by David Nelson
While most of the investigators considered the Gacy excavation one of the worst scenes they’d ever worked, only a month would pass before another tragedy unfolded not far away. Bound for Los Angeles on a clear day before Memorial Day weekend 1979, American Airlines Flight 191 spent less than a minute airborne before slamming into a field near a mobile trailer park just north of Touhy Avenue in Des Plaines. Several cars, a hangar, and one of the mobile homes were destroyed upon impact. Smoke could be seen from as far away as downtown Chicago.
That Memorial Day weekend—and for many days after—Genty and several others who’d pulled young bones out of Gacy’s crawl space, now wandered through the wreckage of Flight 191, finding what they could of the 258 passengers, thirteen crew, and the two civilians killed on the ground. In less than a few months, they’d gone from the site of the country’s worst mass murder to the site of the country’s worst aviation disaster.
MaryJane had California on her mind that May of 1979. After Billy’s disappearance, she’d gotten together with Jerry, one of the few friends who’d believed her about Billy. Now, she and Jerry were traveling back and forth from California, taking things with them to try to build what they thought might be a life together there. Jerry knew about Billy, though they’d never met. He knew part of MaryJane was still searching for him. Maybe they both knew deep down that if Billy returned, Jerry was a bit of a placeholder.
But for now, as they sat eating dinner in her family’s home on Springfield Avenue, she let herself have a moment to relax. They had tickets to see Bad Company at the Chicago Stadium in a few days.
Someone knocked at the door, and either her mother or grandmother got up to answer it. A woman on the porch asked for her by name. As MaryJane stepped up to the front door, the woman introduced herself as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.
“OK, yeah, what do you want with me?” MaryJane asked.
“Well, I’m here about the Gacy incident,” the reporter answered.
“And I knew,” MaryJane recalled. “I knew that Billy was in there.”
Truth be told, she’d considered it long before. She’d even gone to Billy’s family with her belief, but they hadn’t quite been willing to accept it. In the weeks that ensued—as winter turned to spring—MaryJane had worked with Lola, Billy’s mother, to retrieve and send in his dental charts.
The first emotion MaryJane felt was rage. “I wanted to smash this woman through the wall,” she said of the reporter who stood by, noting her reaction to the news. Although MaryJane was angry and tearful, she allowed the reporter to ask her questions for the story.
Throughout the next few days, MaryJane passed through a range of emotions. At times, she found herself yelling at Jerry or her mother. In other moments, she fell into despair and could hardly keep from crying. When someone tried to help her, she turned back to anger. “See, I told you,” MaryJane told them. “I told you something was wrong.”
As the week unfolded, Billy’s family gathered in Chicago to make the funeral arrangements and say good-bye to their son. At the home of a family friend, Lola and Syble, Billy’s sister, discussed the plan for the visitation and the funeral. But Lola seemed fixated on one thing. “She kept repeating herself, saying, ‘I wonder if there’s going to be anything in that coffin,” remembered Syble.
Lola continued to feel uneasy, wondering what remained of her son for them to gather around.
“The next day, something came over me,” Syble said. “I had to do this for my mom.” Alone, Syble went to the funeral home, a large Victorian-style home that had been converted into a funeral parlor, not far from the neighborhood where the family had once lived. Syble explained to one of the undertakers that her mother had been having a difficult time. She’d come to see if they’d let her view the remains of her brother.
They took Syble downstairs to the private rooms where they prepared bodies for their wakes. On a metal table, she saw a long black bag.
“Syble, are you sure you want to see this?” the undertaker asked.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she replied. “I’m doing this for my mom.”
The undertaker unzipped the first bag. Beneath that was another bag.
“Syble, are you OK?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m all right.”
Again, he unzipped it, revealing a third bag underneath. This was the last one.
“Are you all right, Syble?” he asked again.
She nodded. The undertaker moved.
“When he opened that bag, I felt like something cut me right in half,” Syble said of the moment she saw her brother Billy. “I could feel my legs floating.…”
Of all the boys, Billy had spent the shortest time inside the Summerdale crawl space. While more remained of Billy than others, Syble now looked upon mostly bones and sinew. And yet, there was the unmistakable sight of a tattoo on Billy’s arm: “L.W.,” for Lola Woods, his mother. Syble knew it was him.
“And then he closed the bag,” she said.
Syble and MaryJane spent time together during the visitation later in the week. MaryJane remembers wading quietly through Billy’s family and friends from the neighborhood. She remembers one of Billy’s cousins getting in trouble after sneaking off into the funeral home with a boy.
Billy’s old best friend, Danny Jockell, did not attend the visitation. He hadn’t heard specifics about the services, having gotten busy with his own life in the years since Billy’s disappearance, though he did hear about Billy’s involvement in the case. At first, he and other boys from the neighborhood had been shocked. “And then we start putting pieces together,” Danny recalled. “That’s why we hadn’t seen him.”
During the visitation, she approached one of the funeral directors, explaining that she’d brought her grandmother’s rosary with her, and that she wanted to place it inside Billy’s casket. The funeral director told her that if she stuck around after everyone left, he’d see what he could do.
MaryJane waited. She circled through the guests, keeping her eyes on Billy’s casket, as people came and went from the funeral home. After even Billy’s family had left for the evening, she met with the funeral director once more. He asked her to come back to his office where he’d retrieve the key. As he looked through his desk, MaryJane took a seat. The key itself was not any ordinary key—coffin keys are long, with handle-like rods—and it was hard to misplace. He could not find it.
Then the funeral director looked up at MaryJane. He got up from his desk, came over and sat beside her. The funeral director bent over and grabbed something from the floor underneath MaryJane’s chair.
“I don’t even know how this got here,” he said, holding the key.
With the key in hand, he led her back to the empty visitation room. “I remember floating back to the casket,” MaryJane said.
The man put the key into the casket and opened it just a notch for Mary-Jane to reach inside and drop the rosary. She felt sad and heavy, but also glad she’d been given this opportunity. The funeral director stepped away to give her a moment, telling her to take all the time she needed.
In the silent funeral parlor, MaryJane took a seat in one of the chairs facing the casket. She cried for a bit, as she stared at Billy’s casket. But mostly, she was quiet as she contemplated what had happened and what she’d lost.
The next day, Billy’s remains were transported to Indiana, to Little Memory Cemetery, just over the border from Harrison, Ohio, where his family now lived.
For the ride down, MaryJane sat mostly in silence with Billy’s sister, Imogene, along with Imogene’s husband and three children—Billy’s nieces, who had always been so excited to see him when he visited.
At the cemetery, MaryJane remembers standing under a tent at Billy’s grave. Nearby, Billy’s brother, Michael—who had died over six years prior—lay waiting for his older brother to join him.
She doesn’t recall much about that day. There were prayers and hymns, but mostly, she remembers how beautiful and clear that spring day had b
een. At times, MaryJane felt out of place as she moved about his family, there at the cemetery as well as back at Lola’s home. She stayed close to Syble, who had always felt warmly toward MaryJane.
On the way back to Chicago, again mostly in silence, they came to a stop on a rural highway, with traffic at a standstill ahead of them. MaryJane and Imogene and her family all stepped outside in the sun to see what was happening up the road. Some cows from a nearby pasture had crossed onto the highway, bringing the traffic to a halt. In the middle of nowhere, on another bright spring day headed into another bright summer, they shared a laugh.
MaryJane was now approaching nineteen, the same age at which Billy Kindred’s life had ended. They’d only had six months together, and with every year that would pass, this became an even smaller fraction of the life she’d live.
Within those six months were the small, singular moments that had made up their relationship, and that would continue to resonate throughout MaryJane’s life like an echo, unending, turning in time. The moment she put her thumb out for a ride on a busy street on a summer day. The moment he’d told her, unflinchingly, that he loved her. The moment she spent lying beside him in a hotel bed in a new year only hours old. The mere seconds she spent listening to him tell her through the telephone that he’d be over soon. And finally, the last moments they’d ever have alone together, as she cried softly beside a casket holding all that remained of the boy named Billy Kindred.
Two families in other parts of the country watched the events unfolding in Chicago with great interest.
“When Gacy got caught, we thought, oh my God,” Linda McCoy said. “This might be what happened to Tim.” Just after New Year’s Day in 1972, her brother Tim McCoy had stopped in Chicago on his way home from visiting relatives in Michigan. Although his cousins remembered seeing him get on the bus, those waiting for him in Nebraska never saw him get off.
“We were sure that he was one of the victims,” said Beverly Billings Howe, the cousin who had spent some of Tim’s final days with him.
Listening to the news, the family knew they had to secure Tim’s dental records and send them to the Chicago police for verification. Among the family, they decided that Aunt Tiny—the woman who had gone to pick up Tim from the bus station in Nebraska—would be the one to go about gathering Tim’s records and sending them in. “She was a teacher. She was always really smart,” Linda said, “so she handled this part of it.”
This was a family effort, though, as all of them had always been close. They all loved Tim, and they all wanted him back in their care, whether he was alive or dead.
But as months passed, and the media frenzy faded as it waited for a trial, nothing happened. “We thought maybe he was too badly decomposed to identify,” Beverly said.
By then, they’d waited seven years. Now they would have to wait more.
The Conner family had also been waiting since 1975 to learn what had become of Craig, their musical brother and son.
Like the other families, the Conners also secured copies of Craig’s dental records and sent them off. And then they waited.
Although they heard nothing from Chicago, Craig’s name had garnered interest among investigators. His name featured frequently in some of the reports. For a time, Craig’s name was part of the “hot list,” which comprised young men that the police deemed potential victims.
And yet, despite that, the Conner family and the McCoy family continued to wait.
MaryJane did not return to California. Jerry left without her, and the two broke up, though they maintained a friendship. Instead, she moved back in with her mother and grandparents at the house on Springfield Avenue.
Investigators had started calling upon her to speak with them and give her statements. They were building their case against John Wayne Gacy for the upcoming trial to begin sometime in the following year.
In June 1979 MaryJane drove herself up to the sheriff’s station in Niles to speak with officers there. They had her flip through a book of photographs featuring belongings found in the house. She picked out the medallions. A week later, she returned to the station where they asked her a range of questions about the last time she’d seen or spoken to Billy.
Inexplicably, investigators also told her about the state they’d found Billy in. From news reports, MaryJane had heard of the skeletonized remains. She knew far more than she needed to know, but now the investigators were walking her through the grave site in horrifying detail.
Across a table, they spread out the items she’d identified through photographs. She recognized the broken tiger’s eye belt buckle, one of two that had been found among the bodies. Next, she saw the Catholic medallions that had originally belonged to her grandfather, and which she’d given to Billy. When she asked if she could get them back, the investigators informed her she could retrieve them after the trial concluded.
But then they showed her one last item. Laid out upon the table, MaryJane recognized the leather jacket Billy had worn that final winter. The coat had brought up a distinct odor, the musty scent of death, that MaryJane recognized. Though she’d never smelled it before, she knew what it was.
“I never want to see or smell that coat ever again,” she said.
She continued to have moments where her rage consumed her, sometimes flashing at her family in ways she couldn’t control. Other times, she was too tripped out on acid to notice how truly sad she felt. In some ways, acid helped get her through those days, as the 1970s came to a close.
In the next year, she would have to face the truths of Billy’s death head-on. She would have to grapple with its effects—seen and unseen—on her life and the lives of the people around her. As the curtain fell upon the decade, she would have to face John Wayne Gacy himself.
They all would.
* John Gacy later admitted he’d gotten the idea for his makeshift pillory after reading about the Corll case.
* One of the most perplexing and lingering mysteries of the Gacy case is a series of phone calls to the Butkovich family beginning in October 1975. Marko Butkovich, John’s father, answered and spoke with a young woman who informed him his son was alive and well in Puerto Rico. When the family got their phone bill, they called the number back and learned the call had come from a “hamburger hut” in Puerto Rico. The owner, who spoke with Marko, said a young man had been seen there in the company of two young girls. One or two more calls occurred during the next few months. It’s still unknown who made these phone calls or why.
10
THE GALLERY OF GRIEF
CHICAGO HAD ALREADY COMMANDED the nation’s interest with previous trials like the 1922 trial of Leopold and Loeb, or the more recent trial of the Chicago Seven. For a few weeks in the winter of 1980, the nation would now return to the city to hear lurid details of the contractor and the boys inside his home. Although the victims had been found literally under the feet of their killer, there was still uncertainty and suspense surrounding the conclusion of the case.
For William Kunkle, Bob Egan, and Terry Sullivan, the Cook County state’s attorney’s prosecution team, there was considerable work to be done in order to ensure Gacy was convicted of murder.
Kunkle had first learned of the case during a call sometime after midnight on the day of the second search warrant, after he’d settled into a sleep that would hopefully cure his hangover from the Twenty-Sixth Street Trial Division’s Christmas party earlier that evening. On the other end of the phone was Terry Sullivan, a state’s attorney supervisor for the Third District, quickly rattling off facts of the case unfolding in the unincorporated area of Norwood Park Township. “There was no municipal police department in that area,” Kunkle explained. “So by law, by statute in Illinois, the Cook County Sheriff is responsible for police protection.” The Des Plaines police stayed on, as they handled Rob Piest’s disappearance.
His head reeling from the party, Kunkle took a few moments before the words actually resonated with him.
Kunkle and Egan were bo
th on the scene the next day, speaking with Dr. Stein as bodies came up from the ground underneath them. While Egan stayed on as liaison on-site, Kunkle still remembered the scene inside. “It was very musty and foul-smelling,” Kunkle said. “Much of that was simply from the bad drainage in the crawlspace.… It was always damp, if not flooded.… But of course, on top of it there were [twenty-six] bodies in the crawl space.”
As the investigation on the property subsided, preparation for the trial continued. Thirty-three bodies, each with a story to tell, each with witnesses and loved ones who could prove vital—all of it had to be meticulously recorded.
Kunkle, Egan, and Sullivan were part of a large joint task force compiled from members of the state’s attorney office, the sheriff’s office, Chicago Police, Des Plaines Police, and other municipal departments. Various investigators and detectives fanned out throughout Chicago, and even the country, to interview witnesses and experts.
“[Gacy] was pretty much down to an insanity defense at that time,” Kunkle remarked. “There was simply no question that was going to be the defense.” Indeed, Sam Amirante had already assembled his own team that was now putting Gacy in front of psychiatrists and psychologists. Early on, Gacy even claimed he had multiple personalities, including one called “Jack” who hated “homosexuals” and “hustlers.”
Kunkle and his team had their own roster of specialists who would counter any theories of insanity or multiple personality disorder from the defense team. Despite this, the case was not necessarily a “slam dunk,” and as the first day of the trial started, there was still nervousness, still trepidation among all those who wanted to see John Wayne Gacy put away for good.