On one cold winter night, while being driven through Cabrini in a cab, I barely avoided a thug who skulked up to the cab at a stoplight and tried to force open the door to rob me with a long knife. The cab pulled away just before the man could force his way inside.
In the late 1970s, it was not the safest place to be at night, not for me, not for anyone—especially since it served as the opening scene to many of John Gacy’s murders during his four-year crime rampage. About five blocks away from the crime-plagued Cabrini Green, that sprawling low-income housing project known nationally for its gangs, drugs, and violence, was the notorious Bughouse Square.
On that freezing winter night, I felt it was important to retrace some of Gacy’s steps as he picked up local hustlers. There is, even though I am a doctor, a fair amount of investigative work in my research. Bughouse Square was full of leafless trees whose scraggly branches reached over muddy footpaths that snaked through the run-down park. As I walked, occasionally a shadowy figure would emerge from behind one of the trees, stare at me until I was frightened, and then pass silently into the night. As a frigid wind blew through the park, I was thankful for my black earmuffs. I rubbed my hands together for warmth and continued my search.
It was not hard to find one. Half lit by a streetlight, he stood on a corner in jeans and a black jacket, waiting.
“Excuse me. How are you?”
“All right…. What do you want?” He appeared a little startled.
“I just want to talk. Have you heard about John Wayne Gacy?”
“Are you with the police?”
“No, I just want to talk.”
Streetwise and fidgety, he spoke with a slightly feminine voice. “Yeah. I certainly know about him. Everybody knows about him.”
After saying he’d read about Gacy in the papers, he admitted he’d even met Gacy. “Sure, I knew John Gacy. I had sex with him. He wanted to give it rough. He didn’t hurt me…much.”
“Weren’t you warned about him?”
“Everyone around here said to be careful. We knew he could be violent. That’s what we heard.” He spoke with a kind of bravado, like he’d been on the front lines of a war.
“Then why did you go with him?”
He shifted his weight and looked at the ground for a moment. “Person’s got to make a living, honey.” With that he walked away into the darkness of the park. The brief encounter and the trip gave me some insights into how people picked up the prostitutes at Bughouse Square as well as the culture that existed there. Familiarity with the Bughouse scene would help me not only as a researcher but also as someone who had to speak to Gacy about his crimes.
Not long after this, I was called to the hospital in an emergency situation. I was told that Gacy was contemplating suicide. After I arrived, he calmed somewhat. When I asked him about it, the way Gacy explained his nature was certainly scarier than the person I met in the park, and it chilled me more than the freezing temperature that winter night.
“I think there are two distinct characters,” mused Gacy from a chair in his guarded room at Cermak. As he talked, the tiny eight-by-fifteen-foot room seemed to grow smaller, and I felt a bit claustrophobic. Gacy continued. “One body, two persons. The active person, John Gacy, has fifteen characters, not personalities, see? Fifteen different characters evolved in one man. The sex drive, when it breaks in, it’s two people. John Gacy and Jack Hanley.”
“Okay.” I quickly regained my composure and thought to myself, Is this a crock?
“This guy Jack controls me. Eighteen hours of the day. Sometimes twenty-four. But apparently when he’s been drawn down and, not only by alcohol or drugs, and that, but evidently right at the crest, when I got angered, he picked them up. He comes out. He comes out! He’s got loose morals. He’s got loose ideas. And you know, anything goes…How the hell do I get him out? I don’t know how to talk to him. I don’t know how to bring him out.”
“I see.” It was just not possible that John had any kind of split personalities, since he didn’t display the classic symptoms, symptoms that are seen very rarely in clinical practice. Dr. Morton Prince introduced the concept of split personalities in 1898 when he reported the case of Miss Christine Beauchamp, a Radcliffe student who showed three distinct personalities: saint, devil, and woman. With split personalities, there are situations in which a person can become stressed, and that stress leads him to go into another personality. Gacy often killed when he was under no pressure whatsoever. Still, I wanted to hear what he had to say.
“The only logical conclusion is one’s gotta kill the other. If you can’t separate the two, then you gotta kill both of them. I don’t think I’m suicidal, but I’m afraid.”
“You think you’re out of control when you’re doing, or not doing, something.”
“The fear. Scared of what? There’s nobody here except me, but I’m afraid of myself. And afraid I’m going to hell.” But Gacy really had no concept of hell, at least as opposed to heaven. When he later talked about Jesus Christ and Satan, it was clear to me that he had developed no clear distinction between the two in his mind. To him, they were the same being. Gacy couldn’t differentiate among people, nor could he differentiate among concepts that were more far more complex, abstract, and philosophical.
He even asked me to hypnotize him so we could find out what caused his crimes. I remembered what had happened with Richard Macek and said, “The problem with hypnotizing is this. We could get you into a state and might not be able to bring you out again. That’s why I won’t do it.” (In fact, no one would do it.) Since the turmoil within Gacy was exponentially worse than what was within Macek, I did not know what would occur. In addition, there was the chance that under hypnosis, Gacy might have displayed the same kinds of injuries he suffered while torturing his victims. Gacy could have hurt himself far more than Macek did with those blisters that spontaneously and mysteriously arose on his hand.
Undaunted, Gacy continued. “If that state would be where you’d uncover what really happened, and if I’m that way, I really don’t want to live, anyway.” Outwardly, he seemed to feel trapped, that he wanted to do something, anything, to change his circumstance. And he said he had methods of suicide that would work. “I could jump off in the courtroom and jump the judge. I could kill myself.”
“How would you kill yourself?”
“In here? I could do the rope trick to myself. Secondly, I could hang myself with a rope. If I was really bent on suicide, any time they took me on a trip, I’d bust away from them. They have orders that if I escape, don’t even bother coming back. Them goddamn mothers up there—they’re gun happy and they probably would blow me away in a second if they had they a chance.
“Yet, you know something, if I was really bent on escape, I’ve had at least five opportunities to disarm an officer. They trust me. While I was at County Hospital [a few weeks ago], they’re all there with their guns, sleeping in the chairs…. Then again, I could suffocate myself. I could take blankets. I could burn the mattresses, start a fire, rip open the matches and start a fire in this gas stuff [he meant the old oxygen tank connectors] here near the door. These plastic bags, put your head right in the bag. Tie it. You can suffocate. At one time I had a razor blade, but that’s such a sloppy mess, and there’s no guarantee.”
“That’s right.”
Gacy was never a person of a few words. A self-proclaimed “motormouth,” every time he spoke, he ran on and on, often writing what he said or what I said in his ledger book as we spoke. The clinical name for such a condition is logorrhea, one of the symptoms seen in persons who are in a manic state. They talk on and on, even if they’re not hyperactive, and they can’t seem to stop. Gacy was somewhat like a radio talk show host in that he seemed to love to hear himself speak. He was everywhere when he spoke, all over the map, ranting, explaining, cajoling, imparting what he believed were truths. The surprising under-current to many of his verbalizations was his belief that he was the victim. No matter that he raped. No matter that he tortured. No matter that he killed mercilessly. He was the one who was being persecuted by everyone else, and he reveled in voicing his rationalizations to all who would lend an ear.
On another gray afternoon in January 1980, Gacy began to tell stories about his childhood. He recalled being eight or nine years old, about having a young friend who had polio, and playing with him when other kids wouldn’t. Then he mentioned dreaming of the wheelchair-bound child’s father, “of looking at his father in a swimsuit or something, the muscular build.” So did that statement indicate that John was gay early on? Absolutely not. Again, Gacy did not distinguish between men and women sexually or otherwise. It was as though people were one sex to him.
Then, knowing what I knew about Gacy’s history, he mentioned two things that were a bit frightening and momentarily gave me the shivers. “I can remember when us kids were small, we used to play about the Black Hand. The Black Hand will get you. Scared the shit out of them every time.
“Then we used to go over to the Jewish cemetery and take the flowers. I used to collect the papier-mâché buckets and separate the Styrofoam and all the ribbons and all the artificial flowers. We’d have a wedding and we’d use all the funeral flowers. Once we found a dead dog. We’d get all these flowers and get like the casket and spread it over the whole wagon with this dead dog with the flowers on it. Had to bury the poor dog.”
I asked Gacy if there was a time during his youth in which he became frightened of things like monsters and ghosts. He shrugged and said that he hadn’t. “But you wanna know something? When I was a kid, I was afraid of firemen. Whenever I heard a fire truck, I would run like hell for home. Because they used to go by so fast and they were blurry on their faces, they looked like monsters. You couldn’t see no face on those trucks. You just seen a blur.”
I was at a momentary loss. I had no idea from where his fear came, especially since most children like fire engines and firemen. As Gacy indicated, it may actually have been the unpredictable noise of the sirens that frightened him, but most boys want to be firemen. I took the statement at face value, and certainly Gacy couldn’t figure out precisely why he was scared. Gacy equated firefighters and blurry faces with monsters. That was all.
Gacy then mentioned his compulsion to steal panties, which first began with stealing his mother’s silky underwear off the line and hiding it in a paper bag under his porch. He also pilfered underwear from various clotheslines as the mood struck him, often when he worked at a local store delivering groceries to neighbors’ houses. It continued through his teens. “I used to masturbate with them. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I just took ’em all at once and I was burning garbage out in the alley, so I burned all of them. But they wouldn’t burn. They actually melted, because of the acetate in them. Some of the guys I went out with would be wearing girls’ underwear and I would take it from them.”
“It wasn’t the smell or anything like that?”
“The feeling of it. I’d keep it and never use it for nothing. Just liked the silky feeling when I was a kid.” It was the same with Gacy’s masturbating with the panties. It wasn’t that the panties had sexual meaning to him. He just liked the feeling of them in his hand and on his body. To him, it was about simple comfort and quick release and not about fantasies or dreams.
During the time we spent at Cermak Hospital, Gacy’s perception of me would vary, to say the least. Sometimes I was a friend. Sometimes he would lash out at me. Sometimes he saw me as a doctor. Sometimes he saw me as “dumb and stupid.” Sometimes he saw me simply as someone who would bring him magazines or cut through the red tape at the hospital.
On the surface, of course, Gacy liked to portray himself as powerful and influential. And he seemed to be smooth, and occasionally suave. But there was always something ambivalent about Gacy, even when he spoke of those closest to him. Even when his mother, the person closest to him in the world, was ill, he couldn’t express anything but the facts of her situation. Of these inconstant emotions, he was always unaware. There were periods when, even though he was incarcerated, he felt he could rule the world. These then alternated with feelings of being down. Gacy would say he was lonely and lost and confused. He even said he had lost all will to live. But I believe that’s what he thought people expected him to say. Both his elation and his despondency were extreme. He never tried to hurt himself, but he sure talked a blue streak about how up or down he was. For a while, he would become suspicious, his face seeming to change subtly. Then he would flash that creepy smile of his and start gabbing again.
During one of our meetings, I gave Gacy a language test and asked him to characterize what was happening in these sentences: “Arthur threw the ball into the woods. Barbara was very angry.”
Gacy made his answer into an elaborate story, beginning:
It seemed to me that Arthur and Barbara were playing ball and that Arthur threw the ball into the woods. She may have thought he did it on purpose. The [sic] again it may be that she was his mother, and thought that he was being disobedient. She may have told him not to throw it in the woods and he was showing that he was going to do what he wanted. There is a lot of things a person could take from the two sentences. Maybe is Arthur was too young to understand, that it was an accident. I can’t see why she became very angry, unless she was drinking or not feeling well. Everyone is not perfact and can make mistakes. Barbara was very angry, maybe she missed the ball herself, and thats why she was mad. The question doesn’t tell if Barbara was angry at Arthur, it just assumption. Maybe they are both older and the ball came into there backyard and instead of throwing it back he through it into the woods out of spite, and his wife got angry at his action, because he took such action.
Although Gacy had an above-average intellect, he lapsed into a very primitive mode of thought. His sentence structure disintegrated into thoughts propelled by such sheer impulse that they were disjointed. There was no focus, just a series of unconnected thoughts. A normal person would come up with a structured beginning, a middle, and an end to the story, maybe like this: Arthur threw the ball into the woods because he wanted to see Barbara’s reaction. Barbara was very angry because Arthur had done this before. So Arthur went and got the ball and Barbara was happy again.
As I’ve mentioned, he did not know how to restrain himself verbally. Throughout much of his life, his impulses and his wishes were most likely experienced as stimuli coming from outside himself. It was almost as if he felt he were drowning when subjected to emotional complexity of any sort. He couldn’t sit back, think, and come to a logical conclusion. When confronted with the complexity of others, he fell apart. He didn’t think; he acted. He didn’t pause; he pounced. For instance, if he thought a person to be “dumb and stupid” and the person didn’t act that way, that same person might well become a victim.
One evening, I received a short note from Gacy saying, “Just thought I would drop this short note, and enclose my latest fan mail, as you can see he used the words dumb and stupid, just like I do.” The note was anonymous and carefully written by hand. After expressing the hope that Gacy would be given the electric chair, the writer began to rant:
You are dumb, you really are, you are real super-stupid and dumb since you were caught in all of those crimes you committed, no matter what you had before or what you were like before, you are real stupid, stupid, dumb…. You are, right now, royally, and always bedumb, you are really super, extra stupid, extra dumb…. You don’t have enough sense or intelligence to be insane, you’re too dumb to be that. You’re too stupid to be crazy.
It was a haunting note, as though his abusive father were writing him, chastising him from the grave. But if it gave Gacy any pause, he didn’t mention it. It was not in him to feel grieved by so complex an idea. It simply was something to add to a bland letter that mentioned trite facts about his lawyer, his sister, and his mother. (He never once mentioned Carol in letters, since they were divorced and he never saw her anymore.)
But there was nothing trite about what was about to come—the media circus of the Gacy trial itself. In a way, I dreaded the idea of it. The publicity, the newspaper and TV reporters, could very well distract me from my work. The press constantly indicated that Gacy’s murders were homosexual crimes, and some even called Gacy an “avowed homosexual.” It was a truly antigay tactic that was perpetuated throughout the trial and before, one that almost seemed to glory in leading readers to believe that murder was a punishment for homosexuality. At the same time, I was curious to see how it all played out. How would Gacy fare before the court? Would he sit quietly or break under the pressure? And how would the court and the jury react to what I had to say about the man who had become the world’s most notorious serial murderer?