by David Nelson
At work, too, the disappearance of Billy distracted her during her days. After she filed a missing person report, the police came to see her and discuss any details about Billy’s life that could lead to his whereabouts. The disruptions to the work environment created friction between MaryJane and her coworkers, including her managers.
But police were no closer to finding Billy. In fact, it was MaryJane who put in more investigative work, spending day after day looking for him. The original missing person report by the police amounted to little more than a list of acquaintances, sparse details spread out over four pages. But without answers, and now eighteen years old, MaryJane knew she had to keep moving with her life, even if Billy continued to line her memories.
MaryJane eventually began a relationship with Jerry, an older friend from the neighborhood who’d helped her after her abandoned trip to California. He’d been one of the few to believe her story about Billy and his disappearance. Although MaryJane kept the relationship mostly casual in case Billy did show up again, the two of them began to discuss getting away from the talking heads of the neighborhood.
Not long after, Jerry’s employer offered him a job out in California—of all places—where they’d also arrange for a house for him and MaryJane to live in. She’d once thought of California as the place she’d find Billy, maybe spotting him there amid the palm trees and or along the beaches where the Pacific broke fast against the sand. Now she looked to California as a place for her own escape, a haven where she could move on with her life. She knew Chicago held the answers to Billy’s absence, but she also knew she could not wait forever.
The opportunity seemed far too good to pass up, and so she and Jerry packed up and left for California.
Along one of her journeys west, MaryJane saw the Grand Canyon for the first time. They got out of the car to look around, walking to the lip of a rock ledge, where she laid down and gazed out. Someone snapped a photo. Set against the red cliffs, MaryJane appears small. In her smallness, she looks straight out into the vastness of something almost incomprehensible. She seems unafraid of the chasm capable of swallowing her whole at any time. For her youth, her smallness, she is also fearless.
Judy Patterson faced similar scrutiny as the girlfriend of Greg Godzik, missing since just before Christmas 1976. In the halls of Taft High School, whispers and even outright accusations followed Judy from class to class. Even some of Greg’s closest friends believed the rumors. “Everybody in high school started calling me Mrs. Godzik,” she said. “They were saying he ran away because I was pregnant.” Things became so difficult that Judy made the decision to leave Taft to complete her education at Carl Schurz High School.
She still could not make sense of her boyfriend’s disappearance. The night she last saw him, he’d been agitated, vague, and dismissive, and they’d parted on tense terms. But it was not enough to run away over. His mother had shown up at the Patterson house the next evening, clearly upset. She’d known early on that something was wrong.
Yet days later, his car appeared in the parking lot of a pet shop in Niles, three miles north of the Godzik’s home. Friends passing by had recognized the abandoned Pontiac. Inside, the keys were missing.
Simultaneously, Greg’s mother, Eugenia, had gone to her local police station to file a missing person report. They took down details about the car and began interviewing Judy as well as Greg’s other friends. They even interviewed Greg’s old rival, Glenn, just to ensure they hadn’t met up in another confrontation.
Eugenia herself telephoned the Salvation Army and halfway houses to see if her son was staying there. She next called Greg’s employer, John Gacy, a contractor running his business out of his house on Summerdale Avenue, about ten minutes away from Greg’s home.
Mr. Gacy told her Greg had left a message on his answering machine, saying he’d be in for work the next day. Greg never showed, not even to retrieve his most recent paycheck. When Eugenia asked Mr. Gacy to replay the message for her, he said he couldn’t. He’d erased the message.
In between holidays, police gathered new but unconfirmed details: Greg had possibly been staying with a woman in the suburbs; there’d been a party he’d gone to the evening of his disappearance; he’d been seen in the school lunchroom by the Taft High security guard just a few days before Christmas. He’d recognized Greg but been unaware he was missing.
Parallel to this, Judy did her own investigation. Part of her was angry, but part of her was also concerned.
Three weeks or so after Greg’s disappearance, Judy and two of her girlfriends cut class to go on a tour of places linked to Greg. They went to the parking lot where his car had been found, to the pizza shop where he’d previously worked as a delivery boy, then to the lumber company, and finally to his last job: working with John Gacy.
Judy had been to Gacy’s house before. Greg had driven there with her in the car several weeks back to pick something up. She doesn’t know exactly what Greg went inside to retrieve, but she recalled him mentioning that Mr. Gacy often gave him drugs pilfered from the many pharmacies he remodeled. Toward the end of their relationship, she remembered his drug activity increasing, including one time when they went to see Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same. Greg had evidently taken something beforehand, causing him to “blabber through the entire movie.”
Judy still remembered how to get to the house. Although there was snow on the ground, they could still see the distinct white stones on the home’s front lawn arranged to read “76” in honor of the bicentennial. They parked the car in front of the house, got out, and went to the door. They knocked, but inside was quiet.
The girls decided to leave, but as Judy’s friend started the car, the engine sputtered out and died. Stranded in the cold, they knocked at a neighbor’s house where someone agreed to call a tow truck for them.
While they waited, another car came down the road, passing by and pulling into the driveway. Mr. Gacy got out of his car and approached them, asking what they were doing. One of Gacy’s teenage employees stepped out from the car as well.
Judy stepped toward him. “We want to talk to you about Greg,” she said.
He told the girls only Judy could come inside with him. He spoke in a recognizable Chicago accent, emanating from a round, mustached face with hair greased to the side. Judy followed him to the front door of the house, where he led her inside. His teenage employee stayed outside with Judy’s friends.
Mr. Gacy’s house was drab, missing traces of any homeliness a family might have given it. She was distracted enough not to notice the portraits of clowns adorning the wood-paneled walls. She could tell the house was empty, as Mr. Gacy led her to an office where he quickly took a seat behind a large desk, as if to conduct a job interview.
She got directly to it.
But Mr. Gacy hadn’t heard from Greg, not for some time. He suggested maybe Greg had gone to California, like he’d said he wanted to do. Judy was confused. Greg had been enthralled by the state of Colorado since taking a trip out there, but he’d never said anything about California.
Mr. Gacy also mentioned the trouble Greg had had with Judy’s old boyfriend, Glenn. Mr. Gacy said that he had “connections” that could help Greg out. He knew powerful people in high-up places.
“Big asshole,” Judy said of her impression of Mr. Gacy, who she felt condescended to her during the entire conversation. The conversation didn’t last long, though Mr. Gacy continued emphasizing his desire to help find Greg. He opened the door for her to leave.
When Judy went back outside, the tow truck had arrived.
In February, not long after their visit to Mr. Gacy’s, a local neighborhood newspaper ran a story about Greg. The article detailed the disappearance, the fateful date between Greg and Judy, the security guard at Taft, even information about his academic performance. Mr. Gacy was also interviewed.
“I don’t think he’s a bad kid,” Mr. Gacy said in the article, echoing the implication that he’d run away. In
so many minds, a runaway meant a throwaway.
By April the police finally contacted Mr. Gacy. He stuck to the same answers.
They continued following up on Greg’s case, but it wasn’t enough. The Godziks eventually hired a private investigator, paying him around $5,000 between 1976 and ’78.
But the investigator came up empty like the rest.
In the end, it was Judy who’d come closest to the truth. She’d looked it right in the eye.
“Have you seen Billy?” Violet Carroll asked Gene Anderson over the phone one day. “I’m worried to death. He ain’t been home.” Gene hadn’t seen him. Even before Billy had last been seen on the evening of his older brother’s birthday, Gene and Billy had starting drifting apart.
Sometime after that, police began coming by Gene’s apartment on Halsted. They asked questions, of course, but they also asked Gene to head down with them to the morgue on Polk Street.
At the morgue, the officer pulled out a body from a drawer.
“This one ran in front of a truck,” he told Gene.
“I can’t see his face,” Gene replied. “There’s hardly no face left on him.”
But it wasn’t Billy. Gene knew it. The officer pulled out multiple other bodies, but each time Gene looked into a face, he said no.
Gene Anderson eventually ended up in Kentucky, but first he went to California. It seemed like everyone in those days was trying to go to California, whether to be absolved, to start anew, or to simply find a little more sunlight.
Although no police came to speak with him, Mike Bowling also had not seen his friend Billy in some time. The last time he’d seen him, Billy had been with a guy who’d thrown a snowball at Mike’s sister. Mike and the guy got into a fight. When it was over, Billy and he parted ways, though Mike had no idea it was the last time. Sometime after, Mike also moved back to Kentucky, where his family had originally come from.
“I haven’t seen Billy Carroll since 1975,” Mike said. “He was somebody you can never forget.”
As boarding announcements sounded around him, Michael Conner stood near the gate to his son’s planned flight back to New Mexico. The date was Tuesday, November 4, 1975. He’d flown back to Chicago only weeks after Craig’s disappearance in order to stake out the terminal.
He’d even talked to one of the airport security guards, so there’d be no trouble with him standing around, looking into the faces of passengers and tourists. Even though air travel was notoriously lax with security in those days, bombings and skyjackings were still a concern.
The airline had also informed him that the reservation had actually been canceled in the weeks after his son’s disappearance. Sometime after the cancellation, someone had called the airline again to reconfirm.
Michael stood back and waited.
In the 1970s O’Hare was still considered the world’s busiest airport. No doubt Michael watched a sea of travelers hurrying around, juggling luggage as they bade good-bye to their families or bought last-minute souvenirs. In every face, he tried to find his son.
The plane began to board. Michael watched as a line gathered at the gate, filing their way down the ramp and into the belly of the plane. Craig was not among them.
Even after most passengers had boarded, Michael continued to watch. Stragglers came sprinting to the gate to get inside. The gate attendants moved to close the gangway. Not long after, the plane began to taxi away from the terminal. Michael wandered away. Once again, he would have to return home to New Mexico without his son.
This wasn’t the last trip to Chicago. Like Gene Anderson, Michael Conner would stand in the morgue time and again, looking into the faces of dead bodies to see if one of them was Craig. When the rivers or the lake thawed out each spring, he would go once more to see what they’d given up. And time after time, he would shake his head no, as each face looking back at him was not his son’s.
For another year, Michael went back and forth.
Then things went quiet.
Dale Landingin came up to Milwaukee on a few occasions to visit his friend Phil Couillard, now living there with his mother after the death of his father. This time, Dale arrived in a stolen car with a few friends. He hadn’t seen Phil in some time and he had a story to tell.
The incident had occurred back in Chicago the previous summer. Dale and a group of other boys were walking not far from his home on Marshfield Avenue when he and another boy fell behind.
Summer in Chicago could have its quiet moments. Late at night on a street like Marshfield Avenue, the normal sounds of the day—sirens and car horns, children playing, music out a window—disappeared, replaced by a rustle of leaves and the steady static of crickets marking time till dawn. The familiar summer hymn was only interrupted by the carefree sounds of young boys at the final turn of childhood.
The near silence broke as a car shrieked around the corner and flew down the street at the boys. Just as it stopped alongside them, shots cracked through the night.
Dale stood still. For a half second, he paused, stunned.
Someone reached over and pulled him away.
The car peeled off to the corner of Irving, before turning east and vanishing. When they looked around, the boy who’d been next to Dale had disappeared.
They followed a trail of blood along the sidewalk and found him a short walk away at the doorway to a nearby restaurant. Blood was running down the boy’s chest.
Police arrived to survey the scene, but by then, the boy had been shuttled off to Ravenswood Hospital via ambulance. He died on the way.
According to Dale, who now relayed it to Phil, he’d seen the whole thing. He’d spoken in a hushed voice, taking Phil off to the side, fearful the boys he’d driven up to Milwaukee with might hear him. Dale knew who’d done the shooting, but he didn’t want others to know.
Most likely, the incident he recounted was the murder of a neighborhood boy, Bryan Wagner, a few weeks shy of his seventeenth birthday. As witnesses described, Bryan and some friends had been hanging out late that August evening. Bryan had been circling around on his bike when a gray Chevy with eagle decals on the rear window pulled up alongside them. The driver and Bryan exchanged words, after which the driver warned he would return. Evidently, it did not worry the boys. They stayed out for some time after that. Minutes later, they decided to head up to the Blue Bird Tavern at the corner of Ashland. As they walked north, a red Vega wagon came by and someone fired a rifle into the group. Bryan was hit twice, once below the left clavicle, and once below the shoulder blade.
Phil remembered Dale saying someone inside the car had said, “Don’t shoot the dude with dark hair.” Someone had also yelled, “You shouldn’t be hanging with these boys, Frankie, or we might think you’re one of them.” Possibly this had been said during the encounter with the gray Chevy before the shooting.
Few people called Dale Landingin by his real name, Frank, or Frankie. It was Popeye, Dale told Phil, their old acquaintance from Stockton School and a member of the Latin Eagles.
The next evening, police took in Hector Escobar, a nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican member of the Harrison Gents otherwise known as “New York.” He quickly gave up a driver (who later gave a credible alibi) and a shooter, José Martinez. According to Martinez, he’d wrestled with Hector over the gun in the moments before Bryan Wagner’s shooting. Neither boy was initially charged.
Over the next few months, police gathered more eyewitness testimony that began to paint a picture of Hector as the driver and José as the shooter. Warrants went out for the boys’ arrests. They found Hector hiding in the storage closet of an apartment where he’d been making plans to skip town. In January the next year, police caught up with José Martinez. During a routine patrol, they spotted him on a street corner where he was arrested without incident.
Police could never conclude if there were two or three people in the car. And Popeye has never been arrested or charged in connection with the murder.
In early 1978 both boys went to trial separa
tely. Escobar was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen to thirty years at Joliet. But Martinez was found not guilty and let go.
Bryan Wagner was laid to rest in Maryhill Cemetery. Some reports claimed he had been mistaken for a member of the Simon City Royals gang.
Phil and Dale didn’t talk much about the shooting ever again. Dale was fearful of retaliation: one of the witnesses had already been sent to the hospital after a group of boys jumped him and struck him with bricks. The evening following the shooting, several cars had passed by Bryan’s home shouting gang slogans and pointing guns out the window.
Living in Uptown, Dale had seen his fair share of death and danger. This time he had seen death up close.
Phil would also drive down to Chicago on occasion, looking for Dale. Oftentimes, Dale was not at his father’s home, so Phil would drive around the neighborhoods asking if anyone knew where to find him.
On one trip, he found him at his mother’s house on Clark Street.
Dale came downstairs to say hello, but he couldn’t leave. In fact, he was grounded.
“I’m thinking, ‘You’re eighteen, and you’re grounded?’” Phil remembered.
Dorothy had gotten remarried not long ago. She was Dorothy Miller now. Her new husband, Al, had been gracious enough to let Dale stay, though Denise Landingin remembers him being stern and unkind, perhaps no better than her own father, though Dorothy had married him at a Buddhist Temple of all places. It appeared Al also had strict rules for Dale.
Aside from that, it seemed things might be looking up for Dale. As he stood out on Clark Street, he told Phil about a contractor he’d met. Dale could make five dollars an hour working for the man.
The conversation didn’t last long. After all, he was grounded. The boys said good-bye.
“We used to hang out at a bar in the neighborhood called the Good Luck Lounge,” MaryJane said. “We’d go there a lot.”