by David Nelson
The church, nothing more than a cult, continually turned down their request for information, even laughing at Rick’s mom over the phone.
When police discovered bodies on Summerdale Avenue, Rick’s sister stood outside and passed along her brother’s name to investigators.
Uptown began to figure heavily in the case of Gacy.
Darrell Samson, born in West Virginia, had gone missing in April 1976. Previously, he’d run away to avoid a court date over curfew violations in 1973, showing up days later at his father’s home in Virginia. His had been the last body exhumed under the dining room, which Gacy had been renovating at the time of Darrell’s disappearance from his apartment in Uptown. Among his bones, investigators found soda cans, as if Gacy had thrown him away like refuse.
Not long after Samson disappeared, Billy Carroll also walked out of Uptown and never returned. Now, only a day apart, their remains had been identified.
Violet and Huey Carroll submitted dental records for their son once word had reached them about the bodies at Summerdale Avenue. And not long after, police knocked on their door, now on Lawrence Avenue, to tell them what they’d suspected had been true.
The Sun-Times also visited their home, where Billy’s parents posed for photographs. Huey and Violet gaze up at the camera with looks of defeat and exhaustion as they sit together on the edge of Billy’s simple cot bed.
Among Billy’s friends, the news came initially as a shock, but they quickly realized that it all made sense. They knew where Billy had gotten his money, and they knew now that one of those individuals had most likely been John Wayne Gacy. “Because of what he was doing, a lot of people weren’t that surprised,” Tom Thweatt said.
Gene Anderson had started losing touch with Billy not long before his death. “Everything just kind of broke up after ’76,” Gene said. “I kinda gave up on everybody.” Although he knew about Billy’s disappearance, he didn’t hear about the recovery of his friend’s bones until he read about it in the newspaper.
Marianne Rogers, a childhood friend of Billy’s at whose apartment he often found refuge, also spoke with the Tribune. “I dreamt about him until a week before the Gacy case broke,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. “It would be nighttime and there would be lots of lights and lots of concrete.”
Less than a month later, the Reffett family heard a knock at their Carmen Avenue apartment. In the doorway, Russ Ewing, a reporter with the local NBC affiliate, had come to speak with them about their son, Randy.
“My parents pretty much made us children go in our bedrooms,” Clyde said. “But we could hear.”
Both Myrtle and Charles agreed that Ewing could bring cameras and lights into the apartment to speak with them about their son’s disappearance. By April ’79 they’d spent several months confronting the possibility that John Wayne Gacy had snuffed out their son’s life.
Myrtle had first gone to gather Randy’s dental records, but their dentist had retired or disappeared himself.
Some time passed before Myrtle had another idea: the X-rays taken of Randy after his stabbing in 1974. She went to Weiss Hospital and promptly asked for a copy of the X-rays, which she then forwarded on to the Chicago police. For a while, the family waited. They followed the happenings at the Gacy home as the media and the city continued to talk incessantly about it.
And then finally, the knock came.
In the days that followed, the family remained busy. Police came both to the apartment and asked each of the Reffetts to come down to the station to speak more about Randy.
The Reffett family also went together to make the funeral arrangements. They picked out flowers and a casket to hold what remained of him.
That weekend, the family bid farewell to their oldest brother and son in the chapel at a funeral home on Lincoln Avenue. His remains were then buried in Rosehill Cemetery, in a newer section of the famous graveyard, on the northernmost edge along a chain-link fence, shaded by trees.
After Randy was buried, the Reffett family attempted to move on as best they could. That first Christmas without him, Charlie bought his three remaining children each a new ten-speed bike. But the thought of Randy lingered in his head. “He said that if my older brother had been around, that he would have bought him a car,” said Chris. “I’ll never forget that conversation.”
In the years after Randy’s death and disappearance, Clyde—seventeen at the time of Randy’s recovery—had wanted to go into the military. His mother, worried she might lose another son, refused to let him go. “She wanted me to stay home and teach Chris and Brenda how to be better,” he said.
By then their parents’ marriage had disintegrated, as Myrtle continued to blame not only Clyde but her husband for bringing them to Chicago, what she viewed as the catalyst for her son’s death. “After twenty-seven years of marriage, they got a divorce,” Clyde said.
Charlie Reffett had begun moving on even before the divorce though. At his job, Charlie met another woman, now pregnant with his child. They named the boy Charles Jr. and moved into an apartment on Marine Drive near the lake.
With his new child, Clyde immediately noticed a difference in their father, who coached football and softball for Charlie Jr. at Welles Park. “He spent a lot of quality time with that child that he didn’t with us, because he didn’t have time,” Clyde said.
Despite the divorce, Myrtle and Charlie got closer as friends. Charlie often came to visit her and catch up with her on the kids. “I never saw nothing like it,” Clyde said. “They were talking about meeting … each other in heaven one day.”
Through those years, Clyde often thought about the night he last saw Randy and his friend, Samuel Stapleton. He also thought about a time not long after that when he stood inside a phonebooth at the corner of Winona and Clark talking to a girlfriend. He remembered the car pulling up alongside him, checking if he wanted a ride. He remembered taking his belt off and slamming it against the car. Clyde had gotten a good look at the driver’s face. “I know that was John Wayne Gacy,” he said.
And for a moment, one must wonder, had Clyde gotten inside, had he traveled willingly back to Summerdale Avenue, would John Gacy have even realized he’d killed this boy’s brother only years before?
“The hope was gone a long time ago,” Juanita Dodd said of the time leading up to the discovery of her brother Samuel Stapleton’s remains. “I’m pretty sure it was for my parents. We wouldn’t talk about it.” Like the Reffett family, the Stapletons had heard the news of John Wayne Gacy. You could not live in Chicago in the winter of 1978–79 and not hear about the case.
James and Randy, the two youngest kids and half-brothers to Sam, both recognized the name Gacy from a call Randy had answered in the weeks before his brother disappeared. Gacy had called looking for Sam, mentioning he had a job for him. At first, hearing the name on the news, the brothers did not say anything. But they didn’t need to. “My dad told me later on that he knew as soon as he saw it,” Randy Stapleton said. “He knew Sam was dead.”
Bessie Stapleton began the process of collecting her son’s dental records. Investigators had two other clues to work with: Sam had once fallen out of a tree down in Ohio, causing a hairline fracture in his arm; and he had worn a chain bracelet permanently soldered around his wrist.
In November 1979 Bessie and Bill both worked for a blueprint manufacturing company in the suburbs. Although all the bodies had been discovered nearly a year before, they’d heard nothing official. But when police visited them at work one day to show them a photograph of a bracelet discovered around the wrist of one of the boys, they knew for sure what their hearts had been telling them for so long.
Bill and Bessie returned home from work that day, visibly upset. No matter how certain they’d been, the confirmation hit them both hard.
Russ Ewing, the NBC reporter, also showed up at the house. Over the next year, he would become a mainstay of coverage for the case, specifically from the perspective of the victims. In turn, families began to tru
st and speak to him often. “She would only talk to him,” James said of Bessie. “She talked to him a lot on the phone about anything to do with the updates.”
But not everyone dealt with the presence of media and national attention in the same way. “I couldn’t go home from school a lot of times because I’d see reporters out in front,” Randy recalled. Even at school, he remembered his homeroom teacher pulling him aside to give her condolences about Sam’s death.
How’s she know about this? Randy remembered thinking. “I didn’t even grasp that whole story at that age. The whole world’s watching this story. I was living [in] my own world, and I didn’t want any part of it. I wanted it all to go away.”
Three and a half years after his disappearance, Sam Stapleton was laid to rest. During the service, the funeral director had to use smelling salts to revive both Bessie and Juanita, who passed out from shock. Juanita, nine months pregnant with her son, had attempted to go up to the casket, but as she began to walk toward it, her knees gave out and she collapsed. James remembers watching, waiting “forever” for Juanita to revive.
They laid Sam in a spot in Rosehill Cemetery just yards from his friend, Randy Reffett. Given the circumstances and time frame of their disappearances, it’s likely the two friends had gone to the Gacy house together. They had probably died and shared a grave together. Now they would rest near one another.
For a time, Patti Szyc held off on going back to Missouri for college. At any moment, the police might decide to release John’s remains for burial.
“Then there was talk that they couldn’t release the remains because they might need them for evidence,” Patti said. With that, Patti traveled back to Missouri to continue college, waiting for the call that they could finally have a funeral.
The investigation had an uncanny knack for coinciding with holidays. The first call from police had occurred on Rosemarie Szyc’s birthday in December 1978. The identification of his remains had come on New Year’s Day. Now, in April 1979, the Szyc family finally heard that Johnny’s remains could be collected. On the Saturday before Easter, they laid him to rest.
The day was cold and rainy, fitting for a funeral. Only family gathered together for a short chapel service at the cemetery. Not even the media learned of the service. And so, quietly, Johnny Szyc was placed into his grave.
Mark Johnson had been following the events. But he knew better than to show up at Johnny’s funeral. In life, Johnny had had two sides to himself. For his family, he was Johnny; for Mark, for Cliff, for Lynn Meadows, he was John. Silly, lovable, smiling John, finally figuring himself out. Although the two sides had struggled against one another, everyone who knew John or Johnny loved him and mourned the loss.
As she waited for her son’s remains to be released, Eugenia Godzik attended a memorial for the victims at a local Catholic Church not far from the Gacy house. The Piests were also in attendance, sitting among two hundred other parishioners that included neighbors and friends of Gacy as well. Some of the parishioners came forward to speak about their horror or their guilt at not knowing what had been happening for so many years.
Eugenia Godzik stood up in front of everyone to speak. “How can a God who is supposed to be good allow something like this to happen?” she asked before sobbing into her hands.
In April, like many of the other families, the Godziks finally received the remains of their son, Greg.
Judy Patterson remembered attending the funeral with her entire family, sitting in the packed church listening to the Catholic prayers and hymns. Afterward, the Godziks had put together a reception, but Judy decided to go home instead.
But Eugenia Godzik wanted her there. They’d been united by Greg’s death. Now, Eugenia sent two of Greg’s friends to go retrieve Judy and persuade her to come. Judy agreed and found herself among Greg’s friends and family at a local restaurant where Eugenia made sure all Greg’s friends were taken care of, even letting them drink alcohol after ensuring they had a way to get home safely. “It’s what Greg would have wanted,” Judy said.
In some cases, families of the victims had already experienced tragedy. The family of Matthew Bowman, a nineteen-year-old from the Crystal Lake suburb, had already lost a loved one to homicide. In 1975 Matthew’s stepfather, Anthony Rovetuso, was shot in a carjacking, as he waited to pick up Matthew’s mother from the Pulaski El station. Rovetuso stumbled into a nearby liquor store, where he asked the manager to call the police. He later died at the hospital.
Two years later, the family last saw Matthew on July 5, 1977. He’d had a court appointment for a parking ticket. His mother dropped him off at the commuter train station, where he took the 8 AM down to Harwood Heights, not far from the house of John Gacy.
Later, Matthew phoned his mother around 11 AM to say he was headed into the city to visit his sister at her apartment. Sometime around 6 or 7 PM, he told his sister he was heading back home. No one in the family saw him again.
The Bowmans weren’t the only family to have a double tragedy in their history. John Mowery, then only fourteen, had discovered the body of his sister, Judith, after he’d been sent to her apartment to check on her in November 1972. He found her on the floor of her living room, stabbed to death with three puppies huddled against her.
The murder undoubtedly affected John, who later joined the US Marines after graduating from Amundsen High School. When he returned, he got a job at a bank and took accounting classes at nearby Truman College in Uptown. By September 1977, he had moved into an apartment on Cullom Avenue with a friend known only as “Mike.”
John and Judy’s mother last saw her son at her Sunnyside Avenue home, where John had come for dinner to try and cheer up after the recent death of one of his dogs, who’d been hit and killed by a car that weekend. Rain had begun to fall outside by 10 PM, when John decided to go home. His mother asked him to stay, but he insisted, grabbing a bubble-style umbrella before heading out.
Somewhere in between the raindrops, John Mowery vanished.
So, too, did Tommy Boling, who sat inside a bar watching the movie Bonnie and Clyde when he called his parents to check on his father, who hadn’t been feeling well that evening. Unlike the young men and boys he’d be found among, Tommy had been married with a three-year-old child.
At the time of his disappearance, he’d had a warrant out for his arrest for burglary. He’d also been receiving threatening phone calls at his apartment. The calls had been troubling enough that Tommy had told his mother she should go to the police if she hadn’t heard from him in over twenty-four hours.
Near Tommy Boling, investigators found Robert Winch, who’d run away from his home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in November 1977. What occurred during his time in Chicago is unknown, but before then, the sixteen-year-old had been living in a foster home after difficulties at his own home, where he lived among five siblings, his mother, and a father who taught physics at Kalamazoo College. Like so many young people in those days, Robert’s final destination might have been California. Instead, he’d ended his journey on Summerdale Avenue.
David Talsma’s destination had been Hammond, Indiana, for a concert on the evening of December 9, 1977. Whether he made it is unclear; he had plans to meet up with a girl around 2 AM, but he never showed. Like John Mowery, David Talsma had also spent time in the US Marines. And like John Mowery, and all the other boys, somehow John Gacy had overpowered him and put him in the crawl space.
As their names came in and their families mourned, still one more boy remained missing: Robert Piest, the teenager from Des Plaines whose disappearance had brought investigators to John Gacy’s doorstep for the last time.
As the rivers and lakes around Chicago cracked open with the spring thaw, they yielded one last secret. Near the Dresden Dam on the Illinois River, a trucker saw the pale shape of a body floating near the locks. It was Rob Piest.
“Me and Linda, we had some major cries,” said Joanne Jerger Rusch, who, along with her friend Linda Mertes, had both seen Rob Piest o
n the last evening of his life.
Although they didn’t attend, Rob Piest’s funeral took place on April 18, 1979. Among the mourners, three hundred students as well as faculty from Maine West High School came to pay their respects.
That same month, most of the Gacy house came down in a complete demolition. The driveway had been upturned by men and machines. Inside the house, the walls, flooring, and guts of the former dwelling had already been torn out, tossed into dumpsters that had sat outside during the excavation. The house was a mere skeleton now, hollowed out and empty of its secrets. Gawkers and tourists had trampled over the lot to take photos, and now they gathered once more to watch as demolition claws pulled apart the brick and wood. Although Gacy and his lawyer tried to fight it, the property was completely leveled and removed from the former address of 8213 Summerdale Avenue.
While the families dealt with grief, the investigators faced their own difficulties. One of the investigators, Jim Pickell, died not long after, with his widow citing stress from the case as a factor.
“Anybody who tells you they didn’t have bad dreams about it is not being truthful,” said Rafael Tovar, who’d dug up and brought out so many of the bodies. In news footage, he can be seen wearing colorful rugby shirts. Previously, he was accused of wearing them to catch the cameras, but he insists he wore them for comfort as the house was opened up to the winter cold. After the case, Tovar put the rugby shirts in a drawer and “never touched them again,” except on one occasion when he tried one on. “I broke out into a sweat,” he said. Later, his wife threw out the shirts.
To keep himself sane and separate his work from his life, he had a ritual each day of work. “I had a big twenty-peso coin from Mexico,” said Tovar, who has ties to the country. “I started doing it when I was in narcotics. I saw a lot of nasty shit there. When I went to work in the morning, I had this coin in the ashtray of my car. I put the coin in my pocket—I was on the job. When I came home, I put the coin back in the ashtray, and that’s where the job stayed.”