Buried Dreams (19 page)

The way John recalls it, Carol threatened to burn down the garage. John said, “Go ahead. Fine. Real smart. Burn down the fucking garage, you’ll fucking go to jail.”

John would work sixteen straight hours, checking out bids and jobs, running all over Chicago in his first PDM truck: the one he painted a big number “4” on so people would think he had at least four of those babies out on the street. He’d come in, take a shower, fall into the sack with Carol, and try to “get into it with her.” But sex with a female takes time and tenderness and love and emotion. John tended to fall asleep, he was that tired.

Carol, her mind poisoned by her mother’s suspicions, would say, “You don’t want to do it with me.” So John just gave up, thought, “Fuck it.” If she was going to accuse him, he might as well go out and do something to be accused about.

So then, sure, he got it on with a few of the employees. A couple of them. One kid was only fourteen, a part-time worker making three dollars an hour. He was “real naïve,” and John told him about the Kinsey Report: how it’s “part of your manlihood” to have sex with a male before you have it with a female. It was such a crock of shit, the Kinsey Report thing, and John could rattle it off like it was a chapter out of
the Bible. Just like Voorhees in Iowa, the kid was worried about “putting something dirty” in his mouth.

John told him how it wasn’t any dirtier than any other part of the body; he suggested the kid try sucking on his thumb, like an experiment. John could hardly keep a straight face watching these dumb shits sitting there with their thumbs in their mouths. The Kinsey crock worked best with the young ones, the fourteen-year-olds. You had to come up with something better than that to outsmart them when they got to be sixteen, seventeen.

So, okay, some of the accusations were true, but John still had respect for the marriage vows he’d taken. He wasn’t really cheating on his wife because he was having sex with boys and not with women. It was like a kind of masturbation, sex with some dumb and stupid kid, some hustler. There was no love, no tenderness, no necessity to satisfy: it was an animal kind of sex. The love part he saved for Carol. A boy on the street, ten minutes, ten bucks, it was done.

That’s what John told the docs up on 3 North: The seeds planted in Carol’s mind by her mother sent John Gacy out after midnight, looking for sex. That was in late 1974, early 1975, the time when Jack Hanley began to surface. Jack wasn’t some alternate personality, John said, none of that science-fiction shit. Jack Hanley was just a name he used, because everyone on the streets used false names. It was part of the game they all played, trying to outsmart one another. John outsmarted the young hustlers with Jack Hanley.

In May 1975, when Gacy made his Mother’s Day announcement, both Carol and John knew it was only a matter of time before the inevitable divorce. John was out most nights. It was like a compulsion for him, an uncontrollable urge to become Jack Hanley and haunt the night streets of Chicago.

It was also in May that Tony Antonucci met John Gacy while the contractor was remodeling the Antonuccis’ house. Tony was fifteen, and John offered him a summer job at three dollars an hour. He often did that, hired boys he’d just met. In late May, John had young Tony doing tiling, plumbing, electrical work, and general clean-up. Shortly after he started with Gacy, sometime in June, Tony helped John clean up the Democratic headquarters on Montrose Avenue. They were working alone and it was about eight at night when Gacy
began making advances. “He asked about giving me a blow job,” Antonucci said, “and I said, ‘No.’ “

Gacy suggested they sit on the couch. He produced a bottle of whiskey and encouraged Antonucci to have a drink with him. Then, Antonucci said, “he started asking me about homosexual activity. Offered money.” Gacy was talking fifty or a hundred dollars.

Antonucci said he wasn’t interested.

Gacy applied some heavy pressure. “What if it meant your job?”

And Antonucci said he said, “ ‘No.’ I just continued with ‘No’ replies.”

They went back to work then, and Gacy made the incident seem as if it had been a kind of exam. Antonucci thought his boss had made the proposition “to see how I would handle pressure.” He knew Gacy had a wife and two kids; he had heard him make derogatory comments “about fags.” Tony thought his boss was testing him.

But then Gacy started grabbing at the boy’s crotch and buttocks until Antonucci finally “picked up a chair, like I would swing it.” Gacy “sort of laughingly asked me why didn’t I just say, ‘Stop’?” It was horseplay, John said: just a joke.

First a test, then a joke.

Later, after work, Gacy took Antonucci out for a hamburger and explained that the incident had, in fact, been a “test of morals.” Gacy was the kind of boss who needed to know if his employees would “break under pressure.”

About a month later, in July 1975, Antonucci was sitting in his parents’ home. His mother and father were on vacation. Tony had stepped on a nail at work the day before, and Gacy knew he was home alone, injured, so when John knocked on the door that night, Antonucci thought his boss was just stopping by to see if he was all right.

It was about midnight, and John said he had just been to a party. He had a bottle of wine with him. The boy and his boss drank some of the wine and, after about half an hour, Gacy said he had seen some stag films at the party. The films and projector were in his car. Did Tony want to see them? Gacy “asked me persistently,” Tony recalled, “and I said, ‘Okay.’ “

They were heterosexual films, men and women, and after they were over, Gacy grabbed for the boy and started “wrestling around.” It was just “regular collegiate-style wrestling,” Tony recalled, all armlocks and headlocks, more horseplay,
and not at all a serious fight. The boy was careful not to humiliate his boss, but after a minute or so, he felt Gacy trying to slip “a handcuff on my left wrist.” Tony swung his other arm around but Gacy got hold of it and managed to get both of Antonucci’s wrists cuffed, behind his back. They had been in a standing position, but now Gacy knocked the boy to the floor.

Tony Antonucci lay face up, his hands cuffed behind his back, and Gacy “started to unbutton my shirt and unbuckle my pants and pulled my pants down halfway to my knees.” Nothing was said. Gacy went into the kitchen. Tony never knew why Gacy left or what he was looking for in there. The boy could feel that the right cuff was very loose on his wrist. He managed to work it off, but he lay, waiting, watching the entrance to the kitchen, hands behind his back, as if still cuffed. When Gacy stepped back into the room, Antonucci hit him with a football tackle at the knees. The boy weighed 150 pounds; Gacy weighed 230, but Antonucci wrestled on the high-school team, and this time he was fighting seriously.

The boy “took the handcuff that I removed from my right wrist” and slipped it onto Gacy’s wrist. “I found the key”—Antonucci couldn’t recall if he got it out of Gacy’s hand or his pocket—"and unlocked the handcuff on my other wrist.” Antonucci put the other cuff on Gacy so that he had him lying there, face down, both hands locked behind his back. The boy held his boss down for a minute, maybe two, then got up and let Gacy lie there, face down on the rug, for five minutes or so.

There was some conversation then: no cursing, no threats, everything very rational, and Tony recalled, “It was agreed he would leave. I just let him up. He didn’t do anything then. Just left.”

After Gacy was gone, Antonucci thought that one of the strangest things about the incident was the first thing his boss had said as he lay on the living-room floor with his hands locked behind his back.

“Not only are you the only one that got out of the cuffs, you got them on me,” Gacy said. Like the guy went around putting handcuffs on people all the time: Antonucci couldn’t make any sense out of the statement, “It really didn’t have any meaning,” it was “strange.”

About a week later, another of Gacy’s employees, John But-kovitch, failed to get out of the cuffs and was never seen alive again.

*Name changed.

CHAPTER 12

T
OO
MANY ECHOES OF
Iowa: a managerial position, young boys working for him, wrestling matches, boys with hands chained behind the back, a variation of Kinsey crock working well, boys whose jobs might or might not depend on sex. But now a new element: the Jack Hanley character, John’s nighttime persona, was taking on a life of his own, a life wholly separate from that of John Gacy.

Maybe if the marriage had gone better, if Carol’s mother had gotten out of there just half a year earlier; maybe if the work wasn’t so demanding that “normal sex” could be a pleasure rather than a duty; maybe if Carol had been more aggressive in bed; maybe if he hadn’t taken on so many jobs for PDM; maybe if he hadn’t joined the Moose, or started performing as a clown for hospitalized children; maybe if he hadn’t gotten so deeply involved in Democratic politics at the local level; maybe if he hadn’t agreed to work like a bastard directing the Polish Day parade; maybe if he had learned how to sleep like any normal man . . .

Carol thought John looked “tired,” “worn out,” even “very . . . older-looking.”

All this in the summer of 1975, a time when his business needed him more than ever; a year when he began drinking more steadily, more heavily, probably because the divorce was looming up, surely only months away now.

The way John saw it and explained it, in that summer when the Other Guy finally surfaced, circumstances had conspired to destroy him, to defeat him with anxiety and fatigue.
Always on the go, never thinking about himself, never sleeping, working himself into the ground.

Then a period of blackout, and John Butkovitch was dead.

John Butkovitch was sixteen and working in a hardware store when Gacy offered him a job in construction. It was good work and good pay for a boy who had not finished high school.

Butkovitch, John said, “learned fast,” a tireless kid. Carol thought “he was a very nice boy. He was over, spent several times with us, had dinner with us.” Sometimes the boy would come over to pick up his paycheck and spend an hour or two, just playing with Tammy and April before he left.

When Ma moved to Arkansas to be with Karen and her family after they moved down there, John Butkovitch helped her move.

John Butkovitch and John Gacy: Carol called them Big John and Little John. They’d argue sometimes. Big John always argued with the teenage boys he hired to work for him.

Once Carol said, “Boy, if I ever worked for you and you did that to me, I’d turn around and say, ‘The heck with you, John.’ Because he was on them all the time, hollering. I said, ‘Is it necessary to holler?’ “

“You have to,” John said. “I have to keep them in line. I have to make sure that they know I’m the boss. Otherwise they take me for granted.”

Sometimes the arguments would degenerate into wrestling matches. Not serious fights, but a kind of wrestling where John just rolled around on the floor with one of his employees.

John argued with Butkovitch about money, or more properly, about the hours Little John claimed. Carol said, “Big John always felt that the boys would end up putting too many hours on the card anyway, so it was a little argument over the hours that Little John did spend on the job that Big John didn’t think he did.” Big John said he didn’t owe Little John that money.

Little John worked almost a year for Gacy. During that time, as their marriage degenerated, Carol did a lot of traveling with the girls. She’d go to nearby Shaumberg to visit Karen’s family before they moved, or to Indiana to visit her
relatives there. In July and August 1975, she went to Arkansas to help Karen care for Ma after she broke her hip.

When she came back from that trip, Big John told her that Little John had quit, run away, something. She never saw Little John again.

The Other Guy surfaced for an hour, maybe less, in the early-morning hours of July 31, 1975.

Little John Butkovitch was home early in the evening, complaining that Gacy hadn’t given him a check for his last two weeks’ work. His father, Marco, a Yugoslavian immigrant, had taken the money he earned as a janitor and invested in several apartment buildings. John, his son, was living rent-free in an apartment building the elder Butkovitch owned. Knowing a little about how the system worked in the new country, the father suggested that if Gacy did not pay up, young Butkovitch should threaten to inform the authorities that his boss was not deducting taxes from employee earnings, as required by law.

John Butkovitch and two friends left for Gacy’s house that night.

The way Gacy remembered it, Carol was off on one of her visits when Butkovitch arrived with three friends at the house. John said, “They threatened to kick my ass unless I gave him his check.” Gacy talked fast: “John,” he said, “I’m not going to hold back your check because you earned the money, but let me just go get the file on you.” Gacy offered the boys a drink while he sorted through the records in his office. When he came back into the living room, things had calmed down, and no one was going to get his ass kicked until the evidence was presented.

“Okay, look,” John said. “Butkovitch has a hundred seventy dollars coming from work. But look here, it’s all invoiced out.” The records showed that Little John had spent six hundred dollars redecorating the apartment his dad gave him and had charged materials to the Gacy account to get a contractor’s discount. Not only that, but he’d also been paying Gacy back out of his paycheck and still owed three hundred dollars.

“Look,” Gacy argued to Butkovitch and his friends, “if John didn’t owe me the money, why would he pay me back? Now, he has a fight with his dad, his dad’s going to take away
the apartment, and John wants to leave town. Why should I get stuck with a three-hundred-dollar debt?”

Butkovitch said, “The carpeting is worth three hundred dollars. Get the money from my dad.”

“John, you signed for the carpeting. We got it for you. Your dad isn’t going to pay me.”

A compromise was reached. Maybe Little John could tear up the carpeting and take it back to the store for credit on the Gacy account. Then Big John would give Little John his check.