The Man Who Killed Boys

by Clifford L. Lindecker

  He liked money and one of the places to find it was at the corner of Diversey, Broadway, and Clark. The corner is constantly crowded with urban commuters waiting for Chicago Transit Authority buses. A blind man who holds a tin cup and dangles a blaring transistor radio from his belt has taken over one spot on the corner, and a newspaper kiosk has another. Shops and stores offer snacks of pizza, ice cream, Cantonese rice and noodles, gyros, cocktails, Big Macs and Yankee Doodle Dandies.

  To Billy and his friends, the intersection had other charms not confined to the shops, restaurants, and cinema. They knew they could make money if they hung around long enough. He met street hustlers, a boy named Jaimie, another named Jerry, and others who were less cautious than himself about climbing into cars with strangers when the price was right. Made conspicuous by their short haircuts, neckties and white shirts, the strangers cruised the streets with the driver's window rolled down until eye contact was made with the right person.

  The motorists were almost invariably middle-aged or older and lived in suburbia with wives and children or with parents, posing as sexually straight during the day and cruising the city streets at night once a week or so looking for young boys. Avowed homosexuals with nothing to hide had their own friends and frequented their own bars.

  Stories were passed around about boys who returned from rides with their eyes blackened and noses bleeding or doubled over in pain from less obvious injuries. The boys had to be cautious. Jerry once climbed into a car with a solid, tough-looking man who was so rough and threatening that the boy jumped out of the car and ran. The youthful hustlers learned quickly from friends or by sad experience that a certain breed of man enjoyed inflicting fear or pain.

  Billy knew what went on in the cars, and he sometimes parleyed at curbside with motorists or permitted someone to buy him a taco at a restaurant. But he never got in their cars. He arranged for other boys to go for rides, and when they returned he was waiting for a share of the money they brought with them. Billy Carroll's parents said that their son was too smart to voluntarily ride away in the car of a stranger, and he was too scrappy to be forced.

  When Billy was a regular on the corner there were stories about a big, rugged chunk of a man who cruised in a new black Oldsmobile with a spotlight. Young men like Jaimie, who trades on his thick-lipped likeness to Mick Jagger and is a regular at homosexual hangouts, believed they narrowly escaped serious injury or death after encounters with him. He told of a frightening confrontation with the big man in the sleek Oldsmobile in an article by Gene Mustain and Gilbert Jimenez in the Chicago Sun Times.14

  The encounter began at Bughouse Square, about a half mile north of Chicago's Loop, when Jaimie was introduced to the man by another male prostitute known on the street as Speed Freak Billy. Bughouse Square acquired its unique name years ago when the block-long park on the near north was a haven for soapbox oratory. Day and night, self-appointed experts climbed on top of wooden crates, overturned buckets, and park benches, or merely stood tall and lectured to anyone who cared to listen on subjects as diverse as Marxism and the evils of big business, to the universal draft, prohibition, or flying saucers.

  By the 1960s the park had changed. The speakers were gone and had been replaced by winos with faces and bodies as vacant and exhausted as worked-out coal mines, and by young boys—runaways, truants, or just kids whose parents didn't care where they went and whether or not they came back. It became known as a chicken park where young boys patrolled the sidewalks near the curbs with no underwear on and socks wadded up inside their pants to make their genitals bulge. When a car slowed and a motorist looked interested they might rub the front of their pants suggestively or "throw the basket out," pushing their crotch enticingly forward. They patrol year around in all types of weather until they earn the price of a supper, an ounce of grass or carton of cigarettes, and another night in a hotel room.

  Jaimie said he was driven to a house on Summerdale Avenue in Norwood township. The big-bellied man who drove him was John Gacy.

  The first meeting was uneventful, even though there was something discomforting about the house. It was almost too still and the young hustler was bothered by "bad vibrations like spirits." He was uneasy being alone with his host. But once they had shared a couple of drinks and talked, Gacy drove him back to Bughouse Square, after giving him thirty dollars and a handful of pills. "See, I'm okay, you can trust me," Gacy reassured him. "You'll be seeing me again."

  It was a couple of weeks before Jaimie saw Gacy at Bughouse Square again. A full, gibbous moon had fumbled its way out of the clouds, dimly illuminating the dark shadows of the park in a brackish yellow glow, when Gacy smilingly approached the second time. Gacy's smile groped for the corners of his mouth and his eyes squeezed into pleased slits as the young man climbed into the car and accepted an offer of thirty dollars for mutual oral sex. When they pulled away in the big car Jaimie was embarking on a different sort of evening than he had spent with his companion earlier.

  As the story was reconstructed, there were no pleasant interludes of friendly conversation or drinks. Jaimie's husky host led him into the bedroom, where both of them stripped. Gacy told Jaimie to get busy doing what he was being paid to do, but before the youth could comply his head was jolted back with a sudden slap. Suddenly Jaimie was being beaten. He tried to scream but the noise was smothered by powerful hands that closed around his throat.

  Jaimie had been a prostitute since he was twelve, and he realized that he was with one of those people who were sexually stimulated by hurting others. The trick was to defend himself but not to fight so hard that it made his attacker even more violent and more dangerous. Tears were welling in his eyes and he was trying to wriggle free when Gacy did something that terrified him even more. From somewhere, Gacy produced a pair of handcuffs. Jaimie picked up a vase and shattered it over the man's head. He grabbed at the handcuffs and hurled them against a window, then gripped Gacy's wrist and bit down until he tasted blood.

  As his attacker clutched his wrist and jerked away, Jaimie screeched that a friend had taken down the Oldsmobile's license number. That was how the boys protected themselves, he lied.

  Moments later Jaimie was lifted off his feet and heaved onto the bed. The man threw his own heavy body onto that of the youth, smashing him into the mattress. Jaimie couldn't move. He was smothering. The man on top of him was groaning.

  Abruptly the man rolled off the boy, got to his feet, and snapped on the bedroom lights. He was panting heavily and smiling. It was time for them to get dressed so that Jaimie could be driven back to the park, he said. Before leaving the house. Gacy gave the frightened boy fifty dollars, the thirty-dollar promised fee and a twenty-dollar tip, and added another handful of pills.

  Jaimie was silent on the ride back. After he left the man who had beaten him, he took a month off from the streets. It had been a terrifying experience. Much later Speed Freak Billy casually mentioned to Jaimie that he was a specialist. His clients were sadists, masochists, and bondage freaks.

  Jaimie had more than he wanted of sadists, and he told his friends about the man from Norwood Park. He warned them to stay away from the man if he came around again.

  He came back. Various boys talked of seeing him around the square, in leather bars on the near north and in New Town clubs like Cheeks, Broadway Limited, and Blinkers. All the clubs were known for their gay clientele. At other times he was spotted cruising in his Oldsmobile farther north on Broadway, his eyes gleaming hungrily at curly-haired boys carrying shoulder bags, youths in cutoffs and sneakers walking hand-in-hand past pizza and gyros restaurants, leafing idly through stacks of rock albums or leaning against the brick-and-glass fronts of gay bars and discos. Streetwise hustlers avoided him. The word was out.

  There was also talk of the same man in a black Oldsmobile cruising the meaner, grimier streets of Uptown looking for young boys. It was said that although he could be generous with his dollars, he was also dangerous. It was best to stay away from him because he w
as as rough and mean as an oilfield bully.

  There was speculation that he might have been involved in the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy who was a known prostitute and pimp for other children. Nine years old is not too young for boy prostitutes. There are men who find pleasure in sex with even younger children. In street parlance men who seek sex with boys are called chicken hawks. By eighteen or nineteen a boy hooker can be burned out and so old for the street that the price for his services has dropped precipitously.

  An hour or so with a nine-, ten-, eleven- or twelve-year-old can bring one hundred dollars to a don, the man who acts as go-between for the extremely young and their clients. Men who desire sex with preteens are reluctant even to circle known pickup spots at parks or street corners where youth or vice-squad officers may be watching to make embarrassing arrests or to record license numbers. It is safer to make the arrangements with a don to pick up the boy at a certain location and take him from there to a hotel or to an apartment.

  By the time boys become fourteen or fifteen years old, even those new to the business, they are usually working on their own because they no longer need a go-between. But by that age their value as sexual partners has already begun to drop. Their bodies are becoming too muscular and hairy, and their voices too deep.

  When the nine-year-old vanished from his old hangouts, other boys provided Area Six Youth Division officers with a description of the man in the black Oldsmobile. Driving the car with the red spotlight on the side, he wasn't difficult to find. With fellow officers from Area Five, the police tailed him through the grimy streets of Uptown and through the lively streets of New Town. Eventually he led them to the bungalow on Summerdale Avenue. During a two-week stakeout, several youths seen going in and out of the house were questioned. None of them had anything incriminating to say about the man who lived inside.

  Like earlier policemen who had been led to the house on Summerdale, none of the youth officers bothered to check the computers to determine if there was an arrest record on John Wayne Gacy.

  While Gacy was becoming familiar to boy prostitutes and youth officers, he was also making new friends in straight bars and neighborhood clubs. He was drawn to clubs like the Good Luck Lounge, a working-class saloon with a predominantly young Polish clientele on North Elston Avenue in the neighborhood where he had attended Schurz High School.

  Occasionally he showed up at the tavern with Carole, both before and after their marriage, or with a young female cousin. A couple of times he walked in wearing his Pogo the Clown outfit, explaining that he had been entertaining at a children's hospital or private party and had stopped for a drink before going home to change clothes.

  The young men who drank bottles of Old Style and Bud or shot pool with the sleeves of their T-shirts rolled up to show off the tattoos on their forearms might have been suspicious of the newcomer at first. The Good Luck Lounge wasn't the kind of bar where a man can set his drink down and squeeze the leg of the fellow next to him or announce that he would like to meet cute young boys.

  The young men were there, but they were not the type who carry shoulder bags or bleach their hair blond. If they wear leather in the bar it's because they have just parked their motorcycles outside. And when they drink and dance to the conversation-crushing rock music that crashes from the jukebox or to the live bands that play on weekends, it's with girl friends who wear blue jeans, have shoulder-length blond hair and ask for beer or whiskey straight up.

  The heavyset man with the small black moustache behaved himself. The women he brought with him from time to time were vivacious and pretty. And he was in the construction business, an occupation that many of the robust tavern patrons knew about firsthand.

  As the noisy young crowd got used to the large friendly fellow who came in to sip Scotch and follow the action, they began inviting him to play pool on a table placed conveniently near the front door or to pit his skills against a local favorite on one of the two pinball machines at the far end of the bar. It didn't matter that he was about ten years older than everyone else.

  Like many others at the Good Luck Lounge, Daniel Rosasco found Gacy to be entertaining and good company. Rosasco, who worked for two years as the club bouncer, visited dozens of times at Gacy's home. Gacy was a good host, despite the strangely musty odor that continuously hung over the house.

  Rosasco worked days as a mechanic, but the jobs could be spotty and he was quick to accept when his contractor friend asked him to help out with some remodeling. A few others from the tavern had worked part-time for the contractor and the money was welcome. Few of the people who gathered at the lounge had too much money, and jobs were often difficult to find.

  Rosasco was impressed with the zeal that Gacy applied to the work. The man was always pushing to get each job done as quickly as possible so that he could get on with the next. A couple of times when Rosasco arrived at Gacy's house early in the morning, the burly contractor was at his desk, rubbing at his eyes and sleepily doing paperwork. Gacy would explain that he had been up all night.

  After Gacy had been a regular at the tavern for a few months, stories inevitably began to circulate, amid jokes and chuckles, that the big fellow liked boys better than girls. They were stories that people like Gacy's sturdy bouncer friend found difficult to believe. The few times when Rosasco was riding with him and they saw someone who was overtly homosexual, Gacy would snort and tell him to "take a look at the weirdo." If someone was telling dirty stories and the butt of the joke happened to be an unfortunate homosexual, Gacy always laughed the loudest.

  The two men got their biggest laugh the day Gacy was driving them back from a job and he noticed two black men in a car behind him passing what appeared to be a marijuana cigarette. He loved to play policeman, and he told his passenger that he was going to make the men think he was a cop. He slowed until the two cars were abreast, then turned his spotlight on them. Gacy and Rosasco roared with laughter when one of the black men swallowed the dope.

  Gacy liked the good times he had at the lounge, and was upset when he learned that it was going to be sold. When the new owners took over he stopped coming in as often as he had previously, and confided to some of the regulars that he was thinking of buying his own bar. Soon after that, he stopped in a tavern on the northwest side that was for sale. He talked to the owner and impulsively announced that he had decided to buy and would leave a down payment after picking up his checkbook. About a half hour later he returned and wrote a check for the deposit.

  The tavern owner couldn't believe that the loquacious customer was serious about doing business so impulsively and he put the check on the counter behind the bar and forgot about it. He didn't hear again from the prospective buyer, but a couple of weeks later remembered the check and took it to his bank. Payment had been stopped.

  Gacy was busy with other matters. People at the Good Luck Lounge were talking about their friend, Robert Sipusich. They were telling each other that the out-of-work construction man called Snags by his buddies had been lured to the big guy's house with a promise of drugs and sexually assaulted.

  It wasn't a story that Snags was proud of. It was a disturbing, nasty tale that he talked of frankly and honestly, however. Snags had seen Gacy around the Good Luck Lounge for some time before the older man suggested one night that they could have a drink at his home and that he would give his young friend a few hits of speed.

  Speed is a common street name for amphetamines, the tablets and capsules that housewives and kids take to lose weight, for a quick rush of euphoria, or for extra borrowed energy to help carry them through a rough day or night. The tablets and pills have myriad nicknames like white crosses, black beauties, and hearts. And they can be deadly if too many are taken at once or if they are used with alcohol.

  Snags' work was slow and it had been a while since he had a job. When Gacy suggested that he had some speed for him, Snags was agreeable.

  Initially the older man impressed him as a considerate host. Minutes after they w
alked into the house on Summerdale, Snags was relaxing in a comfortable chair with a whiskey and Seven-Up. A few minutes later Gacy slipped a pre-rolled marijuana cigarette into his hands. As Snags sipped at the whiskey and toked on the joint, Gacy talked about other drugs. The young man was impressed with his host's knowledge of the subject. He had been somewhat suspicious of all the bragging about owning so large a supply of drugs. Gacy talked like he operated his own pharmacy.

  Snags realized the boasting was based on facts when his host began pulling brown bottles full of capsules and pills from a shelf and lining them up on the bar. There were hundreds of Preludins, and new unopened bottles of Darvon, Valium, and Placidyl. Snags began listening with more respect as Gacy talked of being some kind of law-enforcement officer. It sounded reasonable. He wouldn't be the first policeman who kept confiscated drugs.

  When Gacy asked him if he had ever used poppers, Snags replied that he had. Poppers are thin glass capsules filled with amyl nitrite. Amyl nitrite stimulates and speeds up the heart. When the top is snapped off and the fumes are sniffed there is a quick rush of sexual excitement and exhilaration.

  If Snags was expecting his friend to produce a popper, he was wrong. Gacy pulled a rag from behind the bar, inviting him to try it.

  Snags pressed the rag loosely over his mouth and nose. The odor was heavy and unpleasant, and the fumes smashed through his consciousness like a giant fist. He was immediately dizzy and his stomach convulsed, causing him to vomit on the floor. Gacy shoved a towel into his hand and told him to clean up the mess. The young construction worker leaned over and wiped at the vomit with the towel. His head was spinning as he straightened up, and he was helpless to prevent the rag from again being pressed to his face. He blacked out.

  Sometime later, when Snags regained partial consciousness, a naked body was pressed against his. It seemed to the twenty-three-year-old that somehow he had gotten into bed with a woman. Slowly he realized that he wasn't with a woman, but that the hairy contractor from the lounge was sprawled on top of him.