by David Nelson
Patti listened as her mother spoke. “He spent eight years at St. Stanislaus Kostka Grammar School, two years at Gordon Tech High School, and two years at Maine West High School,” Rosemarie said.
“Did he graduate from Maine West High School?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Prior to the last time that you saw John, Mrs. Szyc, did you know him to date females?”
“Yes,” she replied.
Like all the other mothers, Rosemarie talked through the final time seeing her son and the call from Johnny’s landlord some days later that brought her inside his apartment. “All my son’s winter coats, all his clothes were there,” she said. “His income tax papers were on the table as though he had been working on it. His one coat was laying across the bed, and some clothes were hanging on a chair outside the bathroom, as though he had taken a shower. His supper dishes were on the sink, washed and lined up, but his TV and clock radio and small items were missing as far as we could tell.”
Rosemarie described looking for Johnny’s car on the street. “But we couldn’t find it anywhere.”
She told them about hearing of bodies found on Summerdale Avenue, how not long after police questioned her about a graduation ring from Maine West. She spoke about turning over paperwork for her son’s television set and his car.
“Showing you now what has been marked as People’s Exhibit 19,” Sullivan said, “do you recognize the photograph, Mrs. Szyc?”
“Yes, it’s Johnny.”
He joined the others.
The defense had little to ask about Johnny, so Rosemarie was dismissed. Patti watched as her mother stepped down from the stand.
“Other than the end,” Patti said, looking back, “the one moment that sticks out in my head is at one point, when the state’s attorney was talking about my brother, [Gacy] made a smirk.… I was looking at him, and I could hear my brother’s name mentioned, and he just got this smirk on his face. Like almost like it was a joke.… That little moment, that lasted ten seconds … it told me he remembered specifically my brother.”
“My mom was a wreck,” Randy Stapleton said of the evening after the first day of testimony. No doubt most of those inside the courtroom that day returned home emotionally spent.
Inside the apartment, Bill did his best to calm his wife. When she had finally settled down, Bill Stapleton found a space to himself in the apartment, now quiet. Randy found him alone and crying. “That’s the first time I saw my dad cry,” Randy said. “He just broke down.”
“I wouldn’t wish that [on] nobody to go and look at the person who destroyed your family,” Juanita recalled. “It was just terrible.”
Nevertheless, although Bessie’s testimony was finished, they would return the next day, and the next day, and the day after that, until their son’s murderer was found guilty. But even that was not necessarily a certainty.
Families continued testimony the next day, starting first with relatives of Matthew Bowman, who’d gone missing in July 1977.
His mother, Marie Todorich, spoke about dropping him off at the train station that morning. His sister, Laura Mortell, described seeing him later in the day.
The ritual continued: Matthew Bowman’s photograph took its place among the other boys he’d lain beside for over a year.
The uncle of Robert Gilroy testified next. In response to Bob Egan, Thomas Gilroy noted that Robert’s home at the Pavilion Apartments complex was only about half a mile from Gacy’s house.
On September 15, 1977, his nephew left to go buy his girlfriend a card. After that, he was going to practice horseback riding, Gilroy’s passion.
Like Gregory Godzik, Robert Gilroy had attended Taft High School. In 1976 their names were recorded together in the index, just lines away from one another.
Days later, John Mowery went missing, his mother, Dolores Nieder, testified.
She went on to explain requesting John’s dental records from the US Marine Corps, as well as identifying a Western-style suede jacket found inside the house.
The gallery of grief grew.
Norma Nelson, from Cloquet, Minnesota, helped add her son Russell’s photograph to the board.
She recounted the call she received while she was staying at the hospital in October 1977. Russell had called to wish her a happy birthday, which had occurred just several days before. Russell had been planning a trip around the United States with a friend.
Not long after, that friend phoned from Chicago to tell them Russell had gone missing.
Upon cross-examination, Sam Amirante asked Norma Nelson about her son’s girlfriend.
“I will not divulge that,” Norma replied. “She is trying to make a life of her own. And she is very upset about this.…”
“She is not available to testify then?”
“Right, she is too upset,” Norma reiterated. “Once they had been planning to marry and had children’s names picked out. I think you can understand that, can’t you, sir?”
Amirante asked her too about Robert Young, the friend from South Dakota he was traveling with.
“I never met him,” Norma said, although she discussed phone conversations she’d had with him after Russell’s disappearance. “He told us two different stories. He told us first Russ disappeared at [Crystal’s] Blinkers. And the next day he turned around and said Russ disappeared on his own at a different place. We had two different stories.”
“OK, do you know what Blinkers is?”
“Yes, I believe it’s a disco bar.”
Later, when Amirante continued to press her about Bughouse Square and Crystal’s Blinkers, referred to as simply Blinkers, she replied, “I am sorry, sir. My recollection is not well. I wish I could forget other things as easy.”
From Kalamazoo, Michigan, Joyce Winch spoke about her son, Robert Winch’s journey to the crawl space. She recounted how Robert spent weekdays at a foster home due to problems at home. On the last day she saw her sixteen-year-old son, she agreed to let him visit a friend’s house under the condition he return at five o’clock that afternoon. He never did.
Arvenia Boling recalled the final conversation she had with her son, Tommy Boling. She told Bill Kunkle of the double-ring ceremony her son had had for his marriage. As the court watched, he showed her that ring once more, which she confirmed as Tommy’s.
By now, the prosecution had come to the final months of the 1977 murders with Pearl Talsma taking the stand to discuss her son, David Talsma.
She told them how he’d volunteered for the US Marines while down in Florida earlier in 1977. At the time of his death later that year, he’d been on inactive duty right until the day he stepped out of their home to go to a concert in Hammond-Whiting, Indiana.
Upon cross-examination, Bob Motta attempted to call into question a letter Pearl Talsma had written to Gacy before the trial began. Mrs. Talsma had written that she’d forgiven Gacy for murdering her son.
But Motta wasn’t concerned about forgiveness, he tried instead to bring up an insinuation she had made about Gacy’s mental state.
The line of questioning was quickly struck down.
MaryJane had little faith in the justice system. Years before, the father of some neighborhood friends had shot his wife to death in front of their children. The man had been convicted and sentenced to twenty years. He’d been out in only seven.
To MaryJane, it was only a matter of time before Gacy himself was released. She paid little attention to the proceedings, though she knew eventually she’d be called to testify. “It needed to be done,” she said, “and I needed to be part of it on behalf of Billy.”
But she had her own distractions to deal with.
The Sunday before the start of the trial, MaryJane had been in a car accident on Western Avenue. Another driver had rear-ended her, severely enough that they admitted MaryJane to Roosevelt Hospital for injuries to her ribs, back, and neck. As a result, she was in traction with a neck brace until she healed.
On the day of her testimony, the
state’s attorney’s office signed MaryJane out and took her by ambulance to the courthouse downtown. She was wheeled to the front of the courtroom and sworn in. Sullivan instructed the jury to raise their hands if they had trouble hearing MaryJane, who could hardly project her voice with the brace around her.
Sam Amirante suggested her testimony be stipulated, so that she would not have to physically testify.
Prosecutor Terry Sullivan turned to MaryJane. “Miss [Piper], do you have any problem with testifying here today?”
“No,” she replied.
Once more, MaryJane stepped back through her brief time with Billy. In testimony, she recalled the day she’d first met him.
“Did you begin to date him after July 28, 1977?”
“Yes, I did.”
Sullivan continued, “How often would you see him?”
“Every day …”
“Had you two in fact planned on becoming married?”
“Yes.”
He asked her then about the items she’d identified from Gacy’s home, the ones previously belonging to her grandfather, and which she’d given Billy. Now they were People’s Exhibit No. 32.
She identified them as the medallions formerly belonging to her.
“Had you ever met an individual by the name of John Gacy?” Sullivan asked.
“Yes, I have.”
“I ask you to look around the courtroom today and advise the jury whether or not you see him in the courtroom.”
MaryJane answered, “Yes, I have seen him in this courtroom.”
“Are you able to point him out, or can you describe where he is and what he is wearing?”
Confined by her neck brace, MaryJane could hardly see out into the crowd listening to her testimony. Like Judy Patterson, she faltered, but eventually found him at the defense table.
She’d met him before by the most twisted turns of fate.
“How did you meet him?” Sullivan asked.
“He sketched my picture and came up to me in the bar and handed it to me.”
“Did he introduce himself?”
“Yes, because he signed his signature to the picture.”
But there was another time too. Although today MaryJane remembers them almost as a single event, on the stand, she recalled them as distinct incidents.
“Did you again see Mr. Gacy in the Good Luck Lounge?” Sullivan said, referring to an event in November of 1978.
“Yes, I did,” she answered. “He brought me a drink, and he tried—he asked me if I was interested in coming to a party, a dinner party, and it would have been held on December 21, and it was going to be a big doing with a lot of important people.”
In fact, MaryJane testified to encountering Gacy four or five times. Looking back at those moments, it’s tempting to think John Wayne Gacy was playing a maniacal trick on her, almost taunting her with an invite to the place where her boyfriend had died. To the best of her knowledge, she’d never encountered Gacy while in the presence of Billy Kindred before he disappeared.
There would have been no way for them to know their connection to one another. It was sheer coincidence that she ever crossed paths with a serial killer, let alone the serial killer that murdered the love of her life whose photo was now affixed to the gallery of grief.
MaryJane began to cry in the courtroom. The prosecution asked for a recess, and for a moment she was free. The break was brief, though, and before she could return to the hospital Bob Motta wanted to cross-examine her.
“What type of injuries do you have?” he asked.
She did her best to describe her prognosis.
“Are you under any form of medication right now?” he pressed.
“Yes, I am, but I haven’t had any today,” she said.
Motta fired off question after question.
“Was [Gacy] with his wife, Carol?”
“Do you know a man named Michael Rossi?”
“Do you know a man named David Cram?”
“When did you have your car accident?”
MaryJane answered each question. As she did, she tried to speak up. “Could you please—”
Sullivan spoke over her to object to a previous question. Motta replied, but MaryJane tried again. “Could you do me a favor?” she asked.
Motta ignored her. “Could you answer the question?”
The questioning continued until she tried again.
“Could you please—I would like Mr. Gacy to please stop staring at me,” she said firmly. She looked up at the judge for assistance.
Later, looking back at it all, MaryJane said, “I remember feeling like he knows me. He knows who I am.” She could feel him there, even though she couldn’t bring herself to look at him directly. Through all the eyes looking at her, she could feel his gaze stronger than others.
The questioning continued without any reprimand to Gacy.
“What neighborhoods did he frequent? Didn’t he frequent Broadway and Diversey?”
“What sort of drugs were you taking before you came into court?”
“Did you take drugs yesterday?”
“Do you feel sleepy?”
“Are you in pain?”
And then it ended. The questions ceased, like a rainstorm passing. She was wheeled away, still shaking, to the ambulance waiting outside to drive her back to the hospital.
That evening, like many evenings that followed, whenever coverage of the case came on during the news, her nurses would come in and quietly change the channel, sparing her the pain of reliving everything she’d been reliving over and over since that day in 1978 when Billy never showed up.
Testimony for the day had not concluded, and though reporters in the courtroom had already gotten plenty to fill their stories, the trial had one more moment of drama.
The prosecution next called a young Filipino woman, Donita Ganzon, to the stand. A slot in the gallery of grief awaited her friend, Timothy O’Rourke, whom she last saw sometime before midnight in fall 1977 as he headed out to buy cigarettes, several months before his body was found in the Des Plaines River. Owing to his wayward lifestyle in those months, Ganzon was the last verifiable witness to Tim’s whereabouts.
She spoke about the few months Tim had lived with her, how she remembered the distinctive tattoo on his left arm with the words “Tim Lee.”
“Would you explain that, please?”
“Well, he was a very avid fan of Bruce Lee …”
She positively identified a photograph of Tim’s tattoo. Then she identified Tim himself.
Sam Amirante came in quickly for cross-examination. “Miss Ganzon, is it Miss or Mrs.?” he asked.
“Miss Ganzon.”
“How long has your name been Donita?”
The prosecution objected but was overruled. Amirante repeated the question.
“Since March 1977,” Donita replied.
“What was it before that?”
“Don Ganzon.”
Amirante asked a few questions about Timothy O’Rourke but returned quickly to Donita’s history. “How long have you been a female?” he asked.
Again, the prosecution objected, but the judge overruled it.
“I am in the process of being a woman,” Donita answered.
“So when you met Timothy, you were not a female, were you?”
“That is right.”
Donita discussed meeting Tim at a party on Broadway, but that he was just a friend.
“So you were not in love with him?”
For a third time, the prosecution objected. This time Judge Garippo agreed, though Amirante ignored it and asked again to a fourth objection.
“I was not in love with him,” Donita replied.
Amirante tried to get her to go into detail about a statement she made, and though she struggled to remember, eventually he showed her documents. “Do you remember telling them that Timothy O’Rourke said he was in love with you?”
“Yes, he was in love with me,” Donita said.
“And you told
that to the investigators?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Have you had the sex change operation yet?
Objection—sustained.
“No, I haven’t,” she replied anyway.
“That means you’re still a man?” Amirante said.
“You don’t have to answer the question,” Judge Garippo interjected after a sixth objection.
The method of attack had been to undermine Donita as a credible witness through obvious homophobia and transphobia,* while turning Tim’s sexuality into an excuse for his meeting John Wayne Gacy. Ultimately, it is telling that the defense team took two witnesses—Roger Sahs, a gay man, and Ganzon, a transgender woman—as opportunities to conveniently ignore their attempt to go easy on the life and death witnesses.
Frequently, Amirante and Bob Motta asked about physical features like hair color of the victims, in an attempt to establish Gacy’s compulsion for specific types of young men.
They would have more opportunities to call into question the compulsions and eccentricities of Gacy. But for now, the families would finish having their say.
Denise Landingin wanted to see the man who had supposedly murdered her brother.
“I wanted him to see my face,” she said.
Inside the crowded courtroom, Denise took a spot about five rows back from Gacy himself.
She hadn’t expected the scene to be quite like how it unfolded. She hadn’t thought about the crowds gathering around Gacy as if he were holding court. “I didn’t think I was going to be sitting there looking at this man,” Denise recalled, “and he [could] turn around and look at everybody like it was nothing. Like he was a big star.”
She knew there was security around, but nevertheless, she reached down to take off a shoe.
Sitting beside her, her husband stopped her. “I couldn’t think of anything else,” she explained. “I just wanted to hit him right in the head so bad.”
Sobbing and barely able to breathe, she got up and left before the proceedings could begin. As she hurried down the aisle toward the door, she drifted through the crowd just like she’d done at her brother’s wake. “No sound, just crowds of people,” she said. “Just my heart just breaking.”