The Man Who Killed Boys

by Clifford L. Lindecker

  Lillie had mentally computed one or two spoonfuls of potato salad, multiplied 125 to 150 times. "John, fifty pounds is plenty," she said, her forehead wrinkling at the prospect of trays and platters heaped with mounds of leftover potato salad.

  The bridegroom insisted on at least one hundred pounds of potatoes, and it was his wedding, so one hundred pounds it was. When he bought or prepared food, even at home, he did it as if he were ordering supplies for one of the restaurants he had worked at. He bought in case lots. The storeroom and closets were filled with cases of canned foods, cereal, soap, cleanser, and wrapping paper. One of his friends observed that there was always enough food and kitchen supplies in the house to sit out a war and never touch a ration book.

  Lillie Grexa also volunteered to whip up two kinds of coleslaw to go with the beef, turkey, and other food her neighbor planned to prepare at work. The night before the wedding, he invited the Grexas to his house for a last-minute planning session. His mother, Carole, and a woman from the restaurant—who was going to help serve—were also there.

  Gacy had decided to make sauerkraut and kielbasa, a spicy Polish sausage, at the house early the next morning before leaving for the wedding. Lillie Grexa was horrified.

  "John, you can't smell up the house cooking kielbasa and sauerkraut the day of the wedding," she told him. "You're going to have the reception here in the backyard. There will be people running in and out of the house. It's June and the smell will hang over the place all day." She shook her head in disbelief. "You just can't do it. I'll cook the sausage for you at my place."

  There was already an odd smell at Gacy's house, and the aroma of Polish sausage, regardless of how good it might taste, wasn't desirable for the man's wedding day. He agreed that it might make good sense to do the cooking next door. But he wasn't sure that his neighbor knew how to make good kielbasa.

  "There's nothing to it," Lillie bristled. "You use a little bit of brown sugar, some caraway seeds ..."

  "Oh, my God, no. You can't do it that way. It isn't the Polish way."

  "You wait. You'll see," the woman insisted. "They'll like it."

  That afternoon Lillie and Ed Grexa carried thirty pounds of sausage, a tray of spices and a box of brown sugar with them when they went home. She cooked the sauerkraut and kielbasa early the next morning. Her way. The guests ate it all.

  Gacy also formed a new friendship with a young man at about the time of the wedding. Martin Zielinski was a freelance photographer who had taken pictures for Gacy's sister and was asked to photograph the June nuptials. Gacy was pleased with his work and it wasn't long before the ex-convict and the young photographer—who knew nothing of the older man's past—became good friends.

  Zielinski was barely out of high school and he was trying to get a foothold in a competitive business. Gacy gave him work, and bragged about his photography. Zielinski was susceptible to the flattery and easily accepted the older man as an entertaining and congenial companion.

  After the reception, John and Carole left for a two-day Wisconsin honeymoon. Audree Grexa, the Grexa's teenage daughter, baby-sat with the girls and Carole's brother's two children.

  The new bridegroom wasn't one to ignore his obligations, and to show his appreciation for Lillie's help with the reception, he and Carole decided to take the Grexas to see a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. But Gacy changed his mind before the show and asked if the Grexas would care if they went instead to see two friends of his who performed as a music and comic duo at a nearby restaurant. Both Gacy and his mother knew the performers.

  The Gacys and the Grexas sat through three performances. Between acts the brothers sold jewelry and visited at the table. Gacy was at his most ebullient, and gloried in the stares of other patrons when the performers joined him and his friends at their table. He talked loudly, greeted them with vigorous handshakes, and slapped their backs.

  Lillie Grexa wasn't that impressed with the two effeminate men playing around in swami robes. But the outing gave her neighbor an opportunity to exhibit his show-business connections, and the evening was a gratifying diversion, even though sitting through three shows was a bit tiring. There was no denying, however, that even if he was loud and given to showing off, Gacy was a gracious host.

  He proved that again one Sunday afternoon in July when the Grexas returned home from a trip to Wisconsin. It was Lillie's birthday, and she and her husband weren't home many minutes before Gacy showed up. "When you two get the car unloaded and have a couple of minutes, stop over at the house," he suggested. "I have something to show you." A few minutes later they stepped across their driveway and knocked at the back door.

  John and Carole and both their mothers were waiting. He had made hors d'oeuvres and he gave Lillie a gift-wrapped bottle of whiskey. She was impressed. On the way home an hour or so later, she mentioned to her husband how nice it was of their neighbor to have the surprise party for her. Throwing surprise birthday parties for neighbors could become an expensive undertaking.

  Gacy was a good neighbor, but it was a shame about the persistent musty odor in his house. The Grexas had noticed the odor for months, and it was getting worse. Carole and her mother were complaining about it. Even John's mother had said it bothered her when she visited the home.

  Lillie remembered the trouble that she and her husband had with a similar stench shortly after they moved into their house. It was foul, so bad that it almost made her sick when she ate. She was certain that a mouse, or possibly a rat, had crawled under the kitchen sink and died. She had talked her husband into pulling up the sink to look for the rodent when they discovered that the odor was coming from a broken sewer tile. They notified the builder, who dug up the old tile and replaced it. The nasty smell disappeared.

  The Grexas doubted that their neighbor's odor problem was caused by a broken sewer tile, because one of the previous owners of the house had installed the lines between the ground and the flooring. A broken tile would be too obvious and easy to trace.

  Gacy insisted that the trouble was nothing more than "that darned moisture" and hauled in more lime. He was their friend, but the Grexas didn't lose sleep over his problem. When he installed the brick facing on the front of his house, he closed off the last two working vents from the crawl space, so the odor didn't carry as far as their house. And since he himself treated the problem so cavalierly, there was no sense in their wasting their time agonizing over it.

  Gacy had other problems. They were problems that he didn't want to share with his friends and he didn't want to talk about with his wife. On June 22, 1972, he was arrested again. Police picked him up on charges of aggravated battery and reckless conduct.

  The trouble started on Chicago's action-oriented Near North side. The Near North is the home of some of the city's more well-to-do citizens, as well as Chicago's playground. Some of Chicago's finest hotels and most imposing old mansions along with chic restaurants, popular singles bars, discos, boutiques, bust-out joints and stately high rises serve the beautiful and not-so-beautiful people who inhabit or roam the Near North.

  A young man told police that he was standing on a street corner when Gacy swung his car toward the curb, flashed a badge and identified himself as a sheriff's deputy. The youth was ordered into the car under threat of arrest.

  He said that after he got into the car he was forced to perform oral sex on the driver. After completing the act, he cowered in the passenger seat, his fright building, while the bogus policeman continued driving. In suburban Northbrook, some twenty miles from where the young man had first climbed inside, the driver stopped the car and again demanded sex. The youth shook his head and jumped out the door. The driver tried to run him down. The charges were eventually stricken, with leave to reinstate by the court. The case was never brought to trial. It would be more than six years before Gacy was again named in a police complaint.

  During the intervening period, barely a year after Gacy's trouble in Northbrook, his neighbors and other Americans sat before their
television sets watching in fascination and horror as news cameras focused on the activities of a sex-and-torture-murder ring uncovered in Houston.

  At least twenty-seven boys and young men had died in what was described as the worst multiple murder in American history. Dean Corll, a thirty-three-year-old Houston electrician, was named as the homosexual mastermind responsible for the slayings, many of them carried out with help from a seventeen-year-old neighborhood boy, Elmer Wayne Henley.

  Images of husky Houston detectives carrying the pathetic sacked remains of the victims flashed onto television screens during news shows and TV specials. Most of the remains were dug from under a toolshed. Others were disinterred from a riverbed near the southeast Texas city that was previously noted more for its oil and aerospace industries than for grisly mass murder.

  Most of the bodies had been eaten away by quicklime, moisture, and mold and were so badly deteriorated that they were difficult to identify. Pathologists and police experts talked impressively during lengthy on-screen interviews about using dental charts and reconstructing faces in efforts to determine who the victims were.

  Most of Corll's victims were drawn from the same area of Houston, a lower middle-class white neighborhood known as The Heights, where he had once helped run a family candy making business near an elementary school. He developed a reputation there as a gentle young man who loved children, and was commonly known to give away candy to youngsters from the school.

  Sometime after leaving the candy business, he began sexually molesting and killing adolescent boys. Henley said that he started procuring his friends and other neighborhood youths for Corll, and was paid as much as two hundred dollars each for the victims. Many of the boys were seduced with beer and drug parties before being overpowered and tortured. Finally they were shot or strangled to death.

  After almost three years of the insane activities, The Heights was nearly stripped of adolescent males. Some families lost two sons each. Yet, invariably when parents contacted police to ask for help in locating their missing boys they were told that the children were obviously runaways—and because runaways were so common there would be no official search.

  The policemen were wrong. Although it began belatedly, the search got underway on August 8, 1973, when Henley telephoned police and told them he had shot Corll to death. Henley said he had delivered a teenage boy to Corll, but also brought along a fifteen-year-old girl. Corll was furious and they quarreled, but the man finally calmed down and the three teenagers busied themselves with a huffing party, using brown paper sacks to inhale the fumes from acrylic paint. One by one they passed out.

  When Henley awakened hours later, his ankles were tied and Corll was snapping handcuffs on his wrists. Corll was raging and he began poking the youth in the stomach with a .22-caliber pistol, screaming that he was going to kill him because he had brought the girl. Henley begged for his life. He promised to do anything Corll told him to, and the older man finally relented. Henley was freed and told to strip the girl, while Corll began spread-eagling the other boy, who was already naked, face down on a plywood board.

  Henley objected when Corll started to sexually assault the helpless boy in front of the girl, and the coconspirators began to quarrel again. The quarrel ended when Henley finally shot Dean Corll.

  Less than a year later Henley was convicted of participating in the murder spree with Corll and was given six ninety-nine-year prison sentences. He was found not guilty of murder in the fatal shooting of the older homosexual torture killer after pleading self-defense.

  Criticism of police work was widespread after the grisly doings of the murder ring were disclosed. Some adults, acting in alarm, established a national toll-free telephone hotline called Operation Peace of Mind so that runaways would make calls to parents to assure family members that they were alive and not among the unidentified victims. Operation Peace of Mind became a permanent hotline for runaways to relay messages to their families while keeping their own locations confidential if they wished.

  While Americans were shuddering at the outrages committed in Houston, John Gacy was busy developing a reputation as a gracious and generous host. He especially enjoyed hosting theme parties, get-togethers that featured a specific time in history or a geographic location and offered an opportunity to dress in appropriate costume.

  The theme parties were kicked off in 1974 with a Hawaiian luau. Lillie Grexa made leis for the guests from colored tissue paper and Gacy set up a barbecue and roasted two suckling pigs. A makeshift bar was located in the driveway just off the patio and stocked with beer and mixers. Guests who wanted stronger drink brought their own bottles. The host was usually content to sip a couple of glasses of J & B and water or drink Kool-Aid.

  The Grexas moved back and forth between the two homes at his theme parties, meeting his business associates, friends, former neighbors, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Gacy had many relatives in the Chicago area and they often visited together. Although the theme parties might draw anywhere from two hundred to four hundred guests and cars were parked for blocks along Summerdale and the nearby cross streets, Gacy did not invite all his neighbors. Usually he asked only the Grexas and one or two other families.

  The luau was followed with a Western theme party, and Gacy built a barbecue in the backyard on which he cooked a side of beef for his guests. He boasted that he had been the head chef at Chicago's famous Blackhawk restaurant before taking his current job and could cook anything. To others he confided that he was an honest-to-goodness, bonafide Kentucky Colonel. People who knew him well smiled and shook their heads. There didn't seem to be any harm in telling tall tales, as long as it made him feel good. But at times his stories could get hip-boot deep.

  Gacy was rambling on to Lillie Grexa one time about all the jobs he had held and all the accomplishments he had to his credit when she interrupted him. "Now, John, you're only thirty-three," she reminded him, "so how the heck can you have done so many things in such a short time?"

  His eyebrows arched in surprise. "Don't you believe me?" he asked, allowing his voice to betray the hurt.

  "Nah. How could you do all that?" she replied, laughing.

  "I'll show you. Next time I see you, I'll prove it to you."

  The next time he saw the Grexas, he had a prepared list of former occupations and activities. Reading from the sheet of lined yellow notebook paper, he said he had been an ambulance driver, Marine, chef, policeman, fireman, bartender, shoe salesman, manager of a fast-food chain, and award-winning Jaycee, had served on a governor's study committee and more. Lillie reached for the list, but he pulled it away. It was his "proof." She didn't openly question his integrity again.

  The year of the Western theme party was the year that Gacy went into business for himself, and started PDM Contractors, Inc. PDM stood for Painting, Decorating, and Maintenance. It was also the last full year of his marriage to Carole.

  The marriage had begun going sour long before that. It wasn't that Gacy went out of his way to be unkind. But he had an erratic, volatile temper, and it seemed that he just didn't have enough time for her. He was always tired.

  She once recalled that during the nearly four years of their marriage, her husband slept an average of only about two hours a night. He avoided sleep, as if his dreams swarmed with phantoms. He would get so tired that he sometimes slumped on the living-room couch, staring straight ahead, his eyes blank and his mind obviously lost in its own dark thoughts. She once sat down beside him to comfort him and he tensed, jerking away from her. Without turning to look at his wife, and speaking in a voice as papery and parched as a deathbed whisper, he asked her to move away and let him relax.

  At other times his somber moodiness would turn suddenly savage. He was short-tempered, and when he was angry his powerful hands clenched into tight fists. Then his temper flared and he would scream and throw furniture. Ed Grexa works as a marble setter, and twice replaced broken marble in a coffee table after Gacy had picked the table up during one of his rages a
nd smashed it to the floor. There was a lot of furniture broken during his outbursts, and Carole learned to watch quietly and as unobtrusively as possible while the anger swelled in her husband and he smashed their furniture into junk.

  There were times when the rages stopped as abruptly as a stream of water from a shut faucet. One moment he would be raging and the next moment he would suddenly be in good spirits again, seemingly oblivious to his anger of a few seconds before and unconcerned about the broken furniture.

  They had been married barely a year when he began leaving home at midnight or later and staying out until dawn. The couple's sex life became almost nonexistent. Carole remembered that during most of the marriage, her husband couldn't perform sexually. For a time she blamed herself. It was disturbing, and occasionally she let the bitterness slip out in front of other people.

  There was the time that Ed Grexa saw her in the backyard a few months after the marriage, and called out jokingly:

  "Hey, no little ones on the way yet, Carole?"

  She turned, unsmiling, and replied: "You have to sleep with someone first."

  She wasn't a complainer, but she occasionally let a hint of her troubles slip out in a remark to her sometime babysitter, Audree Grexa. Most of the time the two young women talked of other, more pleasant things, however. Audree was looking forward to her own approaching marriage and they talked of that, or of Elvis Presley. Audree was a Presley fan, and named her Norwegian elkhound "Elvis" after the superstar.

  Along with the other problems that were developing in the marriage, there was the ever-present odor. The stench hung over the house summer and winter. If it wasn't the warm weather making it worse in the summer, it seemed that it was the heat in the house in the winter. But it was always there. It was increasingly bothersome and frustrating, especially considering the business that Carole's husband was in. As a remodeling contractor, it seemed that he could do something about it. But no matter how noticeable and disagreeable the odor became, he continued to dismiss it as a minor problem and said it was caused by the damp and darkness of the crawl space. When she complained too vociferously or other people began mentioning the odor to him, his solution was to haul in more quicklime.