The phone kept ringing, and even though I was far too busy, I answered it. “Dr. Morrison, this is Sam Amirante. I’m the attorney for John Wayne Gacy.”
The media was already in the process of making John Wayne Gacy the world’s most notorious serial killer, but I wasn’t in serial killer mode at all. In fact, I was deeply involved in the plans for my wedding. Sam Amirante had seen the paper that morning; an article about me and my work called “Tracking Down Our Mr. Hydes” had appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Within the story, I was quoted as saying that most serial killers are never caught. I said that serial killers shouldn’t be “written off as psychopaths or sociopaths,” that the reason they kill is much more complex. “It’s not someone whom we would call crazy, not someone who’s actively hearing voices. It’s not that clear-cut. Someone like that could murder, but they’re not as organized as people who do it across time. Multiple murderers have a much deeper inner disorganization that is not really seen until they’re in the middle of a crime or just as the crime is beginning. At that point, they’re like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They fall apart and then they come back together again.”
The article itself pointed out that serial killing had become more rampant throughout the United States, and the FBI estimated that at least thirty-five killers were on the loose.
On that chilly mid-November morning when all I wanted to think about was the brilliant neurosurgeon I was about to wed, the very animated Sam Amirante said he was so intrigued by the story, he had tried to read the article while in the shower. He had his work cut out for him as the defense lawyer for Gacy, the thirty-seven-year-old contractor who was alleged to have murdered thirty-three young men and teen boys in and around Des Plaines, a suburb about seventeen miles from the center of Chicago. It was hard even for the police to believe he was guilty: Gacy was involved in local politics and even had barbecues in his yard for the community, and that included members of the police force. But the phone call wasn’t about specifics of the crimes. Amirante was using his considerable charm with me for a reason.
“How did you know?” asked Amirante.
“What do you mean?”
“You described John Gacy’s personality perfectly. Are you sure you’ve never met him?”
“Of course not.” Sam and his staff didn’t know that anyone had ever studied serial killers over a lengthy period of time, and he was thrilled to hear that I had.
“Dr. Morrison, I’d like you to be a witness for the defense on the Gacy case,” said Amirante. “We’re going to go for an insanity plea.”
“Hold on, Sam. That all depends on what I find after I examine him.” I couldn’t simply sign on to be part of any old team, defense or prosecution. Too many people were already “doctors for hire” by lawyers, professionals who would agree to say what they were told to say for the money and the media exposure. That wasn’t at all what I wanted, since it had nothing to do with science or the oath I had taken when I became a doctor.
Amirante was persistent, just as he would be persistent in front of Judge Louis B. Garippo during Gacy’s trial. “Can you examine him this week? I can arrange it right now.”
The young lawyer had seen Gacy go from acting casually and admitting nothing about the murders to acting frantic and panicky and admitting everything after Chicago police dug up the earth under the thirty-inch crawl space under his house north of Chicago. There they uncovered dozens of bodies.
And what a gruesome discovery it was. Almost overcome by a sickly sweet smell, Cook County evidence technician Daniel Genty went at the stinking mud with a shovel. After just a few shovelfuls, he hit bone, human bone. Meanwhile, Officer Michael Albrecht found a dark purple puddle, dug a bit, and encountered loose, rotting flesh. What he thought to be a leg covered by blue jeans was actually blackened, decaying human matter. Soon the police found dozens of severely decomposed bodies. Then the crowds came. Curiosity seekers constantly milled about the site, even though it was cold, even through Chicago snowstorms, as though the site were a tourist attraction.
Ten-year-old Kelly Pucca was one of Gacy’s neighbors. What he told the Chicago Tribune was representative of the fear that gripped children and adults alike who continued to live on Summerdale Avenue. Kelly admitted, “I get scared. I’m afraid in the shower that someone will get me and I’m afraid spirits are going to come into our house.”
The fear and the tourist draw, combined with the fact that December was a slow time for news, all congealed into one epic national horror story. John Wayne Gacy was on his way toward becoming America’s most notorious serial killer.
While I was extremely interested in talking to Gacy at length, I told Amirante that I couldn’t do anything that week but briefly meet Gacy until I returned from a short three-day honeymoon to Key Biscayne. I certainly didn’t tell Amirante, but I was deeply in love. I didn’t feel I’d ever find the right person…until I met my husband practically right under my nose. I found him in the parking garage of a nearby apartment building during Christmastime 1978. He is a well-respected brain surgeon and the son of generations of Chicago doctors, and his family was very Northern European proper; I wore white gloves when I first met his grandmother.
My husband was always thoughtful about romance, and I remember that it rained horribly during a trip we took to Manhattan. The winds pushed the rain sideways, but he had hired a horse-drawn carriage to take us around Central Park. After the summer rain stopped, and as the smell of greenery and flowers from the park wafted, he proposed to me. I know it sounds a little corny, but the romance of it all was just perfect. So I didn’t want to think about lawyers, serial killers, or law enforcement until well after the wedding.
During that New Year’s trip, I didn’t once think of my work. It was, however, the only time that I was ever able to totally separate my work and my personal life. In the future, on every trip to every country from Brazil to Bali, I was compelled to spend part of my time on serial killers and mass murderers.
Upon returning from my brief honeymoon, I was refreshed and ready to talk to Gacy. They kept John Gacy in Cermak Hospital in the southwest part of Chicago. The concrete structure housed thousands of patients, but Gacy was in an area called 3 North, kept away from much of the prison population, who would have killed him in a minute given the chance. Child molesters were, and still are, considered the lowest of the low within the prison pecking order. And because of the constant media attention Gacy received, there were probably some guards who wanted to get Gacy as well. So Cermak was one tough, ugly place, a no-holds-barred asylum where inmates sometimes tried to commit suicide. Those unfortunates were called “swingers” because they had tried to hang themselves. In this facility I would spend hundreds of hours with Gacy.
The door slammed shut and was locked from the outside. I can still hear the singular sound of that lock echo in my mind. One sound, one moment, and there I was with Gacy in his room, no one but him and me—except for the guard posted outside the door. The bland yellow room held a bed and a tray table, a small table near the door, and a private bathroom. Gacy was writing in an oversize red ledger book when I came in, and he placed it on top of a stack of other such ledgers, diaries of his days of incarceration and an attempt at writing his own life story. Gacy loved to do jigsaw puzzles, and there were five completed puzzles glued onto the walls. He directed me to sit at the small table, an area without direct access to the door. It was a very subtle move, but an unmistakable power play.
On the surface, Gacy was a pleasant man of five feet eight inches, and he wore a white T-shirt with khaki pants and sneakers. Stocky yet fastidious, Gacy kept his living space neat and clean, with everything in its place. Gacy was portly, with an oval face and a double chin. It was almost as if he had no muscles there to give him expression when he talked. And talk he did, about watching TV or playing dominoes with the other inmates or about NFL football.
Still, immediately I felt threatened by him. I could see that Gacy felt he was better than anything or anyone around him. He was condescending about everything I said or asked, while at the same time he was trying to be ingratiating.
The phrase “dumb and stupid” was used often by Gacy, a term that was constantly used by John’s father to demean his son. Always, I had the sense that he was thinking, Oh, you dumb, stupid person. Or, Why did you ask something so stupid? While he wouldn’t dare say it to me, he constantly seemed contemptuous and smug. Gacy displayed a trait called grandiosity, something far beyond the arrogance found in some successful people, because a terrible aggression lies beneath everything he says or does. I could just feel that Gacy felt he was too good to explain his actions, that he was above explaining himself, not just to me, but also to anyone. Yet it was his seeming thoughtfulness that relatives, friends, acquaintances, and victims first saw and chose to believe. He was able to con most everyone. But to use the word con isn’t really strong enough to convey the hold Gacy had over people. Compared to Gacy, con artists were babes in the woods. Often in magazine articles and books, Gacy is labeled a psychopath. But Gacy’s pathology went far beyond that of the stereotypical psychopath skulking around the world without a conscience. First, the serial murderer is never as organized as a psychopath in his methodology. A psychopath can plot and carry out complex schemes. Secondly, psychopaths have a structured personality that doctors can pinpoint, utilize, and work with. That structured personality is like most everyone else’s, with an ego, an id, and a superego. The psychopath has problems with the superego, where guilt and conscience reside; he has no conscience, and he’s not scattered the way a serial killer is. With intervention, the psychopath’s personality can be modified and contained by a psychiatrist, whereas the serial killer’s is all bits and pieces. Since his self is scattered, all his day-to-day social activity is modeled on the way he has seen people act. In medical terms, Gacy was far worse than a psychopath, for he cannot be cured.
Gacy had already confessed to murdering teen boys and men, but he then changed his mind, recanting his confession. And even though our initial conversation didn’t dwell on the details of any of his crimes at all, Gacy made it clear that he was innocent of the murders of which he was accused. To put it simply, Gacy felt he had been framed. Since I was just there to listen on that first occasion, I didn’t push and ask how he had been set up.
“I didn’t do any of those things they say I did,” Gacy complained. Then he flashed a smile. It was not the kind of smile that made me feel closer to the man who offered it. It didn’t make me feel that Gacy was being open and candid either. It was the kind of smile that was both leering and arrogant, and it stayed with me as though the smile could, at any moment, grow feral, almost as if he could sprout fangs. It inspired fear and made me want to keep my distance. I would remember it when I was alone at night and my husband was away. It was my job, however, to try to get inside Gacy. And I began to make my way inside, even on that first day, simply by listening and egging him on.
“I don’t know if I actually killed anybody,” said Gacy.
I’d heard this kind of thing before, and it’s a very standard defense for the common criminal up against the legal system. The murderer could be lying or he could have the same memory problems Richard Macek had. But I did believe it was manipulative for John to bring his killings up so early in our meetings. I don’t think twenty minutes had passed before he began his rants. Gacy said he was taking massive amounts of Valium at the time of the killings—“between thirty milligrams and fifty milligrams a day.” He admitted he got the Valium illegally from pharmacists by having his successful construction company do work on their drugstores. Then, from a file folder, he brought out articles supporting the idea that Valium and poor memory are related.
He said, “I sleep four to five hours a night, and I think about it a lot. It bothers me. And it’s a hell of thing to be charged with, thirty-three murders, and not know what the hell really transpired. [Especially] For a guy who is as organized as I am about things.”
Organized? That was really an understatement. I looked around the place. “I’ve got to say this is one of the nicest places I’ve ever been to talk to anybody.” It was obsessively clean. Gacy was able to organize small things in his environment, but he wasn’t able to organize the big things, like what went on inside his head.
Gacy was pleased that I noticed, and he preened a bit. “What, roomwise? You’ll find that cockroaches still crawl around here, but I can’t stand that. So I wash the floor. I scrub the floor on my hands and knees. I wipe the floor. I washed all the walls; they just don’t come clean.”
“Uh-huh. Too many years. How long have you been here as of today?”
“Eleven months of being here and being secluded like this. I have not had no nightmares. I have no remorse. I don’t feel sorry for anybody. I’m here and I don’t understand it.”
Changing the subject to his family, I asked Gacy about his relationship with his father. I knew he was an abusive man, a man who was never satisfied with his son, and he had died while Gacy was in prison in Iowa for sodomy.
“They waited four days to tell you that he had…”
“Died. Of course, you know, I took it hard. Cause, you know, all along, throughout my life, I’ve let my dad down. So here, once again, I did it again to him. My dad always thought I was dumb and stupid. That I would never amount to anything. Just dumb and stupid.”
It was as if Gacy knew the kinds of things that would interest a psychiatrist, as if he were trying to do my own work for me. But it came too quickly, I thought. I left Gacy after three hours of casual, introductory conversation and returned to my office at the Evaluation Center, a psychiatric and neurologic diagnostic and intervention facility. Starting the Evaluation Center from scratch wasn’t just a milestone for me; it was a dream come true. I had always wanted to bring a multidisciplinary group of professionals together to provide the best possible consultations. With as many as fifty consultants available for a case, we are able to utilize the best of academic medicine, clinical practice, and research. The goal is to have everyone do a top-notch job without the constraints of a quota or of having to deal with intradepartmental hospital politics. I had opened the center in 1980 to assess brain functions from a medical and psychiatric perspective. For instance, if someone is having memory loss, I always assess the person for blood-flow problems to the brain. If there is a positive finding, we have the person looked at by a neurosurgeon who is capable of doing bypass surgery in the brain. If the person is psychotic, we will continue with the evaluation, often done by me. We can provide a very comprehensive diagnosis using these two perspectives, and it’s one I use with serial killers as well.
As I reviewed my notes, it just staggered me that Gacy was so like Richard Macek. Physically, they looked alike, thick-bodied, with slumped postures and puffy faces like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. To top it off, Gacy’s manner—his ingratiating words and the anger I saw boil beneath—was just like Macek’s. I was beginning to think these men were somehow cut from the same cloth. And I wondered if they had some kind of genetic mutation that made them appear human. But inside they were not like us. They do not have the same feelings you or I possess. It is as if someone took a cookie cutter from a kitchen drawer labeled “serial murderer.” The baker stamps out the dough and puts them in the oven to bake. When they’re done, they come out…ready to kill.
While the flagrant crimes of John Gacy may have appeared sexual in nature, they were really about anger and aggression. Gacy was described as a sickly boy who had various spells of fainting throughout his early years. When he was fifteen, Gacy had a huge fight with his father about use of the family car. Later that night while he was playing cards with friends, Gacy’s eyes rolled back in his head, he listed for a moment, and then passed out. After three weeks in the hospital, where the doctors found nothing consequential, he passed out again when he returned. When he came to, he flailed about frighteningly in his own bedroom, where a doctor diagnosed him as having an epileptic fit. John Sr. despised his son for what he saw as the boy’s hypersensitive, girlish, sickly ways and continued to label him “dumb and stupid.” He occasionally beat him, as he even did his wife, who was once punched in the face and left bleeding. By the age of twenty, Gacy left his father and family life and migrated to Las Vegas, where he worked as an attendant at the Palm Mortuary. Gacy later admitted to getting into a coffin, holding a stiff, lifeless body close, and arousing himself by pulling it on top of himself. It’s important not to read too much into this act, because Gacy was not a necrophiliac who commonly had sex with dead bodies. What he did was a combination of experimentation with a body and something he saw as comfortable. He wanted to lie down, and the coffin seemed to be the handiest thing available. The definition of necrophilia is basically receiving pleasure from sex with a dead person. It’s not a completely uncommon act with serial killers, but it’s certainly not a constant. What Gacy did with the body had nothing to do with the power and control that is said to fuel the need for necrophilia. And unlike necrophiles, who avoid relating to living people, Gacy had a full social life. For Gacy, what he did in the coffin was more about answering the question, What is this like? Like Albert Fish with his pins or like Kansas City’s Robert Berdella, whom we’ll deal with soon, Gacy was simply experimenting, trying to see what would happen if he did something.
When Gacy was twenty-six, near Christmas 1967, he began to lure boys to his suburban home. Long before he began to kill them, he would concoct elaborate plans to get sex from them. For instance, he invited fifteen-year-old Donald Voorhees to his home to watch stag films, saying that the movies were useful education for sex. He lied well and vigorously, telling Voorhees that the Kinsey Report (the landmark human sexual behavior study of white middle Americans under the age of thirty-five first published in 1948) said that many young people his age start their sexual experiences via oral sex with a man. When Voorhees said that semen might taste bad, Gacy claimed it had no taste, that oral sex wasn’t dirty, that it was just like sucking on your thumb. Since Gacy was the chaplain of the local Jaycees at the time, he also made it clear that the act between the two of them wouldn’t be immoral. He even gave Voorhees money to help the boy buy an amplifier for his rock band—and then coaxed him into having sex.
He eventually would coerce a teenage boy to pummel young Voorhees brutally in an effort to stop Voorhees from testifying against him in court. But the law caught up with Gacy, and he was jailed. While Gacy was awaiting trial on the Voorhees charges, which included malicious threats to extort and sodomy, police found that Gacy had had sex with other underage boys. One of these teens was Edward Lynch, a cook at the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant that Gacy managed for his wife Marlynn’s father. In addition to being raped, Lynch was chained and choked to the point of unconsciousness until he lost control and urinated in his pants. Gacy would shackle other boys with their hands behind their back before he raped them. While Gacy claimed that the sex was always consensual, Judge Peter Van Metre of the Tenth Judicial District Court sentenced the twenty-six-year-old Gacy to ten years in the Iowa State Reformatory for Men in Anamosa for sodomy, which included tying Voorhees up and raping him. The jail sentence was the beginning of the end for Gacy’s marriage to Marlynn and for any contact with his young son and daughter.
In Anamosa as in Cermak hospital, Gacy was an ideal prisoner, fastidious, orderly, often reading the Wall Street Journal in the library. Always scheming, he rose up the prison ladder to become one of the prison’s top chefs, where he awarded gourmet meals to prisoners in return for favors like cigars or to guards in return for extra time on the telephone. He even started a prison chapter of the Jaycees and persuaded an elderly couple to donate their miniature golf course to the prisoners. He was convincing, charming, and ingratiating, a politician, really. Nonetheless, the prison wouldn’t permit Gacy to visit his father, who died during Christmas 1969. Within seventeen months, John Gacy was released from prison because of his exemplary behavior. Psychiatrist Richard Lee’s report to the parole committee read “The likelihood of his again being charged and convicted of antisocial conduct appears to be small.” Unfortunately, Dr. Lee couldn’t have been more wrong. Gacy became morose because he hadn’t been given leave to go to his dying father, and that pall remained with him when he left the jail. When he visited his father’s grave on Christmas 1971, John broke down and couldn’t stop crying.
After my initial meeting with Gacy, I asked one of his surviving victims, Jeff Rignall, to visit me in my office at the Evaluation Center. Rignall was a man of medium height, thin but not skinny, with a mustache, long sideburns, and brown hair. He had been one of Gacy’s more vocal victims, one who survived Gacy’s cruelty, and he felt he was scarred for life.
In late March 1978, Rignall, a gay man who also dated women, argued with his girlfriend, left her apartment in the New Town area of Chicago, and decided to go to a bar. While Rignall was strolling down the sidewalk, a fancy black car pulled up next to him. Slowly, Gacy rolled down the window and affably struck up a conversation. Within seconds, Rignall judged Gacy to be a nice guy, probably a closeted gay man with a wife in the suburbs. He even felt somewhat sorry for him. When Gacy offered some marijuana, Rignall got in the car, and they began driving.
It didn’t take long for Gacy to pounce. Just as Rignall inhaled for the second, possibly the third, time, Gacy slapped a reeking wet cloth over his face, and the chloroform went to work. Rignall tasted its sweetness, which doctors know to be forty times sweeter than sugar. And there was the intense burn on his face, a feeling of unbearable pain, before he passed out. When he awoke, he was in Gacy’s house on a couch near a bar over which hung a painting of a clown. It seemed to leer at Rignall, mocking him, laughing at him. Gacy restrained Jeff in a kind of pillory he had fashioned. Then he forced Rignall to give him oral sex. While Jeff’s face felt afire and swollen from the chloroform, Gacy shoved various dildos, even a sharp fireplace poker, into him. After beginning to bleed from the rectum, Jeff Rignall was in very bad shape. When he was done with Jeff, Gacy dumped him in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, in an area full of weeds, litter, and scurrying rats. When he woke, he was able to make his way back to his girlfriend’s apartment. There, his injuries got worse. Rignall spent weeks recovering in a hospital. He sustained permanent liver damage from the chloroform, which is also known to trigger heart attacks.
I thought meeting with Rignall would help me gain more insight into Gacy. Gently, I began to ask questions.
“Can you tell me what happened to you?”
Rignall became emotional as he recounted the story. “I didn’t think I’d get out alive. I continued to bleed from the rectum in the hospital. And the police didn’t believe me.” It wasn’t easy for Rignall to set aside what had happened. When he had bad memories of the experience, he said he’d get in a car, “drive a hundred and fifty miles and just cry.”
“How do you feel about John Gacy now?”
“In a way, I’d really like to see him burn. See, I thought I knew horror. But I never realized that that kind of horror ever existed. And that has a tendency to come back sometimes.”
“How so?”
“I’ve aged a lot in the last two years. I used to look a lot younger than I do now.”
I felt that no matter what he said at the time, Jeff would gradually recover some semblance of a routine in his life. He may have thought he aged, but he was still only twenty-eight. Before him, he likely had a long and promising life.
“Why do you think you survived?” I asked.
“Any time that he did anything to me or when he started to do something to me, I never resisted because I was totally restrained and there’s nothing I could do about it. He would wait until he would see the pain on my face and then he would put the chloroform rag over my face and I would be out. And I’d wake back up, and I’d be in a different position, then he would tell me what he was going to do and say, ‘I just want to hear you say’…just real, I mean real vulgar things. And at no time did I resist. That’s why I really kind of think I’m alive, because I think that kind of turned him off.” That may well have been the case. Rignall may have played a role of submission that allowed him to live. That’s not to say that submission would’ve worked for any victim of a serial crime or any of Gacy’s other victims. But at that moment in time, perhaps because Gacy was tired, perhaps because Rignall didn’t fight back, Rignall survived. I didn’t gain a huge amount of insight into Gacy by interviewing Jeff, but it was important for me to speak to one of these young victims, if only to get a handle on the body type Gacy gravitated toward: thinnish light-haired or brown-haired young men. It was just one more piece of the Gacy puzzle.
It was not the angry, occasionally hysterical Rignall but Robert Piest who proved to be Gacy’s downfall. Sadly, before Piest, the authorities didn’t seem to care that much about the men and boys Gacy was alleged to have killed, and they wouldn’t arrest him. Rignall told me that when he suggested that police go to Gacy’s house, they hemmed and hawed, saying it was too out of the way. Those unfortunates like Rignall were the marginal in society—the poor, the runaways, the prostitutes, the depressed, the immigrant workers—people authorities must have believed were not high on their priority list. The authorities seemed to neglect and even eschew the tenet that no person should be considered disposable.
But Robert Piest, just fifteen years old when he was murdered, was different. Consistently, he made the honor roll at Maine West High School, where he was a gymnast and an avid amateur photographer. The slim but athletic Robert was considered handsome and wore his brown hair in a shag cut that was popular at the time. He was just about to become an Eagle Scout when he encountered John Gacy at the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois. Piest was a hard worker at the drugstore. But on the night of December 11, 1978, he wanted a job that paid him more money—perhaps because it was near Christmas, perhaps because he wanted to buy a Jeep, perhaps because it was his mother’s birthday. Maybe Robert wanted to show her he could do even better than he was doing. Whatever the case, Gacy, who by now ran his own contracting business, was in the store to give the owner some advice on upgrading the place. While stacking the shelves with merchandise, Piest overheard Gacy mention what he was paying his employees, which was twice what Piest was making at the drugstore. Robert said nothing to Gacy, who eyed him occasionally while speaking to the drugstore’s owner. Gacy left the pharmacy, then returned to pick up his forgotten appointment book.
Outside, snow had begun to fall, and the Chicago weather was icy cold. Piest asked a colleague if he could leave just a few minutes early to speak to Gacy about getting some extra work. Donning his blue parka, Robert went over to his mother, who was waiting to pick him up in her car.
Excitedly, he said, “I just want to talk to this guy for a minute or so. He might have work for me.”
Proud of her son’s work ethic, Elizabeth Piest agreed, then left her car to pass the time by browsing the aisles of the pharmacy.
Robert ambled over to Gacy’s truck. He looked in to see Gacy rustling some papers. For a moment, he hesitated. Then he rapped on the window.
“Sir, are there any jobs available with you? Because I heard you talking in the store.”
Piest flashed a smile at Gacy, who asked the boy to get inside the truck. With the snow and wind whipping around, Robert obliged.
“Can you tell me more about the jobs you have?” asked Robert once again.
According to Gacy, Piest was too aggressive about asking for a job. He suggested that if Robert really wanted money, he might think about selling his body for sex. Maybe Robert thought Gacy was joking. Maybe he was stunned by the suggestion. Whatever his true feelings were, Robert didn’t say. He remained silent, and Gacy began driving toward his house on Summerdale in the Norwood township near Des Plaines. Once there, he wasted no time. Roughly, he handcuffed Piest. Robert begged him not to do anything more.
By morning, Piest was dead, raped then killed by Gacy’s choking rope, and stuck like a rag doll between Gacy’s bed and the bedroom wall. He slept with the body for a while, then Gacy placed Piest in the attic and went to work. Later, he drove forty-five miles to Interstate 55 and threw the body into the Des Plaines River. After months passed, Robert’s decomposed remains were found near the Morris Dresden Dam in Grundy County, dozens of miles away. Gacy was charged with murder, aggravated kidnapping, deviant sexual assault, and taking indecent liberties with a child.
In my office, I looked at the photographs of all of the murdered kids, pictures that obviously were taken in high school. They all looked alike in a way. Yes, they were slim, attractive, and generally light haired, the kind of person Gacy always stalked. But more, under the mops of their longish hair they bore a look of hope and trust on their faces. None mugged for the camera. None made faces or appeared too shy to offer up anything but a face full of light. (Only one, nineteen-year-old Matthew Bowman, seemed somewhat suspicious of the camera.) As a psychiatrist I needed to remain objective, but sometimes emotions did creep through, despite all my training. These young people deserved to be alive…and free. I kept thinking, What a damnable waste of human potential, of precious life. But a key tenet of being a research investigator is to follow a protocol and to deal with the emotional impact later.
His family, of course, found it impossible to believe that John had done anything wrong. I asked Gacy’s youngest sister, Karen, to come to the office so that we could talk about her brother. Karen was a small, nondescript, quiet woman with dark, shoulder-length hair that was done neatly. For hours, she spoke about Gacy in glowing terms, about his giving nature, about how he went out of his way to help people in the community, about how he was protective of the family, especially his mother, after his father, John Stanley Gacy, died. Like many family members of serial killers, she was suffering from a deep kind of denial.
“I can’t believe this could have happened. He was always such a good brother. How could this have happened?”
“We’re all trying to find out.”
“Well, can’t people find out without it being in the papers and on TV every day? It’s like we’re to blame, his family.”
The media was indeed making the Gacy case a spectacle, and she was angry about what the family was being put through. Misinformation flew about like sand flies in summer, and in a battle to get the story first, some reporters wrote and broadcast rumors as facts without checking them. Because I had heard it before from Richard Macek’s family (among others), I understood what Karen was going through and said as much. As the minutes passed, Karen began to open up.
“We were always together, even though there was some sibling rivalry. What I did notice was he got hit in the head with a swing lots of times, had lots of blackout spells; he had some at school.” I understood what Karen was doing. A person who’s had something bad happen within their family constantly searches for a reason. No one wants to think it’s just the family member’s fault. It’s just natural to want to blame it on something. But in all the diagnostic work that had been done throughout Gacy’s life, there was absolutely no indication that there had been any physiological damage that could have led to the future killings. Even the mildest head trauma would usually result in errors in schoolwork or perhaps as vision problems, and that was simply not seen.
“Did he have any other kinds of spells?”
“I remember that once he passed out at the top of the stairs and didn’t remember who he was when he came to. He was like someone who was drunk, but he wasn’t drunk. Something in his voice was different. It was not his voice.”
Karen also recounted another alarming instance in which John keeled over. Taken to the hospital, John railed against being restrained. He had a “fit,” tearing at and destroying the straps “like he had the strength of ten men.”
“I hear that John and his father had problems.”
Karen took a deep breath. “Sometimes they were small things. I remember he didn’t want John to take a bath because he said it cost too much for the pilot light to heat the water. He’d shout at John, daring him to take a punch. But John never did.” John Stanley maintained a Depression Era mentality that never waned, and in reality had grown obsessive over the years.
“Anything else?”
“When John was away in Iowa [serving time for the sodomy conviction] and our father died, John felt he died because he was embarrassed about the crime that was committed. He somehow felt he was responsible for his father’s death.”
I got Karen a glass of water, and when she finished, I said it would be of real importance to speak to her mother. Karen blanched.
“My mother doesn’t talk to anyone,” she said. Karen took another sip of water. Then there was a prolonged silence. She held the glass in her hand and looked into it. Then she looked at me, saying, “But I’ll try.”
It took weeks, but after Sam Amirante, Karen, and even Gacy himself asked her to cooperate, I talked to Gacy’s mother, Marion, on the phone at length. Marion had been employed by a pharmacy and had worked her way up through the ranks so that she was a kind of pharmacist herself, albeit without a degree, ranking slightly above a pharmacist’s assistant. Though Gacy’s father continually berated young John by calling him “dumb and stupid,” John and Marion were very close.
Marion believed her son was being persecuted unjustly, and she went on about that. But early in the conversation, she began talking about John as an infant.
“John was late as a child, and when he came out, he was blue.”
“That must have been hard on you, Marion.”
“I did everything I could to help him. For months, I even gave him daily enemas.”
“Pardon me?”
“I gave him enemas and suppositories because he had problems before birth. He defecated inside the womb and that caused respiratory problems.”
She deduced that John suffered meconium aspiration, in which a baby inhales his own feces while in the womb and has difficulty breathing because of it. At its worst, such a condition can cause pneumonia or even a collapsed lung. Several days after his birth, she said, he had what she described as breathing problems once again and became allergic to all kinds of milk. Rectal suppositories, she said, were inserted to decrease the breathing problems.
“Who prescribed this?” It certainly didn’t seem like the proper prescription to me.
“I did. I am a trained pharmacist.”
“How long did you continue this treatment?”
“All the time for about his first three months.” Some might have jumped to the conclusion that John’s mother was crazy herself and that her particular kind of mothering hurt John. The early psychoanalytic thinkers may have said that the enemas and suppositories made an older Gacy think the world in general was threatening and that what she did to John kept John from developing a full personality. I myself was surprised at her comments, but it was my feeling that while she saw things in her own, sometimes curious, way, she wasn’t deranged at all.
Yet I thought it wise to travel to see Marion Gacy face-to-face. When she opened the door to her home, the seventy-five-year-old woman I saw was outrageously overweight, so much so that she found it difficult to move around. We sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, my notebook out as I wrote down what she said.
“What was John’s father like?”
“He was like my own father. He was a great fisherman, a man, not a mollycoddle. He was a strict guy, though, perfection personified.”
“Strict how?”
“Well, when the kids went out, they had to write out where they were going, the address and the phone number and when they’d be back. Things like that. John really didn’t trust anyone much.”
“Were there any medical problems?”
“He had some. Some from war injuries. He had a brain tumor, but doctors said they couldn’t operate. That’s why his behavior changed all the time. He could be verbally and physically abusive. Doctors said that’s the way it was and I would have to live with it.” Marion seemed resigned. She’d had a life that was sometimes difficult, and now with John’s dire circumstances, it had gotten much worse. She revealed that the elder Gacy was hospitalized in the first years of their marriage for symptoms that included everything from total paralysis to headaches. “Something in our son bothered my husband a lot, though.”
Once she finished speaking about her child and her husband, I again brought up the fact that she said she’d given him suppositories and enemas as a baby.
“I never said that. Never said that at all.” Her face reddened, and she was having trouble breathing.
Marion must have been overcome by guilt, because she did indeed say it to me on the phone. More than likely, she had thought about what she said and felt it might be interpreted that somehow she was at fault regarding the murders her son John had committed. Mrs. Gacy also described some very remarkable happenings. Young John would sleepwalk and become completely unaware of his surroundings or actions during these spells. She said that one evening, she put her son down and the next morning noticed he had acquired a birthmark. The mark had disappeared from her arm and reappeared on John’s, and she described it as though it was a kind of supernatural, religious experience. She also outlined another circumstance in which she had discovered that a tooth disappeared from her mouth. She looked at John when he brushed his teeth; the tooth, she said, reappeared in John’s mouth. Again she spoke of this as if it were a miracle of sorts.
“It just shows how close we were. He was just like me. He couldn’t sleep for more than four hours at a time. He didn’t like to be alone, like me. And, well, he was overweight.”
But unlike his helpless, aging mother who felt an overriding, unspoken responsibility for her son’s crimes, Gacy was accused of murdering almost three dozen people.
I then spoke with Carol Hoff, Gacy’s second wife, about whether or not she felt something was awry when she lived with the murderer.
“Carol, were there things that weren’t normal going on at the house?”
“Not that I could tell.”
“Did you ever smell anything that was different or unusual?”
“Yes, a bad stink, and I asked John about it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘We have a lot of mice and we’re putting down lime to stop the smell.’”
“Was there anything suspicious that you had seen?”
“No, not at all.”
“Why did the marriage end?”
“He was never around anymore, too busy with his contracting business and with doing things for the neighbors. He just wasn’t available. He was always working.”
“There was a young man he brought into the house to live, John Butkovich. John later killed him.”
“I had no idea that there was anything going on there. Little John was a kid who needed somewhere to stay. John said we were doing a good thing by letting him live with us. And I thought, Gee, what could possibly be wrong with that? It was a shock to hear that John did those things, a real shock.”
It’s generally true that family and neighbors are often stunned when someone they think they know very well becomes involved in a crime like murder. Because Gacy was so involved with his community, the news was especially jarring. Gacy not only ran a flourishing contracting company, but also fixed things like faucets for neighbors without charging them. Carol was a nice, quiet person who had two affable daughters from a previous marriage. Outwardly, they seemed like the perfect suburban family. When he wasn’t with his wife and stepdaughters, he was doing charity work. Gacy designed an outfit and dressed up as a character he called Pogo the Clown to entertain sick children in local hospitals, and he gave huge yearly backyard parties where hundreds of people—including well-known local politicians—were entertained and fed. He organized Chicago’s mammoth Polish Day Parade. First Lady Rosalynn Carter came and posed for a photograph with Gacy. Lillian Grexa, who lived near the murderer and even prepared Polish sausage for Gacy’s 1972 wedding reception, told me that John was “better than a neighbor. He was a good friend.” Gacy wasn’t merely well liked. He was admired.
But Lillian Grexa didn’t know the nighttime John Gacy. It was during the wee hours of the night that Gacy haunted a then-sketchy area of Chicago. Called Bughouse Square because of its proximity to flop-houses of the 1800s, the three-acre park was popular with local bohemians and radicals in the early 1900s. They gathered there from their cold-water flats and cheap hotels to argue and rant and face the occasional rotten tomato. Legendary Scopes monkey trial lawyer Clarence Darrow and political activist Emma Goldman even debated there. Today, the tree-filled park is surrounded by an upscale neighborhood of high-rises, and a yearly park festival commemorates those long-gone original bohemians with food, entertainment, and debating contests. In Gacy’s time, however, Bughouse Square was a run-down, seedy place where male prostitutes plied their trade.
Though word had spread quickly about how Gacy engaged in rough sex and circled the park in his black Oldsmobile outfitted with a police spotlight and scanner, many male prostitutes in dire need of money paid no heed. Sometimes Gacy appeared as a gruff-voiced police officer, complete with fake ID. At other times, he was his affable, outgoing self. Gacy acknowledged frequenting these prostitutes many times without killing or threatening to attack them. He bragged to one police investigator that he had 1,500 bisexual relationships in seven years (150 of which were homosexual encounters). Because that meant almost one per day, it was probably, as far as I can tell, inaccurate. The comment reminded me of Richard Macek when he was asked how many days in a year there were. Macek said “Two hundred and five.” Gacy wasn’t exaggerating so much as pulling a number out of thin air.
But if a boy tried to hike the price for services rendered or if Gacy he felt threatened by him in any way, Gacy would get riled up and, by the night’s end, end his life. After bringing a boy to his home, the way an animal brings its prey to its lair, Gacy would begin toying with him. To avoid the prospect of a swift getaway, Gacy would show handcuffs to the victim, then manipulate him into trying them on by saying it was a trick. Once his victim was incapacitated, he’d say, “There’s no key to let you go. That’s the trick.” Like a magician in a bad B movie, he’d then say, “I have one more trick to show you. The rope trick.” He would tie a rope around the neck of the still-handcuffed youth, knot it, place a board between the knots, and twist it with a stick, creating a kind of primitive garrote.
After the boy at his feet was nude and unconscious, Gacy might take photographs of the tortured victim. When a boy regained consciousness, he’d twist the rope again, taking away his precious air, repeating the process until the boy expired. Any thinking individual would have thought the authorities would have been so astonished by reports of the crimes, they would have arrested Gacy directly. But they repeatedly looked the other way.
One of the first examples of law enforcement’s blunders regarding the Gacy case occurred with nineteen-year-old college student Robert Donnelly. While Donnelly walked to a bus stop, Gacy turned on the Oldsmobile’s blinding spotlight and aimed it at him. After informing the frightened Donnelly that he was a policeman, Gacy shouted, ordering Robert into his car. Then he handcuffed Donnelly and drove to his house. He forced him inside, where he tormented the boy mentally, physically, and sexually.
“My, aren’t we having fun tonight?” Gacy asked.
Taking a pistol, Gacy pointed it at Donnelly’s head.
“Why are you doing this?” asked the boy, quavering, stuttering. He often stuttered, but now it was more noticeable. He thought he was going to die.
Ignoring Donnelly’s plea, Gacy proclaimed, “There’s one bullet in here.”
After waving the gun around, Gacy decided to play a game of Russian roulette. Each time he took his finger to spin the cylinder of the gun, each time it clicked as the cylinder turned, Donnelly felt he would die. Gacy then pulled the trigger, once, twice, many times. Donnelly wanted it all to be over; he had already been raped, humiliated, and injured, and now he just wanted it to end. When the gun finally fired, Donnelly squinted, shutting his eyes as tight as he could. In a moment, he realized the bullet was merely a blank. It was another of Gacy’s cruel pranks. Gacy laughed.
Gacy then led a dazed and wounded Robert to his bathroom, took his head, and pushed it under a bathtub full of tap water. Quickly, Robert’s larynx tightened and closed. He felt a stifling, panicky suffocation. Gasping and coughing, Donnelly passed out. When Donnelly regained consciousness, Gacy forced his head underwater again. Gacy did this again and again until Donnelly was confused and began to turn blue.
“Please. Just kill me,” begged Robert. Dazed, he felt he had been drowned four times. He had been tortured all night long and said he couldn’t take it anymore. As the morning broke and Gacy felt the need to ready for work at his contracting business, he released Donnelly, telling him to shower. Then he drove him to work.
When police investigated the case, they strongly suggested to assistant state attorney Jerry Latherow that Gacy be brought up on charges of kidnapping and deviant sexual assault. Startlingly, Latherow didn’t believe Donnelly. Perhaps because Donnelly was in therapy and appeared to Latherow as possibly mentally unstable, Latherow didn’t think the charges would hold up in court. And because Donnelly stuttered and spoke slowly, Latherow didn’t believe a jury would convict Gacy.
Though Gacy dumped a few of the bodies into the Des Plaines River and the Illinois River, he dragged twenty-nine of them into his crawl space, shoving them into shallow graves that he, along with his unwitting workers, had dug beneath the house. Arranged in a kind of circle, the dead were placed like spokes on a bicycle wheel. As he’d told his wife, Gacy did sometimes toss lime in the crawl space, but it was really to help speed up the decomposition of the bodies and to cover the smell of death, not mice.
When the police dug under the house, they found ten bodies that were so miserably rotted, skeletized, and putrefied that the cause of death could never be determined. Bodies were found with ropes tied about the neck. And those that weren’t yet so decomposed were discovered to have wads of material placed far back past the throat and into the esophagus, probably to stop massive bleeding onto the floors of neat freak Gacy’s home. Cook Country Medical Examiner Dr. Robert Stein theorized that some of the victims may well have been buried alive and that they tried desperately to dig themselves out. Gacy, who transported bodies into the crawl space late at night, assumed that each person was a cadaver. But they may have been merely battered and unconscious and, according to Stein, would have lived had they been given the chance.
Police had tailed Gacy for some time, watching him constantly after screwing up some earlier half-baked attempts at undercover work. Gacy even found them observing him, sought them out, and went to a restaurant with them, nervously trying to impel them to come over to his way of thinking: that they were following him for no good reason. But once they searched Gacy’s suburban ranch home at 8213 Summerdale Avenue, Gacy did make his confession. Later, in retracting what he had said, he claimed he was hung over and on drugs when he confessed. He said he was overtired when the statements were made, and indeed he was exhausted. The murderer was so worried about being caught that he hadn’t slept for days.
Gacy was no more manipulative than any other serial killer. That’s not to say he didn’t manipulate with vigor. Because he murdered at least thirty-three young men and teens, he cajoled and coerced more than most modern-day killers, and the story was told around the world by the news media…on a daily basis. In fact, with the advent of mogul Ted Turner’s Cable News Network, headlines and one-minute summaries about Gacy were beamed out to the world hourly. And the newspapers! They had field days as gory headlines boosted circulation. There were stereotyped stories about serial-killing monsters, stories that seemed to want to make people not only fear Gacy but also be wary beyond vigilance: again and again they cautioned that a serial killer could be lurking in anyone’s backyard.
On a one-to-one basis, Gacy himself was one scary guy, smugly smiling through many of his early conversations with me. And each time I received a typewritten letter from him as addendum to our conversations, I was reminded of his twisted point of view from headline-like Gacy-isms he had placed atop his letterhead: “Execute Justice…Not People!!!” or “Execution…Revenge for a sick society!!!” It was into all of this that I would be thrust if I decided to agree to work with Gacy for Sam Amirante.