by David Nelson
“I’m ready anytime you are,” Gacy said sarcastically.
They stopped next at Summerdale Avenue, where Gacy briefly went inside. From there, they went to another associate’s home, where Gacy emerged, crying. They returned once more to the gas station where, again, Gacy shook the hand of his friend, the station owner.
From there, they went back into the city, arriving at Cram’s house, where Rossi stood outside loading tools into his car. Gacy greeted him and invited him inside, but Rossi refused, complaining of all the police harassment he’d received over their association. He only finally went in after Gacy said to him, “It may be the last time I ever see you.”
With Cram driving, Gacy then went north to an appointment with LeRoy Stevens at a restaurant. As Gacy spoke with Stevens at the front door, Cram walked over to the car. They asked him why Gacy seemed to be so depressed, as he seemingly said good-bye to people he knew.
“He told his lawyers he’d killed over thirty people,” Cram said, adding that Gacy wanted to go to the cemetery to visit his father’s grave. He’d also been taking pills with alarming frequency.
Increasingly concerned Gacy might attempt suicide, the team radioed back to headquarters for guidance as they continued speeding after Gacy. Lieutenant Kozenczak replied that if they thought they had an arrest, they should proceed.
They realized they did in fact have a reason to arrest him.
John Wayne Gacy was arrested for marijuana possession just after noon on December 21, 1978, by the surveillance team that had now spent about a week tailing him all over Chicago. He was handcuffed at the busy intersection of Milwaukee and Oakton in Niles.
He’d lived most of his thirty-six years freely among the American population. He’d been a son, a brother, a father, a businessman, a precinct captain, a volunteer clown, a neighbor. Sometimes he’d made people uneasy, and sometimes he’d said things untoward. Sometimes they found him odd, aggressive, maybe even violent. But up until that moment no one had thought of him as anything other than what he presented himself to be. He was quite simply John to them. But to the world, he was about to become something else entirely.
* Any connection between Gacy and Charles Hattula’s 1978 drowning has never been found. In fact, police in Freeport, Illinois, reported that there were several witnesses to Hattula’s accidental drowning. Nevertheless, it remains a curious anecdote in the life of John Gacy.
9
LIGHT AND CONCRETE
STILLNESS HAD COME TO Summerdale Avenue as it approached the Christmas holidays. Snow swathed the little houses where, inside, lights twinkled and blinked as families prepared for celebrations, unaware of what was happening beyond the glow of their Christmas trees.
Toward evening on December 21 that quiet broke as light and sound filled the street. Men poured out of cars, slamming their doors and crunching up through the snow to the home of their neighbor, Mr. John Gacy.
Police went in and out of the house freely. Lights blazed at all hours of the day. Chainsaws groaned, and chunks of wood and plaster came out piled in wheelbarrows. But Gacy himself was nowhere to be seen.
Daniel Genty, an evidence technician with the Cook County’s Sheriff’s Office, stepped inside the Gacy house once more. He’d been primed for this moment ever since hearing about the case from his superior. In fact, Genty had been inside Gacy’s home years prior.
Although he worked for Cook County, they often partnered with the surrounding townships to provide extra enforcement. One day, he had shown up at 8213 Summerdale Avenue to follow up on a report about a runaway girl from Missouri. The girl’s parents had come up to Chicago looking for her and given police the name of her boyfriend, whom they traced to Gacy’s house. When no one answered the door, Genty had gone around the house to peer inside. A young man came to the door. Genty explained the reason for his visit, but the young man was quick to tell him that there was no girl inside.
Gacy quickly appeared at the door alongside the young man and invited Genty inside, where he could now see a young girl eating chicken at the bar inside the recreation room. Although he was looking for a blonde girl and this girl’s hair was light brown, he asked for her ID. She said she didn’t have one, so he asked where she was from. California, she replied.
Gacy allowed Genty to search the rest of the house but followed him as he went back into the bedroom. In the hallway, Gacy grabbed Genty’s arm. “That’s the girl,” Gacy whispered.
Genty returned to the recreation room where he told the young girl he needed to take her down to the station to hand her over to a juvenile officer. The young man asked if he could accompany them, to which Genty agreed. The man had been stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where he and the young girl had fallen in love. In fact, the young man had recently taken a trip down to see her, with Gacy tagging along for fun. According to Gacy, he and the young man had argued when Gacy refused to help him bring the girl back to Chicago. A week or so later, she came up north to see him, where he’d been living with Gacy, his employer.
Genty had filed a report and gone about his day, hardly giving the incident a second thought. At least not until a few years later in December 1978, when he came across the same young man walking around the Des Plaines Police Station. This young man was David Cram, and he was now tied to the investigation of a missing boy from Des Plaines.
“What the hell is going on?” Genty had asked.
“I could’ve told you the guy was an asshole,” Cram said, referring to Gacy.
This coincidence between events was enough to intrigue Genty, who told the state’s attorney investigator Greg Bedoe that he wanted to be part of any further search warrants, after the first had already been completed.
“Greg, we missed something at that house,” Genty told him. “I don’t know what it is, but we missed something. And if you get another search warrant, we gotta get back in there.… You get one and give me a call. I don’t care what time of the day it is.”
Genty hadn’t bought his wife a Christmas present that year, so he promised to take her out shopping one evening to pick out things she wanted. As they prepared to leave, the phone rang. The second search warrant had come through.
Now Genty walked through the Summerdale house once again. Little had changed, though now it was noisy with other investigators roaming and inspecting Gacy’s rooms and belongings. He, however, had a different purpose.
“I thought the only place no one else is going is the crawl space,” he said. “So that’s of course where [I’m] going.” Pulling open the trapdoor, Genty found the crawl space now partially underwater. The sump pump had been unplugged. They plugged it back in, and slowly the water receded. As they waited, Genty went to put on overalls and firemen’s boots. By the time he returned with an entrenching tool and a flashlight, the water had dissipated enough for him to drop in.
In darkness, he crawled through the mud. Underneath the house, only a single chain-pull light offered any additional visibility; otherwise, he relied on a flashlight held by Rafael Tovar to guide him through the two-foot space between the joists of the house and the mud underfoot. Karl Humbert, another evidence technician, joined him down below the house, and together they divided up sections for inspection.
As he army-crawled through the mud, Genty noticed what looked like hair coming up from the dirt. He also recognized a depression running about eight to ten feet long, cracked along the edges like “a dried-up lakebed.”
His flashlight revealed odd-colored liquids pooling around the dirt, some with little red worms that scattered when his light found them. So he began digging.
Not far down, little white particles drifted upward, like grains of rice. From previous scenes he’d worked, Genty knew it to be adipocere—a waxlike substance that occurs when decomposing flesh has been in moist conditions for a significant time period. He dug farther down until he hit something hard. He reached in to pull it from the earth, holding it up to his face for a closer look. He recognized the object as an ar
m bone.
“Charge him!” Genty called up to Kozenczak and the other officers thudding around above him.
As the other investigators zeroed in on the crawl space, they passed down floodlights—though at one point, the fuse blew out and submerged them all in darkness, standing in that dank underbelly of the house.
Genty knew there were other bodies down there. When the others asked how he knew, he pointed out the strands of hair in the mud. “I think this crawl space is full of kids,” Genty said.
Not long after, Karl Humbert uncovered what they believed to be a human knee, barely covered by dirt in another section of the crawl space. “A lot of these kids weren’t deep,” Genty said. “They were just under the surface.”
Dr. Robert Stein, the medical examiner for Cook County, who now had jurisdiction over the find, arrived around 11 PM that evening. He confirmed the remains were indeed human, and later, in a meeting around Gacy’s dining table, instructed them to treat everything like “an archeological dig.”
By then, they had located at least three separate sets of remains, but it was too late to continue. They set officers to watch the home for the remainder of the evening. In the morning, they’d come back to find whatever else they were meant to find.
In the long hours before dawn on December 22, 1978, John Wayne Gacy finally unburdened himself.
“How many bodies are in the crawl space?” they asked Gacy.
“I’m not sure,” he replied.
Gacy explained he’d used lime to cover the smell. People had complained about the odor over the years, and he’d given a range of answers. Although the house had indeed had issues—even a neighbor had reported drainage problems in his own crawl space—the presence of decomposing bodies certainly exacerbated the rank smell.
As to why he’d done it, Gacy went on to explain he was not a homosexual but rather a bisexual. All the boys had been killed when he’d felt threatened or that they might reveal his desires, a loosely kept secret throughout his life. Some had asked for more money, some had tried to rob him, he claimed.
Regarding Rob Piest, he confirmed the boy was dead but said they’d never find his body. Piest, like all the boys, had been handcuffed and strangled, but he wasn’t in the house.
The detective placed photographs in front of him, and Gacy identified three of them: John Butkovich, Gregory Godzik, and John Szyc.
Later, in the presence of his lawyers, Gacy expanded on his confession. As they moved toward morning, Gacy explained how he’d first killed in 1972: a boy he’d picked up at the Greyhound station downtown. He didn’t know the boy’s name, but he’d stabbed him to death in an act of self-defense when the boy had appeared in his bedroom holding a knife from the kitchen. They’d wrestled together, falling to the floor, where the boy landed on the knife. Gacy plunged the knife four or five more times into the boy’s chest. After he waited what felt like forever, Gacy opened the hatch to the crawlspace and rolled him in, then went about cleaning the blood. In the kitchen, he noticed food on the counters and realized that the boy had most likely been using the knife to prepare breakfast. Later in the day, at the wake for his Aunt Pearl, his sister expressed concern over a cut on his hand, which he explained as an injury from cutting carpet in the garage. He followed her advice to get the gash checked out at the hospital, then returned later in the day. Sometime afterward, he went down and buried the boy. “That was just a nicely kept secret,” Gacy later said.
The killings escalated in 1976, after which Gacy lost count. Many of the boys were young hustlers, some of whom he’d picked up from Bughouse Square or the Clark and Diversey area. Sometimes he posed as a cop, flashing a fake badge, or turning on a police spotlight attached to the car. Others had worked for him at the house.
Once or twice, he’d killed pairs of boys together, killing one in one room before asking the other to come see what’d he done. During another killing, Gacy had allegedly recited Psalm 23, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” as the body of a young man thrashed against him.
As the killings went on, it became more difficult for him physically to get bodies in the crawl space because of a “heart condition.” Moreover, he believed he’d run out of room in the earth below his house. Over the last year, he’d started disposing of bodies in the Des Plaines River, in particular off the I-55 bridge. Gacy guessed that he’d thrown at least five into the water, with one of them possibly falling onto a passing barge.
He talked extensively about his use of a rope to take each life. Looping it around a neck, he’d twist it tight behind their head like a garrote, until they died.
Sometimes boys tried to chisel him out of money, like a young man named Mojo, or Joe, whom he’d recently killed. Six days after Gacy’s confession, the body of Mojo, or James Mazzara, was indeed found in the Des Plaines River. He’d last been seen after Thanksgiving that year.
Back when Kozenczak and the other officers had first come to the house, Piest’s body had been upstairs in his attic. When Gacy had peeled off in the Oldsmobile, with Rossi following in the van, he’d been off to dump the boy’s body in the river.
Coming to the subject of Michael Rossi and David Cram, he admitted he’d had ongoing sexual relationships with both young men. Earlier, he’d also indicated they had participated in some of the killings themselves. But for now, investigators kept their focus on Gacy.
As the confession drew to a close, some of the officers questioned the details. The sheer quantity of bodies Gacy seemed to imply was staggering. Chicago had not forgotten Richard Speck and the murders of eight student nurses, and they had definitely heard about Dean Corll and his twenty-eight victims—all young boys—down in Houston.* If Gacy was telling the truth, he had surpassed Corll’s record and become one of America’s worst mass murderers.
Patti Szyc hadn’t heard anything about the disappearance of Rob Piest or even the name John Gacy. Down in Missouri where she attended college, news back home hadn’t reached her, and the disappearance of a high school student was still mostly a local matter. She was also a young student with finals on her mind and a Christmas vacation to enjoy.
But even when she did start hearing about the case, she didn’t think much about it. On the eight-hour drive home, “all you could find on the radio: Gacy, Gacy, Gacy,” Patti recalled. “The thought of my brother never crossed my mind.”
As soon as she got to the family house in Des Plaines though, her mother, Rosemarie, arrived home from work and confronted her. “There’s something I need to tell you before you hear it on the radio,” Rosemarie said. “You probably heard about the murders.”
“Yeah, that’s all I heard,” Patti replied.
“There’s a good chance that Johnny’s one of them.”
Patti took this in as best she could. All this time, it hadn’t occurred to her to consider her brother as one of the bodies they were now pulling out of a home not far from their own house.
But now, putting the two things together—the disappearance of her brother and the young men buried in the house of John Gacy—it made horrifying sense.
Two days before Christmas, investigators drove Gacy first to his father’s grave for a final visit in the presence of his sister. Once he’d finished, police then drove him an hour’s journey to the I-55 bridge over the Des Plaines River where he’d thrown four to five of his last victims, including Rob Piest.
As they stood out on the bridge, staring down into the black water, Gacy gave details on how he’d discarded his final victims. He’d gone to the bridge at night, standing in darkness in between passing cars. He’d heaved the victims over the railing and waited those long seconds before hearing the splash of their naked bodies hitting the water.
The stop did not last long. Chicago media had started listening in on the scanners and now appeared at the end of the bridge. Gacy and his police escort quickly got back in and drove the hour back to Gacy’s home.
Summerdale Avenue had exploded not only with the presenc
e of law enforcement but also with media and onlookers waiting to hear every grim detail of whatever had happened in the house of Gacy. The police car carrying Gacy himself cut a slow path through the growing crowd, a susurrus of chatter and clicking cameras following him up the driveway.
Gacy took them to the garage where, with a can of spray paint, he marked the spot where investigators could find the body of eighteen-year-old John Butkovich. Butkovich had indeed worked off and on for Gacy for about a year before the two had an argument over money. According to Gacy, he’d run into Butkovich on Lawrence Avenue in Chicago and picked him up to have a chat back at Summerdale Avenue. Gacy murdered him that evening after Butkovich continued to press him for money.*
The missing person report that had followed—beginning in August 1975—had gone so far as to name Gacy as someone police should talk to. Although his name had been misspelled as “Cassey,” his address was correct. It could have ended then and there.
Inside the house, Gacy was dismayed to find it full of cops and mud. Officers gave him little time inside though, quickly cuffing him and hauling him back to the station.
Officers asked Gacy to direct them to other bodies. On the back of a pink inmate’s property slip, he drew a primitive sketch detailing where officers should dig.
At the house, Kozenczak came over to Genty—who by then had established himself as methodical excavator—and showed him the sketch. “Do you think this is possible?” Kozenczak asked, referring to the quantity represented in Gacy’s drawing.
“Yes, I do,” Genty told him. He recalled, “The diagram, for being so crude—it was pretty accurate.”
Most of the first full day had been devoted to sawing through the flooring of the house so that workers could dig with greater ease. For the job, they’d called in the fire department, or the Flying Squad, to come in and open up the house for easier access. “Then we at least [could] get down there and stand up once in a while,” Genty said.