by David Nelson
During one of his interrogations, Gacy even indicated as much. “There are others involved,” he said.
“Directly or indirectly?” Officer Mike Albrecht asked.
“Directly.”
Jeffrey Rignall, during his attack in 1978, reported seeing another individual in the room with them as Gacy tortured him. He stated this on the stand in 1980 again. Elsewhere in the house, Rignall recalled, a light came on as Gacy busied himself.
While none of the men were ever charged, and Gacy’s lawyers never used this as a tangible part of his defense, Gacy continued to raise this possibility from prison, especially when it came time for his appeals. While Gacy’s ever-changing story makes him an unreliable witness, there is some plausibility to this claim: Gacy traveled frequently for work, visiting job sites in progress. His mother and sister relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he often visited them. “I don’t understand how the hell there could be thirty people buried in the house,” Gacy later said to a reporter. “Like I said again, in ’77, I was gone too goddamn much, I was never home.”
Sherry Marino’s attorneys, Steven Becker and Robert Stephenson, were also involved in bringing attention to various business records in recent years that revealed Gacy was indeed out of town in 1977 during the disappearance of Robert Gilroy, renovating a pharmacy called Weber Drugs in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
A ticket for Allegheny Airlines shows Gacy flew out from Chicago to Pittsburgh on September 12 and returned on September 16. Eighteen-year-old Robert Gilroy was last seen on September 15, a full day before Gacy was back. (Another airline ticket among Gacy’s business records states that sometime after that he flew to Newark, New Jersey, aboard American Airlines Flight 636, returning September 20.)
Only a few weeks later, Russell Nelson vanished outside Crystal’s Blinkers, according to his friend, Robert Young, with whom he’d been traveling. Young, also known as “the Cowboy,” filed the police report and kept Russell’s family apprised up the situation for several days. But soon the nature of the calls shifted. He told Russell’s mother that he knew Russell had travelers checks on him. He asked her to send him money. His tone became more aggressive.
When Russell’s father and brothers arrived in Chicago to look for Russell, they met with Robert Young. During one conversation, Young mentioned he knew a contractor who could get both of the brothers work.
Young died in 1987 in California.
John Mowery was last seen in September 1977 leaving his mother’s home on Sunnyside Avenue for his apartment on Cullom, a short walk away. He shared this apartment with a roommate the family knew only as “Mike.”
Two female friends of John Mowery contacted Steve Becker and Robert Stephenson, to tell them about their interactions with “Mike” leading up to and after Mowery’s disappearance. Two days before his disappearance, “Mike,” who had moved into the apartment less than a week before Mowery’s disappearance, had been heard telling Mowery about a man he wanted him to meet.
The last time one of these friends spoke with Mowery, he answered the phone and told her there’d been an accident. One of his two dogs had been hit and killed by a car.
After not hearing from Mowery for a several days, one of the female friends and a cousin went to his apartment. Mike the roommate told them that indeed one of the dogs had been killed, and that Mowery had left his keys and groceries on the counter. “Mike” even asked if the girls wanted Mowery’s other dog.
Later, when the girls were shown a picture, they confirmed the roommate had been none other than Michael Rossi. Back in the 1970s, they’d made a rhyme out of his name, which they still recall today—“Bossy Rossi.”
Most ominous of all, “Mike” made a damning comment regarding a place he knew with a lot of dead bodies that even the police did not know about. The women reported this to police, though nothing ever came of it.
In 2012 Becker and Stephenson brought the information to the attention of the sheriff’s office and the media.*
Rossi, of course, had lived and worked with Gacy. They had developed what was effectively a father-son-relationship, albeit a troubled one. “I was hard on Mike,” Gacy wrote from jail, “harder then [sic] on most, but I treated him like he was my own family and he knew it. And took full advantage of it.”
According to Gacy, the relationship was indeed sexual. He recounted coercing Rossi into oral sex one evening, before grooming him as a regular sexual partner. “As he had pick up I [sic] of my actions and deeds,” Gacy said. “Even some of the bad one [sic] along with the good ones.”
Gacy once recalled that Rossi said, “I couldn’t fire him because he knew fo [sic] Greg Godsik [sic]. I asked him what about godszik [sic] he knew bout him working for me and then disappearing. I said so, but he never explained what he knew.”
Over the course of the investigation, police interviewed Rossi on numerous occasions. During one interrogation, his mother arrived at the station demanding to see her son. While police did eventually let her in to see Rossi (whom they found in tears after she left), she also mentioned having connections to powerful politicians in the city. Today, there are many who believe she helped quash any potential charges against him.
Sometime after the case, Karen Kuzma, Gacy’s sister, was allowed to go through and collect some belongings that had been in police storage. Underneath one piece of furniture, she discovered several photographs depicting Gacy, Rossi, and an unknown young man engaged in sexual activity. In disgust, she destroyed the photographs.
In 1982 Rossi and several others were involved in the kidnapping and beating of a male neighbor. While the jury acquitted Rossi of aggravated kidnapping, they were hung on charges of aggravated battery. Prosecutors decided to pursue simple battery charges instead, to which Rossi pled guilty.
The victim in the trial later recalled Rossi telling his fellow abductors, “I’ll do the tying. I have experience tying knots.”
The jury reportedly wept when they heard of Rossi’s experiences in the Gacy case.
David Cram, on the other hand, mostly stayed away from law enforcement. He spoke about the case sparingly throughout the years, mostly anonymously. Whatever haunted Cram, however, stayed with him until 2000, when forest preserve police discovered his hanging body among the trees. He’d died by suicide.
During the summer of 1978, Gacy needed additional help with a demolition out of town. He was willing to pay forty dollars an hour to anyone seeking work. David Cram brought along a friend, Phil Paske, whom Gacy hired, according to his business records.
Cram warned Gacy that Paske was “strange,” and not to make him mad because he’d previously been in a “mental institution.” Cram even disclosed Paske had possibly killed someone or was involved in killing someone. Paske himself claimed he was a bisexual who’d made stag films with young boys and girls. Only a year before, Paske had been fired by the city, though he did not go into why.
In fact, Paske had been fired from his job as a children’s supervisor at a fire department swimming pool after the Chicago Tribune informed them of his involvement with a man named John Norman. In May 1977 the Tribune uncovered the existence of a nationwide child pornography ring centered in Chicago and operated by Norman, a forty-nine-year-old man serving four years for sodomy.
Norman had previously been in the Dallas area until 1973, where some have speculated he might have had ties to the Dean Corll case and the twenty-eight murders in Houston. That same year, he fled to Homewood, Illinois, a distant suburb of Chicago, where he was eventually arrested after an anonymous tipster informed police of Norman’s sexual activities with teenage boys.
Among Norman’s belongings, police found thousands of index cards with names of high-profile clients. In a twist of either sheer stupidity or a blatant cover-up, the cards were later destroyed by police, after being deemed “not relevant” to the case.
During his time in jail, Norman met Phil Paske, a young man serving time for his involvement in the murder of a stamp collector. It wa
s also during this time that Norman continued printing his newsletter—allegedly under the noses of prison staff—and the organization became called the Delta Project. Under the guise of “self-development and training for young men,” the Delta Project distributed child pornography and arranged sexual encounters with children for thousands of clients.
Norman eventually raised enough money to post bail in February 1976, while he awaited trial. During this time, he and Paske lived together on Wrightwood Avenue just a few blocks south of Clark and Diversey and the Yankee Doodle Dandy restaurant, until his trial finally began in November. Although he was found guilty, his sentence of four years and one day was reduced due to time served in Cook County Jail awaiting trial. Norman served only a few months, eventually being released in early 1977, and he and Paske continued operating the Delta Project out of the Wrightwood apartment.
In June 1978 police raided the Wrightwood apartment and arrested Norman once more.* Although he was present during the raid, and in violation of his parole, police did not arrest Paske. On the outside, Paske continued the Delta Project for a time in Norman’s absence, though he and Norman parted ways after Norman moved to Colorado following his release from prison in 1980. Paske continued getting into trouble well into the ’80s. He died in 1998.
In his eighty-one years, John Norman carried out dozens of crimes through Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and eventually California, where he died in a state hospital for sex offenders in 2011. His victim count could be in the thousands.
As Gacy’s appeals process began in the 1980s and continued into the ’90s, he often cited Paske, Rossi, and Cram in interviews and documentation, while claiming complete innocence for himself. Given Paske and Norman’s proximity to key locations of the case and their connection to Gacy himself, many have entertained the possibility they used the Gacy home for victims of their own. If Michael Marino is indeed not a victim of John Wayne Gacy, are John Norman and Phil Paske the next likely suspects?
In an infamous interview with Walter Jacobson of Chicago’s CBS affiliate, Gacy spoke extensively about his innocence, claiming his only crime was “running a cemetery without a license.” He claimed to have knowledge about at least five murders but nothing about the others. Gacy appears shifty, often backtracking, telling Jacobson to “strike that,” when implicating himself.
In particular, he discussed John Szyc, whose murder he blamed on Rossi. Both in the interview and in correspondence from prison, Gacy admitted to socializing with Szyc and Rossi in his home, before going to bed. When he awoke the next day, he found Szyc dead on the floor, as Rossi slept on the couch. “Why didn’t I say anything? Because it wasn’t my business,” Gacy said.
Aside from the fact that Rossi was found driving her brother’s car, Patti Szyc has always had suspicions that Gacy did not act alone in her brother’s disappearance and death.
“I’m assuming he did not leave that apartment on his own,” Patti said. “That trash would have went out the door.” Along with the trash waiting to be taken out, Johnny’s tax papers were out, his clothes laid out. “He wouldn’t have been driving around in the car with his TV.”
Szyc, along with four others—McCoy, Butkovich, Godzik, and Piest—were the five murders Gacy claimed to have knowledge of. For the others, even as early as 1979, Gacy had begun expressing doubts on his involvement and bewilderment at the sheer number. And even with the five he recalled, he often skirted taking full responsibility for their murders. For McCoy, he contended self-defense; for Butkovich, Godzik, and Szyc, he said he remembered them in his house but then went to sleep or passed out. He awoke to find all three of them dead in his house. For Piest, he claimed to have left the boy in one room to take a call, then returned to find him dead.
Perhaps Gacy truly didn’t remember, or perhaps he blacked out in the moments he began twisting the ropes around their necks. His confessions have shifted over the years, and his numbers changed. Most likely, it is a mixture of all things: lies, truths, and half-remembered details.
Bill Dorsch, a retired homicide detective, lived not far from an apartment building at the corner of Miami and Elston on the North Side of Chicago. In the middle of a night in 1975, he came upon the caretaker of the building digging in the yard. “John, what are you doing out here at this time of night with a shovel?” Dorsch asked the caretaker.
“Well, with all the kind of work I do, there just isn’t enough time in the day,” the caretaker said. “So here I am.”
Three years later, that caretaker, John Wayne Gacy, was all over the news. Dorsch called a police hotline with the 1975 tip, but nothing came of it. Not until 1998, when Dorsch was consulting on another case, did he mention the event to anyone.
Police visited the property that November, but according to Dorsch and a man who’d been living nearby as a teenager, they dug in the wrong places. Dorsch called the event a “joke.”
Renewed interest in the case in 2011 resulted in additional pressure to reexamine the property. While the sheriff’s office insisted they wanted to search, the state’s attorney took months to sign off on another search warrant, citing the completion of the 1998 dig. In spring 2013, after obtaining the warrant, the sheriff’s office conducted a quiet, fruitless search of the property.
Even Terry Sullivan, the former prosecutor who’d helped convict Gacy, stated the lack of transparency with the media had been a mistake. Instead of a conclusion, the sheriff’s office has only deepened a mystery and lengthened the case’s enduring intrigue.
Radar scans of the property have shown several anomalies underneath the ground where John Wayne Gacy once walked as caretaker. Are there more bodies waiting to be discovered at Miami and Elston? If so, why didn’t Gacy mention it while he was confessing? Gacy himself seemed to lose count throughout those murderous years. In a comment to Rafael Tovar, Gacy once estimated he’d killed as many as forty-five people.
In tapes recorded after his arrest, Gacy claimed to have killed one man and left his body in the forest preserves near a high school, most likely Maine South. He estimated this boy to be about twenty-four with ties to the military.
Also on this tape, Gacy discusses the possibility of having killed girls. “I remember finding broads’ clothing in my house,” he said. “Panties and stuff.”
Robert Donnelly, one of Gacy’s living victims, recalled Gacy telling him during his torture how he’d killed girls in Schiller Park. On Labor Day weekend 1977, a hitchhiker discovered the unconscious body of sixteen-year-old Deborah Rosencrans in the Schiller Park woods not far from Gacy’s house. She’d been beaten and bound with an “intricately knotted rope ending in a hangman’s noose.” Deborah died nearly two weeks later.
Police never charged anyone with the crime, though they had several leads. The hitchhiker himself failed fourteen separate polygraph tests during the course of the investigation. Another suspect known to Deborah had a history of mental illness and sexually abused a young girl in 1969. On the night of her disappearance, witnesses watched as Deborah was “pulled into” a blue Oldsmobile. The driver of this car might have been the same man wearing a cowboy hat with whom Deborah had been seen earlier in the weekend. Witnesses referred to him as “Clubfoot Charlie” or “Cowboy,” though they never figured out if the driver of the Oldsmobile and this man were one and the same. And lastly, there was a mysterious boyfriend that police struggled to locate. He was known only as “Mike.”
While there is no doubt Gacy murdered many people, questions about the case still linger even decades after he was found guilty. How many people did Gacy kill exactly? Where is Michael Marino? How involved in these crimes were some of the individuals in Gacy’s circle?
Who are the unidentified victims? Do they include Craig Conner, Billy Shields, or Jeffrey Stinnett? And if these boys are not Gacy’s victims, what happened to them?
Are the identities of the unknown victims among the hundreds of names that passed before investigators back in 1978 and beyond? Some of those names have tur
ned up elsewhere. In fact, some of them have turned up alive over the years. Others have been cold cases waiting to be solved in other parts of the country.
Perhaps they are young boys from Uptown, or perhaps they, too, stood out on the corner at Clark and Diversey or wandered through Bughouse Square. Perhaps they were from out of state, Michigan or Minnesota, and found themselves drawn to that luminescent city on the lake. Perhaps they were young men with young dreams of love and opportunity.
They wait to be named.
* The official missing person’s report for Craig Conner has been lost.
* Much of the research around these measurements was first brought up by Randy White, a correspondent of John Wayne Gacy who collected many of his business records as well as documentation of the case. Randy was also one of the first researchers to notice discrepancies regarding the identification of Michael Marino and raise the possibility of accomplices to Gacy’s crimes back in the early 1990s.
* While the sheriff’s office found these new revelations of interest, as of 2020 no charges have been filed against Michael Rossi. Curiously, this story involves another unusual figure, David Buzzek, one of the owners of the building where Rossi and Mowery lived. Buzzek had known Mowery previously but also knew victim Timothy O’Rourke from the local YMCA. Just four days after Mowery’s disappearance in 1977, Buzzek, a Boy Scout official, was arrested for child pornography and having sex with a minor.
* Curiously, two witnesses to Norman’s crimes have also been murdered in separate incidents. The first, Kenneth Hellstrom of Homewood, who’d testified at his 1976 trial, was found bleeding to death in January 1977. His alleged murderer was finally arrested and found guilty in 2012. The second was a victim in a triple slaying in 1979. Michael Salcido, seventeen, and his brother, Arthur Salcido, nineteen, were stabbed to death along with a friend, Frank Mussa, sixteen, while parked in an alley. Before his death, Michael Salcido had been scheduled to testify against Norman, whom he’d reported to police, stating Norman had photographed the boy nude in his apartment before having sex with him. Between 1980 and 1992, four individuals were charged and convicted in the murder, none with any known connection to Norman.