Buried Dreams (33 page)

Later, probably bragging a little bit, John described how the guys in sunglasses tried to take the whip right out of his hand on the day of the parade. “Mrs. Carter,” one of the assholes told John, “is ready.” The guy had a little electronic gadget in his ear and said, “The motorcade is
on the way. Let’s be ready when she gets here.”

The way John explained it later, he really lit into this Washington jag-off. “Hey,” John said, “look at the fucking program here. What time does it say the parade starts? Does
it start at eleven-fifty? Huh? Does it start at eleven fifty-five? The motherfucking parade starts at noon sharp, so you get on your little gadget there and tell Big Rosie that this bastard starts at noon. She can sit in the car, she can ride around the block, I give a shit, but she gets here at noon sharp . . . and then the fucking parade starts.”

John said he got a lot of compliments about how he ran that parade. Cops coming up to him and telling him it was more military than the marines, which, as John probably pointed out, had been his branch of the service.

Later that night, at the private reception for the President’s wife, John Gacy shook the First Lady’s hand. A picture was taken. Both Gacy and Mrs. Carter are staring at the camera and not at one another. Mrs. Carter wore a white blouse, scarf, and cardigan sweater. John Gacy wore a dark suit and tie, with his security clearance button worn rather low on his left lapel, over his bad heart.

Mrs. Carter signed the photo:

To John Gacy

Best Wishes

Rosalynn Carter

A little later that month, toward the end of May, John and Carol had what amounted to their last date. The two of them were having a drink in a North Side bar called the Good Luck Lounge. Carol recalls that “John asked me what type of fellows did I think that he would have anything to do with. He said, ‘You know, look who is in here, look around who is in here and pick them out.’ “

Carol understood that John’s question was a sexual one: Which of the young men in the bar would he want to “have sex with"? Carol had overheard one of John’s phone conversations in which he mentioned these preferences, “so I picked out a few fellows, most of them had light-brown hair, medium-brown hair.” John agreed; it was a good guess on Carol’s part. He told her he liked boys with “light hair, had buttocks kind of firm, small, they were small build. Not real big built, not big boys.”

Almost a year later, after John had been arrested and the bodies exhumed from under the house where she had once lived, Carol realized Little John, John Butkovitch, “had that kind of build.” His body, recovered under the cement in the
garage, had been grotesquely twisted to fit the tiny grave where a storm drain should have been.

“Maybe,” John said later, “I should have asked Carol for help. But I didn’t think she was strong enough, and I tried to protect her from it.”

That’s why he buried Little John in the garage, to protect Carol. That and the fact that there was a small drainage hole there, already half dug.

In the spring of 1978, seven months before John was finally arrested for the murders, there was a groundbreaking ceremony for the retirement center where he had built the refreshment stand and donated his trucks and clowned with Rossi to raise money. Now John Gacy the politician took care of the gate and controlled traffic. Michael Bilandic, then mayor of Chicago, was there for the ceremony, and John asked a friend to take a picture of the two of them shaking hands.

That was the photo the police found in John’s office.

Rignall couldn’t get the police to serve his civil warrant on John Gacy. He “was calling the police department on a daily basis and becoming totally frustrated because they were totally neglecting it.” One officer told him Gacy’s house was “too far of a drive.” Rignall, who weighed 150 pounds when John Gacy picked him up, now was down to 110 pounds.

After two months of excuses from the police, Rignall drove out to the house on Summerdale. Ma, back in Norwood Park on her annual summer visit, opened the door. It was July 15, the morning before a party, and Ma’s hair was done, dyed brown, Jeff thought, and her lipstick was neat and freshly applied.

Ma said that John wasn’t home, that he had taken the van to get the dog clipped.

“Are you coming to the party tonight?” Ma asked. She was very pleasant.

“Are you kidding me?” Jeff said.

The woman, still pleasant, still smiling, invited Jeff inside. John would be back shortly. “I’m John’s mother,” Ma said, and Rignall could hear pride in her voice.

“I don’t know if your son told you,” Rignall said, “but there’s a warrant out for his arrest.”

Ma let the screen door slam and said that John’s business
dealings weren’t her concern. Jeff could come back later, talk to him then. And suddenly Jeff wanted John Gacy’s mother to know about her son, really know him. He wanted to tell her about the chloroform and the rack. “Do you know,” he began, “your son was convicted of a sex crime in Iowa?”

In a book Rignall subsequently wrote about his experience with John Gacy, Rignall said that “the woman’s face turned a bright crimson and [I] could see it harden. Her voice came out harsh and cold.”

“ ‘That was years ago,’ she said firmly. ‘We don’t talk about that anymore. Anyway, it was a bum rap.’ Then she slammed the door in [my] face.”

Rignall went back to his car and a little later saw the van pull in. He called the police and gave the warrant number. Eventually, entirely at the insistence of Jeff Rignall, the police did come. They couldn’t find Gacy, but a young gentleman with brown hair parted in the middle came up to Rignall and “asked me if I would please not say anything about the rape to John’s mother.”

Rignall wasn’t going to give up.

John, however, figured he wouldn’t need a lawyer to reverse the little bastard in court. He filed a countercomplaint that charged that Rignall had “without legal justification made physical contact of an insulting nature with John W. Gacy, by shoving him with his hands and shoving a bottle of Rush in his face.”

Rush is a brand name for isobutyl nitrate, a liquid whose fumes, when sniffed, are thought to intensify sexual pleasure. Rush, sold in head and porno shops, is perhaps more popular with the gay than with the straight population.

“See,” John said, “I figured if I charged him, the complaints would cancel one another out and the case would be thrown out of court.”

Rignall’s lawyer had a copy of the complaint filed against John Gacy by the boy who had been taken to Northbrook, the one who said that Gacy, impersonating a police officer, had picked him up in June 1972 and tried to run him down in the car.

Gacy had countercomplained that the kid was trying to blackmail him because of a sexual encounter.

Back in 1972, the complaints did indeed cancel one another out, and the case was dropped.

Rignall’s lawyer thought pretty much the same thing would happen with the criminal case against Gacy when it came to court on September 13, 1978.

On that date, Rignall and his lawyer met early at the courthouse and went to “felony review.” The criminal charge against Gacy was still a misdemeanor—punishable by a one-hundred-dollar fine—and Rignall wanted to get it bumped up to felony assault, which would make the civil case in preparation stronger.

The state’s attorney who reviewed the facts, like the police investigator, seemed “hostile.” Rignall later testified that the “state’s attorney stood up, took the file, and said, ‘What the hell. This is only a butt fuck. People get shot in this city and they’re not charged with a felony.’ “

When the case was called, Gacy was not present, and the same young man who had asked Rignall not to talk about rape with Ma—the one with brown hair parted down the middle—appeared for the defendant and said that Gacy was in New York on business. It was a stroke of luck for Rignall Had John been present—taken the thing more seriously—it is likely both complaints would have been dropped.

In his absence, Rignall’s lawyer got Gacy’s countercharge dropped, and a warrant was reissued.

Meanwhile, Gacy got his own lawyer to reply to the Rignall civil case against him, and the matter was settled out of court. Gacy paid Rignall three thousand dollars. Rignall’s lawyer thought that was the best they could do, though Jeff's medical bills ran to twenty-five thousand dollars.

A month after an assistant state’s attorney decided that John Gacy was “too nice,” and a “more credible” witness than Robert Donnelly—the boy who claimed that Gacy had choked him into unconsciousness and nearly drowned him in the bathtub four times—a muscular nineteen-year-old named William Kindred disappeared from Chicago’s North Side. Kindred was 5 feet 8, weighed 155 pounds, and had ash-brown hair. A tough, streetwise boy, Kindred lived in the New Town area, where he was known as “Shotgun.” Only three months before, Billy Kindred had gotten engaged and planned to marry Mary Jo Paulus as soon as he landed a good job. There were no rings exchanged, but Mary Jo had given Billy a religious medal on a chain. On the night of February 16, Billy left Mary Jo’s apartment. She noticed that he was wearing
the chain around his neck. Back at his own apartment, Kindred told his roommate that he was going out to a bar.

When Billy Kindred didn’t call the next day, Mary Jo was worried. For the next few weeks, she drove around the New Town area, asked after her boyfriend, and posted information-wanted posters throughout the neighborhood. Finally, along with Billy’s mother, she went to the police and reported him missing.

A half year after the arrest of John Gacy, in the summer of 1979, sheriff's police officers asked Mary Jo if she could identify some articles of clothing and a piece of jewelry. She said the belt buckle looked like the one Billy had on the last time she had seen him; the chain was a Catholic medallion, the gift she had given to her fiancé. Billy “Shotgun” Kindred was the eighteenth identified victim.

There were ten other bodies recovered from the crawl space under the house, and one other found buried beneath the barbeque pit in the backyard. Police and coroner’s officials were unable to identify these bodies before John Gacy went to trial. As one prosecutor said, “All we know is that they were boys. All we know is that they ended up in Gacy’s graveyard.” The victims remained unknown perhaps “because they were from out of state, maybe because they were drifters, maybe because their dental or medical records were never sent in because their parents just didn’t want to know that they ended up at Eighty-two Thirteen Summerdale.”

Burial and periodic flooding in the crawl space had slowed putrefaction of the bodies, but applications of lime and muriatic acid had macerated them, so there was no way even to estimate a time of death for the unknown victims. John Gacy couldn’t help; he said he remembered nothing of the unidentified boys. “I don’t even know if they’re mine.”

What he did remember, what he told police shortly after his arrest, was that the crawl space was filling up, and digging new graves, bent over in that confined space, was hard on his health. Imagine pitching over with a heart attack and dying right there in a grave dug for someone else.

The last four victims definitely attributed to John Gacy were not buried at all. They were found floating in the Des Plaines River. All of them had been thrown from the bridge on Interstate 55, an hour and a half drive south of his house. Gacy had crammed the corpses into the trunk of his black
Oldsmobile and tossed them into the dark waters of the Des Plaines River in the dead of night.

Police called the last four bodies “floaters,” and the first of them was identified as Tim O’Rourke. One night in mid-June of 1978, O’Rourke told his roommate that he was going out for cigarettes. His body was found about two weeks later, floating face down in the Des Plaines River, six miles downstream from the bridge on I-55. O’Rourke, who stood 5 feet 9 and weighed 150 pounds, was a tough, dark-haired boy who idolized the late martial-arts movie star Bruce Lee. O’Rourke had a crude tattoo on his left biceps that read: “Tim Lee.”

Dr. Munesh Ahluwalia performed an autopsy at the Blackburn Funeral Home in Joliet, Illinois. Ahluwalia said the body was “that of a young white male,” but the changes, “the gross changes attributable to putrefaction, characterized by peeling of the skin,” led some police officials to conclude, from the name “Lee,” that the dead boy might have been Chinese, and they scoured Chicago’s Chinatown, asking about a missing person.

Several months after the arrest of John Gacy, Donita Ganzon, a presurgical transsexual, read a newspaper story about the unidentified body. Ganzon, who had lived with O’Rourke for three months, recalled the “Tim Lee” tattoo. She also remembered that O’Rourke had talked about a contractor on the Northwest Side who might have a job for him. When Ganzon asked if this contractor was gay, O’Rourke just smiled. The contractor’s name was Gacy.

Dr. Ahluwalia, examining O’Rourke’s body on June 30, 1978, concluded that it had been in the water for “approximately seven to fourteen days or longer.” Tim O’Rourke was murdered a few weeks after John Gacy posed for a photo with Rosalynn Carter; he was killed a week after John Gacy was photographed shaking hands with the mayor of Chicago and less than three weeks after John failed for the last time with Carol, failed and fell sobbing into her arms, sure then that he was “going the other way.”

John Gacy’s fifth annual yard party, the Italian Festival, was held in July, and it was the largest gathering yet, with more wealthy clients and influential politicians in attendance than ever before. It was a bitch to organize—just to find the time—considering all the work John was doing for PDM and PE Systems. He was constantly on the road for PE, remodeling
drugstores across America. He estimated that he covered nearly sixty thousand miles in 1978. In the first week of February, he was in Woodburn, Oregon, and arrived back in Chicago on the seventh, nine days before William Kindred disappeared.

In early April, before the Polish Day parade, he worked in Brainerd, Minnesota, and Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. John did two stores in Michigan, one just outside Detroit, where he took a side trip to Windsor, Ontario. Then, in late summer, after the death of Tim O’Rourke and after the Italian Festival, he did a four-day job in Knoxville, Tennessee.