Gacy found two lawyers and asked them to institute a suit against the police for harassment, alleging that the surveillance was preventing him from doing business.
The day after the lawsuit was begun, December 20, Kozenczak finally received the paperwork that told him Gacy had been convicted of sodomy with an adolescent boy in Iowa in 1968. Gacy had spent several years in prison for that offense, and had been such a model prisoner that he even started a prison branch of the Jaycees. The sentence had been for ten years, but Gacy’s sterling behavior won him parole in 1970. After being released, Gacy had moved to Illinois, and there had been a charge against him of aggravated battery and reckless conduct in mid-1972; a young man claimed Gacy had picked him up in a homosexual district, then had taken him home and had attempted to hurt him. A few days after Gacy’s arrest, Gacy told police that this young man was attempting to extort money from him in exchange for dropping the charges, and he wanted the young man arrested for that. Nothing came of either charge; when the young man did not show up in court to press the matter of the abduction, charges against Gacy were dismissed.
Armed with this new information, Kozenczak decided he had enough grounds to ask for a full search warrant, obtained one, and, together with the Cook County sheriff’s office, arrived at Gacy’s residence on December 21 with his men in force and began a thorough search of the house. Gacy was there, and the detectives accused him of holding Robert Piest in the house. Gacy denied it, but did say that back in 1972 he had been forced to kill one of his homosexual partners in self-defense, and that he had buried the body beneath the concrete floor of his garage. As the police watched, Gacy took a can of paint and spray-painted the place on the concrete floor where he said the body still lay. Inside the house, the police later found a trapdoor to a crawl space, crawled inside, and found three decomposing bodies and parts of others. Gacy was arrested and charged with murder. In his initial confession, witnessed by a half-dozen detectives, he confessed to the murder of Robert Piest and to that of twenty-seven other young males, most of whose bodies he said were buried beneath the house, and the last few of which—including Piest—he had tossed into the Des Plaines River. Police went to work on Gacy’s home and grounds so thoroughly that when they were finished, all that was left standing were the outside walls, roof, and support beams. They were looking, the Cook County medical examiner told reporters, for “any scrap of evidence—a ring, a belt buckle, a button—that will help us to identify the victims.” That was because Gacy couldn’t remember more than a few of the victims’ names. By the time the body count was complete, there were thirty-three victims (twenty-nine in and under the house, four in the river), more than had died at the hands of any other single individual in the history of American crime. Most of the dead were young males between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Ted Bundy might have killed more people, but not all of their bodies were ever found or attributed directly to him. John Gacy was officially the worst killer in modern times.
Gacy initially confessed to the murders in some detail, then, on the advice of counsel, said no more. The killings, Gacy had admitted, began one night in January 1972. He had trolled the Greyhound bus station near Chicago’s loop for sex partners, and brought home a young man and had sex with him. According to Gacy, the next morning, he saw that young man coming at him with a knife, struggled with him, and managed to stab his attacker in the chest. He buried this young man in the crawl space. Later in 1972, Gacy married for the second time. (His first marriage, which produced two children, ended in divorce during his earlier prison term.) The second wife asked him about the wallets of young men that Gacy had in the house, but he shouted at her that this was none of her business, and she put them out of mind. Then she complained of strange odors in the home, and while she was away on vacation, Gacy later said, he poured concrete over that first body to conceal the smell. Gacy’s mother-in-law and the wife’s children from a previous marriage lived with the couple during the next few years, during which, according to the mother-in-law, the odor of “dead rats” continued. So did the murders.
Gacy couldn’t remember precisely when he’d killed for the second time, but remembered it as between 1972 and 1975, and forensic evidence later corroborated this date. He strangled a young man, then placed him in a bedroom closet for storage before burial, and became a bit distressed that bodily fluids leaked out of the victim’s mouth and stained a carpet. Subsequently, he told authorities, he learned to stuff cloths or other materials in his victims’ mouths to prevent any telltale leaks.
According to that first confession, in mid-1975, John Butkovich, a twenty-year-old construction employee of Gacy’s came to the house with some friends and demanded back wages owed to him; after an unresolved argument, Butkovich left. Later that night, Gacy was “cruising” in his car and picked up Butkovich. He took the young man back to the house and offered him drinks. Then he said he’d show him a “handcuff trick.” Handcuffed, Butkovich was helpless, and he sputtered at Gacy that if he ever got out, he’d kill him. In response, Gacy showed Butkovich his second deadly amusement, the “rope trick,” in which Gacy placed a noose around the young man’s neck, stuck a stick in it, and tightened it slowly, strangling him.
Gacy’s handcuff and rope tricks were later described by several young men who had been picked up by Gacy and taken to his home but had refused to participate in those “magic” demonstrations, and so had survived. Butkovich did not, and was buried in a trench at the end of a toolshed near the garage, and also covered with concrete.
The Butkovich family suspected Gacy at the time, but police did not follow up on their suspicions. “If the police had only paid attention to us, they might have saved many lives,” Butkovich’s father later told reporters. The police didn’t follow up, most likely because they thought that Butkovich, like thousands of other young men around the country, had simply run away from home. Moreover, to have uncovered the crime, they would have had to have some tangible evidence even to ask a judge for a search warrant of Gacy’s home, and they had none.
Later, more was learned about Gacy’s techniques for luring and controlling his victims, and about his sadistic acts. He usually cruised the homosexual districts for victims, many of whom were transients who would not be missed for some time. On other occasions, he struck close to home, convincing some part-time employees to come to his residence on the promise of paying back wages. Once there, they would be plied with liquor and drugs, and then he would offer to show them movies. He’d begin with heterosexual pornography, then introduce some homosexual films. Then, if the young man did not object too strenuously, he’d bring out the handcuff and rope tricks. When a victim was immobilized, Gacy would sexually assault him. Afterward, Gacy would often put him in a bathtub, sometimes with a plastic bag over his head, and nearly drown him, then revive him in order to inflict more sexual assaults and torture.
Gacy was a smart man, with a high IQ, but more important he was a highly manipulative man with good verbal skills, able to defuse a victim’s paranoia and curiosity about himself. He was a spider who had to get victims into the very center of the web before being able to kill them. Whereas Ted Bundy would hit women in the face with a crowbar, Gacy used neither guns nor knives nor blunt instruments, but immobilized his victims through trickery and deceit.
The more he got away with the abductions, assaults, and murders, the more elaborate the rituals and the torture became. With a high opinion of himself, and a low one of the police and everyone else, Gacy transformed himself into a practiced and expert killer.
In February of 1976, Gacy’s second wife and her family moved out, and his killings began to escalate, at a rate of approximately one a month. As he went on, Gacy must have come to believe that he was invincible, for he was not even suspected in the murders. He became more bold and cavalier, not resorting to the anonymity of the homosexual district but taking young men right off the street—one who had been on the way home from a horseback-riding stable, others from his cadre of p
art-time employees. Young males between the ages of about fifteen and twenty simply disappeared, and most of the time it was believed they had simply become runaways. While the killings continued, so did Gacy’s success in the local and business communities. He became a block captain, toured the children’s wards in hospitals in his homemade clown outfit, and threw an annual block party for four hundred neighbors. “He was always available for any chore, washing windows, setting up chairs for meetings—even fixing someone’s leaky faucet,” a local Democratic party official told reporters, and concluded, “I don’t know anyone who didn’t like him.”
Early stories in the newspapers stressed the idea that Gacy was a Jekyll and Hyde character. As I have argued in other chapters of this book, the Jekyll and Hyde story is simply not the right explanation for this sort of murderer: The deadly side is always there, but the murderer is frequently successful in hiding it from the outside world. When Gacy was traced back in time, it was possible to see that the strange, murderous side of him had been in evidence for fifteen years. Back in the 1960s, in Iowa, when he managed three fried-chicken franchise restaurants for his first father-in-law, he would use his position to lure young male employees into having sex with him. In an “official statement of facts” submitted by the State’s Attorney of Cook County, it is alleged that “young men would be rewarded with sex with Gacy’s first wife in return for oral sex with Gacy.” Moreover, “when a sodomy victim reported him to the authorities, Gacy hired another young man to beat him up and convince him not to testify.” It was only after one well-connected victim complained that Gacy was charged with sodomy, convicted, and sent to jail.
Class rings, car title papers, and other possessions of the dead victims were found in Gacy’s home; in one case, Gacy had sold a dead victim’s car to an employee. In fact, he had kept a trophy from almost every victim. By early 1978, Gacy considered the crawl space and other caches on his property to be too full of bodies to contain any more, and he began dumping victims off bridges into the Des Plaines River.
When Kozenczak and his investigators questioned Gacy in his home on December 12, 1978, the body of Robert Piest was still in the attic. Somehow, before the intense phase of the police surveillance began, Gacy managed to sneak the body out of the house and throw it, too, into the river; it was not even found until after Gacy’s trial. By that point, only about half of the victims had been positively identified.
At the trial, Gacy’s attorneys argued that he suffered from having multiple personalities, that “Jack Handley” had done the murders. (Gacy suggested that his “Jack” and “John” personalities were opposites. The actual Jack Handley had been a police officer in the Chicago area whose name Gacy had appropriated.) Still later, Gacy argued that because of the nature of his business, at least a dozen men had keys to his home, and some of his associates lived there from time to time and could also have been involved in murders. He revised his own story to say that he had killed only a handful, not thirty-three, and to say that he certainly had not killed every young man with whom he had sex. Some of these theories began to surface in sixty hours of audiotapes that Gacy recorded for use by his attorneys at the trial, tapes in which Gacy also admitted to many of the murders.
The state pursued a case solely against Gacy, ignoring some evidence that there might indeed have been other people involved, two associates of Gacy’s who did spend time at his home. This is something that often happens in big cases: the DA pursues the one very good suspect and doesn’t develop the others because that would complicate an otherwise-straightforward prosecution. The important thing seems to be to handle the case expeditiously, and so the prosecution can be successful in obtaining a verdict against an obviously guilty man.
At the trial, Gacy and his attorneys presented a defense of him as not guilty by reason of insanity. The prosecution countered by demonstrating that the steps Gacy took to procure victims, to render them immobile, to kill them, and then consciously after death to conceal their bodies argued that Gacy’s crimes were premeditated murders, and that he clearly knew the difference between right and wrong at the time of the crimes. After nearly six weeks of trial, the jury pronounced him guilty of the murder of the thirty-three victims, and Gacy was sentenced to die in the electric chair.
* * *
After his conviction, I requested an audience with John Gacy, and he consented to see me, together with some associates from the BSU. Gacy claimed to know me from his childhood. Our homes were four blocks from one other, and he remembered delivering groceries to my mother’s house, even describing some unusual flowerpots that were part of the landscaping. So we talked about the neighborhood, and developed a relationship of sorts. I had learned enough about conversing with murderers so that I was able to approach Gacy on a rather objective basis, without stigmatizing him for what he had done. By this time, Gacy had become convinced that the police, the psychiatrists, and the courts were all full of fools who simply did not understand him and were beneath him intellectually—but that I was schooled in the ways of intelligent killers and could talk to him about his life in a reasonable way. Gacy states that two or three of his former employees were involved in the crimes. As part of my interchange with Gacy, I told him that I agreed that the police should have more vigorously pursued those employees who had stayed in the Gacy house from time to time. I was sincere in that belief, and still feel today that there are unexplored avenues that might be traced and might reveal others who were involved in the murders.
Gacy would not speak directly to the media and even refused monetary offers for interviews. He said he wanted to tell his story one day, and I urged him to do so. However, I cautioned that he’d have to be candid and not claim he hadn’t killed all of the victims. In fact, I told him, I thought he might have killed more than thirty-three; since he had traveled widely, in fourteen states, he could have trawled homosexual transient districts for victims elsewhere. Gacy neither admitted nor denied my accusation.
Through the years, I continued to stay in touch with Gacy. In our later conversations, he devalued the young men he had killed as “worthless little queers and punks.” I challenged him about that. Why was he running down his victims; if they were worthless homosexuals, what was he? Gacy’s answer was that they were useless runaways, while he was a successful and busy businessmen who didn’t have many hours available for dating. He told me that he found it more satisfactory to have quick sex with a young man than to wine and dine and romance a woman, which took too much time from his very full schedule. This didn’t sit well with me, but I simply accepted his comment without question at the time, in order to maintain our rapport.
Gacy later made a painting and sent it to me. It depicts a clown, dressed in a similar outfit to the one that Gacy had used, posing in the midst of a grove of evergreen trees, surrounded by balloons. The inscription read, “You cannot hope to enjoy the harvest without first laboring in the fields.” Some people take this as a compliment to me, with the meaning that I was able to get close to Gacy because I had spent so much time working with multiple murderers and so had been properly prepared to talk to him. On the other hand, some people interpret the inscription to mean that there are even more Gacy victims who have not yet been found. Gacy himself refuses to explicate.
People who become notorious through crime often attract outsiders to them. That’s what happened to John Gacy in prison in 1986: A twice-divorced woman with eight children came to visit him, and they started an extended correspondence. Two years and forty-one letters later, the woman was persuaded to let the Chicago Sun-Times publish excerpts from some of the letters. They contained such passages as the following:
I’m a gullible person, and I think you are too. But you can overcome it. And it has nothing to do with educational background. I hold three college degrees. Big deal. It doesn’t mean a thing without common sense. Street-wise people you can learn from. But you’ve got to be on guard for the con too. I mean, what the [deleted], the state said I was manipulati
ve or a manipulator. Hell yes. But had I not been I would not have been successful. You wouldn’t be successful undercover if you didn’t manipulate at times.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, who had been the chief psychiatrist at the prison where Gacy was incarcerated, evaluated the letters for the newspaper and wrote an analysis of them. Ziporyn had also interviewed Richard Speck in depth, and had written a book about Speck, Born to Raise Hell. Ziporyn wrote that in every letter, almost in every paragraph, Gacy displayed the two major themes of his thinking. The first was that Gacy’s view of himself was as a “nice guy,” which Ziporyn said meant heterosexual, “helpful, friendly, generous, loving, virile and courageous.” Simultaneously, Ziporyn wrote, Gacy was at pains to deny that there was a “Bad Me, bad being weak, timorous, cowardly, and—above all else—homosexual.” That “Bad Me” had committed the murders. His denial of the “Bad Me” allowed the belief in himself as fundamentally good. Here, wrote Ziporyn, was a classic sociopath, a man whose huge ego “exists solely to satisfy his own appetite for existence. His answer to the question ‘What is one allowed to do?’ is ‘Whatever one can get away with.’ His answer to the question ‘What is good?’ is ‘Whatever is good for me.’” Even in the letters, Gacy was trying to control his new friend, telling her, says Ziporyn, “what to do, what to think, how to deal with her family, how to manage her affairs,” and it was in this display that one could see Gacy’s need to control and dominate, the dynamic that led to his involvement in bondage and murder.
In later years, Gacy has come to believe that his troubles are traceable to his early childhood. Born of immigrant parents (Polish and Danish), he grew up in a household where discipline was strict, and his father drank and often bullied family members. He claimed to have been molested at the age of five by a teenaged girl, and at the age of eight by a male contractor. By the age of ten, he was having epileptic seizures, and his medical conditions kept him out of sports and other activities in high school; when he began work, he was out for medical reasons one day in three. He also insisted that his mind was affected by alcohol and drugs. Later, he came around to the story that he had not even been living in his home at the time the bodies were discovered, and that the crimes had been committed by someone other than himself.
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