Buried Dreams (27 page)

Greg had been dating a girl named Judy Patterson—he was popular with the girls at Taft—but she was special. As Judy recalls, her old boyfriend and Greg “got into a little jealousy thing,” sometime around December 1. Greg went to work looking a little worse for the fight: a few bruises and a cut over his right eye.

On Saturday, December 11, 1976, at about 7:00
P.M.,
Greg was preparing for a date with Judy. His sister, Eugenia, noticed “he was just very, very concerned on how he looked.
He had on new pants, new shoes, and a new shirt. He was very excited about going out.”

Judy recalls the date lasted until about midnight; then they picked up Judy’s mother, who was visiting friends, and Greg drove them both home. Judy’s mother went into the house, and Greg and Judy sat in the car for another half hour. It was the last time Judy ever saw Greg.

When the docs remarked on John’s lack of remorse, he told them that he was just trying to figure it out, understand why it happened. He was too confused about everything to feel remorse, and he could talk about the deaths dispassionately, over a prison lunch, as you would talk about a movie you saw a few years ago: images seen as if on an imperfect screen, something that didn’t actually happen to you.

Just like Godzik. The kid worked for him for two weeks. John knew Greg was having trouble with a girl and that some older guy laid his head open over her. But John really didn’t see Godzik more than five or six hours, all told. The boy was working under Rossi, who was supervising that crew.

John recalled that one day he stopped to see how the Rossi crew was doing, and he heard the boys talking about marijuana. He thought that, the way Godzik was talking, he might have a connection to get some, and John liked to have it on hand. He was beginning to enjoy it himself, but hell, he was thirty-four years old; there was no place he could buy it.

So he got Godzik aside and asked if he could buy any dope. Godzik, according to Gacy’s story, said maybe he could get some Saturday.

Sure enough, Saturday night—apparently after his date with Judy—Godzik called John about the dope. There was some confusion about Greg’s car: his friends had dropped him off. Could John come pick him up?

So asshole John got in his car long after midnight, picked up Greg, brought him home, and the kid didn’t have any dope. They smoked some marijuana that John had and drank quite a bit. John “must have got pretty bombed,” because that’s the last he remembers of that night.

John “supposed” that maybe he started getting mad at Greg. A conversation such as, “First you tell me you have the dope, then you say you don’t.” You could theorize that they argued that way, over dope and money. Maybe something
inside John came out then, thinking Greg was trying to “outsmart” him.

All theory, though. What John clearly remembers is waking up the next morning and finding Greg with his hands cuffed behind him, a rope around his neck, dead. Godzik, John recalled, was sitting in a chair in the living room, and all he had on was his underwear. He had been dead for some time, and rigor mortis had set in.

John had started sort of a hole for a drain tile in the crawl space, so he dumped Greg Godzik down there and dropped him into the hole, burying the boy’s body on its side in a stiff sitting position. Then he smoothed the dirt over and didn’t have to think about Greg Godzik again. Not until 3 North.

John told the docs that there didn’t seem to be any sex involved with Godzik, as far as he could theorize. Just like the first one—the Greyhound bus boy—was self-defense; the second—Little John Butkovitch—was about a carpet; and Godzik was about dope.

Whoever was doing the killing, John speculated, wasn’t killing them for some sex thing. Spend months looking for a “motive,” and John just couldn’t come up with a thing. Self-defense. A carpet. Dope. The motive thing was a real head scratcher.

Mrs. Eugenia Godzik awoke early on Sunday morning and went in to wake her son, Greg, only to find that his bed had not been slept in. She called his friends. No one knew where he was. At about ten-thirty that morning, Mrs. Godzik called the police.

Greg’s maroon 1966 Pontiac was found parked in a northern suburb. It was his first car, a prized possession; it didn’t seem likely that he would simply abandon it if he was going to run away. He had no reason to run away: he and Judy were close; he would graduate in June; he got along with his parents; and he had a good, high-paying job.

About the middle of the following week, Mrs. Godzik called Greg’s employer. John Gacy said he had a message from Greg on his phone machine. The boy had called on Tuesday or Wednesday after the Saturday he disappeared and said he’d be at work by noon the next day. He never showed. Gacy told Mrs. Godzik he couldn’t play the tape for her because he’d already erased it.

Mrs. Godzik called the police and suggested they talk to John Gacy.

At this time, Marco Butkovitch was still calling the police, begging them to interview John Gacy about the disappearance of his son a year and a half earlier.

Butkovitch was calling the police’s Area 6.

The Godzik family was calling the police’s Area 5.

There seemed to be no communication between the two departments.

After John Gacy was arrested and charged with murder, Harold Thomas, commander of the Chicago Youth Division, explained to the
Chicago Tribune
how a serial killer could slip through holes in the system: “You must realize that you don’t treat every missing-person case [as] a possible homicide.”

The Godzik family—like the families of other victims—conducted a private search for their son. They contacted the Salvation Army and other groups dealing with runaways and street people. After six months of fruitless searching on their own, they hired one of Chicago’s most famous and expensive private investigators, who also came up empty-handed.

Judy Patterson, thinking Gacy might be able to help her find her boyfriend, visited his house a few weeks after Greg disappeared, sometime between Christmas and New Year’s of 1976–77.

Judy said that Gacy “seemed like I was bothering him and he didn’t have time for me.” She was in and out of the house in five minutes, but in that time Gacy said that Greg had planned to run away and that he had mentioned these plans to his boss. Judy recalls that Gacy said he wanted the name and address of the guy Greg fought with in early December. “I’m in the Syndicate,” Gacy said, “and we’ll look into this our own way.”

Years later, John recalled quite clearly how a seed sort of dropped right out of his subconscious mind. He was up in 3 North, working on a kind of written variation of the motormouth approach to finding the Other Guy: some deal where he had the names of the victims in front of him, the five he remembered, and he was supposed to describe them in adjectives, without really thinking.

When he got to John Szyc—who disappeared on January 20, 1977, about five weeks after Greg Godzik—John was
motormouthing along with the pencil, not thinking, and he found himself writing pretty much the same stuff as he did for all the others: dumb, stupid, greedy, naive . . . and right in the middle of all those adjectives, a name: “Rossi.”

John remembers, right away, he stopped and started erasing what he’d written. The doc, John couldn’t remember which one it was, noticed and asked him what he was doing. John explained that he was supposed to write adjectives and here he’d written a name: “Rossi.” The doc said, “Just leave it.”

John wished the doc would let him erase the name. Coming out under Szyc like that, it was almost like an accusation. God forbid that he should accuse someone else of “the crimes,” even subconsciously.

The whole thing with Szyc was pretty foggy, anyway. John remembered that it was raining and that he was cruising when he saw this kid walking along and struck up a conversation. This guy Szyc—John remembered the name because later he had to spell it and it was all consonants—said he was about to leave town and wanted to sell his car.

“Oh, yeah,” John said. “You got the title?”

Kid walked back to the car, got the title. John said, “Let’s go back to my place, talk about it.”

They got back to Summerdale, and here John’s memory began to fade in and out. Was Rossi there? Did he tell Szyc, “This guy might buy your car"? Or did Rossi come in later? It’s possible that Rossi wasn’t there at all. John said he honestly couldn’t recall.

John knows there was some drinking, some discussion about the car, some talk about drugs, and then there was a long blank period and John woke up at seven-thirty or so to another of those mornings.

There were three people in the house, and one of them was dead. In his mind’s eye, John could see that morning as clearly as if it had just dawned. Szyc was lying on the floor in the other bedroom, the rope tight around his neck.

Rossi was sleeping on the couch in the front room. He was still wearing his jacket. John didn’t know what Rossi knew about the dead boy, didn’t recall what had happened at all. Still, he figured that if Rossi didn’t know, he wasn’t going to tell him. As quietly as possible, John dragged Szyc’s body to the crawl space and dumped it down there. No time to bury the kid just then.

John recalls that Rossi said he’d just gotten in and didn’t mention anything about meeting some guy who wanted to sell a car, but the title Szyc brought with him was still on the bar, and John said it was for some vehicle. It was Rossi, according to John, who said, over breakfast, “Well, let’s go get the car.”

They drove down to Clark Street and found the car, a white 1971 Plymouth Satellite. Rossi drove it back to the house, and by the time they got back to Norwood Park, he was sure he wanted the car.

John recalls that there was an issue of fairness involved. “Michael,” he said, “you can have the car, but what do I get out of it? Because that car’s worth at least six hundred dollars.”

So they argued about the price for a while, and Rossi didn’t have it in cash, but John sold it to him, anyway. He let him have it for three hundred dollars, about half of what it was worth, and Rossi paid John in weekly installments deducted from his check.

Just like the Old Man had done when John bought his first car, Gacy put his name on the title along with Rossi’s. When Michael paid the entire three hundred dollars, he could have clear title. It was the sort of thing a father does with a son.

The police later discovered that John Szyc’s name on the title looked nothing like John Szyc’s signature.

Michael Rossi testified, under oath, that he had never met John Szyc. In court, Rossi said that Gacy told him John Szyc was selling his car “because he was going to California.”

After John was charged with the murders, after the hints about Rossi’s possible guilty knowledge had been dropped, investigators were forced to consider the etiquette of murder. The police and the state’s attorney’s office didn’t believe in the existence of the Other Guy.

Perhaps they worked it out like this:

If Gacy had killed Szyc in Rossi’s presence, Rossi could blackmail John for the car in return for keeping the murder secret. Instead, Rossi paid for the car.

If Rossi killed Szyc, how is it that John considered himself the owner of the car?

Rossi’s story sounded more credible, and he was never charged in connection with the murders, nor was he charged with any crime in connection with the car.

Gacy seemed to think that whatever it was that happened entitled him to the car. He even kept the things he found in the trunk of the Plymouth: Szyc’s clock radio and his TV. The only reason John kept the TV, he said, was that he wanted to give it to Carol for the girls.

It pissed John off: in the nearly two years between the time Szyc died and the day he was arrested, he never got around to taking the TV over to Carol’s place. The police found it in his bedroom, and they were going to use it to try to tie John to the death of Szyc.

After his arrest, John told the police the reason he moved Rossi out was that it looked odd, a teenage boy and a man living together. He didn’t want the neighbors to think he was strange that way. Rossi found an apartment in April 1977. A woman John had been dating off and on since January, Doreen,
*
moved in with him toward the end of that month.

Doreen met John at some family function. Like Carol, she was a friend of Karen’s. John and Doreen got engaged in the spring of 1977. Neighbors said John seemed happy about his engagement and his relationship with Doreen, but the couple “didn’t see eye to eye” from the start.

John had a “sexual relationship” with Doreen, but there were problems. They’d start necking, begin to get undressed, and John was almost ready, almost hard. But she had had a colostomy, a serious operation in which an artificial anus is constructed, and when she took off her clothes, John would feel himself “get soft again.”

John thought his problem with Doreen was the result of her colostomy. He couldn’t get an erection with her, and it was because he was afraid he might hurt her.

John even went to his doctor and asked about it. The doctor listened to the problem and agreed: John probably had difficulties getting an erection with Doreen because of the operation. That was what John thought from the first, but it was good to have a solid medical opinion backing him up. The colostomy set up a “mental block” that prevented John from having erections with his fiancée.

There were other problems with Doreen, problems not unlike the ones he’d had with Carol. John told people he liked women with backbone, who didn’t put up with any shit,
who talked back, but Doreen really went overboard that way. She read “women’s lib” books, and her mind was all full of those kinds of attitudes.

John’s business was picking up then, and he was always working on three or four projects at the same time. He had crews out all over the city and was running himself into the ground trying to keep up. That was the PDM work, but in March, John was hired as a construction supervisor for PE Systems, a firm that specialized in remodeling drugstores nationwide. He had to do a lot of traveling for PE Systems, and it was exhausting keeping both businesses running smoothly. “I did almost eighty buildings in 1977,” John recalled. He even rehired Cram but still never had any free time. Then clowning and politics stole more of his hours, and when Doreen moved in, he was getting ready to direct that year’s Polish Day parade.