The Man Who Killed Boys

by Clifford L. Lindecker

  Rignall, represented by the same attorney as the Butkoviches, was also talking of filing a multimillion-dollar suit, possibly against both Gacy and the Chicago Police Department, arising from the abuse he said he suffered at the suspect's hands.

  While funeral arrangements were being made for Robert Piest, police were announcing that the identity of another victim had been established. Randall Reffett was officially listed among the dead after authorities learned he had once been X-rayed at a Chicago hospital for a stab wound. The X-ray showed his jaw and some of his teeth. A microfilm of the X-ray was enlarged and compared with the teeth of unidentified skeletons taken from under the house, to match them with Reffett's.

  A few days later Reffett's friend, Sam Dodd Stapleton, was identified as another of the victims. The bracelet permanently welded to his wrist helped in the identification.

  Almost a month later, X-rays and dental charts were used to identify William "Shotgun" Kindred. Police had been told that the youth may have been picked up by Gacy near Broadway and Diversey in New Town. Mary Jo Paulus said she began crying when she read about the bodies of the young men being found in Norwood Park township.

  "It was like instinct. I figured Billy's got to be under that house, too," she said. "I even called Billy's sister and even told my mother that I felt Billy was under that house."27

  Gacy's fast was over and he was transferred back to the psychiatric unit at Cermak Hospital, where he could be more carefully watched and better protected. The hospital, jail, and Criminal Courts Building were all part of the same dingy complex of adjacent buildings and it was convenient to move Gacy back and forth between his cell and the courtrooms for hearings. Flanked by armed guards, he was moved through a concrete tunnel to his hearings. It was never necessary to take him outside.

  The drawn-out process of hearings that had gotten underway in Des Plaines resumed on January 10 before Chief Judge Fitzgerald in the somber Cook County Criminal Courts Building. The handbags, parcels, and persons of everyone entering the old graystone structure were searched by hand and with metal detectors.

  Gacy made his first court appearance behind a high protective glass partition, heavily guarded by a half dozen white-shirted sheriff's police. Wearing a chocolate-colored sport-coat, tan slacks, and black shoes, the defendant appeared startled when he peered out at the crowded courtroom, and dropped his head, moving closer to his attorney. Twenty journalists, some busily drawing on sketch pads, had been assigned seats in the jury box. A public address system carried the proceedings into the glassed-off section.

  Amirante entered not-guilty pleas for his client on the seven charges then filed in the Piest indictments and began presenting a series of motions. Fitzgerald appeared to ponder them, then remarked that the rulings should come from the judge who would hear the case. Before recessing the court moments later for a lunch break, he announced that the trial judge would be Louis B. Garippo. It was Garippo who, as a young state's attorney, had handled administrative affairs in the Richard Speck case. He was appointed to the bench in 1968 and immediately began distinguishing himself as one of the most respected trial judges, by both defense lawyers and prosecutors, in the criminal courts. Now, years after his work on the Speck case, he had been named to preside over a murder trial that promised to become even more notorious and widely publicized.

  The thin, scholary Garippo was on the bench when the hearing resumed after the lunch break. Instead of walking Gacy to Garippo's courtroom as would have been done with most defendants, the judge moved to Fitzgerald's courtroom to begin hearing eleven motions presented by the feisty defense attorney, who was handling his first criminal case in private practice.

  Rulings were reserved on most of the motions, including Amirante's effort to force the prosecution to disclose if it would seek the death penalty. Gacy blinked at the reference to the death penalty, in his most obvious display of emotion during the hearing.

  The judge took immediate action on two motions—overruling a request that Gacy be released on bond, and repeating the order for a psychiatric examination to determine Gacy's sanity and ability to understand the proceedings and assist in his own defense.

  Among the motions taken under advisement was a move by Amirante to quash the indictments on grounds that the search warrants were invalid. During subsequent hearings the motion was denied, and attorneys and the court worked through other pre-trial maneuvering. New indictments were filed on twenty-six new murder counts, bringing the total to thirty-three slayings Gacy was charged with. Amirante entered innocent pleas for his client on each count, and the case moved slowly onward, observed with little obvious emotion by a defendant who had grown a beard and was considerably thinner.

  Gacy was becoming lighter in the pocketbook as well, as the costs of shaping his defense were burgeoning. With permission of the court and the prosecution, Amirante announced that some of his client's last personal possessions would be auctioned to raise funds for the defense. Among the items to be sold were the pickup truck, van, and 1979 Oldsmobile. One prospective buyer representing a museum was already said to be talking of offering fifty thousand dollars for the car. Not all the money raised from the sale would go the Gacy, however, because he still owed thousands of dollars on the vehicles.

  Amirante filed a $375,000 claim against the county for the demolition of Gacy's house, and that was also being looked on as another possible source of revenue to help defray some of the rapidly mounting legal costs.

  The issue of pre-trial publicity promised to continue to play a prominent role in the case. Some of the best-known murder convictions in the country have been reversed because of matters relating to pre-trial publicity. Henley's conviction in the Houston murders is one. Going further back, F. Lee Bailey won reversal of a murder conviction and exoneration in a second trial for Ohio osteopath Dr. Samuel Sheppard in 1966 by arguing that publicity had tainted the first trial. Sheppard was accused of murdering his wife.

  Defense assertions that publicity in notorious criminal cases has been so overpowering that it would block fair trials for their clients are not at all uncommon. The claims can be traced to respectable judicial precedent, and extend back much further than the Sheppard case, although that is one of the best known.

  In Chicago, State's Attorney Carey pointed out that Cook County has a population of more than five and one half million from which to draw prospective jurors who have not been "tainted" by publicity, to the point where they could not make a fair judgment of Gacy's guilt or innocence after a trial.

  Carey, who said he would seek death in the electric chair for Gacy, continue to insist that he would oppose any change of venue to a court outside of Cook County. The State's Attorney also revealed that he planned to try Gacy first for the murder of Robert Piest. It is considered to be the case that would most readily lend itself to the death penalty because Gacy is accused of kidnapping the boy and committing various other felonies, and, as previously stated, murder in the commission of another felony is a capital offense in Illinois. Some of the felonies are related to Robert's age, which made him legally a child. Although some of the other presumed victims were also juveniles, as plans for the prosecution began shaping up, the Piest case was considered to be one of the strongest.

  However the state's attorney approached prosecution, he was sure to be faced with a plethora of difficult legal problems. Despite the twenty-nine bodies found on Gacy's property and the four pulled from area waterways, despite other circumstantial evidence, and despite the suspect's admissions to entire groups of police and state's attorneys, prosecutors will nevertheless be faced with serious legal difficulties in gaining a conviction.

  If the search warrants were ruled to be invalid because the trial judge or an appeal's court decided that there was not sufficient cause to believe that evidence was located on Gacy's property before they were issued, prosecution for the deaths of the young men found under Gacy's house and garage would be severely crippled. According to the Supreme Court, the pro
secution cannot profit from the result of an illegal search warrant.

  The confessions appeared almost certain to be challenged. They could be ruled inadmissible as evidence if a court found that Gacy was not previously advised of his legal rights not to talk, if he was not told he had a right to have a lawyer present, if he was found not to have been sane enough to understand his rights at the time of the confession, or if he was coerced into talking.

  Many other problems promised to crop up along the way, but they were not all difficulties for the prosecution alone. For example, there could be negative aspects to accepting a change of venue to a more rural area where jurors would be presumably less hardened to crime and less tolerant of homosexual or bisexual behavior than are residents of the Chicago area.

  Overshadowing all the legal maneuvering and alternatives, however, were plans by Gacy's attorneys to plead him innocent by reason of insanity. Nearly six months after Gacy's arrest, Amirante filed documents with the court advising that, "The defendant will rely on the state's inability to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in addition to the affirmative defense of insanity."

  According to Illinois law, a person is considered not responsible for a crime if a mental disease or defect prevented him from understanding the criminal nature of what he was doing at the time the offense occurred.

  At trials where the mental state of the defendant is at issue the prosecution and defense usually wind up putting psychiatrists on the stand whose testimony is diametrically opposed to each other. The testimony of two experts at such loggerheads can have a way of canceling itself out in the minds of jurors. And that can happen often. A report compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union called "The Rights of Mental Patients," states that psychiatrists and psychologists can be expected to agree only about 54 percent of the time. Even more disconcerting to those who rely on the expert opinion of such witnesses is the report's contention that psychiatric "predictions of dangerous behavior are wrong about ninety-five percent of the time."

  After complying with a court order to examine Gacy, Dr. Robert A. Reifman, director of the Psychiatric Institute of the Circuit Court of Cook County, reported that the defendant was "mentally fit to stand trial." After receipt of the report and the results of additional examinations by Dr. Reifman and by the defense's psychiatric expert Dr. Richard Rappaport, Garippo announced that the ruling on Gacy's sanity would not be dealt with until the time of the trial in order to reduce pretrial publicity.

  A successful insanity defense by Gacy would mean that he could be confined to a mental institution, but could not be imprisoned or executed.

  Surprisingly, considering the amount of publicity it receives, insanity is a relatively rare defense. Only about 2 percent of criminal trials before juries revolve around issues of insanity. Those that do can be dramatic. Especially when there are implications of multiple personality, which Gacy's attorney's have hinted may figure prominently in their defense.

  One of the most dramatic recent examples in American legal history involved an Ohio man charged with kidnap, rape, and robbery after a series of sexual assaults of young coeds abducted from or near the Ohio State University campus.

  William Stanley Milligan was arrested for the crimes but pleaded innocent because of multiple personalities which psychiatrists indicated were unaware of one another and had no control of each other. Among ten personalities identified were those of "Ragan," the twenty-three-year-old evil side of Milligan, "Adelena," an aggressive lesbian, and a three-year-old girl artist.

  The history-making trial of Milligan, which was the first major felony case in which a defendant claimed innocence because of multiple personalities, ended in December when Milligan was found innocent by reason of insanity.

  Franklin County Commons Pleas Court Judge Jay Flowers, hearing the case without a jury in Columbus, Ohio, remarked that, "There is no alternative from the evidence presented but to find this man not guilty by reason of insanity. In a case of this type it is always difficult to determine if the defendant is faking illness. But every bit of evidence discounts that conclusion."

  Another accused mass murderer diagnosed by psychiatrists as a split personality is Kenneth Bianchi, accused by Los Angeles authorities as the "Hillside strangler," responsible for a string of slayings of young women. Even under hypnosis, Bianchi claimed to know nothing about five murders he was charged with. Psychiatrists reported that as soon as he identified with "Steve Walker," the alter ego talked freely under hypnosis of the slayings.

  As early as January, Amirante was quoted as telling journalists that Gacy drifted from one personality to another and while talking, "his voice would change completely and he would look different."29 In the letter he wrote to his mother from his jail cell, he reportedly observed that "I should have gotten rid of Jack." Some people interpreted his reference to "Jack" as evidence of an alter ego and evil side of the good natured "John" his neighbors and friends thought they knew.

  Investigators conceded earlier that while Gacy was talking about the slayings, he admitted committing some, but blamed someone he called "Jack" for others. They doubted there was any real person named "Jack," but for some the possible reference to another self brought back eerie recollections of the confession of William Heirens. Heirens talked of the three killings he was accused of in the 1940's, but blamed them on "George Murman." He stuck to the same story, even when he was given truth serum.

  Footnotes

  24 Chicago Sun-Times, December 30, 1978.

  25 Des Plaines Times, January 11, 1979.

  26 DeSalvo later retracted his confession and was sentenced to a life term in prison after being convicted of burglary, robbery and molestation involving four women.

  27 Chicago Tribune, May 22, 1979.

  29 Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1979.

  Epilogue

  Before all the bodies were pulled from the dark tomb under John Gacy's home, the Chicago Police Department was developing plans for an improved computer system to trace missing persons. Two top police officials were named to head the program, which will make it possible for investigators to match up common denominators in missing-persons cases that are connected. There was also some indication that the new system would comply with recommendations by Carey and Dr. Stein to computerize area-wide data extending well beyond the city limits of Chicago.

  During a ceremony at the Des Plaines Civic Center, a grateful and proud community presented awards and commendations for a job well done to police and civilian employees, including communications clerks and secretaries, who worked on the investigation. "I submit to you that lives of persons unknown were in fact saved because of the professional manner in which this case was handled," Chief Alfano told the assembled officers and civilians. "Who knows how many more victims there might have been." Lieutenant Kozenczak was moved to command of the department's Patrol Division and was expected to be promoted to the rank of captain.

  Jeffrey Rignall's medical bills had burgeoned to fifteen thousand dollars by early 1979, and he was talking of filing bankruptcy.

  Dr. Stein and his staff continued their ghastly task, attempting to learn the names of nearly half the victims who were still unidentified. Parents of the boys and young men whose names were known buried their dead.

  Neighbors on Summerdale Avenue complained that the empty lot where Gacy's house once stood was left littered with rocks, pieces of fencing, and other trash. The site was damned as an eyesore, a threat to surrounding property values, and a danger to children.

  Others, including parents of some of the victims and much of the media, were looking around for someone to blame. It was difficult to understand how so many murders could occur in one place, apparently at the hands of one man, over such a long period of time. Even more puzzling was how it could happen under the nose of what was ostensibly one of the largest, most sophisticated, best-equipped, and well-trained police departments in the country. Chicago police were publicly criticized for negligence, and named in lawsuits
.

  Some people focused their anger on homosexuals, confirming the worst fears of some of Chicago's large gay community. The killer may have been afraid of being exposed as a homosexual, as he reputedly claimed, if some of the young men and boys he raped went to their parents or to police. But rape is a crime, regardless of the sex of the perpetrator and the victim, gay spokesmen maintained. They pointed out that not all homosexuals commit murder, just as all heterosexuals don't commit monstrous crimes against children. The boys and young men who died in the cozy little home near Chicago O'Hare International were the victims of a sadist and pederast] who happened to be homosexual.

  Blame was leveled at the Iowa Board of Parole. The Board was named in at least one lawsuit arising from the mass murders. But sex criminals walk out of American prisons every day. And John Gacy was one of those people who thrived and did well in the tightly confined area of the prison where he was under rigid control, and his behavior was exemplary. Based on existing standards of judgment, he appeared to have earned parole.

  During the eighteen months he was in custody, there was no attempt to cure him or to modify his sexual behavior in anticipation of the day he would be freed. This was neglected, even though both the judge and prosecutor responsible for sending him to prison recognized his potential for violence and aberrant behavior that indicated he could continue to be a threat to young men and boys.

  Perhaps some day future generations will look back with uncomprehending horror on the twentieth-century practice of freeing known sex criminals before they have been cured. But in today's society, the Iowa correctional system is little different than those in most other states.

  It has been estimated at various times that sex offenders make up anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of the population of most prisons. Yet very little is done to alter the behavior of the sexually dangerous, and, except for the most heinous sex murderers, they are freed time and time again. After the horror in suburban Chicago was discovered, psychiatrists and behavioral scientists attempted to bring the actions of mass killers into focus. Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, an authority on mass murder who was interviewed on Chicago's local ABC television outlet, said the killings on Summerdale Avenue appeared to be classic. "He had the love of power that we all have and he almost has gone berserk, gone wild, gone out of control," Ziporyn said of the murderer, "because he has killed and tasted flesh."30 Ziporyn continued that, having killed once, a murderer might be surprised at how easy the act is, and be pleased with his ability and power to make life-and-death decisions.