Buried Dreams (21 page)

After John Gacy was arrested and charged with thirty-three counts of homicide, the police were severely criticized, and they were quick to point out that about 20,000 missing-person reports are filed in Chicago every year. Three quarters of the missing are minors, and a little less than half of these are juveniles: almost 7,000 boys and girls under the age of seventeen missing in Chicago alone. Most of the missing juveniles and minors turn out to be runaways.

Nationally, nearly 180,000 persons under eighteen are reported missing to the FBI.

In 1984, the Justice Department proposed setting up a Violent Criminal Apprehension program as part of the department’s Juvenile Justice office. Of the 20,000 homicides a
year in the United States, over 5,500 go unsolved. The program proposed by the Justice Department would review these unsolved cases, looking for patterns that would identify serial murderers who most often prey on juveniles and minors.

Research on the phenomenon suggests there could be as many as thirty-five serial killers operating in America in the spring of 1984. “And that’s a conservative estimate,” said Robert Heck of the Juvenile Justice office.

James Stewart, head of the National Institute of Justice, said, “This is like trying to identify and cure a new disease. We’ve had it for a long time, but it’s been overlooked for years and years.”

The way John Gacy was beginning to figure it, up in room 318 in 3 North, a serial killer was born in the summer of 1975. It didn’t matter what you called him—Jack, or Jack Hanley, even Stanley—he was the Other Guy, the one John didn’t know, and he lived inside, skulking, hiding, waiting for his chance. And then he killed.

John told the docs he could really only recall five of the deaths, five burials actually. The first was self-defense, and it was John all the time, all through that. Then came Butkovitch, and the morning he found the boy’s body in his living room, dead, for no reason. John had no recall, no idea how the boy died. For John Gacy, the world wavered and went completely dark when the Other Guy took over; he told the docs he had no memory of the thing inside him that killed.

It was like that with the other three he could remember: Greg Godzik, John Szyc, and finally Rob Piest. John could recall certain small details and then the boys were dead, hands cuffed behind their backs, the ropes tight around their necks.

CHAPTER 13

T
O
CAROL, THE ARGUMENT
leading up to the divorce was “a little thing”: she was just trying to balance the checkbook, save John some work. “I thought I was fixing it,” she said, “and I did mess it up.”

There was a fight then, one of the times John threw something. He’d throw a telephone or a glass, even a chair. Never at her—but he’d break things when he got mad, and this time he broke his marriage and it was irreparable.

When John looked back on the final fight he could see, in a way, that he really wasn’t the sweetest guy to be around all the time, not the way he acted with Carol. He treated her like she was dumb and stupid: dense, naïve. He could see how he was acting just like the Old Man, denying “acceptance” to his wife. No one, man or woman, can live without acceptance.

John’s attitude didn’t have anything to do with the body buried in the basement, the body buried in the garage. Carol couldn’t know about them. No one knew about them. They were just nice little secrets, their lives were over, and no one had to think about them anymore.

No, the arguments with Carol were common, garden-variety domestic disputes. Just like, Carol went through the credit cards like army ants through an orchard, and John had to take them away from her. He put a lock on the phone so Carol couldn’t make outgoing calls. He even put a lock on his office door.

Then she was so dumb and stupid she didn’t know how to buy anything. In shopping, John tried to explain to Carol,
it’s best to be on the offensive from the start. The thing about life is that the most anyone can do when you make a fuss is to say “No.”

John told Carol how you can outsmart salespeople, make them give you discounts that don’t even exist. Like when he wanted the bike for Tammy’s birthday: no reason to pay full price for it, not if you’re smart. Kids’ bikes are just like cars. They put the base model on sale, and the extras cost like a son-of-a-bitch. John told Carol how to handle department-store clerks, using Tammy’s new bicycle as an example.

“I just walked over to the bike that was loaded and told the salesgirl, ‘This is the one on sale.’ “

John went through the whole process so Carol could see how it was done.

“What did it say in the ad? It said the bike on sale has all this optional equipment, didn’t it?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Get the manager over here. The one on sale, it’s got the horn and basket, the saddlebags, it’s got the special handlebars.”

The girl said, “No, the saddlebags . . . I know the ones with saddlebags aren’t on sale.”

John said, “Well, you’re wrong. Get the manager over here.”

“I don’t think I am wrong, sir.” John imitated the sound of the dumb girl’s voice. “Besides, we don’t even have any of the sale items in stock. We’re sold out.”

“Get the manager,” John said with calm authority. “Because when you advertise something and you sell out, then the sale applies to the more expensive model.”

“I don’t think that’s our policy,” the girl said.

“Then you better either get the manager over here or give me your name.”

When the manager arrived, John told Carol how he let him have it, good. “What’s going on here? You guys advertised bikes for sale, I come in here to buy one for my daughter’s birthday, this girl tells me you’re not going to have that model in here for two weeks. My daughter’s birthday is tomorrow, not in two weeks. What am I supposed to do, give her a sales slip? Tell her she’ll get a present in two weeks? I do a lot of business in this store, and you’re telling me I can’t have this bike instead of one you don’t even have in stock?”

The manager—John described him as some clerky guy in a shit-brown sport coat—said, “No, I’m not saying that.”

“Well, isn’t it a practice that when you don’t have a sale item, the next one up goes on sale?”

“On some items.”

“In this case, it should be the same. If you haven’t got the power to do it, get someone over here who does.”

The guy straightened his tie and said, “I have charge of this whole department.”

“Then get me the one in charge of the whole store.”

By this time he’d been arguing with these two assholes for twenty minutes, and they finally just caved in: he got the loaded bike for the sale price.

And that, John told his wife, is how you shop. Call it boldness, call it arrogance, John said it was just being “smart.” But Carol—goddamn it!—wouldn’t listen. She’d go around treating salespeople like they were doing her a favor selling her shit at full price. Paying full price for anything: it just infuriated John. It was dumb and stupid.

That sort of thing was bad enough, but the everyday problems really got on John’s nerves. Just like the goddamn groceries she brought home: Carol was forever wasting money at the supermarket, buying center-cut pork chops when he told her—he
told
her—she could buy a whole pork loin and John would cut it down for her. That way the chops cost about half of what they did at the store. He had all the proper knives to cut down large chunks of meat, but Carol couldn’t understand the simplest rules of shopping and thrift.

With his restaurant experience, John knew how to shop for a family of four and save money, but Carol wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t do it his way: the right way. Pretty soon, on top of everything else, John had to do the grocery shopping, too, because Carol said every time she brought something home, he bitched about it. Carol would care for the kids, clean the house, do the cooking, but she wouldn’t shop.

Carol begged John to quit PDM, go back to working forty hours a week. They wouldn’t have to pretend that the business was going great guns and he wouldn’t be so tired, so crabby when he came home, and John said, “Do you think that’s going to make it for us? You go out and spend two hundred and fifty dollars for Christmas presents for Tammy and April, it’s stupid. What you do, you buy them a favorite toy, then you get them clothes, shoes, shit they need. You got to be practical. Two hundred and fifty dollars, we aren’t making that kind of money for Christmas presents.”

She didn’t even know how to shop for Christmas. Looking back, John could see that he was acting more and more like the Old Man. Locking shit up; hollering about shoes for the kids.

“What the fuck are these shoes you bought for April?”

“They’re pretty. She likes them.”

“They aren’t practical. She’s changing shoe sizes every few months.” John reminded Carol that he had once worked for the Nunn-Bush shoe company; if there was one thing he knew as well as food, it was shoes.

“Sure,” John recalled Carol saying, “you know everything, don’t you?”

And there was a moment there, just a moment, when the comment seized his heart. He did “sound just like my dad”: a fucking know-it-all.

But no, he was right. The shoes were a stupid buy. Of course he was right.

The way John saw it, looking back, it got so that Carol didn’t want to do anything around the house because—it must have seemed to her—there was nothing she could do right. Nothing.

Even before August 1975 and the disappearance of Little John, Carol was making noises about a divorce. She said John wasn’t giving her any money, nothing of her own, and the seeds her mother had planted made her angry and suspicious, ready for a separation. Before Butkovitch, John fought the idea. After he buried the body in the garage, it seemed as if he just didn’t care anymore.

John could hardly figure out why he was such a bastard with his wife—he loved her. It was different than with Marlynn; Carol was dainty, she needed protection, she needed his love, and it seemed—John could see it quite clearly—that he was destroying everything they had together. Almost like he was doing it on purpose.

The loving part of John came up with a solution: They’d be a team, work together on PDM, which, by 1975, was finally established and bringing in money. Carol could learn to drive: she could go deal with the bureaucrats for permits, pick up the materials he’d ordered at the hardware store and lumber yard. That way John could have more free time; maybe it would help their sex life.

“And what if I get the wrong stuff?” Carol asked, and her question was another accusation. “You can yell at your employees
until you’re blue in the face, but I won’t have you yelling at me.” Carol refused to learn how to drive. She didn’t need someone telling her how “dense” she was all the time.

Later, John couldn’t understand why he’d been so nit-picky, why he felt the need to make the person he loved feel so “dumb and stupid.”

Just like the final fight with the checking account. It was in October. “That fucking account,” John said, “what a goddamn mess she made of it. That’s how she was going to help with the business: She was going to take over the checking account, and this was in 1975. But she thought if you wrote a check and didn’t cash it, you forgot about it. The woman had never in her life heard the word ‘void.’

“I told her, ‘Carol, you don’t throw away voided checks, for Chrissake. How is anyone going to make sense of this?”

He went after her then, sitting at his desk, the checkbook spread out in front of him, yelling things like, “Okay, now where is check twelve-thirty?” And he’d have to fill out little sheets of paper so they looked like checks and put them in there. “Where’s twelve-thirty-eight? Twelve forty-two?” He was mad, yelling, because anyone knows things have to be in order, and a checkbook has to balance.

Carol started crying then. “I didn’t want to do this in the first place,” she said, choking, emotional, and she could hardly get the next words out. “I can’t do anything right.”

John wouldn’t let up on her though, not even then, because he was right, and getting a proper balance on the checking account is important. “Don’t give me that crying shit!” John screamed. “Don’t lay that crap on me. You don’t want to learn. You’re so dumb and stupid, you don’t want to learn. Because you don’t listen.”

“I listen,” Carol said. “I know you’d rather hang around with your employees than with me and the girls. I know some things.”

“You know jackshit! You have no idea how hard I work for you, how hard I work for the girls. Because I want them to have the things they deserve, and you won’t help me. You won’t work with me. If I had some fucking help around here, I’d have time for you. You’re so goddamn dumb, you don’t even understand.”

“It would be just the same,” Carol said, “whatever I did.”

“All you ever do is bitch!” John hollered. “Bitch from the time I walk in the door. If I was out banging every other broad in town, you’d have a reason to bitch. If I was gambling away our money, or fucking drinking it up, or buying drugs with it, you’d have reason to bitch. But I’m working! I’m working my ass off seven days a week, twenty fucking hours a day. Where does the money go? All the money goes to you. What do I ever spend on myself? Jesus Christ, Carol, what the fuck do you want from me?”

And Carol said: “I want a divorce.”

Why?

Was he just tired of the fights, the bitching? Was he too exhausted to fight? Sitting up in his room in 3 North, putting the pieces of the puzzle together, John tried to understand his divorce, what brought it about.

He didn’t want it, but he’d said, “Fine, go ahead, get a divorce.” He even sent her to his own lawyer.

But he loved Carol, and she lived with him from October, when she asked for the divorce, until February, and then he used his trucks and employees to help her move. Does that sound like they hated one another? He continued to date her, seeing her often, hoping in some small way that they could find a way to get back together.

He missed her so much when she finally left with the girls. And later, up in room 318, a couple more pieces of the puzzle slipped together. It was John who wanted Carol and the girls: John Gacy. It was John Gacy who felt love and compassion. But it was the Other Guy, the one who had surfaced with Butkovitch, who wanted Carol out. The Other Guy had used John Stanley’s personality to drive Carol out of the house. John could imagine a voice in his head—after Butkovitch—a voice that wasn’t a voice at all but a subtle tipping of his personality, and it wanted him to think, “The bitch is fucking up a good thing: get rid of her. I want the house to myself.”