John Wayne Gacy (43 page)

“In addition to doing that, Officer Pickell said, ‘Well, Mr. Gacy, write in here that you used to hire young people for summer help.’ Mr. Gacy said, fine, ‘I used to hire young people for summer help,’ and signs his name again. Again, this is a man under suspicion for kidnapping. He’s in there cooperating. He stays in there.

“While he’s in there, Lieutenant Kozenczak has a warrant to issue. When a warrant is issued, they say, ‘John, we’re going to go over to your house. Could we have your keys?’ ‘Fine, take my keys, go to the house.’

“He stays at the station. He’s not under arrest. Maybe he was being detained, but he did not have to give them the keys, but he did voluntarily give them the keys to his house, that house where those bodies were. Is that the act of a rational man? Is that the act of a professional or intelligent criminal? ‘Go look in my house, see what you find.’

 “He was calm and cooperative. He wasn’t at all nervous, and he bragged. He bragged about his connections. He bragged about his running the National Polish Day Parade in Washington. He bragged he was a precinct captain—he bragged about this and he bragged about that. Why brag? What does that show?

“Anyway, after that initial search, certain things were found in his house. Lieutenant Kozenczak ordered surveillance. He put Officer Hachmeister, and he put Lieutenant, or Detective, Schultz on the surveillance. Now, the man is being tailed. He’s being tailed; they are watching him constantly. Does he run? Does this evil man run? No.
He enjoys the tail. He plays games with them. He plays hide-and-seek, but does he try to leave the jurisdiction? Oh, no. ‘Here, guys, I might lose you because I’m a fast driver, so here’s where I’m going. I’m going to tell you where I am going. Meet me there.’

 “He became friendly with them. And he invited them in his house. He cooked for them; he gave them a tour of his house. He showed them photo albums. One of the officers’ car was broken down, and when the car broke down, you think he kept going? Do you think he ran? No way. He stopped his car; he went back and gave the officer a ride. He gave him a ride and put him in his car and said, ‘Come on, I’ll take you along with me.’

“He offered to take a polygraph. As a matter of fact, there was testimony that when they were on the elevated train, on the el, going downtown, his lawyer at that time, Leroy Stevens, told him, ‘Leave the country.’ Did he do that? No.

“When they went to look for him at the airport, was he at the airport? No. He was at a Christmas tree lot two blocks away from his house. Is that the act of a man who is running scared? Is that the act of a man who was tied up in a web, in a police web? No. Those are the acts of an irrational man, or a man who wants to get caught.

“He was speeding … sixty, seventy miles an hour down side streets, erratic driving. They had to tell him to slow down. Did he want to get taken into custody?

“He introduced them as his bodyguards. He told them he had a bodyguard with a .357 Magnum that would not hesitate to waste them. They never saw a bodyguard. They never saw anybody with a .357 Magnum.

“He told them that other people were following him. He said they must have others working with them, because he thought he saw somebody following him. The detective said, ‘Nobody else was following him; only we were following him.’ He felt the cars were bugged. He told them that he worked hand in hand with Mayor Daley running the city of Chicago.

“He joked, he laughed. They said he didn’t have a harsh word to them. He just went right along with their surveillance. Did he want to stop the killing? Did he want to get arrested? He drove fast and erratic. He told them he [couldn’t] look at clowns as people, guys, because clowns could get away with murder. Now, this is a man under suspicion of murder. He’s under suspicion of kidnapping, and that’s what he told them.

“He passed—the morning he got arrested, he pulled into the gas station and passed marijuana cigarettes into some kid’s pocket in the gas station right in front of the policemen. Then he tried to—they said he tried to take off. He left the gas station. Did he keep going? No way. He came right back. He came right back into the station and says, ‘Come on, Dave, let’s get going.’ He wanted to get arrested, and they gave no indication even up to that time, with the marijuana, with the speeding, and with everything—they never gave any indication of arresting him.

“Now, when he did get arrested, he finally—he went on that morning and finally got arrested. They took him to the station, and he was there all day, and Mr. Sullivan says he got one of his famous heart attacks, implying he got a fake heart attack. This man had a whole history of fainting, of heart attacks. No medical basis, no physical basis, but that was the history. He had this throughout his whole life, when he was a child.

“Mr. Sullivan calls it a fake heart attack. On the way back from the hospital, after he had his seizure or collapse, whatever it was, he then confesses. Now he has lawyers. His lawyers aren’t there at that time. He went to the hospital and voluntarily says, ‘I want to clear the air. I want to clear the air. I want to talk to you.’ Finally, he was there. He finally talked. He got arrested; the killing could finally stop.

“And how did he talk? He gave a very rambling, disjointed statement. They only asked him one or two questions. This was at three thirty. The first thing he told them was—the first thing he told Officer Albrecht—that he was not a homosexual, and he had a
strong fear of being a homosexual. He said, ‘A man is a man, and he should stay that way. There’s something wrong with a man if he’s gay.’

“Then he said ‘Jack does not like homosexuality.’ Well, the State says he planned this multiple personality thing. Jack, whatever Jack is, we know it’s not a multiple personality, but it’s something for him to get rid of that guilt. How could a man live in a house with all those bodies, all those years, with all that on his mind if he does not have some mechanism, some relief mechanism? So he blames another part of himself. He blames a guy named Jack. They tried to make you think James Hanley up there was Jack Hanley. His name was James Hanley.

“He talked about Jack [first] to Michel Ried in 1970, before he ever met or before James Hanley ever saw him or [John] ever saw James Hanley, if he ever did. He told them at that time that he never forced sex upon anybody. It was always consensual, and he had a heart condition.

“He told them at that time that he slept with the Piest boy after he was dead. He told them that he did not even know Piest’s name, and he told them they were all strangled, and I want you to keep that in mind. When I talk about the medical examiner later, he said they were all strangled. He said he put a rope around Piest’s neck, and while he did that, he went and answered the phone. No feeling, no emotion. That’s what the doctors are talking about—lack of affect.

“Did you see what he did when Mr. Sullivan was calling him a murderer, murderer, murderer? He was laughing. Laughing. Put yourself in that chair over there. Somebody calling you a murderer, somebody asking the jury to find you guilty of this crime, are you going to laugh? That is what they talk about when they say lack of appropriate affect or lack of appropriate feeling.

“He said they killed themselves, and he wasn’t blaming Jack—he was blaming the victims. He said they killed themselves because they sold their bodies for $20. He said he used a rope on every
single one of them. Again, remember when I go into the medical examiner. He said all of the killings were related to homosexuality.

“He said he lost count of the bodies, that the crawl space was full. He said he did not like Kozenczak because he did not have any respect that his uncle had died, and then again at three thirty, as I indicated, he went into another rambling—a long, disjointed statement with only one or two questions.

“He did not like homos; he was afraid he was becoming one. He denied any encounter with Jeffrey Rignall. He said Rignall—then he went on to tell them that when he went to court on the Jeffrey Rignall matter, Rignall was the guy who did not show up in court. Actually, Rignall testified John Gacy was the one that did not show up in court. Twisting things backwards, talking in opposites. His statement is a good example of tangential speech. He went from here to there, changing the subject back to something else again.

“Officer Bedoe described it as ‘Mr. Gacy skipped a lot back and forth.’ He freely gave his statement. There was a definite pattern involved—now, not planned, but pattern. He could remember who many of the victims were. He rambled, skipped, went back in years, then back to the present again; and then he told them that Piest might have been dead when he was in the attic. He said he wasn’t even sure if he was dead.

“At the house later in the morning, when he was taking them to show where the bodies were—a man who was arrested, now the man who was trapped, as Mr. Sullivan would have you believe, in his own web, takes the police to show them where Butkovitch is, where he is buried.

“On the way there, he goes in the garage, wants to know why his garage is so messed up. He starts closing cabinets, straightening out drawers, picking things up. He wants to know how come there’s mud on his floor.

“Officer Pickell had to remind him three times why he was there. The compulsiveness of his behavior … he gave statements
compulsively. He’s compulsively cleaning, compulsively taking care of things all the time—nitpicking, little things. He’s doing it right when he’s arrested, right when he’s showing where the body is.

“Later on that day, he called Larry Finder into his cell. He said he wanted to talk to Larry. You have never done anything to hurt me, and he read the Miranda rights again. This is a man who has just been arrested for murder. He told him that he felt relieved, but he was unhappy, but he did feel relieved. He said he accidentally left his book at Nisson Pharmacy, and had he not left his book, he never would have killed Piest. Is that … a rational, premeditated, planned act? Is that the act of a man who is planning something?

“He left the book somewhere. He goes back to get it, and he kills somebody. That is not premeditated, that is not planned.

“A week later at Cermak, he gave the other statements. Again Mr. Sullivan talked about memory. He remembered that. What did he remember? In all of those statements, what did he remember? He remembered Robert Piest. He remembered something about Szyc, how he spelled his name. He remembered something about Gregory Godzik. He remembered something about—he remembered the first name of Rick Johnston. That was about it—that he was from Bensenville, and he remembered one other thing about somebody.

“Now, Mr. Sullivan went over and over and over the rope trick and the Piest thing, over and over again. There’s thirty-three of them. How many did he go into? He only went into a few. Again as I told you in the beginning, a psychotic state, either somebody remembers everything or nothing at all. That’s how he told what happened, just like he was dreaming about it.

“OK. Then we had the part of the case, the part of the police investigation that involved the excavating of the property. Now the State would have you believe that the excavation or that the burial was planned, was organized. He had holes dug down there, and they bring out these maps, and they show you—look at how nice
and neat everything is. All right, down here, it looks nice and neat. It’s not the way those bodies were buried. That’s the way they were taken out.

“They were buried, the first one being buried under the cement, then out to the garage, then into the dining room, going like this: garage, dining room, and then the third one in the dining room, and the fourth and fifth over here. The sixth was way down over here, and the seventh was way back over in this corner, and so on and so forth.

“As Dr. Morrison said, John Gacy has [somewhat normal] intellectual capability, but he probably has the emotions of a baby. Somewhere, something stopped. Now why? How? Somewhere something went wrong. Look at his medical history; his medical history that Mr. Sullivan said was average, [this] medical history that was totally discarded by Dr. Leonard Hesston in Anamosa twelve years ago, his medical history that was totally discarded by Dr. Cavanaugh and Dr. Reifman as being average.

“You know it is lengthy. You know a lot of things happened to him with no physical bases. Some of the things, as indicated by Dr. Morrison, were, in 1958 he fainted, he had shortness of breath, there was a request for psychiatric consultation. “In 1959, in the hospital, he was found on the floor. He was complaining of a headache. He appeared to be disoriented and confused about what happened and why he did it. He was laughing to himself, and he would not answer questions relating to any accident in the hospital. He was discharged against medical advice.

“Again in 1959, he had fainting and dizziness, difficulty breathing, and a sensation of being choked.

“He had hysterical blackouts. In the nurses’ notes in 1959, they said, ‘He had an acute convulsive episode last night with loss of consciousness and violent thrashing about, but later he was talking normally. He was acting normal and suddenly he developed extreme restlessness after complaining of chest pains, and then he
became impossible to handle, and he went berserk again yesterday and he had to be restrained.’

“In 1963, he had a seizure. He shouted and struggled. He gave strong resistance to ambulance personnel. He had no memory of events until after his admission in the hospital, and on and on and on and on.

“That is an insignificant, average medical history? It goes on like that.

“What did his friends and business associates say about him? You saw Rich Dolke, who said, from even when he was a kid he was friendly. You saw Ken Dunkle: friendly, easygoing, happy-go-lucky person, a sincere and warm person as he grew up. The only time they ever saw him get violent was when he had these fits or seizures, whatever they were. Otherwise, he was fine. He was non-violent. They used to have to protect him. They thought he was a sickly boy.

“It was Rich Dolke who said he used to protect John, because he thought he was sickly. Nothing was wrong with him physically.

“His cell mate, the person he knew at Anamosa, said Gacy was a cream puff, but he was a leader; and he always thought Gacy always gave the impression that anytime anyone wanted a fight with him, what he would do is, he’d have one of his, as Mr. Sullivan calls them, famous heart attacks. They weren’t faked. He would get ashen gray. He would pass out. He’d have shortness of breath. He wasn’t faking it. It was something that was happening with his mind, even back then and throughout his life.