The Man Who Killed Boys

by Clifford L. Lindecker

  The bodies were interred in the crawl space or elsewhere on his property until a combination of poor health, that prevented him from doing more digging, and a lack of space in the makeshift burial ground forced him to seek a new method of disposal. Consequently, he dumped the last five victims into the Des Plaines River. Piest was one of those, and Gacy confessed that the body was still in the attic when Kozenczak was downstairs on December 12. Gacy admitted keeping the bodies in the house for several hours but would not say if he sexually molested them after death, one investigator told newsmen.

  He said he was so unnerved by the appearance of the detectives that after they left, he crammed the body into the trunk of his car and drove to the Kankakee Bridge on the Des Plaines River south of Joliet. He dropped his grisly cargo into the water and tossed the boy's clothing after him. The bridge is about fifty miles from Gacy's home.

  The story was given some credibility when a tow-truck operator from the town of LaGrange reported pulling Gacy's Oldsmobile from a two-foot snowbank on the Tri-State Tollway at about 2 A.M. on December 13. Bob Kirkpatrick, who held a contract to tow disabled cars on a section of the highway, said he didn't record Gacy's name because the twenty-dollar towing fee was paid in cash. He identified Gacy, however, through a photograph provided by Cook County Sheriff's police who contacted him.

  The garage operator said that after he was directed to the car by Tollway police, he had to rap on the window to awaken the driver. The stranded motorist acted as if he were on dope or coming off a drunk. He was unshaven and tough-looking, Kirkpatrick added. After the car was back on the pavement, Gacy drove north in the direction of his home.

  Police were still searching the house when Ed Grexa got out of bed about 5:30 Friday morning, washed, had coffee and a light breakfast and left for work. By 6:45, Lillie Grexa was up and peering out the front window at a television-station news truck that had pulled up next door and parked among the clutter of official cars. She was just shaking her youngest daughter awake to tell her that "something's really wrong next door," when someone knocked.

  A television reporter was standing on the stoop. "Did you hear," he inquired, "they found three bodies?" Her husband telephoned from work a few minutes later. "Did you see the news?" he asked. "They just found a body over at John's."

  On Friday afternoon, Gacy was formally charged with murdering Robert Piest. Wearing a black leather jacket and rumpled trousers that looked like they had been slept in, he was escorted under heavy guard across a short walkway from the Police Headquarters to the Des Plaines Branch of Cook County Circuit Court for a bond hearing. All elevators were stopped while he was in the building, and he was walked up three flights of stairs to the courtroom of Judge Peters. At least another two dozen lawmen were scattered throughout the room. During the seven minutes Gacy was inside, he stood with his head up and his hands clasped behind his back, chattering amiably with the officers surrounding him. Peters ordered him held without bail and scheduled formal arraignment for the following Friday.

  Gacy's hands were cuffed behind him at the conclusion of the hearing and he was walked to the elevator. A half dozen policemen who couldn't jam inside the elevator with him dashed down the stairs. They crowded around him, protecting him from a throng of media men and women, escorting him back across the walkway to security rooms in the police headquarters.

  He continued to cooperate and talked freely to lawmen on Thursday and Friday. One detective disclosed, however, that Gacy did not sign a statement, and said notes weren't even taken of much of the conversation. Gacy was so talkative that investigators were afraid to interrupt or to take notes because of fear that he would stop.

  The suspect provided the time, place, and description of the slayings but said he didn't know or couldn't recall the names of many of the victims because they were people he met in casual encounters. He said he killed them because he was afraid of retaliation or possible extortion attempts.

  The first victim was stabbed to death after being picked up at the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Chicago on January 3, 1972, Gacy said. He could not remember the boy's name. But he remembered two others because they were former employees: John Butkovich, who was buried under the garage floor, and Gregory Godzik. He recalled that another victim was John Szyc, the owner of the old Plymouth Satellite that had been so mysteriously signed away and sold to Rossi. The names of the boys were withheld from the public pending official identification.

  After drawing a rough diagram of his entire property indicating where bodies were buried and promising to show detectives where to find others, Gacy finally balked and stopped talking. He had rambled for hours, sometimes referring to himself in the third person, saying that the sexual and homicidal spree was committed by "Jack" or "John." He said he wanted his younger sister brought to the police station.

  Investigators, meanwhile, had obtained their third and fourth search warrants of the investigation and talked a second time with Czarna, as well as to other associates of the suspect. Detectives were looking with growing suspicion at the driveway. Czarna uneasily conceded pouring concrete early in the day after the job was set up, and he told detectives of Gacy's last-minute change of mind and the overnight shuffling of the forms.

  Authorities disclosed that the naked body of the bearded young man found in a marina on the Des Plaines River south of Joliet the previous month had been identified through fingerprints as that of Frank Wayne "Dale" Landingin. Items found in the house on Summerdale Avenue indicated a link to Gacy. Wallets, driver's licenses, and other articles found in the house led police to conclude that Gacy kept souvenirs of his victims.

  On December 23, Gacy spent the night under heavy guard in the lockup at the Des Plaines Police Headquarters. He dropped off to sleep at about 11 P.M., after asking officers to turn down the volume on their two-way communication radios because the noise was disturbing him.

  The next day he was transferred to Cermak Memorial Hospital at the Cook County jail. Police spokesmen cited his heart condition as the reason for the move, which was accomplished by a troop of armed guards and without prior publicity. Authorities later conceded that they had planned the transfer with maximum attention to security to ensure the safety of the prisoner. No one, observed one policeman, wanted another Lee Harvey Oswald.

  On December 20, the highest criminal appeals court in the state of Texas cited a technicality in overturning the murder conviction of Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. The decision erased sentences he was serving in the three-year-long Houston homosexual sex-and-torture spree that led to the deaths of twenty-seven boys. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said it was forced to overturn the conviction because San Antonio State District Judge Preston H. Dial had refused a change of venue, even though there were strong indications the jury had been influenced by pretrial publicity. Henley was expected to be retried in the case, which drew tremendous international publicity as the most extensive instance of mass murder in the history of the United States at that time. The court ruling was announced the day before the first body was found at the death house on Summerdale Avenue.21

  In California, the previous May, a new trial was also ordered for Juan Corona, who had been convicted in 1971 of murdering twenty-five itinerant farm workers in the Yuba City area. The murders attributed to Corona, who, like Gacy, was troubled by a heart ailment, also had homosexual overtones, and the bodies of some of the victims were found with their genitals exposed. The California Court of Appeal referred to attorney Richard Hawk's handling of Corona's defense as "a farce and a mockery" in wiping out twenty-five consecutive life terms in prison for the former day-labor contractor.

  Footnotes

  19 Chicago Sun-Times, December 29, 1978.

  20 Chicago Tribune, December 30, 1978.

  21 In June 1979 Henley was convicted for a second time of six murders in the series of homosexual torture slayings in Houston. The jury recommended six concurrent life terms.

  9...

  Death House

  Cha
rlie Hill almost ran off the road when he heard on his car radio that several bodies had been found buried under John Gacy's house.

  "But I felt it was true when he said he could lead police to more bodies," Hill recalled. "Knowing John, he would know how many there were and he would like the feeling of being Number One."

  One of the first thoughts Gacy's first wife had when she heard about her former husband's latest entanglement with the law was about how she was going to tell the children.

  Former Black Hawk County Prosecutor, David Dutton, was outraged when he heard about the murders on the Chicago outskirts. "When we had him, I felt that the best thing was to keep this man locked up," he said.

  The three men who had approved Gacy's parole from prison in Iowa in 1970 were dismayed. George Paul said the occurrences at the house near Chicago were "a slaughter." The Board might not have discharged Gacy from supervised parole had members known of the disorderly conduct arrest eight months after his release from prison, Paul said. "That certainly was an error or carelessness on the part of the officials who are supposed to keep those records. We probably would have done some things differently if we had had that information."22

  In Chicago, the woman who was Gacy's second wife cried.

  Robert Martwick returned home from vacation a few hours after police began carrying bodies out of Gacy's house. "At no time did he indicate he was a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde or a homosexual," Martwick said. "When I read the first story about him in the newspapers, I almost collapsed."23

  Donald Czarna snapped awake from an exhausted sleep at 3 A.M. He was sweating. Leaning over, he shook his wife awake. "Lydia," he said, "John buried a gun." Even though he was specifically asked by lawmen if his friend owned a gun, he had forgotten. It had been three years since Gacy told him of burying a gun in the rear stoop. Later that morning, Czarna telephoned the sheriff's department.

  Martin Zielinski was having uncomfortable thoughts about his own mortality. He couldn't understand why he had been spared.

  Early Friday morning firemen and workers from the Cook County Highway Department began cutting up the floor of Gacy's office and ripping it out with sledgehammers and crowbars to provide easier access to the crawl space. As they worked, their activity was filmed on videotape and sound recordings of the voices of evidence technicians were made for possible trial use. The camera filmed technicians as they removed bodies and painted numbers and other marks on the concrete sides of the foundation to pinpoint each burial spot.

  Crowds gathered outside, drawing their shoulders up against the late December chill and staring in fascinated horror as the sound of hammering and the shrill scream of power saws reverberated inside the house. The firemen divided the floor into sections, ripping out segments so that other members of the search team could reach into the crawl space with small trenching shovels and begin sifting through the dirt.

  As soon as the shovels touched bone, workmen laid the tools aside. Then they dug with their gloved fingers until they had removed skulls, pelvises, rib cages, and what Stein refers to as "the long bones"—or the major bones of the legs and arms. "It's like panning for gold," explained one weary technician. "You sift until you hit something hard, like a bone or a belt buckle." Water seeped into the ditches, complicating the sensitive work. Pumps were brought in but the water was not deep enough to be drawn out.

  Nevertheless, two bodies were removed from the property the first day, including remains lifted from the gravesite in the garage previously marked by Gacy with spray paint. That body was encased in concrete, and methane gas from the decomposing tissue was so strong that Stein had to order a break in the work. None of the lawmen wore masks and the gas made everyone lightheaded and nauseous.

  The other body was lifted from the crawl space after it was found wrapped in a plastic sheet and covered with dirt and lime. Lime hastens decomposition. Sheriff Richard J. Elrod told assembled newsmen that the remains appeared to be those of young males, and conjectured that as many as twenty bodies might be found before the investigation was closed.

  Before excavation efforts could resume in earnest, a professional moving company carried furniture and personal belongings from the house and garage, transporting it in two forty-foot truck trailers to a southside Chicago warehouse. Stereo equipment, television sets, game machines, the built-in bar, clown art, a refrigerator, and three large food freezers were among the possessions removed from the house. Carpeting from the bedroom, set aside with other items for closer scrutiny when time permitted, was found to be bloodstained when it was examined a week later. The top surface had been cleaned but stains were found on the bottom and on the padding.

  Stein's mind stiffened in ghastly apprehension when he first saw the lineup of food freezers. In 1957, authorities in south central Wisconsin had arrested Edward Gein, who was known to pass out chunks of fresh venison to his neighbors. It was learned that the mild-mannered semi-recluse had been robbing graves and finally murdered and butchered two women. He ate some of the flesh himself and distributed additional meat to neighbors.

  The Cook County Medical Examiner breathed a sigh of relief after he had examined the meat in the freezers and determined that it was not human remains. Pictures hung throughout the house had also worried him. Most were of heads and he pondered a possible link with several investigations he had underway involving decapitated bodies. Then he learned that Gacy was a clown aficionado and realized that the suspect's interest in clowning was responsible for the many pictures of clown heads and faces in the home.

  Boxes full of records were carried into the den of the seven-room house from the former living room, which Gacy had converted into an office. A guard was posted until lawmen could inspect the papers for clues to the identity of some of the bodies. Included in the mix were documents relating to Gacy's contracting business, campaign material from Democratic candidates, pornography, and cards with telephone numbers. Two color photographs of "Snags" Sipusich, nude and unconscious, were among the haul.

  Even more intriguing to investigators were the photographs of Gacy with Mrs. Carter and with Mayor Bilandic found among the suspect's political mementos. When the news media learned of the pictures there was an immediate outcry with accusatory fingers pointed at the Secret Service and criticism of slipshod work in exposing the President's wife to danger from a convicted felon.

  Others, when they became aware of the photograph, merely shook their heads and marveled at the First Lady's talent for becoming linked with two men who appeared to be among the most heinous alleged mass murderers of the century. Only a few weeks before, her name had been tied to the Reverend Jim Jones, architect of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana. She had both dined with him and mailed him a friendly note.

  A spokesman for the Secret Service at first announced that Gacy's criminal record hadn't turned up despite a check with Chicago police prior to Mrs. Carter's visit. The next day the statement was amended to say the Secret Service was unsure if Chicago police files had been checked.

  While police were preparing to scrutinize the records, a former employee tipped them off to watch for evidence of kickbacks to contractors who referred remodeling jobs to PDM. He claimed Gacy padded his bills to finance the payoffs.

  In the garage, investigators discovered huge mirrors glued to the ceiling. Rubber sexual devices were found and several prophylactics retrieved from behind the walls and kept for laboratory analysis. The garage and attached shed had been carefully insulated with plywood and dry wall.

  The exhumation process was conducted with painstaking care. Dr. Stein made it clear during his first public statements that the search team was faced with "camel-hair brush-work. ... I don't want a hurry-up job to destroy any evidence," he warned. The day after the first bodies were found, he announced that he would seek help from two local medical experts to guide the investigative and exhumation teams collecting human remains, fragments of clothes and other possible evidence in the crawl space and elsewhere on the property.

  Profes
sor Charles P. Warren, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus, and Dr. Edward J. Pavlik, a forensic odontologist, were called in on the investigation. Stein explained that Warren would be looking for anything, ranging from strands of hair, teeth, and bone to clothing, jewelry, and other evidence that might turn up during close scrutiny of the death house. Blood type can be determined from hair, fingernails, and sometimes from bone.

  Dr. Pavlik, a regular consultant to the Medical Examiner's Office, would work with a handful of other dental specialists and concentrate on dental records and teeth in efforts to identify victims through fillings, caps, and other dental characteristics. Teeth that were not matched with charts would be kept in a chemical solution capable of preserving them for two hundred years in case dental records were eventually located to match them with.

  Under the direction of Dr. Stein and the other experts, the search team carefully catalogued each piece of potential evidence, noting the precise location where it was found. For Stein, that was standard procedure.

  The son of a civil engineer in Brooklyn, Stein first became interested in legal medicine when he was a senior in high school. His family physician was a pathologist and introduced him to Charles Norris, the first medical examiner for the city of New York. Stein knew immediately that forensic pathology—utilizing medical facts and legal knowledge to determine cause of death—was the career he wanted for himself, even though his father was deeply disappointed that the young man didn't choose to follow engineering, a profession practiced in his family for generations.