The Man Who Killed Boys

by Clifford L. Lindecker

  Other officers put together a list of names of missing Chicago area youths to assist in the investigation. The names of Gregory Godzik and John Szyc were prominent on the list.

  On New Year's Day, the Medical Examiner's office confirmed that positive identification had been made on the remains of Godzik, Szyc, and Rick Johnston.

  One other name had been added, James "Mojo" Mazzara. On December 28, the nude body of another young man had been pulled from the Des Plaines River near the spot where Landingin was found a month earlier. Like Landingin, the victim's underwear was jammed into his throat. He was identified two days later by his fingerprints, and Assistant State's Attorney Sullivan said it was believed the death could be "definitely" linked to Gacy. Gacy had told lawmen that one of the bodies he disposed of in the river was that of a youth nicknamed "Mojo." The recovery of Mazzara's body and his identification brought the number of known victims of the murder orgy to twenty-nine, not counting the presumed death of Robert Piest. Will County Coroner Robert Tezak determined that the slight young man had died of suffocation.

  With the identification of Butkovich, Godzik, Szyc, and Johnston, Stein had amazingly exhausted all the available medical and dental charts he had on missing boys.

  Even though most of the remains were no more than bones, Stein and members of his staff had rapidly determined that none of the victims were females. And apparently none of them were Negroes. Gacy apparently liked slender young boys with light hair. In determining the race of the victims, pathologists paid close attention to the mouth structure. The roof of the mouth in Caucasians is more angular than that of Negroes, who have more of a horseshoe configuration and lower jaws that protrude more. The orbit of the eyes also differs according to race, with a squarish orbit for Caucasians, oval for Negroes, and circular for Orientals. There are other differences, too, such as the nose cavity in the skulls, which is wider for blacks than for whites.

  The femurs, or thigh bones, were measured to determine the height of the victims, and the approximate ages were worked out by measuring the fusion plates of the long bones. The fusion plates are the site of rapid growth in the body. Stein had perfect skeletons to work with. There were no dismemberments or damage to the skulls. A few of the bodies were found with bits of clothing or cloth, some with a shoe or other item which could also possibly help in identification.

  Yet, from the beginning, Stein made no promises that all the victims would be identified. Most of the bodies he had to work with were skeletons or bones only, so there could be no tattoos, scars, or fingerprints to aid his efforts. Most juveniles do not have their fingerprints on file anyway. And, of course, there was the additional problem of too few dental charts. It was conceded that the task of identification could take years.

  Five years after the discovery of the horror in Houston, only twenty-one of the twenty-seven victims there had been identified. But Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, the Medical Examiner who headed the forensic team, told newsmen that he believed the identification of all the bodies would eventually be achieved.

  On January 4, some three hundred residents of the neighborhood, relatives of victims and clergymen, struggled through the snow-clogged streets and bitter cold to attend an interfaith memorial service at the St. Eugene Catholic Church a few blocks from the house where the lives of so many young men had been abruptly and violently snuffed out. People of the neighborhood were stunned by the horror in their midst. They could not understand how one man who had lived among them as a popular and trusted neighbor and friend could have committed crimes so atrocious as those of which he was accused.

  Residents had been living like hermits, as if they felt a common shame merely for having shared the same street with the accused killer. Residents of the 1800 block of Summerdale Avenue couldn't even drive on their own street unless they could prove they lived there. Gawkers were parking on their lawns, blocking their driveways and keeping them imprisoned in their own homes. They were hemmed in by the disregard for privacy and property and the ghoulish disrespect of the morbidly curious. The whole affair had turned into a grueling and macabre carnival.

  One resident recalled the night when television trucks were outside with floodlights illuminating the area and Sheriff's officers carried a body outside. Someone on one of the television trucks yelled, "Go back. We're not ready yet." The Sheriff's men carried the body back into the house and a few minutes later brought it out again.

  The people gathered in the dimly lit church to ask how the horror unfolding before them could have happened to their neighborhood—and to their sons. They met to pray, to ask for healing, and to somehow exorcise the outrage and the shame.

  Mrs. Eugenia Godzik was there, as were the Reverend Francis Buck of our Lady of Hope Parish in Rosemont, and Kenneth and Kerry Piest, the pastor, brother, and sister of the boy whose apparent abduction and murder had led to Gacy's arrest. Lillie Grexa was there, also.

  Many of those present were parishioners of St. Eugene's and knew its pastor, Father Frank Shaunessy, as a personal friend. Women sobbed and men listened somberly, some allowing tears to trickle down wind-chafed cheeks, as Fathers Shaunessy and Buck and four other clergymen from area churches read prayers and led hymns.

  Toward the end of the service Lillie Grexa stood and in a quivering voice, on the point of tears, moaned, "God forgive me. I take back every good thing I ever said about John Gacy. I just feel so bad for the parents of all these children."

  In Chicago, spokesmen for the homosexual community were also denouncing Gacy. At a press conference called at a Michigan Avenue hotel, spokesmen for the Illinois Gay Rights Task Force said the homosexual community was outraged by the murders. Concomitantly, they cautioned that there should be no "witch hunts" against homosexuals in the name of crime prevention.

  The day before the memorial gathering at St. Eugene's, investigators had their first talk in more than a week with the man blamed for the mass murders. In two separate sessions at the Cook County Jail's Cermak Memorial Hospital, Gacy assured lawmen that the twenty-seven bodies already unearthed from his property were all there were. He also identified a seventh victim by picking the boy's picture from a Gay Life magazine, but the youth's name was not immediately disclosed by authorities. Prior to talking with police, Gacy huddled in a lengthy private conference with his lawyer and was advised of his right to remain silent. But he chose to talk, and Amirante was present during the questioning.

  Investigators conceded that they were "fairly well convinced" that Gacy was telling the truth, but determined to continue the search as a precautionary measure.

  A couple of days later, it was disclosed that four more victims had been identified, bringing the number of dead whose names were known to ten. At the Fishbein Institute, thirty-one sets of dental records supplied by families of missing young men and boys had been compared with teeth.

  The newly identified victims were named as Robert Gilroy, Jon Prestidge, Michael Bonnin, and Russell Nelson. Nelson and Prestidge were the first to come from outside the Chicago area.

  On January 8, the Cook County Grand Jury returned the second set of indictments against Gacy, accusing him of murdering seven young men. State's Attorney Carey announced, incidentally, that he would seek the death penalty when the suspect came to trial. He added that he would oppose any effort by defense attorneys to move the proceedings elsewhere because he was sure that Gacy could receive a fair trial in Cook County despite the widespread publicity the case had attracted.

  The indictments charged Gacy with two counts of murder in each of the deaths of Butkovich, Godzik, Szyc, Johnston, Landingin and Mazzara. The indictments contended that Gacy acted intentionally and was aware that his acts could result in murder. The remaining indictments accused him of the same two counts of murder in the slaying of Piest, as well as the additional charges of murder in the commission of a felony previously cited.

  According to Illinois law, murder during the commission of another felony is a capital offense. Thus conviction on any
one of the murder charges relating to Piest that were connected with second felonies, such as deviate sexual assault, could merit the death penalty.

  Illinois statutes additionally provide death by electrocution for conviction of multiple murders occurring after February 1, 1978, when Governor James Thompson signed legislation creating a new capital-punishment law. Landingin, Mazzara, and Piest all vanished months after the law was signed.

  According to the law, however, even after a murder conviction, the death penalty cannot be invoked until another trial is held to determine if the statute has been satisfied. Either the original jury or a new one can sit during the proceeding.

  It was disclosed for the first time that three sheets of paper on which Gacy apparently wrote the first names of victims were being held as key bits of evidence. Gacy was reportedly given writing paper while he was in his cell and among the things he wrote were several first names of males followed by the names of various cities and towns. The information was considered useful both in developing the criminal case against Gacy and in learning additional identities of victims.

  Another piece of written material provided by Gacy that had already been useful and was being looked on as valuable evidence was the diagram he drew to pinpoint the locations of bodies on his property.

  Severely cold weather and back-to-back blizzards that struck the Midwest, one dumping more than twenty inches of snow on the Chicago area, had hampered digging and caused equipment breakdowns. As investigators became increasingly convinced that all the bodies had been recovered from the crawl space, the work also became less tedious.

  A seven-man crew of county highway department employees was helping with the excavation work. As dirt was dug out, it was tossed into a conveyor and sifted. When a sliver of bone, a clot of hair, or piece of clothing showed up, the machine was shut down and digging with the fingers was resumed.

  The inside of the main house was gutted. The floorboards were gone and planks were laid over the joists with rope handrails to use for walking from the front door to the rear. The recreation room, which had been added at the rear of the house after the initial construction, did not extend over the crawl space and it was preserved from the wrecking crews until the last so they would have a place to sit and eat lunches that were brought in during the search. A couple of bar chairs and a folding chair were left for the workmen and police who continued to maintain their round-the-clock vigil.

  On January 27, the bodies of John Mowery and Matthew Bowman were identified through dental records supplied by their families. Mowery's brother, Robert, said John had never worked for Gacy but he frequented the north side and may have been "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  After a mid-January break in the search caused by the bad weather, investigators prepared to seek extension of the search warrants and resume their probe of Gacy's property. Attention would be shifted from the crawl spaces, and plans were underway to rip up the rest of the garage and shed, the patio, including the barbecue pit, the driveway and front yard.

  The defense opposed the extension and charged at the hearing that the warrants did not show probable cause of wrongdoing. Motta added that the house had already been gutted and said it was obvious that there were no additional bodies on the premises.

  Egan responded that the warrants were valid, pointing out that twenty-seven bodies were eventually exhumed from the property. The appeal to permit immediate resumption of the search was rejected and a February hearing was scheduled on the defense motion to quash the warrants. The search couldn't continue anyway until crews had a chance to remove snow that had accumulated on the property during the past month.

  Permission to resume the search was granted on February 21 as the motion to quash the existing warrants was dismissed. County Highway Department employees broke up the concrete stoop and uncovered the gun Czarna had told police about. The rusted .38-caliber revolver was sent to the Chicago Police Crime Laboratory for closer examination and ballistics tests. The owner had gone to obvious pains to conceal the weapon, and it would be checked to determine if it had been used in another crime. Additional skeleton fragments were also recovered from the garage in the same area where Butkovich's body was previously exhumed.

  A workman was breaking up the patio a few days later when he peeled off the top layer of frozen earth with a giant bucket scoop at the end of a machine similar to a backhoe and was enveloped by a putrid odor. Ignoring the sudden nausea that rose in his throat, he yelled to his supervisor, "Bill, we've got another one." A few moments later the yard was full of investigators, looking down at the grave of the first corpse discovered on the property in ten weeks.

  One of the workmen later admitted that they might have dug right through the body and accidently destroyed it if the frost hadn't been so deep. Faced with a combination of concrete reinforced with chicken wire, blacktop, and frost-hardened earth, they were peeling it away in layers instead of digging straight down.

  The skeletal remains were wrapped in three garbage bags and had been preserved in remarkably good condition in their concrete burial crypt. Unlike the bodies previously recovered, the cadaver appeared to be that of an adult male, six feet tall or more. The shredded remains of blue jeans and shorts were still on the body. It had reposed under electric lines leading from the house to the garage.

  Even more intriguing to investigators anxious to learn his identification was a small chain around his neck and a wedding band on the ring finger of his left hand. The presence of the ring meant that the scope of the investigation would, for the first time, be broadened to include missing men who were married.

  The discovery prompted gloomy speculation that the toll might continue to climb, and investigators prepared to seek court permission for another meeting with Gacy to explore the possibility that there were still more bodies. But discovery also provided timely vindication for the argument authorities had pressed while seeking approval from the court to continue their search.

  Exactly one week after discovery of the twenty-eighth victim on the property, still another body was removed.

  It was announced almost simultaneously that the body found in the Illinois River near Morris the previous June had been identified as Timothy O'Rourke. Identification was made after a friend of O'Rourke's father had seen a newspaper story and recognized the description of the young man with the "Tim Lee" tattoo. The youth's father, Terrance O'Rourke, later explained that his son was an admirer of Bruce Lee and borrowed the Kung Fu champion's last name for the tattoo. Friends of the twenty-year-old murder victim said he frequented some of the same gay bars as Gacy.

  The Des Plaines River flows into the Illinois River just west of where the bodies of Landingin and Mazzara were recovered. O'Rourke's body was apparently carried into the Illinois by the current. He had not been reported missing.

  With the latest two bodies exhumed from Gacy's property and the three youths pulled from the water, the toll of dead attributed to the suburban contractor now stood at thirty-two, and the bodies of Piest and possibly one other victim were still thought to be in the Des Plaines or Illinois Rivers.

  The latest victim discovered on Gacy's property was exhumed from under the recreation room. The body had lain directly below the large table where workmen ate their lunches and Sheriff's deputies read paperback books during all-night watches at the house. It was located when workmen probed in the soft dirt and uncovered a hip bone after ripping off a portion of the flooring. The skeleton was dry and fragile because the heat ducts had been installed on top of it after burial. Another driver's license and additional identification were found when a cabinet was ripped apart.

  Despite the most recent discovery of bodies on the premises, the right of authorities to continue demolition of the house and property was soon challenged again.

  That occurred after State's Attorney Carey filed a civil suit in Circuit Court for permission to tear down the remaining shell of Gacy's house. The State's Attorney contended that the house was "unoccupi
ed, unsafe, dangerous, and hazardous," adding that further excavations were needed in the east and west sections.

  Working in the house was dangerous because floor joists had been cut and removed, plumbing and sewage drainage were gone and four-to-six-foot holes had destroyed "the integrity" of partition footings. The county was prepared to bear the cost of demolition. Wiring was open and exposed and the crawl spaces, dug to the depth of four feet, were flooded and posing danger of fire or electrocution.

  Charging that the home was a public nuisance, the suit was filed against Gacy as one-half owner, and against his mother, Marion E. Gacy, and his two sisters, Karen Kusma and Joanne E. Casper, as owners of the other half. A Chicago bank continued to hold a mortgage for several thousand dollars on the property.

  Before action on the petition could be concluded, Dr. Stein released the identity of another of the victims. Billy Carroll was identified through his dental charts. He had been to the dentist once in his life and had two small fillings.

  Representing the interests of Gacy's mother and sisters LeRoy Stevens threatened a damage suit if authorities went ahead with their plan to demolish the house. But a real-estate appraiser testified at the hearing that the house was a magnet for sightseers, it no longer had any worth, and it was lowering neighborhood property values. Three other expert witnesses told the court that after three months of digging under the house for bodies, the structure was dangerously unstable.

  Gacy requested to attend the hearing, and it was transferred from the City Civic Center to Criminal Court because authorities believed that otherwise they could not guarantee his safety. Although he had appeared uninterested during hearings on the murder charges against him, he showed keen interest in the testimony concerning his home, frequently turning to ask questions of his lawyer.

  But at the conclusion of the hearing, Housing Court Judge Richard E. Jorzak issued an order approving demolition—almost two months after permission was initially sought. In early April, the Illinois Supreme Court refused to reverse Judge Jorzak's order and within an hour the walls and roof of the house were being tumbled down. In barely a week's time, the once cozy ranch house was reduced to splinters and hauled away. A few bricks were handed out to children and adults who asked for souvenirs. Then nothing remained but an uneven plain of black dirt and ocher clay.