The young man avoided alcohol, tobacco, and coffee. "Yet it is clear, despite the parents' protests to the contrary, that Nelson did socialize in the city's gay community," Warren reported. "To gay friends he affected the name 'Parker' Nelson . . ."15
Despite his crushing work schedule, he was young and full of energy and after completing his night shift at the restaurant he sometimes stopped in at The Gay 90s, a onetime strip joint converted into a gay bar. It was apparently there that he met Robert Young, a twenty-eight-year-old from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, who reportedly worked at a variety of jobs, including carpentry. Russell called his new friend The Cowboy.
In October 1977 Russell quit both his jobs and drove nearly six hundred miles to Belle Fourche with his new friend. They stayed with Young's parents for a few days before returning to Minneapolis. Russell then told his parents that he and his companion were going to travel to Chicago, Canada, New England, and Florida. The youth took $2,600 in cash and traveler's checks with him when they left in Young's van on their way to their first stop—Chicago. The Cowboy knew a contractor in Chicago and had other friends there.
One of the first people they met in Chicago was Jim Burnett, a waiter at a north-side restaurant and a friend of Young's. Russell and The Cowboy were apparently sleeping in the van and Burnett agreed to permit them to take showers at his apartment. They stayed overnight on Tuesday, October 18.
Burnett was impressed with the aspiring young architect from Minnesota and considered him to be intelligent and sensitive, but naive. Russell was excited about investigating the architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the prospect of looking over Chicago buildings which Mies van der Rohe had worked on.
He and his friend made the visit to IIT on October 19. The moon was full as the two men, who had been in Chicago fewer than seventy-two hours, headed for Crystal's Blinkers in New Town that night. There is something about the full moon that science has never quite been able to cope with. Countless phenomena associated with it have occult overtones. They range from the old beliefs linking it with werewolves to scientifically documented studies which have shown that postoperative surgical patients bleed more profusely and birth rates rise when the moon is full. Almost any policeman who has been on the job long knows that people act more irrationally than usual during the full moon, and murder and suicide rates often go up. Sexual desires are also believed to be heightened.
The full moon that hung over the city that night was apparently the last ever seen by Russell Nelson. Young later told police that after some time in the bar he and his friend left and were standing outside when he was distracted by some other people. When he turned back Russell was gone. The Minnesota youth didn't return to the van or to the apartment, and Burnett said that thousands of dollars and valuable personal possessions were left behind.
Young filed a missing-persons report with the police and contacted the Nelson family, asking for money to finance a search.
The Nelsons refused to give him the money, but Russell's older brothers met him in Chicago when they arrived there to search on their own. The effort was fruitless. The brothers rejected an offer by Young to get them jobs with a local contractor while they were in the city.
Young didn't mention the contractor by name, but John Gacy was in Roseville, Minnesota remodeling the Setzer Pharmacy in June 1977—only four months before Russell Nelson's fateful trip to Chicago. Roseville is a suburb of St. Paul, the twin city of Minneapolis.
Gacy's work was increasingly taking him outside the Chicago area to other communities in Illinois and to dozens of states. The Grexas were socializing with him less frequently, and other friends saw less of him. Occasionally they would see him and he would say that he was flying to New York the next day, to Minnesota a few days after that, and then to Texas or New Jersey or Florida. He once told the Grexas that he was expecting to receive an award for flying one hundred thousand miles. Several times he returned to Springfield, where he had lived from 1964 to 1966, to do remodeling jobs.
Although he was branching out to other states, Gacy still managed to find much of his work in his home area. One of the stores he remodeled was the Ksiazek Pharmacy on Chicago's southwest side. Owner Ed Ksiazek later observed that although pharmacists try to guard against thefts, it would be possible for someone to help themselves to handfuls of drugs without the owner noticing when construction or remodeling is underway. There is no law requiring all prescription drugs to be locked up out of sight.
Czarna once agreed to pour the foundation and concrete floor for a pharmacy for Gacy, and Gacy escorted him through the back door to introduce him to the owner. They were surrounded by thousands of pills and capsules as they waited for the pharmacist, and it would have been simple for either of them to have helped themselves to handfuls of drugs without anyone knowing they were missing.
Gacy subcontracted twenty-five or thirty drugstore remodeling jobs with Ted Gladson, a respected contractor from a far Chicago suburb. Operator of the P & E Systems in Lisle, Gladson specialized in drugstore and supermarket jobs and referred several young men to Gacy for jobs, when he himself didn't have work for them.
Gacy had plenty to keep them busy. Amazingly, after so many years of fixing up his own home, he still had jobs for them to do at 8213 West Summerdale.
His photographer friend, Martin Zielinski, was at the house one day when Gacy had a teenager crawling through the space under the house to repair a minor plumbing leak. Gacy put both Rossi and Cram to work digging out sections of the crawl space at other times. He told them where to dig, explaining that he was having drainage problems and wanted to install tile.
It was awkward, nasty work. The crawl space was narrow, cramped, and musty. A sour odor mixed with the sweat of the teenagers as they hacked at the dank earth with trenching tools provided by their boss. It was not an ideal working space for a man with Gacy's humpty-dumpty build, or with his reputed heart ailment.
Yet, Zielinski had once joined him on a job that required them to work in a crawl space similar to the one under Gacy's house and the young photographer was amazed at his boss's performance. Despite Gacy's corpulence, he worked in the cramped tunnel for eight hours on his knees. He grunted and sweated but he showed surprising physical endurance for a man of his size.
The day the boy repaired the plumbing leak, Zielinski crawled after him just to see what the underside of his friend's house looked like. The tunnel was lighted by a single bulb that shriveled and bent the shadows as they played over the smooth dirt. Zielinski wasn't aware of any particular odor, although there were dark puddles of standing water.
Zielinski's relationship with the man he called "Johnny" was often turbulent during the half dozen years they knew each other. In addition to the photographic work he did for Gacy, Zielinski also occasionally helped out on construction jobs.
The money came in handy because Zielinski was working toward a degree in business administration at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus. But even though the money was welcome, it didn't always come easy. There were constant differences about the pay or working arrangements. Working for Gacy eventually became more trouble than it was worth and the young photographer began avoiding him. But not before he had gotten an inkling of his friend's unorthodox sexual attitudes.
Gacy once asked him to go to a porno movie, and Zielinski agreed. He was surprised when he got to the theater and discovered that the film had an all-male cast. He was also bored, and showed it. Perhaps, he reasoned later, that was why Gacy never made a pass at him.
Another time Gacy asked him to shoot revealing pictures of homosexuals, and Zielinski refused, saying that it was illegal. Gacy told him that if he was smart he wouldn't get caught, Zielinski recalled, and that he should consider it because there was good money to be made and homosexuals love to be photographed.
The chunky contractor talked about other shady dealings he was supposedly involved in, but wasn't specific, although he claimed that he had been que
stioned by the FBI and local police. Gacy told some of the younger boys that he was a hit man for the Mafia, and offered to take care of anyone who was giving them trouble.
Zielinski said that he was threatened during one of their quarrels after demanding payment for photo work. Gacy reputedly sent word that he had friends who would put Zielinski in a hospital if the photographer didn't back down. "I do a lot of horrible things, but I do a lot of good things too," Gacy once told him.16
Apparently, one of the bad things that Gacy did got him into trouble in the late summer of 1978 when he was beaten and kicked in the groin. He was taken to Loretto Hospital by Cicero police at about 1:15 A.M., and admitted with injuries to his groin, chest, and face. He told police he was mugged, but his doctor said Gacy claimed he was beaten after getting into a quarrel in a tavern. When regulars at the Good Luck Lounge heard about it they chuckled and told each other between beers how the big fellow had made the mistake of propositioning a karate instructor. Gacy's friends in Norwood Park township heard still a different story, that he was beaten by Rossi and another teenager during a quarrel. Whatever version of the incident might be true, if any, Gacy remained in the hospital four or five days.
Earlier he spent a longer period of time in a north-side hospital after making a nude dash across his back lawn to put out a fire in the playhouse he had built for Carole's daughters. It was a snappy, cold November day when officers in a passing suburban police car noticed smoke coming from the outbuildings and alerted the Norwood Park (township) Fire Protection District.
Gacy was taking a shower when the policeman pounded at his door. Without waiting to dress, he sprinted across the lawn, covered only by a towel clutched around his hairy belly, and began battling the flames. The fire was extinguished before firemen arrived, but Gacy was hospitalized for treatment of smoke inhalation and bronchitis.
During one of his hospital stays he gave his business card to a nurse and asked her to refer young men to him for construction jobs. She never sent him any prospects, but he had no trouble finding willing young workers elsewhere. He contacted some of the boys who worked for him by posting a notice on a bulletin board at a supermarket at Harlem and Lawrence Avenues near his home. One boy who took his girl friend along when he asked for a job was rejected. Gacy told him he was too skinny.
Robert Gilroy was the son of a Chicago police sergeant who worked at the city's central auto pound, and lived near the supermarket where the notice was posted. On September 15, 1977, the youth left home to join about fifty other young people who belonged to an equestrian club and were going to be bussed several miles for a day of horseback riding. A student at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus, which Zielinski attended, he was an outdoorsman who often went camping with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. Gilroy, and their policeman friends. The active eighteen-year-old never showed up for the bus ride. After waiting for a while, friends contacted his parents and told them he was missing.
Robert's father and some other policemen began looking for the youth, who had been talking of possibly earning some money to help pay for a transfer to school in the East where he could study animal husbandry. An official at the Blue Ribbon Riding Center in Northbrook said he hadn't attended his lessons for weeks.
He had been scheduled to check into the Potomac Horse Center in Gaithersburg, Maryland, for a special class on September 29—exactly two weeks after his disappearance. Sergeant Gilroy telephoned the center on September 27 and confirmed that his son had not checked in. The boy's riding gear was still at home in Chicago. Gilroy filed an official missing-persons report. It had been almost two weeks since he had seen his son.
The official probe of Robert's disappearance eventually filled a forty-four-page report, including twenty follow-up investigations by police and additional information gathered by his father. The elder Gilroy's search turned up a report by the doorman of a luxury high-rise apartment building on North Lake Shore Drive that the boy may have accompanied a resident of the building inside on November 6, nearly three weeks after he presumably left home to meet his equestrian friends. No workable leads materialized from that report. Other reports indicated that the youth spent some time around the three-way intersection of Clark, Diversey, and Broadway in New Town. Nothing turned up in the investigations specifically linking him to Gacy. And nothing in the investigations led his father or other policemen to the boy.
Barely two months before Robert was last seen by his family, eighteen-year-old Matthew Bowman of Crystal Lake, some thirty miles northwest of Chicago, disappeared.
On September 25, nineteen-year-old John Mowery was seen alive by his family for the last time. John's disappearance was especially alarming to his family because his only sister, Judith, had been savagely murdered five years earlier. John, then fourteen, had discovered the body.
The twenty-one-year-old woman had been released early from her job as a clerk typist with the Cook County Assessor's office the previous afternoon because it was an election day, and returned to her apartment about a block from her grandmother's home. She had moved into the modest three-room walk-up only two months earlier so that she could keep pets.
She was in the habit of visiting her grandmother nightly and when she didn't show up for two nights in a row and couldn't be reached by telephone, John was sent to her apartment to look for her.
He found his sister sprawled fully clothed on the living-room floor, stabbed nine times in the chest and back with a knife that was long enough to have punctured her lungs. Three frightened eight-week-old puppies were huddled against her body. The killer was never caught and the case remains open in the files of the Chicago Police Department.
The family of Johnny Mowery, which included one older brother and one younger, closed around each other in support and he survived the trauma of finding his only sister murdered. By early 1977 he was discharged after serving eighteen months in the Marines and was taking his first steps toward a possible career in accounting.
He had returned to his family home only briefly after completing his military service, before moving into an apartment with a friend that his family knew only as "Mike." One night not long after that, he told relatives that he was going out for the evening. He didn't say where he was going. He wasn't in the habit of doing that. They never saw or heard from him again.
Early the next year on February 16, Mary Jo Paulus said good-bye to her boyfriend for the last time. William Wayne Kindred had telephoned and gone to see her every day or night since the previous July when he had given her and her girl friend a ride as they were hitchhiking on the north side.
They were talking about getting married as soon as the muscular nineteen-year-old youth could find a good job. In the meantime, he supported himself by doing odd jobs. Friends said the youth they knew as "Shotgun" also knew how to make money on the street and was a familiar figure at hangouts in New Town frequented by street people.
He didn't telephone his girl friend on February 17, and he didn't stop to see her at her home. When she looked for him at his apartment, he was gone but had left his clothes and other belongings behind.
Mary Jo reported to police that he was missing. For many nights, after getting off work as an office clerk, she drove and walked around New Town and other areas of the city looking for him.
While Mary Jo Paulus was continuing her fruitless search for her boyfriend. Sergeant Gilroy was passing around pictures of his missing son. Questions were being asked about John Mowery in areas of the north side he was known to frequent. Jon Prestidge's friends had given up combing Chicago bars and hanging "Information Wanted" posters in New Town with his picture on them. In Michigan, however, his mother and stepfather, Alan Cassada, had in desperation consulted a psychic. The psychic told them that Jon was dead but couldn't pinpoint his location or the manner of his death. The Cassadas began sending Jon's dental records to different communities in Michigan where the unidentified bodies of young men were found.
Gacy, meanwhile, was busi
ly continuing to build his reputation as good neighbor, good Democrat, and community worker.
He posed for photographs in 1978 while shaking hands with Mrs. Rosalynn Carter, wife of the President. The First Lady later autographed one of the pictures taken by a White House photographer: "To John Gacy. Best Wishes. Rosalynn Carter."
The occasion was Chicago's Polish Constitution Day Parade on May 6, marking the 187th anniversary of democratic government in Poland. It was the third consecutive year that Gacy had been director of the parade, which in 1978 consisted of fifty-four floats, twenty bands and some ten thousand marchers.
Ed Dziewulski, a spokesman for the Polish National Alliance, said Gacy was recommended for the job by Colonel Jack Reilly, Chicago's special-events director under Mayor Richard J. Daley. Reilly was credited with promoting the contractor for the task because of the excellent job Gacy had done on one of the Democratic Day parades in Springfield during the Illinois State Fair.
Gacy wore a lapel pin bearing the letter "S" while he and about fifty other people shared the parade-reviewing stand in Chicago with Mrs. Carter. The pin indicated he had been cleared by the Secret Service, which guards Presidents and their families. The Secret Service was provided with the names, addresses, birth dates, and social security numbers of Gacy and three assistants, among those of others expecting to share the reviewing stand or attend a reception for Mrs. Carter in the Daley Center during her near four-hour stay to participate in the festivities and to work at improving relations of her husband's administration with Chicago Democrats.
Prior to the parade, the Secret Service sent the "S" pins to the Polish National Alliance for distribution to the people whose names were on the list. A Secret Service check of the backgrounds of the people recommended for clearance should have turned up information about Gacy's sodomy conviction in Iowa. Before issuing clearance, the agency is known to consult with the FBI, the National Crime Index, regional Secret Service agents, and local police. Gacy's sodomy conviction record followed him when he was paroled and became available to Chicago police when he left Iowa. However, the Secret Service did not learn of his felony conviction.
The Man Who Killed Boys Page 15