Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  Those around her began discussing the need to get her out of the environment she’d been in. Lisa’s behavior had grown increasingly erratic and out of control, and she and her mother often clashed. Despite this, Lisa still had decent grades and so was considered “salvageable.”

  A doctor recommended a school out in California working with kids from backgrounds much like Lisa’s. “No locked doors, no prescribed meds, just dealing with feelings and dealing with growth,” Lisa said of the school. “There was a lot of emphasis on tools for living.” There were workshop sessions where groups told their stories and sometimes broke down with regrets over their bad habits. While a few of the methods of the school (like Erhard Seminars Training, or EST) have become outdated and the school itself has often been criticized as a cult, Lisa found it to be her turning point.

  While she was up in the mountains of northern California, finding her footing in life at long last, her friend Dale Landingin, who had never been able to find that footing, was being laid to rest.

  John Gacy called into the Des Plaines station later that evening on December 12, 1978, to see if Lieutenant Joe Kozenczak still wanted to see him. Kozenczak said yes, and Gacy said he would be there within the hour.

  By 1 AM, when Gacy still hadn’t shown, Kozenczak began dismissing his men and even started packing up his own things. He gave orders to the officer at the front desk to tell Gacy to come back in the morning, if he even came in at all.

  Gacy did eventually show up sometime after 3 AM. He asked for Lieutenant Kozenczak, adding that he was late due to a car accident. To the officer on desk that evening, Gacy seemed rattled, even agitated. He also appeared to be covered in mud around his shoes and pants.

  By the next morning, December 13, Kozenczak and his team were fully pointed toward John Gacy, though they still hoped for Piest’s safe return. They had to get inside the house on Summerdale, either to find Rob himself, or a clue that led them to him.

  Next door to the station, Kozenczak met with a young prosecutor, Terry Sullivan, in the state’s attorney’s office within the civic center. Sullivan listened to the story of Piest’s disappearance and Gacy’s potential involvement. The old sodomy charge and the circumstances surrounding it were especially interesting to investigators. Sullivan agreed to request a search warrant of Gacy’s home.

  The Piest family too had fixated on Gacy, and Harold Piest continued to press police to talk to the contractor.

  Rob’s friends and coworkers had begun helping as well. Nisson’s pharmacy became something of a headquarters for them, as they went out into Des Plaines to distribute fliers and ask other citizens if they’d seen the young man. Linda and Joanne stayed near the pharmacy, falling into conversations full of speculation and worry.

  “He would never disappear, he would never take off,” said Joanne, who detailed the mood among Rob’s friends and coworkers. “He would never run away.”

  Police lingered in the pharmacy, making them all uneasy. In the recent days, both Linda and Joanne had given statements, though both differed on the description of the truck they’d seen outside the store during their second visit that evening. Linda stated that it was red, whereas Joanne had stated it was black.

  “You didn’t want to say out loud something very bad has happened,” Joanne said. “Like you’re dancing around the issue when you’re all in shock … and all hell’s breaking loose.”

  “People are coming in all the time talking about it,” Linda Mertes said of those days after Rob’s disappearance. “I know it was the conversation of every single day.… And then of course, the stories started flying around that Gacy was there.”

  As the search warrant request proceeded through proper channels, John Gacy finally returned to the station for a formal statement and interview. He walked them through his movements on the evening of December 11, how he got to the drugstore, whom he interacted with, how he’d left and gone home to find a message about his forgotten appointment book on his answering machine, and how he’d returned to get it. Later, at home again, he’d had another message informing him that his uncle was dying, and he’d gone off to say his good-byes. Not once, Gacy insisted again, had he spoken with Rob Piest, though he refused a request to take a lie detector. Instead, they asked him to make a written statement.

  A search warrant, meanwhile, had been signed off by a judge, who’d sworn Kozenczak to it that afternoon as Gacy sat in his office. When they returned to the office, both Joe Kozenczak and Terry Sullivan confronted Gacy, asking for the keys to his home.

  Gacy refused.

  Kozenczak told him to turn over the keys; otherwise, he’d have to buy a new front door.

  After some back-and-forth, Gacy angrily tossed the keys onto the floor for them to retrieve. “Gacy saw me as his nemesis,” Kozenczak later said. “He was a belligerent personality. He wanted to be in control all the time.” After this time, Gacy always referred to Kozenczak as “asshole,” a badge which Kozenczak wore proudly.

  They numbered seven that dim afternoon as winter lurched closer to Chicago and its suburbs. Inside the dark house, the officers were silent and nervous as they inched through the rooms. Nothing about the home was warm or inviting. Gacy had furnished it in a lurid, nonsensical fashion that seemed out of place even for the 1970s. Through one hall, a jagged tricolored stripe of yellow, green, and rose ran along a wood-paneled wall. Paintings of clowns held a madcap watch over them as they picked through the house, with Gacy’s small, worried terrier at their heels.

  As his team moved through the house—through closets, drawers, and cabinets—Lieutenant Kozenczak picked up the first item of note from one of John Gacy’s trash cans: the receipt for photo prints that Kim Byers had processed on the evening of December 11. While Kozenczak did not know the history of this piece of paper, the fact that it had come from Nisson’s Pharmacy was enough for him to appreciate its importance.

  Outside the house, police also combed through a storage shed attached to the garage, as well as a nearby barbeque pit and patio.

  Sometime during the search, another teenage boy showed up at the house. He moved through the house with familiarity, even opening the fridge to help himself to some pop. He was another one of Gacy’s teenage employees, who seemed to know his employer better than most. The teenager, David Cram, watched as police continued gathering items from all corners of the Summerdale home.

  When they were finished, they’d accumulated drugs in the form of pills and syringes, a switchblade and a starter pistol, and pornographic films and books (with such titles as Tight Teenagers, Bike Boy, Abnormal Sex Cases, and Pederast-Sex Between Men and Boys.) They also confiscated a wooden board with two holes (a pillory of sorts), rope, sex toys, a set of handcuffs, an address book, a section of rug with a dark stain on it, and belongings that were clearly not Gacy’s: underpants, a shirt, a wallet card holder, driver’s licenses in the names of young men. Last, they towed Gacy’s vehicles—the black Oldsmobile and the Chevy van—for further inspection. David Cram delivered the Chevy pick-up with the snowplow attached a few days later.

  While they were indeed thorough, Kozenczak and his men came close to missing the trapdoor along the floor of a closet in the front room. The door opened upon a pit of darkness underneath the home. The crawl space.

  Detective Rafael Tovar and another officer dropped down into the belly of the house, flashlights combing through the empty corners. Underfoot, they found hard earth dusted with lime, which they assumed had been laid to prevent dampness and nothing more. One of the investigators noticed a stench familiar to damp basements.

  “My first reaction was I’m a big claustrophobic,” Tovar said. “We were looking for one person. So obviously, if you go down there to dig around, the obvious thought is you’re looking for a mound of dirt … but we didn’t find anything, and we got the heck out of there.”

  They were relieved not to find Rob Piest there, though his disappearance had now faded into the winter mist. Gacy’s secret would be safe for a
nother day.

  But there was one more item of note that investigators had gathered and bagged, one that looked out of place: a class ring from Maine West High School, where Rob Piest was also a student. But it couldn’t be his. Along the band, they found the markings for the class of 1975 with the initials J. A. S.

  John Allen Szyc had not been seen since January 1977. But several months after his disappearance, a young man had driven off from a gas station at Kimball and Montrose without paying. An attendant had taken down the license plate, which led police to a house in Des Plaines. John Szyc’s parents informed them that their son had been missing since January.

  When Chicago police eventually tracked down the title to the car, they found a new name: Michael Rossi. They quickly located him, and Rossi told them that the man he worked for would clear everything up.

  When police confronted Rossi’s employer, Mr. John Gacy, he told police he remembered John Szyc. The nineteen-year-old had been looking to sell his car for money to help him leave the city. Gacy had purchased it for $300 and then sold it over to Rossi for the same amount. He even had all the paperwork to prove it.

  Rossi had been broke when he stole the gas. To cover the deliberate theft, he’d swapped out his license plates with the old ones belonging to Szyc. Gacy informed police that he’d take Rossi to apologize to the gas station owner. He also offered to personally pay any fees in exchange for Rossi’s charges to be dropped. Police agreed.

  The episode was vaguely mentioned in Johnny Szyc’s missing person report: “Further learned that the boy had sold his car and stated he wanted the money to leave town.” They also noted that his brother had heard from friends that they’d seen Johnny at the beach sometime that summer. No further updates were made by Chicago Police.

  Although they didn’t know the connection yet, on December 14, 1978, while Gacy was burying his recently deceased uncle, Rafael Tovar and another detective went to Michael Rossi’s home in Chicago to ask him some questions. As they waited for Rossi to arrive, they spoke with his wife, who also knew Gacy. She didn’t have warm feelings toward her husband’s employer, telling investigators that Gacy often meddled in her marriage, only a few months old. Rossi had even beaten Gacy up at one point, resulting in court proceedings, though they still worked together.

  “What kind of car does he drive?” Tovar asked her so they could keep an eye out for him.

  “A white Plymouth Satellite,” she replied.

  They were just about to leave when Rossi pulled up in the Satellite. He agreed to go down with them to the station. During the ride, he revealed Gacy had been agitated lately, withdrawing money in case he needed to make bond.

  At the station, police questioned Rossi, who gave them further details but contributed little overall to the investigation, which had started to lose some of its momentum.

  The first call to the Szyc house came that same day, December 14, the birthday of Rosemarie Szyc, who answered the phone inside their Des Plaines home, just four minutes from Nisson’s Pharmacy, and five to the Piest home.

  “They called and said, ‘Can we speak with John Szyc?’” Patti Szyc remembered.

  Rosemarie informed them that her son had been reported missing about a year ago. They asked to come speak with her.

  “No sooner [had she] hung up the phone in the kitchen [when] they were already at the door,” Patti said. “She said it was like they called from the driveway.”

  The police had tracked them down through the Maine West ring found at Gacy’s house.

  Rosemarie told them everything she knew. After her son had not reported to work or collected a paycheck, she and her husband had gone to Johnny’s apartment themselves. With help from the landlord, they went inside and found Johnny’s life stopped in a single moment. His tax forms were on the table, his bed was unmade, a bag of trash sat beside the back door. They also noticed a portable television and a clock radio had gone missing, along with an iron and a hair dryer. Outside, his car was gone too.

  Eventually, they moved their son’s things out of the apartment. They hired a private investigator to look into Johnny’s disappearance, but he found little of substance to add to the information already recorded in Johnny’s missing person report. They mentioned that his car had turned up during a robbery of gasoline at a gas station in the city that summer.

  While the police took down as many details about her son’s disappearance as she could give, they were not as forthcoming with information for Rosemarie. Instead, they told her simply that they were working on an ongoing investigation. But Rosemarie and her family had heard about the missing boy from the pharmacy near their home. Reporters had even started naming a suspect: John Gacy.

  By the end of the next day, Friday, December 15, Des Plaines investigators had gathered up the missing person report on Johnny Szyc. On the first page, Rafael Tovar read a note regarding a 1971 Plymouth Satellite, the same type of car driven by Michael Rossi.

  Tovar investigated the possibility Gacy had kept John Szyc’s television as well. During the first search, he’d noted a similar style television in Gacy’s bedroom. Rosemarie Szyc had provided officers with a service brochure to the television, but it did not include a photograph of the television itself.

  Motorola had stopped making televisions in 1974, so eventually Tovar found himself on the phone with Quasar, formerly the Motorola television division. They had an office in Franklin Park, where an elderly customer service representative informed him that he had kept brochures for every TV they’d made.

  “Yes, there is a God,” Tovar said, and agreed to come pick it up once the man had found it.

  When Tovar arrived, the man handed over the pamphlet corresponding to Szyc’s service brochure, which proved a visual match to the television they’d found in Gacy’s home. On the pamphlet, the picture of the television depicted a clown smiling back at him.

  Moving quickly now, police began looking further into the identification for Johnny’s car. While they got no hits on Johnny’s license plate, they quickly noted that his vehicle identification number (VIN) was only one digit off from Michael Rossi’s VIN. “It was easy to alter a single number of a vehicle registration form,” Lieutenant Kozenczak later wrote. “An old trick used by streetwise cons.”

  The next day, when police attempted to speak with Rossi at his apartment, they again found only his wife. Michael had been out drinking the night before and was in no shape to answer questions.

  Not until December 17, almost a full week into the disappearance of Rob Piest, were investigators able to follow up with Rossi.

  He’d met Gacy in 1976, after Rossi dropped out of school to work with a plumber who had taken a job at Gacy’s Summerdale house. During the visit, Gacy had promised Rossi better money if he joined him. Later on, he even let Rossi move in with him.

  Asked if Gacy had done or said anything unusual during the week of Rob Piest’s disappearance, Rossi told them Gacy had offered to give him and his wife some spare ornaments to decorate their tree. When Rossi offered to help Gacy retrieve them from his attic, Gacy insisted he stay downstairs. Rossi claimed then to have loaded the ornaments in the van, while police continued watching the house from outside.

  After that, Gacy had suggested Rossi go to a friend’s tree lot to pick one out for his apartment. When Gacy did not show up, Rossi bought a tree and eventually went back to Summerdale. Rossi claimed they went to a wooded area to cut down a tree. Later that evening, at the Des Plaines station, Gacy had finally showed up, looking for Lieutenant Kozenczak, his pants covered in mud.

  Regarding the Plymouth Satellite, Rossi said Gacy had told him about a friend looking to sell his car for money to move to California. Together, Gacy and Rossi drove to an area known as Bughouse Square where the car was parked.

  Rossi took the car for a test drive, returning sometime later to let his employer know he’d buy it. The title stayed in both of their names at first; they’d agreed on a payment plan of $50 a week until Rossi had paid back t
he $300 to purchase it from Gacy. Once paid off, Gacy would sign the title over to Michael Rossi.

  John Szyc’s signature on the transfer of title was an obvious forgery, though police were never able to prove who’d done it.

  As if in a fog, Denise Landingin, now nearly nine months pregnant, arrived at the funeral home with her husband and her one-year-old son. After her brother’s identification, his body had been brought to Machacek-Casey Funeral Home to prepare for his wake and funeral.

  “The place was crowded,” Denise recalled. “I thought we were at some kind of concert.” As she entered the room, she felt everyone turn to look at her. She knew her family was somewhere in the crowd, but all she could see were the faces of other kids her brother’s age. “I knew everybody was looking at me because I looked terrible,” Denise said. “I was pregnant … I didn’t have my hair done. I was wearing a kerchief around my head because my hair was so bad, and I just felt ugly.”

  Slowly, Denise inched through the crowd toward the front of the room. “I was in a dream world,” she said. “I felt like I was watching myself walk through.… It was like slow motion.” With her son’s hand in hers, the crowd parted and gave way to the sight of her brother’s coffin, the hue of a copper penny, and flanked with flowers and wreaths. Together, she and her son approached her brother, underneath the closed lid.

  She knelt at the casket, then asked her little boy to do the same. “Then I told my son to kiss it, and we kissed the coffin together,” she said. “And then I couldn’t do anything else.”

  The sight of her little boy putting his tiny lips against the casket was too much for Denise. She broke down and stood up. As quickly as she could, she left the funeral home.