my head.”

  There was a kind of one-sided fight then, but John had to admit that the kid didn’t actually “fall on the knife and kill himself.”

  He said he grabbed the boy in his huge hands and flung him hard against the wall. The kid hit his head, dropped the knife, and slid slowly down the wall. When John moved forward, the boy kicked him in the stomach, doubling him over.

  “Motherfucker,” John heard himself say, “I’ll kill you.”

  He was on him then, straddling the boy’s chest. His left hand was tangled in the boy’s blond hair, and he was banging the head onto the floor. The knife was in John’s right hand and he saw it plunging into the boy’s naked chest. There was blood, hot and slippery, and it felt, to John, like some strange and violent form of sex.

  The room, John said, seemed to be whirling. There were some incomprehensible sounds: the splat of the knife, the screams of pain and fear, the awful “guzzling” of open chest wounds. “It was like that Goodbar movie,” John said, “where he stabs the girl in the end.”

  When the boy was finally still, John rolled off his body “I felt exhausted,” he said, “just totally drained.” He looked down at the wash pants he’d worn to bed. They were covered with blood, of course, but John noticed something else there “I seen the front of my pants were all wet,” John said.

  The ejaculation had been an involuntary response, like sneeze, but the power of that orgasm numbed his mind “That’s when I realized that death was the ultimate thrill,” he said.

  It was this revelation, as much as the never-ending “gurgulation” from the bedroom, that had him “walking around like a chicken with its head cut off. I was drained, physically and emotionally.” John found himself in the bathroom, washing the blood off his body, off the knife he seemed to be carrying. When that was clean, he took it back to the kitchen, “where it belonged.”

  He noticed, then, that the table was set in two places. John hadn’t done that. There was a carton of eggs on the counter and a chunk of bulk bacon on the cutting board. No slices had been cut from the bacon.

  The boy had set the table for two, and he’d walked into John's bedroom to wake him, absentmindedly carrying the knife in his right hand. Maybe he was going to ask John if he wanted any bacon.

  “See,” John explained, “he wasn’t trying to outsmart me at all. He was trying to do something nice.”

  So the first one had been an accident, not John’s fault at all. That’s why he told the cops about it. Because he was completely innocent.

  He didn’t tell them about “the ultimate thrill,” though. He didn’t tell them that the seed planted a dozen years before had taken root when he killed the Greyhound bus boy.

  As nearly as John can recall, as closely as police and pathologists can figure, it took another three and half years for the dark flower to reach full bloom.

  John said he buried the bodies in his crawl space because “they were my property.” He sometimes referred to them as “my trophies.” He liked having them in the crawl space because “sex was always better, just knowing they were own there.” And it was smart, storing his trophies in the crawl space. If the police had been finding bodies out in the parks or the rivers all along he never would have been able to walk his way out of the Rignall mess or the Donnelly arrest. That he’s outsmarted the police for six years. Because he buried them in the crawl space. It was a stroke of “animal genius,” storing his trophies down there.

  “I’m in the Guinness Book of World Records,” John said, did it was a matter of obvious pride to him. You don’t get to that book by being dumb and stupid.

  “Killing them was almost too easy,” John once said. It was no challenge after the first dozen or so. In some of the later ones, John said, he even changed the rules. “Just like, some of them, they weren’t even handcuffed. I just used the rope trick.” The nights he killed two at once—and John said it happened more than once—were special challenges, like the time “I did a double with only one pair of cuffs.”

  Those were the best times, John said, fun times when the dark flower was in full bloom.

  The bodies, his trophies, were evidence of a brilliance John could barely believe belonged to him. It was like a destiny from God, his brilliance. He felt almost as if it had come from somewhere outside the person he knew as John Gacy.

  On February 15, 1983, Henry Brisbon, a black man known as the I-57 killer, was being escorted to the Menard prison law library when he somehow slipped out of his handcuffs, broke away from a guard, and stabbed John Gacy in the arm with a sharpened wire.

  Brisbon, the second most notorious killer on Menard’s death row, was convicted of murdering two people in a two-dollar robbery along Interstate 57. He received the death sentence after fatally stabbing a fellow inmate at the Stateville Correctional Center in 1978.

  Gacy and another man injured in the attack had been out of their cells, sweeping the tier on a voluntary work program Guards said they were not aware of any feud among the three men.

  Gacy was treated for a puncture wound at the prison hospital and released. Officials said Brisbon would be punished for the attack. They said his in-cell television and radio privileges could be revoked.

  In the summer of 1984, the Illinois Supreme Court voting 7 to 0, upheld John Gacy’s conviction and death sentence, ordering that he be executed by lethal injection. The justices found Terry Sullivan’s carefully prepared search was rants to be entirely proper and denied claims that Gacy’s postarrest statements to various officers violated his constitutional rights in any way.

  After studying the transcripts of the trial, the justice concluded that Gacy’s attorneys—Sam Amirante and Bob Motta—were not incompetent. On the contrary, Justice Joseph Goldenhersh, writing for the court, said Gacy’s attorneys mounted a “vigorous” defense and that “there is no merit to the assertion that their representation was ineffective.”

  The court also ruled that a statement made by William Kunkle during the penalty phase of the trial did not justify a reversal of the death penalty. Kunkle had said, “As a citizen of Illinois, I don’t want to pay this guy’s rent for the rest of his life.”

  Lawyers for the Illinois public defender’s office, who represent Gacy, said they expected “to follow the common practice in criminal cases of asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision.”

  William Kunkle was “very pleased” with the decision. The court set November 14, 1984, as the date for Gacy’s execution, but Kunkle said, “We’re probably looking at three or four years at a minimum, unfortunately.”

  On March 4, 1985, the United States Supreme Court denied John Gacy’s appeal.

  John paints pictures of clowns, but the one he did of the Seven Dwarfs caused a good deal of controversy. When the governor heard that John had made thirty-five dollars for that painting at the Illinois State Fair, he banned any further sales. In the painting—a rendering straight out of Walt Disney— the dwarfs were carrying picks and shovels. Some people thought that the digging implements were references to the crawl space under the house at 8213 Summerdale.

  John told one reporter that the painting was designed “to bring joy into people’s lives, that’s all.”

  At Menard, John studies the pictures of the victims and wonders “who the hell they were and where they came from.” He figures most of them were product
s of broken homes.

  It’s the families John thinks of most, though. He “feels sorry for them” because they are “filled with hate.” Hate doesn’t solve anything. You can’t live a life filled with hatred; you can’t do anything productive. Hate fills up all your time. John “prays for them.” Like him, they’ve experienced tragedy. Unlike him, they can go on with their lives should they so choose. If he could give them a message, he’d tell them to seek solace in the Bible, in the word of God above. Seek and ye shall find.

  John’s not asking for forgiveness. “If I did the crimes, then I don’t deserve to live,” he said. The sad part is, no doc “has been able to prove to me that I did it.” That’s “the biggest joke”: After all this time, after all the docs, John still doesn’t know. He swears he doesn’t, “with God as my Witness.”

  He’d like to explain that to the families, especially the Piests. Maybe he should have taken the stand. “If I would have told the truth about Robby, the truth as I know it, how could Kunkle have picked that apart? What could he say if I told the truth—that I might have done it, but if I did, I don’t know why?”

  It was too bad Kunkle had scared him off the stand, John said. That was where he could have made his statement to the families. He would have said something to help them, to ease their minds. He wanted them to see that John Gacy was every bit as much a victim as their sons. “I would have started with my youth,” John said. “I would have shown how I was the first victim. How I was cheated out of my childhood. How I was victimized in Iowa. I would have gone through the ones I remember and explained everything so that the families could see my side of it.”

  For a time, John wanted to write a book. Not for money. The money would have gone to charity. The book would contain everything he didn’t understand and would be addressed to the families. He’d call it “The 34th Victim.”

  But the state took that away from him, too. Illinois has a civil law that says a criminal can’t financially benefit from his crimes. Even if the money is going to charity.

  It was another victimization, this denial of his chance to finally explain himself to the families, to present his side. He wanted them to “meet the real John Gacy” and not “a monster the media created.”

  He wondered if, finally, after his death—after the last victimization—there would be someone, somewhere who would understand how badly it had hurt to be John Wayne Gacy.

  In Illinois, execution by lethal injection involves the administration of three different drugs through intravenous tubes. The first, sodium thiopental, is a surgical anesthetic that causes the loss of consciousness.

  When the condemned is asleep, a combination of potassium chloride and Pavunol are pumped through the tubes. Pavunol paralyzes the diaphragm. Potassium chloride stops the heart.

  When the drugs are properly administered, lethal injection is an entirely painless way to die. Death comes in about seven minutes, while the condemned sleeps.

  The funeral service John says he wants would be a 10:00 A.M. white Mass at St. Francis Borgia. He wants to be dressed in a blue suit, a white shirt, and a red tie with blue stripes. The hands should be folded over his chest, steepled as if in prayer. A black rosary should be fit in under the thumbs.

  John would like the congregation to sing his three favorite hymns: “Amazing Grace,” “How Great Thou Art,” and “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name.”

  He wants to be buried in Maryhill Cemetery, in the plot at the head of his father’s grave.

  The coffin should be silver-gray with a white interior.

  * * *

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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  * * *

  Tim Cahill, a well-known journalist, is a Contributing Editor to Rolling Stone, has a monthly column in Outside and has had numerous articles published in major publications including the New York Times. Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, a collection of his Outside articles, will be published in Fall 1987.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1986 by Tim Cahill and MC Productions, Inc.

  ISBN 978-1-4976-7276-5

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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