by David Nelson
Families in Chicago continued to face the trauma of the Gacy case. Just days later, two more families were notified their boys had been inside the crawl space.
Margaret Parker filed a report in October 1976 for her missing son, Kenneth, who’d last been seen at their apartment in the Edgewater neighborhood. Like many other families in the area, they’d come up from Tennessee.
Kenny had his troubles. At the time of his disappearance, he’d been on parole for a previous charge of car theft. His own car—a 1967 Mustang—was found a few days later, not far from the Yankee Doodle in New Town, a restaurant he often frequented with Michael Marino, a fourteen-year-old boy from Uptown, who’d also been reported missing in 1976.
Now, both boys had been identified as Bodies 14 and 15.
Kenneth Parker eventually came to rest in Rosehill Cemetery, just two plots away from Randy Reffett, and not far from Samuel Stapleton. A fourth victim—still unidentified as of 2020—lies buried near them as well.
“It’s different if someone comes to the door and says your brother died in a car accident,” Kenny’s sister, Pennie Johnson, told a reporter. “But it’s awful to think about the kind of death those boys died.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Michael Marino’s sister said to the same reporter, “I wouldn’t mind pulling the switch myself [to execute Gacy.]”
Marino’s mother, Sherry, had filed a report for her son in October 1976. They’d had plans to see a movie together that evening.
At fourteen years old, Michael Marino and Samuel Stapleton were the youngest of John Wayne Gacy’s victims.
In Uptown one day not long after the trial ended, a young man, William Starnes was searching for his thirteen-year-old sister who’d run away from home. He and his father had learned she’d been in the presence of Robert, or Bobby Carroll, the older brother of Billy Carroll, who’d been killed by John Wayne Gacy.
The Carroll family had recently moved to an apartment on Lawrence Avenue. The Starnes family knew the Carrolls well. Starnes’s younger brother had been friends with Billy, even telling a reporter he’d been at Clark and Diversey with Billy the night he disappeared.
But Starnes’s sister was not with the Carrolls. Instead, he and his father found her not far away on Winthrop.
They found Bobby Carroll in the front of a friend’s building, where Starnes stepped forward to confront him. The two quickly fell into an altercation in which Starnes apparently defended himself with a three-inch pocketknife, which he drove through the left side of Bobby’s chest.
When police arrived at the scene, they discovered Bobby Carroll bleeding on the ground. Starnes emerged nearby. “You don’t have to look any further,” he told the officer. “I’m the one who did it. Here’s the knife.”
Bobby was rushed to Weiss Hospital at the end of Eastwood Avenue, not far from their old building where, on his birthday, he’d last seen his younger brother four years prior. During emergency surgery, Bobby died.
Starnes spent a brief time in jail, but a jury later acquitted him on account of self-defense.
With their younger daughter at a care home, Violet and Huey no longer had any other children at home. Huey lived not much longer, dying of an epileptic seizure in 1985. Violet lived on her own until her death in 2007, the last of her family.
There’d been one more witness the prosecution had held on to, in the event Gacy decided to take the stand in his defense. Admittedly, the witness had come forward late—mere weeks before the trial began. He told prosecutors a unique story that took them from the neon-lit bars and disco-ball clubs of New Town to the home of John Wayne Gacy himself.
They’d listened to his story. As a precaution, they even polygraphed him on January 23, 1980, at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. The polygraph examiner found him to be truthful in all his answers.
Despite this, the prosecution had doubts about the witness. “His background was a little shady,” Kunkle recalled. “So we didn’t want to dirty up a clean case.…”
The media never really got wind of the secret witness, though the Sun-Times ran a short blurb about it. They never gave his name.
But not long after the trial, this witness, a young man by the name of Gerald Burress, knocked on MaryJane Piper’s house on Springfield Avenue.
She recognized him. She’d met him several times before in Billy’s presence, though she’d never gotten to know him.
He asked if he could speak with her about something.
“We went upstairs into my room,” MaryJane said. “We sat down, and that’s when I could see him trembling.”
There was a long pause as Gerald looked for the words.
“I have to tell you what happened,” Gerald told her.
“With what? About what?”
“I was there,” Gerald said. “With Billy, I was there.”
“I remember him saying that so well,” MaryJane continued. To Gerald, she said, “You were there? You couldn’t have been there …”
Gerald told her they’d been drinking together. He and Billy had gone inside Gacy’s home.
“He knew he was drugged,” MaryJane explained. “He knew.”
After some time inside the house, Gerald was sent out for cigarettes or beer. So he left. But when he returned to the house, he couldn’t get back inside. “I was so fucked up, I didn’t even know if I was at the right house,” Gerald told her.
“And then he started looking through all the windows,” MaryJane said. “And then he witnessed what Gacy was doing to Billy.”
Through one of the bedroom windows, Gerald saw Gacy kneeling over Billy Kindred on the bed, a rope tightening around the teenager’s neck, twisted hard by the hands of the man who’d invited them inside.
According to the Sun-Times, Gerald and Billy had previously met Gacy at a club in New Town. They’d gone home with him and seen his drugs at the house. Sitting in the same club on February 16, 1978, they decided they would rip off Gacy’s drug supply.
It’s unclear how they got to Gacy’s house, though through the polygraph, it’s possible to surmise Billy arrived via Gacy’s car, while Gerald “staggered” his arrival by cab.
The sight of Billy’s murder had frightened Gerald, who quickly fled into the night. He’d waited almost two years to tell anyone. “Nobody would have believed me,” Gerald told her.
“It traumatized him,” MaryJane recalled. “I could see it in his face.”
Given how police had treated all the cases, including the cases of Jeffrey Rignall or Robert Donnelly, Gacy’s surviving victims, Gerald was likely not wrong.
To this day, MaryJane struggles to remember all the specific details of not only her relationship with Billy but also the circumstances surrounding his disappearance. She’s not even sure if she told investigators about Gerald, though she remembers that winter night in 1978 when Billy called to tell her they were together.
Whatever happened, Gerald had been holding onto it until now. When he finished, regaining some composure, she walked him back downstairs and said good-bye. He walked off and disappeared into the neighborhood.
She never saw him again.
* In prison, Gacy often associated with Richard Lindwall, a former science teacher from Glenbrook North High School, who’d been convicted of the abduction, sexual assault, and murder of a young man, as well as the abductions of two other men. “If I hadn’t been caught, I would have turned into another Gacy,” he later said. “I would have been worse than Gacy.”
* At this point, the prosecution stated Sam’s last known sighting occurred on May 13, 1976—a full day before the date they’d given for Randy Reffett: May 14, 1976, whom he’d allegedly been killed with.
Although the dates in the reports are inconsistent, questions have arisen over the years about whether Randy and Sam were in fact killed on the same day as part of one of Gacy’s self-proclaimed “doubles.”
Given that Clyde Reffett recalled seeing the boys together that evening and Gacy himself attested to the fact t
hat some boys had died together, it’s most likely a mistake within the reports. How Gacy alone managed to subdue and kill two strong and able young men is another question.
* In later accounts of the trial, Amirante would continue going after Donita Ganzon, describing in one particular passage dripping with misogyny how she “sashayed” into the courtroom and “strutted her stuff toward the jury box, outfitted in a standard-issue ‘little black dress’ […] . She was a piece of work.” Even in 1983 Sullivan wrote: “The defense subjected Ganzon to what all of us felt was excessively harsh cross-examination on her sex-change.”
* Hanrahan served as Cook County state’s attorney from 1968 to 1972, during which time his office coordinated with the FBI and Chicago Police to assassinate Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader, during a raid on Hampton’s apartment.
* Donald Voorhees died by suicide in 1997.
* Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko brought Donnelly’s case back into the spotlight with a column on November 2, 1980, criticizing the state’s attorney’s office for not charging Gacy with the assault against Donnelly. State’s Attorney Bernard Carey shot back in a press conference stating the column was a last-minute smear ahead of Election Day and that Donnelly had not been a credible witness due to his history of drug use and mental health issues. “He was not an outstanding citizen when this occurred,” he said. Shortly after, Donnelly filed a lawsuit against the state’s attorney’s office, stating his civil rights had been violated. The lawsuit was dismissed in March, though by then Carey had lost reelection to Richard M. Daley. Among their reasons for not pursuing charges against Gacy, Carey’s office claimed they never saw any marks from the handcuffs Donnelly claimed Gacy put on him, though Ted Janus, the officer assigned to Donnelly’s case, testified that he saw them during the 1980 trial.
11
BOYS COMING HOME
WHILE HER PREGNANT SISTER went back for a routine checkup at the doctor’s office in East Lansing, Beverly Billings Howe sat down in the waiting room. At random, she took a magazine from one of the tables and opened it.
It was 1986.
As she flipped through the magazine, she stopped on a story about the John Wayne Gacy case. A new book called Buried Dreams by Tim Cahill was about to come out, based on the reporting of Russ Ewing, now with Chicago’s ABC affiliate, WLS, who’d covered the case extensively.
Beverly and her family had previously suspected Gacy’s involvement in the disappearance of her cousin, Timothy McCoy, who’d last been seen getting on a bus to Chicago in 1972. Fourteen years had passed.
In an excerpt from the book, Beverly read about Gacy’s first victim, who’d been killed just after New Year’s 1972. He’d been picked up at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Chicago and taken back to Gacy’s house, where the two spent the night together. The next morning, according to Gacy, he awoke to find the boy standing in his bedroom doorway holding a knife. Gacy was able to retrieve the knife and stab his young companion with it.
This body—Body 9—was the first to go inside the crawl space. To investigators, he became known as “the Greyhound bus boy.”
“The lightbulb just went off in my head,” Beverly said.
As they drove home from the doctor’s, Beverly told her sister they needed to talk about something but that she couldn’t do it in the car. So they pulled into a nearby grocery store, where they sat together in the food court. “I want you to read this,” Beverly said, handing her the magazine.
Beverly said nothing in particular about it. She hadn’t underlined anything, just simply passed it over for her sister to read.
“Wow,” her sister said after a few moments.
“I know,” Beverly replied.
They discussed with their mother what to do next. Back in Iowa, where the families had all come from, Aunt Tiny had allegedly sent her nephew’s dental records to Chicago. And nothing had ever happened.
But now they were certain a mistake had been made. This was Tim.
After calls to Chicago for information, they eventually got ahold of the author, Tim Cahill. He told them he would be there in two days to speak directly with them.
During the interview, Beverly and her family recounted the holiday spent with Tim before putting him on a bus back to Iowa. She recalled how she gave him the Model A belt buckle, which he’d loved. This detail was particularly interesting to Cahill. From there, he and Russ Ewing went on a hunt for Tim’s dental records.
By then, Tim’s siblings—Linda, Terry, and Cindy—had all been informed of the possibility Tim might actually have been among the victims recovered from Gacy’s home. “We knew something bad happened to him,” Linda stated.
Eventually, Ewing located Tim’s dental records down in Florida, where the family had previously lived. He then turned them over to the Cook County Medical Examiner. It did not take long for the confirmation. Body 9, the Greyhound bus boy, was Timothy Jack McCoy.
Of course, there were still questions: Why hadn’t his dental records yielded a positive match back when the case broke?
After the identification, Linda and her siblings learned the truth: Aunt Tiny, who’d been in charge of sending the records off in 1979, hadn’t actually sent them off. She’d wanted to spare the family of the possible horror. “She thought she was protecting us,” Linda explained. “We all love Aunt Tiny.”
With help from Russ Ewing and WLS, Tim’s remains were sent home. A week and a half after what would have been Tim’s thirty-first birthday, he was laid to rest beside his father, Jack McCoy, who had died three years prior. The mishap with the dental records had been a blessing, sparing Jack the details of his son’s death. “I think it hurt Dad the most,” Linda said. “Dad never talked about it … and thankfully he passed away before.… So he never had to know.”
Linda could not make the funeral, as her son was about to be born. But as soon as she could, she made her way to Omaha where she stood beside her father’s grave, adorned with an intertwined horseshoe and guitar, and her brother’s, his name underneath a golden mountain.
In 1981 the Funeral Directors Services Association of Greater Chicago donated funerals for the nine boys yet to be identified.
As the case receded from the public view, investigators moved to bury them.
On June 12, 1981, nine coffins were arranged in a semicircle before the chapel for a service that began at the Hillside Cemetery chapel and included a combination of prayers from the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths.
Cook County medical examiner Robert Stein gave a eulogy, stating, “I don’t want to see you go to your resting place just as numbers.”
From there, the remains fanned out across the Chicago metropolitan area to various cemeteries where ceremonies continued. Each boy received a stone marker with the words WE REMEMBERED.
And then, after the identification of Tim McCoy, there were eight. For over thirty years, there would be no further developments.
In the fall of 2011, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office announced they had obtained DNA profiles from all eight victims. Along with the profiles, they assigned tentative time frames for each murder based on Gacy’s statements as well as their placement in the crawl space relative to other victims.
Based on this information, Sheriff Thomas Dart asked the public to come forward if they had had a young male family member go missing anytime between 1972 and 1978.
Only a month later, investigators returned with their first identification: William Bundy, a nineteen-year-old boy from the Buena Park section of Uptown. In the days before his disappearance in October 1976, he’d been working in construction.
“He was a street kid, like the rest of us,” a friend, Scott Doleman remembered. “Trying to make the best of a life of struggle …”
Phil Couillard had remembered his friend Dale Landingin leading a group of boys to confront rival gang members who had previously roughed up Bill Bundy. In Uptown, the orbits of many of these boys had often grazed one another.
Much like the
McCoys, the Bundy family had also suspected Gacy murdered their son. When the case broke, they attempted to locate dental records but found Bill’s dentist had since retired and destroyed all his files.
Although Bill Bundy’s parents had passed away by the time of his identification, his sister and brother found consolation that their brother’s unidentified remains had been buried in the same cemetery as other relatives. For years, they’d been coming to the cemetery without knowing how close their brother had actually been.
Only two months before Bill Bundy, Gacy killed James Haakenson. The sixteen-year-old had walked into his family’s kitchen one day with his brown hair bleached blond, informing them he was headed to Chicago.
Jimmy’s father was absent for part of his life, and his mother worked long hours to support him and his siblings. James often left home, sometimes for extended periods.
But Jimmy called home on August 5, 1976, to let his mother know he’d made it to Chicago. It’s possible he died later that day or sometime the next. A month later, Jimmy’s mother reported him missing, telling police she thought he might be in the “company of gays in Chicago.”
In 2017 after a nephew decided to find out what happened to his uncle, police informed the Haakenson family that Body 24 was indeed Jimmy. His body remained in its spot with a new marker.
Among the many reports and documentation, there are dozens of names for potential victims, young men from Chicago or its surrounding environs or even all over the country and the world.
Billy Shields went missing in June 1977 at the age of twenty-two. In July 1979 his sister Kathy wrote to the Chicago Tribune, stating, “He was a patient of Chicago Read Mental Health Center and was diagnosed as schizophrenic.” Kathy added that the family indeed contacted the Cook County medical examiner but heard nothing.
Jeffrey Stinnett never returned to his apartment near the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor early in 1978. His mother quickly filed a police report in which she indicated “her son may have joined a religious cult owing to his attitude in the past year.” Today, his sister, Nancy Kubinski, has no leading theory regarding her brother’s disappearance, only that she believes he is deceased. “I really don’t believe he would have walked away from the family,” Nancy said. “He was still connected to us and cared about us.”