The Man Who Killed Boys

by Clifford L. Lindecker

  Yet, at Edgewater Hospital in the city's far north side, thoughts were on life, not death and defeat. It made no difference that the parents of the St. Patrick's Day baby traced their heritage not to Ireland, but to Poland and Denmark. And it made no difference that the baby was born into a tempestuous time and into a city more known for the violent and venal ways of its citizens than for its positive accomplishments.

  Chicago and the world welcomed the lusty, squalling baby boy. His parents named him John Wayne Gacy, Jr.

  Beginning with its earliest days as a settlement, the history of Chicago has been solidly engraved with violence. Chicago has spawned and sheltered some of the country's most unscrupulous and rapacious politicians and most infamous and ferocious killers.

  As the gateway to the West, Chicago had always offered fortunes to be made by those who were strong enough and bold enough to take them. Every kind of vice and corrupt scam that man could think of existed in Chicago. Even the great fire that roared through the city in 1871 failed to cleanse or slow the villainy. From the Haymarket Riot in 1886, to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, through the Democratic Convention riots in 1968, Chicago has been identified with acts of violence.

  "Chicago is unique," once observed Professor Charles E. Merriam, University of Chicago political scientist and civic reformer. "It is the only completely corrupt city in America."1

  But Chicagoans refuse to live in grief and loss for the past any more than they are willing to live in terror of the future. Some citizens, in fact, take a rather perverse pride in their city's violent and shifty reputation. There is never a February 14 when the media fails to commemorate the St. Valentine's Day Massacre with nostalgic stories of the mad days of Prohibition.

  The Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau would undoubtedly prefer that the city achieve its fame for landmarks like Navy Pier, the 1,468-foot Sears Tower, and Buckingham Fountain, or for such aspects of human achievement as its part in splitting the atom and opening the atomic age, or for the great men and women who lived and worked there, such as Clarence Darrow, Jane Addams, George Ade, and Richard J. Daley.

  Unfortunately, too many events in Chicago history that should have been remembered with pride and satisfaction have been marred by violence. Events like the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893-94 commemorating Christopher Columbus' landing in the New World. While 21 million people were paying admission to the World's Fair along the lakefront, a little man with the prosaic name of Herman W. Mudgett was filling a charnel house on the south side with the bodies of murder victims and laying claim to the very unprosaic title of most industrious mass murderer in the history of the United States.

  Mudgett, who used various aliases but preferred the name of Harry Howard Holmes or H. H. Holmes, was believed responsible for the murders of as many as two hundred victims, a large number of them unsophisticated young women and small children. Although he was linked to murders occurring as far away from his home base in Chicago as Toronto, and was eventually hanged for slaying a business partner and coconspirator in an insurance-fraud scheme in Philadelphia, investigators believed that he found many of his victims at the Columbian Exposition.

  Although Mudgett eventually admitted to only twenty-seven murders and was officially credited with twelve, workmen and investigators who dug up the cellar under his murder castle found so many bones, teeth, and other fragmentary remains that it was estimated that he had killed hundreds.

  There have been other celebrated crimes in Chicago since the days of Mudgett's horror castle. Child slayings like the ruthless thrill killing of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924; six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, whose dismembered body was pulled from sewers in 1946; the triple murder of John and Anton Schussler, thirteen- and eleven-year-old brothers, and their fourteen-year-old friend Robert Peterson in 1955; and the puzzling deaths of the Grimes sisters, fifteen-year-old Barbara and thirteen-year-old Patricia, in 1956.

  The child killings were dreadful, but it was 1966 before a mass murder occurred within walking distance of the Lake Michigan beachfront near the South Chicago Community Hospital that was so sudden and savage that it horrified people throughout the world. Mudgett's grisly deeds had been exposed nearly three quarters of a century before. The torture castle had been demolished and long since forgotten. Chicago was ready for a new horror.

  It was just after 6 A.M. on a warm, humid July Thursday when Patrolman Daniel R. Kelly braked his squad car to a stop outside a building in the 2300 block of East 100th Street. A young woman he later learned was twenty-three-year-old Filipino nursing trainee Corazon Amurao, was standing on a ledge ten feet above the sidewalk screaming: "Help me. Help me. They're all dead. I'm the last one alive."

  Drawing his Smith & Wesson .38, Kelly clattered up a half dozen steps and through an open rear door, moving quickly past the kitchen and into the living room. He stopped abruptly. The naked body of a young woman was lying face down on a divan. By a bizarre twist of fate, he recognized the victim as Gloria Jean Davy, a pretty twenty-three-year-old nursing student he had dated. A strip of torn linen that had been used to strangle her was still stretched around her neck.

  It is not unusual for a policeman to date or marry a nurse. Their jobs bring them in frequent contact. And city policemen learn to find their way around hospital emergency rooms as quickly as they learn to travel with a partner.

  Kelly's partner was Patrolman Lennie Ponne. As Ponne coaxed the shrieking young woman from the ledge back into the building, Kelly moved past the body on the divan and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He was met by a hideous scene. The mutilated bodies of seven more student nurses were scattered like limp and broken dolls throughout the apartment. Their wrists were bound with linen strips. Their mouths were gagged. They were all dead.

  When Miss Amurao, the lone survivor of the slaughter, had quieted enough to be questioned, she explained that she had let the killer into the building at about eleven o'clock the night before.

  Six of the girls were in their rooms, she said, when someone knocked on the door downstairs. Assuming it was one of the nurses who had forgotten her key, she went downstairs and opened the door. A slender young man confronted her. He was dressed in dark trousers and a jacket that opened over a white T-shirt. He held a long, gleaming knife in one hand and a revolver in the other.

  "I'm not going to hurt you. I need your money to get to New Orleans," he said, attempting to make his voice soothing and reassuring. "I'm not going to hurt you. I just want your money." The unmistakable sweet odor of whiskey followed him as she led him upstairs, the gun trained on her back.

  The girls were quickly assembled in a single room and forced to lie face down on the floor as the gunman tied their hands and gagged them with strips of linen he tore from a sheet. Three other girls were professionally tied with good strong square knots and gagged as they returned to the house during the next forty-five minutes.

  All of them submitted without struggling. The Filipino nurses suggested at the last moment that they all try to overpower the armed intruder, but were overruled by some of the American girls who, calling on their knowledge of classroom psychology, believed it would be better to cooperate and avoid doing anything to make him angry.

  With their last opportunity to resist gone, the young women listened in eye-bulging dread as the man rummaged through their rooms. One by one he then led them from the front room. Miss Davy was first. She was taken downstairs. He returned alone nearly a half hour later and led away one of the Filipino girls.

  The quiet was terrifying. The more time that passed, the hollower his promises not to hurt anyone began to sound. The young women were helpless and in the power of a man who was a thief, had been drinking, and was armed with terrifying weapons capable of dealing death or horrifying injury. There was little about the situation to inspire confidence in his good intentions. Wriggling and squirming, Miss Amurao rolled over to one of the bunk beds and squeezed underneath, pressing her body against a wall.

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p; She remained there, her frightened brown eyes wide open as the remaining girls were led away. After the last girl left, there was total silence. At 5 A.M., the shrill peal of an alarm clock shattered the funereal quiet. The young nurse began to struggle free of her bonds, and thirty minutes later she was on the window ledge screaming for help.

  The mass murder had been carried out with almost unbelievable ferocity. Cook County Coroner Dr. Andrew J. Toman, working with a half dozen pathologists and investigators manning a mobile crime laboratory, quickly determined that Miss Davy had been strangled. All the other victims had been stabbed. Some had been both stabbed and strangled. One nurse's throat was slit. Another had been stabbed in the back, neck, and eye. Newspapers described the massacre as the most bestial crime in Chicago's history.

  Three days later, concluding one of the biggest manhunts ever mounted in Chicago, police picked up a Texas drifter who drank too much alcohol and shot too much dope and charged him with the crime.

  A sketch by a police artist made from a description provided by Miss Amurao, and a tattoo, "Born to Raise Hell," on the left arm, led to his capture. Richard Speck, a sometime maritime worker who had been trying to book working passage to New Orleans, was arrested after he had slashed his wrists in a skid-row hotel and was recognized by a doctor at Cook County Hospital. The doctor had seen the police sketch and read of the tattoo in a newspaper, just before being called to the emergency room to work on Speck.

  A young lawyer with the States Attorney's office, Louis B. Garippo, handled the administrative details of the trial, which was moved from Chicago to Peoria, Illinois in an effort to dilute the circuslike shenanigans and the effect of publicity to ensure a fair trial for the defendant.

  One of the most difficult aspects of the task was accommodating the unruly horde of reporters who fought each other for seats, while still managing to keep a few spots for other members of the public. But Garippo, whose deceptive easygoing manner and meticulous workmanship were honed during three years in Army intelligence, calmly did his best. Before the judge and jury were halfway to a finding of guilty, and sentences for Speck totaling from 400 to 1,200 years in prison, there were empty seats in the courtroom almost every day. Even the shock of murders coming eight at a time can pale after a few months, especially if they occur in Chicago, where hundreds of people die violently every year.

  John Wayne Gacy, Jr., was born twenty-four years before the butchery committed by Richard Speck. He was the offspring of a forty-one-year-old machinist, John Wayne Gacy, Sr., a Chicago native, and his thirty-three-year-old wife, born Marion Elaine Robinson, in Racine, Wisconsin.

  The father-to-be checked his wife into Edgewater Hospital at about 9:30 P.M. on March 16. Barely three hours later their first and only son was delivered by their physician, Dr. David S. Levy. Dr. Levy would periodically continue to provide medical care for members of the family, including the healthy baby boy, for more than thirty-five years.

  The baby was a Pisces, with the same birth date as Rudolf Nureyev and the same astrological sign as George Washington, Albert Einstein, and Charley Pride. On the birth certificate, his mother's profession was listed as "housewife." It was an occupation she had followed for more than three years after a depression-year wedding in 1938.

  When the new baby was taken home a few days later, it was to a family that already included a two-year-old sister, Joanne. Two years later the third and last child, Karen, completed the family.

  The world of war and urban violence seemed far away from that of young Johnny Gacy as he grew up on the north side. His mother had inherited a Danish respect for cleanliness from her Scandinavian ancestors, and he lived in a neatly kept home, attending neighborhood Catholic schools with his sisters until he was eleven.

  The family moved at about that time and he transferred to public schools, earning a reputation as a student ranging from good to indifferent. He was a well-behaved child and got along well with his teachers. He had a newspaper route and worked part-time in a grocery store after school hours. Everywhere the family lived, his relationship with his neighbors was good. He was a typical neighborhood boy who joined the Boy Scouts, romped with his dog, and played stickball and other street games with his friends.

  He hit his head on a playground swing when he was eleven, and suffered occasional blackouts until he was about sixteen, when the trouble was diagnosed as a blood clot on the brain. The clot was dissolved with medication and the blackouts stopped.

  There were other encounters with the medical profession, however. The boy was hospitalized for five days to have his appendix removed when he was fifteen, and in 1958 he began taking medication for a heart ailment.

  But his health was probably as good or better than many of the youngsters he went to school with. Perhaps the most significant aspect of his school experience was the fact that he attended four high schools and never completed his senior year.

  The first was Carl Schurz, a huge coeducational high school on the far north side. At Schurz, Johnny Gacy was no more and no less noticeable than any other student. He was never one of the popular boys. Nevertheless, he made friends and he got along well enough with his schoolmates to earn a reputation as a generally easygoing young man, although years later he told his first wife that he was taken out of school in a straitjacket a couple of times after flying into uncontrollable rages.

  His grades could have been better, but those of many of his schoolmates were worse. If there was anything outstanding about him during his student years, it may have been his neatness. Many of the other boys his age were careless about their dress. He wasn't. His clothes weren't expensive, but they were always neat and carefully chosen.

  His manner of dressing was one of the things about him that most impressed a girl friend of his sisters, Carole Kotowski. Carole was petite and perky, with a kind of vanilla-ice-cream beauty, and she giggled with John's sisters about the fact that he kept his room cleaner and neater than theirs.

  Even though they dated only once, when they were both sixteen, she remembered his neatness. She was a student at Schurz, and he had just transferred from there to Providence St. Mel High School.

  As a high school student, he did better in some classes than in others. He made better grades in English and science than in print and auto shop. Soon after his date with Carole, he transferred again, this time to Cooley Vocational High, and signed up for business courses. But a year later he had again changed schools and enrolled at Charles A. Prosser Vocational. His enthusiasm for classes changed along with the shift of schools. At Prosser his attendance was spotty, and after a couple of months he dropped out. The restlessness that had been growing within John Gacy until it culminated in his leaving school led him to a brief separation from his family. It was perhaps overdue.

  Although he respected his father, signs of strain had been increasingly developing between the two men in the family. The young man resented what some were to later describe as the senior Gacy's tendency to be a little too strict and demanding of his son. Perhaps because he was the only boy, his father was less tolerant of his problems than of those of the girls. In later years the son talked sadly of his love for his father and his disappointment that they weren't better friends. The teenager was closer to his mother and sisters. The bond between the young man and his mother was particularly strong, and she affectionately called him "Johnny."

  The day finally came when Johnny Gacy, still a teenager, left home. He headed west and eventually wound up nearly broke and alone for the first time in his life without family or close friends nearby. He landed in Las Vegas, where newcomers are appreciated more if they arrive with money than without. Jobs weren't easy to find for a teenager without so much as a high school diploma, but he finally found part-time work as a janitor, cleaning up at the Palm Mortuary.

  Twenty years later, funeral director George Wycoski recalled that Gacy was a good worker, who cleaned about two hours a night when he showed up. "He was trying to get money to get back East," said Wyco
ski. "That's all there is to it. He was just a transient."2

  Gacy saved enough money within a few months to pay for his transportation, and a couple of nights later he was at home with his family, being fussed over by his sisters and eating his mother's cooking.

  His parents would have been pleased if he had returned to high school to earn a diploma. Although he had not graduated, he enrolled at Northwestern Business College. This time he applied himself to his lessons, and on graduation day he celebrated on campus by posing with his parents for pictures.

  If there was any trouble ahead for the young man, it seemed that it would involve his health. He was developing a weight problem, and the heart condition that had intruded into his life was still bothering him. In one period of three years he was doctored or hospitalized several times with heart trouble. In 1961 he spent twenty-three days in the hospital with a spine injury.

  Nevertheless, his future looked rosy, and he left business college optimistically looking forward to carving out a place for himself in the business world. A position in the sales profession was perfect for him. He loved to talk. Words spilled topsy-turvy from his mouth, and few people listened closely enough to realize how little meaning the motley collection of words and phrases often had. He was articulate and ingratiating. Those qualities, along with his natural gregariousness, made him a good salesman.

  So it wasn't long after his graduation from business school that he went to work for the Nunn-Bush Shoe Company as a management trainee for sixty-five dollars per week. He did so well that by 1964, just before his twenty-second birthday, he was transferred to Springfield, Illinois, to manage the company's retail outlet at Roberts Brothers, a leading men's clothing store.

  The March 8, 1964 State Journal Register in Springfield reported that Gacy was with Nunn-Bush several years in the Chicago area, where he attended school. The new manager of the shoe store held a degree in accounting and business management, the article said, and "... up and until his transfer (he was) very active in youth work and young adult clubs, of which he is a member of the board for the Catholic Inter-Club Council and membership chairman for the Chi Rho Club."