Crime of the Century

Postscript

Expert commentary

by William J. Kunkle, chief prosecutor of serial killer John Wayne Gacy

Robert Piest was a fifteen-year-old sophomore at Maine West Township High School on December 11, 1978. His home was in Des Plaines, Illinois, but his part-time job was located in Park Ridge, Illinois. He worked evenings at a pharmacy owned by the Torf brothers. He was trying to save money for college and especially, for a car. Since he had none, his mother Elizabeth would pick him up at the end of the school day and drive him to his job in Park Ridge.

December 11 was Elizabeth Piest’s birthday. There was to be a big family dinner and birthday celebration at their home when Robbie got home from work. Elizabeth drove to the pharmacy a little early, at about nine o’clock, to bring them home as early as possible. At about nine-fifteen, Robbie ran out the front door of the pharmacy throwing on his jacket and hollering to his mom that she should wait for him. He said he was going to talk to a contractor about a job.

He never came back.

Over the course of the first twenty-four hours after Piest’s disappearance, the Des Plaines Police Department learned that the “contractor” was John W. Gacy, a general light contractor who had previously done remodeling work at the pharmacy and was present there just before Piest left. During the next week they received oral and written denials from Gacy that he had met or talked to Robert Piest. They obtained a warrant to search Gacy’s house and vehicles on December 13, 1978, and executed a search on that date. They recovered evidence linking Robert Piest to Gacy’s home at 8213 Summerdale Avenue in the unincorporated Norwood Park Township. They also found evidence regarding a young man named John Szyc, who had been an employee of Gacy’s and had disappeared on January 20, 1976. Also seized were handcuffs, ropes, chains, other restraint devices, as well as sexual and drug paraphernalia. They took numerous photographs inside the house that proved extremely useful in witness preparation and as evidence at trial. They even photographed the dirt crawl space under the house, plainly showing the lime that had been spread over the area, which was very muddy from poor drainage and had a musty odor. There was no evidence of recently disturbed soil and they had no authority in the warrant, or otherwise, to dig for evidence of Piest’s possible abduction.

Gacy was put under twenty-four-hour surveillance from the 13th until his arrest on December 21, 1978.

Much more was learned about John Gacy over that week. In addition to John Szyc, two other young men working for Gacy’s construction crew had gone missing. John Butkovitch had disappeared July 31, 1975 and Gregory Godzik on December 12, 1976. Gacy had been interviewed by officers from two different Chicago Police areas and Park Ridge, Illinois, and had not been regarded as a suspect in any “foul play.”

The Des Plaines investigation and Gacy’s interaction with the surveillance officers was beginning to paint a picture of a man who was much more than the gregarious and workaholic contractor known for his self-promoting summer theme parties, his roles as a democratic precinct captain, and a trustee of the Norwood Park Township Lighting District, and his entertaining at parades, picnics, and other events as “Pogo the Clown.”

Gacy had been convicted in Blackhawk County, Iowa for sodomizing a sixteen-year-old boy in 1968. He was sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary, but was paroled after serving eighteen months. Sadly, his parole was transferred to Illinois.

He had a penchant for hiring young men, even teenagers, to work on his crew. Some of his neighbors were aware of the constant parade of young men, employees, and others through 8213 Summerdale for parties that ran late into the night. During his short second marriage, he had told his wife that he would remain bisexual, but that he would exercise his preference for males in his expanded garage, which contained mattresses, red lights, and mirrors among other things. The garage area was “off limits” to his wife and daughters.

During his surveillance, he told the officers that when he was a clown at parades, he could walk right up to women at the curb and squeeze their breasts and everyone would just laugh because he was just a clown. “In fact,” he told them, “a clown can even get away with murder.”

On December 21, 1978, under the watchful eye of a surveillance team, Gacy passed some pills and a packet of marijuana to a young gas station attendant in Park Ridge. As Gacy pulled out of the station, the attendant brought the contraband over to the officers, who confiscated it.

That day, Gacy was being driven around by one of his employees, David Cram. When Gacy went into DeLeo’s restaurant for a meeting, his driver excitedly approached the surveillance officers and told them Gacy had said he had killed over thirty people for the “outfit” and feared he was going to be arrested shortly. He said he was going to the cemetery to visit his father’s grave.

Gacy was pulled over and arrested for delivery of controlled substances. While in custody in Des Plaines, he had one of his signature phony “heart attacks,” and was taken by paramedics to Northwest Hospital for diagnosis and treatment.

During the same time period, a second search warrant was being prepared and authorized to search the crawl space by excavation for human remains. This was based on the products of the first warrant and subsequent investigation, as well as the specific averment of a surveillance officer who had been in the house, in the bathroom, when the furnace in the crawl space kicked on and sent a flood of warm air up into the bathroom. He had experienced the odor of decaying flesh on forty or more occasions and immediately recognized the smell coming up from below.

By the time Gacy was returned to the lockup from the hospital, investigation of the crawl space was begun and Cook County sheriff’s police evidence technicians discovered human remains in two separate areas. Gacy was formally arrested and charged with murder.

He then proceeded to give a series of oral confessions, mostly with his attorneys present, albeit over their objections and noted advice. He named four of his victims and described the circumstances of the first (January 3, 1972), and last victim (Robert Piest), and gave the circumstances and nickname for a seventh.

During his description of the last murder, he stopped talking, then began again in a changed voice, saying, “Who are you and what am I doing here?” When told he was describing the murder of Robert Piest, he stated that he was not the murderer. The killer was “the other John.” Even the defense psychiatrists would agree this was “malingering.” His attempt to mimic a multiple personality disorder was purportedly rejected even by the queen of multiple personality disorders, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur.

Gacy had described in gory detail how he had used his “handcuff trick” to subdue his victims and his “rope trick” to strangle them. The exception was his first victim who had been stabbed twice in the chest (confirmed by postmortem examination). He also indicated he had buried the victims in his crawl space and when that became full, he put the last four or five bodies in the Des Plaines River.

The next day, he had a voluntary conversation with assistant state attorney Larry Finder and a policeman during which he demonstrated the rope trick using his rosary beads and also drew a sketch of the crawl space on the back of a police telephone message slip, showing the location of trenches and individual bodies in the crawl space, hoping to avoid unnecessary damage to his premises.

Also on the 22nd, he was taken to the bridge to show where and how he had dumped the bodies in the river, and to his house where he spray-painted a stick figure showing the exact location and orientation of the body of John Butkovich under the concrete floor of his garage addition.

Late in the afternoon, I was back in my office at 26th Street, looking through the stacks of paper already being generated by the several law enforcement agencies already involved. I had already enlisted a number of Chicago homicide detectives, through the chief of detectives and the superintendent’s office, to immediately canvass the neighborhood around Gacy’s house and interview every relative, employee, or friend of Gacy’s they could find and “get them on paper.” When interviewed by experienced detectives, they are usually as factual as possible. But if the media or, worse yet, a defense investigator, gets to them first, memories may get a lot less factual and more colorful.

There was no doubt that this was going to be an insanity defense. The defense of last resort. I had handled a number of such cases. I was prepared to immerse myself, with the help and guidance of those experts who would ultimately side with the prosecution, into the study necessary to present the factual evidence needed to support our experts’ opinions. My objective was to destroy the opinions of the defense experts. My other difficult tasks would be presenting our experts on direct examination and cross examining the defense experts.

But this would be a huge media case, with defense motions for delay, change of venue, jury sequestration, and any other twists the defense could imagine based on claims of prejudicial pre-trial publicity. Just like People v. Speck.

I had handled “specials” and “heaters” before. But this would be the biggest pressure cooker yet. I had seen everything 26th Street could produce, first as a public defender and then as a state’s attorney. I had seen the breadth and depth of the inhuman acts evil people had committed upon their fellow citizens and it was staggering. You learn to deal with anything. But this would be different. There would be not one, but dozens of victims’ families to try to comfort, deal with, and prepare for “life and death” testimony. There were already not one but several police agencies involved. Des Plaines, Park Ridge, Chicago, the Cook County sheriff’s office, which had jurisdiction over the crime scene at 8213 Summerdale because it was in unincorporated Cook County. There would no doubt be more, as bodies might be recovered from the river in different counties or municipalities. Getting court-worthy identifications of the recovered remains would be a monumental task. And, we might very well have wound up trying a few, or many, indictments based on unidentified victims’ remains and possibly even prosecute based on a murder of a known victim with no remains ever recovered. Would there be one trial or many? This would be a death case. As the Speck trial had shown, the jury would have to meet the stringent standards of the U.S. Supreme Court as those standards stood at the time of the trial and as those standards might be defined in the future.

What had I gotten myself into? How did I get to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and once-in-a-lifetime burden? It is often said that to get by in the felony trial division of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office you had to win the cases that should be won. If you wanted to be a star, you had to win a few that were expected to be losers. But if you wanted to be viewed as an utter failure, just lose a big case that’s supposed to be won.

This case was supposed to be won. Gacy had the bodies on his property and made oral admissions. How could you lose?

To win, twelve ordinary citizens, who no doubt would start the trial thinking that anyone who could kill thirty or more victims and then go to sleep so close to their bodies over a period of six years would have to be “crazy,” would have to be convinced that the killer was legally sane during every murder. Indeed, seven of the twelve selected jurors who ultimately signed the guilty verdicts and the death verdicts expressed the “crazy” opinion during voir dire examination.

I had arrived at this life-altering place and time by a circuitous and fortuitous route.

I attended Northwestern University School of Law after working three years with Union Carbide Corporation as an engineer. My initial purpose was to become a corporate and/or patent lawyer and return to the company significantly higher up the corporate hierarchy with engineering and production experience and a law degree. Several criminal law and trial practice classes and some successes in moot court competitions had instilled in me an interest in both criminal and trial law. But I stuck with the plan, taking Securities Regulation, Corporate Financing II, and Antitrust Law.

Then I met Professor William Martin.

I took his Criminal Evidence Seminar. The curriculum involved assignments as either a prosecutor or a defense attorney, preparing and presenting live witnesses and evidence before a real criminal court judge on various pre-trial motions using actual Chicago police reports, evidentiary materials, and real narcotics and homicide detectives, crime lab personnel, and evidence technicians. Complainants, defendants, and other witnesses were played by other law students.

There was no other practical course in the curriculum anything like it. I was hooked. I spent more time preparing for these exercises than I spent studying for finals. I was learning how to do something that mattered. As the late Hon. Earl Strayhorn, a superb, practical, street-wise, and fair 26th Street criminal felony trial court judge once said, “The true meaning and application of the United States Constitution is not decided in the Supreme Court of the United States by and for legal scholars. It is decided every day in the well of this courtroom by trial judges and trial lawyers for the victims, complainants, defendants, and the people of Illinois.”

This experience taught me many critical lessons. One, that Bill Martin was one of the most intelligent, most compassionate, and most diligent felony trial prosecutors in the history of the office of the state’s attorney of Cook County. That, if he would have me, he would be my mentor for a forty-four-year legal career as an assistant Cook County public defender, as he had first wanted to be; an assistant state’s attorney of Cook County, as I had first wanted to be; a private practitioner in both civil and criminal trial practice; and, in my case, a criminal division judge in the circuit court of Cook County.

It was often said that a good trial prosecutor was usually a frustrated jock looking for another arena in which to compete. It is no surprise that Bill Martin played competitive hockey throughout his life.

Bill Martin taught many good lawyers the supreme importance of out-preparing your opponent. Every legal issue must be anticipated and researched, with a written brief or memorandum ready for the judge before the argument arose. Every witness must be thoroughly prepared and comfortable with giving his or her testimony and being cross examined. A prosecutor must be able to think like a defense lawyer in order to anticipate every move and tactic of the defense and either preclude it in the state’s direct case or eliminate it in cross examination of defense witnesses. Finally, it is often effectively done in the state’s case in rebuttal. A prosecutor must also be able to think and speak like a juror when a jury is deciding the case.

Just as we learned these lessons in the Criminal Evidence Seminar, you have learned them from the prosecutor/defender professor in this book. You have come to understand that Bill Martin did not become the best by trying and winning the “Case of the Century.” But rather, he was chosen to be the “first chair” for the biggest heater case anyone had seen out of a pool of talented and experienced trial prosecutors. Prosecuting Richard Speck did not make Bill Martin the best. Giving him the case demonstrated clearly that he was already the best.

The investigators, detectives, and prosecutors assigned to assist Martin knew and shared that belief, and state’s attorney John Stamos and first assistant Lou Garippo were aware of that fact and entrusted him with being the chief prosecutor of the case.

The crucial points where Bill Martin followed his gut shine through in this case; his knowledge of the trends being applied to change rules written in stone by years of law or practice was proven correct time after time. Not opposing the defense motion for a change of venue, agreeing to a court appointed panel of experts to provide expert opinions on the issues of fitness for trial, his sanity at the time of the offense, and providing the defense access to a protected and concealed key witness, not just for an interview, but for a court reported or recorded cross examination (essentially a criminal pre-trial deposition) were unprecedented, hotly debated, and ultimately all were correct. The Crime of the Century has given the reader a detailed, accurate, and fascinating account of the behind-the-scenes strategies employed in the celebrated case.

Indeed, these and dozens of other obvious or subtle tactics and procedures would become crucial to the successful prosecution of serial murderer John Gacy in 1980.

As luck and prescience would have it, two critical assignments brought the lessons of Bill Martin and the wisdom and experience of one of his superiors into direct contact with the prosecution and trial of the man who would become the serial killer with the most murder convictions (thirty-three) in the history of the United States.

On December 22, Cook County State’s Attorney Bernard Carey appointed me to lead the investigation and prosecution of John Gacy. On January 10, 1979, in the criminal court building at 26th Street and California Avenue in Chicago, chief judge of the Criminal Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Richard J. Fitzgerald, assigned Judge Louis B. Garippo as the trial judge for the matter of The People of the State of Illinois v. John Wayne Gacy, then consisting of Indictments No. 79 c 69 through 79 c 75. These first seven indictments charged the defendant with the murders of seven identified victims, including Robert Piest, whose body had not yet been recovered.

Lou Garippo was the chief of the Criminal Division of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office during the investigation and prosecution of Richard Speck. He had agreed with Bill Martin’s appointment and was directly involved in providing personnel and other resources to the trial team, as well as serving his sage counsel. He gained first-hand knowledge of the issues and problems associated with the prosecution of Richard Speck.

Garippo’s experience with the Speck case led directly to his masterful and error-free trial of John Gacy. He warned the defense attorneys to “be careful what you ask for” with respect to filing a motion for change of place of trial due to allegedly prejudicial pre-trial publicity. He was well aware of the reality of leaving a jury from a big city in favor for a jury from a rural area. Publicity for a case like these reached everywhere. Particularly in a case where the defense of last resort, the defense of insanity at the time of the offense, was sure to be raised, the defense had a better chance in a large metropolitan area than in rural, “downstate” Illinois. Nevertheless, the motion was filed. As in Speck, the defense motion was granted. Also, as in Speck, the state did not object. I felt that we would get a more state-minded jury pool elsewhere, and if Judge Garippo wanted to protect the record on appeal and eliminate a potential defense issue on appeal, so much the better.

However, unlike Speck, where Judge Paschen had a free hand at selecting the place of trial, in Gacy, the defense wanted to have a very extensive and expensive media survey of potential venues done by experts of their choice, as well as studies of the potential jury venires. Again. following the examples of Judge Paschen, Judge Garippo began with his own survey of potential venues with adequate jury pool populations, jail and courthouse security, courtroom availability for a lengthy period, access space for public and media spectators, housing for lawyers and witnesses, and the willingness to take it on. He did not put Peoria on the list, as he felt Peoria had already paid its dues in full. While the Court’s search was going on, we were doing our own. I was talking to prosecutors in likely locations to get a feel for their jury pools, local media, and court and jail personnel.

Judge Garippo ruled that the defense proposal was overbroad and unnecessary. He chose six possible venues, including Winnebago County, to assess, using a more limited media survey involving inches of written media reporting on the case to-date. The report came back with a significantly lower level of publicity in Winnebago County. It was believed that Rockford was the best venue. The county seat of Winnebago County, it was Illinois’ second-most populous city and was located farther from Chicago than most of the other contenders, had more citizen focus on local newspapers, and local television and radio, than smaller counties, which relied on Chicago-based media more heavily. We were delighted, as our research had suggested that Winnebago County jurors would be just what we were looking for.

Judge Garippo’s additional ruling was even more appreciated. I knew him well by reputation and through personal contact. As a public defender, I had second-chaired my first murder defense before him. He was a true product of the great Chicago neighborhoods, a real trial lawyer himself, a superb judge of people, street-wise, a legal scholar, and was a man who always found a way to do the right thing and protect the record at the same time. Many who knew him, but not well, viewed him as a defense-minded judge. Much like Bill Martin, he had been a competitive and successful prosecutor, but never lost his sense of fairness or his compassion. As he put it, he just couldn’t get overly excited about the “routine” drug, auto theft, or other less serious cases, which he called the ninety-five percent. On those cases, he didn’t give anyone a free pass, but he didn’t take all police traffic stop or narcotic surveillance testimony as gospel if it didn’t stand up to cross-examination or common sense. However, he had fair but intense focus on the five per centers. He issued the death penalty on more than one occasion and well understood the seriousness of the armed robberies, rapes, and murders that were the basis for most jury trials at 26th Street. Richard Speck and John Gacy were at the very top of the five per centers.

We had not worried about losing him in a change of place of trial, because we knew he was going to remain the trial judge. His plan was to ask the Supreme Court of Illinois to transfer him to sit in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit Court of Illinois, which included Winnebago County, for the purposes of selecting the jury. Once the jury was selected he would be transferred back to the Circuit Court of Cook County to attend to the trial and his court call as necessary. Since the defense had filed a motion to sequester the jury during trial to protect them from any and all publicity during trial, which was granted, it mattered little whether they would be locked up in a hotel in Rockford or a hotel in Chicago. The Judge implemented a six-day-a-week trial schedule. We were to have witnesses ready to keep working steadily from nine to five on week days and nine to four on Saturday. He arranged for dinners out and sometimes a play or other event for Saturday nights and gave the jurors the option of being bused to and from their homes near Rockford on Sundays, or meeting with families in the hotel in Chicago. None of this was objected to by the defense. They knew they would never get a fairer judge in Cook or Winnebago Counties. Although this was a first in Illinois, none of these procedures ever created an issue on appeal. Lessons were learned from the “Trial of the Century.”

Also, by holding the trial in Chicago, experts and other out-of-state witnesses had easy transportation and lodging access, other judges were available to handle any emergencies on Judge Garippo’s regular court call, physical evidence in the custody of the medical examiner was properly maintained a short distance away, the families of twenty-two known victims could travel easily from home to testify or observe. The huge volume of physical exhibits and the large size of some of them were easily accommodated in areas very close to the courtroom.

Judge Garippo also took charge of modifying the courtroom itself. The “hard seats” for spectators were altered to create more room in the well of the court and the jury box was modified to accommodate four alternate jurors. Special passes for media and families of the victims and the defendant were prepared and a “first-come” process was set up for passes for the public. Front row seats were available for the media’s courtroom artists.

Because of the large media presence, Judge Garippo met with representatives of the media and made an agreement whereby the media pool on any given day was to select a single representative to be given access to all “side-bar” conferences, including those conducted in chambers, and to then report back to all reporters present during the next break.

Again, more lessons learned from Speck.

Like the Speck team, I did not want to create an appearance of unfairness, or piling on, by having too many lawyers at the prosecution table. As first chair, I would have the ultimate last word on any procedural or strategic decisions. But, as was always my practice on trial, the rest of the team would be expected to have a large share of the burdens and the exposure. I would direct the overall trial strategy and “order of proof.” I would handle my share of the “routine” witnesses, but my focus would be on the direct examination of six of our seven psychiatric witnesses, the cross examination of five of the six defense experts, and the direct examination of Dr. Robert Stein, the medical examiner of Cook County. I would give the last or “rebuttal” closing argument for the people in both the guilt phase of the trial and at the end of the separate penalty phase.

The second chair, Robert Egan, would focus on the testimony on the recovery of the remains from the Gacy property, which he had personally viewed from beginning to end, the dental and radiological identifications of the known victims, the direct examination of one of the prosecution psychologists, and the cross examination of one of the defense psychiatrists. Bob would make the opening statement for the prosecution, which all jury research and most trial lore regards as critical. The jury must begin hearing of the evidence already knowing that the people can and will prove the defendant guilty. He would also give the people’s opening closing argument during the death penalty sentencing hearing.

The third chair, Terry Sullivan, would focus on the majority of the Des Plaines Police testimony, the largest portion of the “life and death” testimony of the identified victims’ family members and friends, and certain Gacy employees and friends. Terry would also give the people’s opening closing argument in the guilt phase of the trial.

The fourth chair, who did not sit at counsel table unless presenting a witness, was James Varga. Jim was a “Rule 711” law student clerk, practicing under our direct supervision pursuant to Supreme Court rules. He was our legal researcher, the same task carried out by Jim Zagel on the Speck team. He also presented several witnesses at trial, including “life and death” witnesses and others.

All of us would direct or cross examine many other witnesses. In our case alone, I think approximately eighty witnesses were presented.

To fulfill my central role as the architect, some might say the cinematic director, of the evidence and arguments to prove Gacy legally sane at the time of all thirty-three murders, I had to take up the study of psychiatry, at least to the extent defined by the diagnoses and opinions of thirteen experts. To understand what legal insanity entailed, I had to come to my own understanding of this insatiable killer.

I had known Dr. Robert Riefman of the Psychiatric Institute of Cook County and Dr. James Cavanaugh of the Isaac Ray Center at Chicago’s Presbyterian Saint Luke’s Hospital for several years from prior cases. Both were appointed as court’s witnesses and were in no way “controlled” by either party. The Psychiatric Institute evaluation was requested by the defense and the Isaac Ray Center’s team was requested by the prosecution. Both found Gacy fit for trial and sane at the time of the offenses.

Both men and their supporting staff or team would be called to testify by the prosecution. However, because they were court appointed, and owing to their fair nature, they were all readily available to both sides for interviews and to us for preparation. Therefore, I did not need a separate, non-testifying expert to assist my preparation. Particularly, Dr. Cavanaugh became my tutor and adviser regarding my effort to win the battle of experts. As the defense of insanity had to be raised affirmatively by the defense, they had the burden of going forward with evidence to support their theory. Therefore, all of our psychiatric expert witnesses would be offered in rebuttal to individual or groups of defense experts and were given copies of the transcripts of the testimony of the witnesses I would ask them to rebut or refute and we would prepare in detail for their own testimony.

I compiled files on all of the expert witnesses including their reports and notes all psychological testing materials and other documents, their testimony in prior relevant cases, their professional history, their articles and publications, and any “expert treatises” they relied on in their reports.

The people’s experts were very uniform in their diagnoses. All agreed generally that Gacy was not suffering from any psychotic illness, had no neurological or relevant physical problems, and was not suffering from any mental disease or defect which would excuse him from legal responsibility for his crimes. They regarded him as suffering from personality disorders, such as antisocial personality disorder, psychosexual personality disorders, and some added narcissistic personality disorder as well. Illinois law did not recognize personality disorders as a “mental disease or defect” sufficient to constitute a valid basis for an insanity defense.

The defense experts were all over the map. Their Freudian-oriented diagnoses included consistent paranoid schizophrenia for the entire time period or only during the murders and body disposal, psychotic rage attacks induced by stress and/or drugs and alcohol, and a borderline personality disorder which expanded into florid psychosis at the time of the murders. Two of the defense psychiatrists did not give any legal opinion at all, but rambled on about their diagnoses, using old European Freudian terms and definitions not mentioned in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatry, the “bible” of psychiatric diagnosticians as adopted by the American Psychiatric Association.

The most significant difference was that the people’s experts relied heavily on the facts of the crimes and on Gacy’s life during the relevant period in reaching their opinions, while the defense experts relied on psychoanalytic theory, Gacy’s self-serving statements to them and, in essence, that his upbringing, failure to accept his homosexuality and abuse of alcohol and drugs was at fault. Dr. Reifman said it best for the prosecution: “John Gacy denying he is a homosexual is like Bruce Sutter (a star with the Chicago Cubs in 1980) saying he is not a ball player” and “John Gacy has no remorse because John Gacy has no remorse.”

My personal conclusion was that John Gacy is simply evil. In reading this book, I have learned in painful detail that Richard Speck was simply evil.

The defense witness testimony and the defense arguments to the jury repeatedly alluded to Gacy having a condition or psyche depicted in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In rebuttal argument I told the jury that Gacy had a base of morality. The kindly Dr. Jekyll had sought to study evil. Not external evil, but the evil that lurks under the surface in all of us. He sought to study the evil buried within him. He devised a potion which would release that evil and he made a conscious decision to take it. It worked. He was transformed into the evil Mr. Hyde. He was now capable of awful brutality, of the worst of crimes against his fellow humans. And he committed them. And he learned that he enjoyed committing them. He learned to love what he believed was the god-like power to decide who would live and who would die. And when the potion wore off, and he turned back into kindly Dr. Jekyll, he remembered it all.

And then he made a conscious decision to do it again, and again, and again.

Just like Dr. Jekyll, John Gacy made the conscious decisions to have the handcuffs ready, to have the rope and handle ready, to have trenches dug for use as graves, to assault and immobilize his potential victims and then to take their lives for his own conscious pleasure.

But I told the jury that they must not forget the moral balance at the end of the story. Dr. Jekyll paid for his crimes with his life.

Trial preparation took just over one year. The trial was originally scheduled to begin in November 1979, but another Gacy phony heart attack delayed us until January 28, 1980. The jury was selected in Rockford, Winnebago County, Illinois. Judge Garippo’s superb process for selecting the jury completed the process in less than a week. Opening statements followed by a full day of evidence began the trial on February 6, 1980. Working full days, the trial was completed in six weeks. The jury’s guilty verdicts in the guilt phase were returned on March 11, 1980 after deliberations lasting one hour and forty-five minutes. The jury returned twelve death verdicts on March 13, 1980.

John Gacy was ultimately convicted of thirty-three murders of young men and boys. Twelve of those murders were committed during the time that Illinois had reinstated the death penalty. Gacy was sentenced to twelve death sentences and twenty-one life sentences without possibility of parole. Although he never won a new trial or significant hearing on appeal, Gacy was not executed by lethal injection until May 9, 1994. That he was convicted and executed without need of a second trial, or in legalese, “without reversible error,” is in no small measure due to the caliber and character of my trial team and the legacy of the lawyers in the Felony Trial Division of the Office of the Cook County State’s Attorney and their wise supervisors in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and in particular to the courage, character, and intellect of Bill Martin and Lou Garippo.

The Crime of the Century is a comprehensive and spell-binding account of what goes into the preparation and trial of a celebrated case. I set forth the strategies applied in Speck that were utilized, in part, for the preparation of the Gacy prosecution. There are differences, mainly attributed to Gacy invoking a full-fledged insanity defense and Speck not raising an insanity defense at all. Another crucial factor is that Gacy gave pre-trial confessions to certain elements of his murders whereas Speck did not confess to anything. A substantial number of mental health experts testified and were cross-examined in detail in Gacy. No psychiatrist testified in Speck’s trial. In order to use an insanity defense, the defendant must admit that he committed the crime. Speck was shrewd and admitted nothing. He did not want to trade admitting the crime for raising an insanity defense. Moreover, the Speck defense was locked in by the impartial psychiatric panel that the public defender requested and received. Their unanimous finding that Speck was sane at the time of his murders left Speck no experts to testify to an insanity defense, as opposed to Gacy, who used multiple mental health experts.

The problem of dealing with a frenzied media was identical in each case and solved the same way. Neither case was turned into a media circus nor sensationalized because the prosecutors kept their mouth shut.

I strongly recommend The Crime of the Century as a compelling, comprehensive, and fully documented account of one of the worst crimes ever committed. I know of nothing else like it.

During Thanksgiving 2015, the sole survivor of Speck’s murderous rampage, Corazon Amurao Atienza, agreed to a worldwide publishing first—posing for family photographs with (from left) son, Christian Amurao Atienza; Cora; husband, Bert Atienza; and daughter, Abigail Atienza Phillips, outside Abigail’s home in Virginia.

This photo of the entire family, also taken at Abigail’s home, includes Cora’s six grandchildren: ( front row, from left) Jadon Atienza, Bailey Phillips, Bert Atienza, Cora, Jasmin Atienza, and Abigail Atienza Phillips; (back row, from left) Christian Amurao Atienza; his wife, Maria Atienza; Jacob Atienza; Tyler Phillips; Steve Phillips, Abigail’s husband; and Jordan Phillips.