Buried Dreams (30 page)

“I bought my first black car after the divorce from Carol,” John said. A new Oldsmobile Delta 88 that John had stripped of any extraneous attachments except for a red spotlight on the driver’s side, a white light on the passenger’s side, and the pair of CB antennae on the trunk. The vanity license plate read “PDM 42” for John Gacy’s business and his year of birth. The cops were saying that he had tricked the black Olds out to look like an unmarked police car. They said he posed as a cop to pick up boys, intimidate them, kill them.

Not true. First of all, the car looked official, almost presidential, and he could use it for parades and shit. John told Cram that Norwood Park picked up part of the cost because the Olds could be used as “the township car.” There were more “double meanings” here: John told the docs, “When I bought the black car, I was fighting the Jack Hanley side.” He had been battling the Other Guy about Carol, and after the divorce he was fighting Jack, trying to outsmart him with an Oldsmobile that looked like something a police detective might drive. A cop car.

“I figured,” John said, “that no hustler is going to come up to a car that looks like an unmarked police car. That way, if I woke up and found myself cruising the park, I wouldn’t be able to pick anyone up. I thought, ‘I’ll fix the son-of-a-bitch.’ “

Look at it in that light: Any doc could see that John Gacy never had that much control over the Jack Hanley part, anyway. Why would you be constantly fighting with yourself?

The black car didn’t work as well as John had hoped, however. “Some of the hustlers were awful damn bold,” John said. “How do you figure it: prostitutes coming up to a black car like that?”

The workaholic John Gacy, who needed his time, came up with another way to “make it hard for Jack to go down to the park.” Gacy stopped carrying cash. There were double meanings here, of course. The boys who worked for him were forever whining about money, asking for advances on their salaries. John didn’t like to lie, he said, and he didn’t like to pay for work that hadn’t been done. The solution was simple: Don’t carry money. If John Gacy needed gas—if he wanted to pay for a dinner out—he had his credit cards. You made big purchases by check.

“But see,” John said, “on the same token, I was fucking over the Jack Hanley side. Because prostitution is a cash business. Some of them want to see the money up front. You can’t show them a credit card or a check.”

This is where a second aspect of Jack Hanley came out. “This guy, Jack number two, he figured a way around it,” John said. Without a dime in his pocket, the second Jack Hanley could talk a hustler into the big black car with only a promise. But this Jack Hanley, the second aspect of Jack, even outsmarted John Gacy because he used the car as a prop to get sex free. “See, this guy,” John said, “he’d have the kids thinking he was a cop.” John had bought the car to fuck over Jack, but Jack was so smart, the car actually made it easier for him to outsmart hustlers. “Jack didn’t even have to tell them he was a cop,” John said. “He just planted seeds.”

Jack was so smart he could even deny being an officer in such a way that the seed erupted like a jungle in a boy’s mind. It was a good way to “dominate” hustlers, to “have the master control” over them.

The second Jack Hanley was a tough, streetwise homicide cop who could track down homosexuals, then “cunningly
trap them.” He was “a genius at what he did,” but he “wasn’t such a bad guy”: certainly not a killer. Jack just “outsmarted them” and discarded them.

There was a
third
Jack that John knew about, another character that split off the second Jack. He was still a cop, the third Jack Hanley, but he wasn’t “bent on outsmarting” the boys who hustled their bodies down at the park. He was a good cop, the third Jack. Just like John Gacy on the right-hand side, he admired police officers. It was a tough job with a lot of character roles to play. You had to be a violent person sometimes, and you had to be smart. A good cop, the best sort of officer, has “humanity” he has compassion for the people he deals with every day, even the scum. A cop can be like an understanding father figure to young boys. He can help them straighten themselves out.

The third Jack was like that. He was a compassion cop.

John could recall bringing boys out to the house on Summerdale and not having sex at all. Sometimes he’d just talk to the kid. If the boy told a genuine hard-luck story, the third Jack might even give him a few bucks out of compassion. But sometimes John Gacy lost the third Jack Hanley in that fog. Sometimes, John told the docs, the boys who came home with the compassion cop died.

In the darkness of the fog, during the time lost to John Gacy, the Other Guy split from the third Jack. John told the docs he was sure of it. But who was he, the fourth Jack? John was blundering around in the flickering darkness of the fog, looking for the killer, and he was armed only with “suppositions” and “rationalizations.”

They gave him pictures of the victims, and John spread them out on his bunk up in 3 North. He recognized Butkovitch, Godzik, Szyc, and the last one killed, the one who got him caught, Piest. The rest of them were ciphers.

The only way to think coherently about the boys in the pictures, John thought, was to catalogue their similarities and build a composite picture of the typical victim. One thing, most of the dead boys were of a single physical type. The typical victim was slender, muscular, short. Seventeen of them had been between 5 feet 2 and 5 feet 9, and all had weighed less than 150 pounds. The composite victim was young—twenty of them were under twenty, and the youngest was fourteen; the rest were under twenty-two. The overwhelming
majority of them, nineteen of the victims, had light-colored hair: sandy blond, red or light brown. Six had brown hair.

Picture some kid who was young and muscular-looking, with light-colored hair and blue eyes. Why did the composite victim remind John of someone? Who the hell. . . ? It came to him one day, John said, in a flash of insight: Donald Voorhees looked like that! Voorhees, the boy who had outsmarted him in Iowa, who blackmailed him, whose testimony before a grand jury sent him to prison on a ten-year rap for sodomy.

Voorhees had been young, fifteen at the time, and he was short, muscular, with brownish-blond hair and blue eyes. A clean-cut kid—no beard or moustache, none of that dirty hippie shit—Voorhees had this cunning air of innocence about him.

The dumb-looking, dewy-eyed ones, John knew, were the most dangerous. They could use it, the naїve act, to outsmart you. Greedy little bastards with “deviate minds.” Healthy boys who wore tight-fitting clothes on a small, tightly muscled frame. Trick minds hiding behind innocent baby faces.

John examined the pictures of the victims, working rapidly through the large stack, shuffling them like a deck of cards. Butkovitch looked a lot like Voorhees. The Stapleton kid, the fourteen-year-old, John couldn’t remember him, but he had that dangerous, baby-faced Voorhees look: an innocent, naїve-looking boy with blond hair falling across his forehead. The rest of them didn’t look exactly like Voorhees, but every one of the little assholes had something of Voorhees in his face. The eyes, the hair, a smile, the sense of being lost or lonely or troubled—every one of them had that look.

All the victims, John told the docs, were Voorhees.

The composite victim was a key piece of the puzzle, and it fit neatly into its spot on the personality tree John had drawn on the flyleaf of his Bible; it slid right in there next to the breakdown of the various Jack Hanleys. The edges of the composite-victim piece matched those of the piece John was calling the fourth Jack Hanley. Bad Jack. The Other Guy.

The compassion cop picked them up because they were young and innocent. He wanted to help them. But then the “Other Guy switched on.”

John’s rationalization:

“Remember what happened in Iowa?” Bad Jack says. “Remember how you wanted to help the kid out and he blackmailed you? Remember how he outsmarted you and fucked over you? Remember Voorhees?”

John said he could hear the Other Guy screaming, “This is the son-of-a-bitch who destroyed you in Iowa. Get the motherfucker, now.”

That scenario made sense to John, and he began to “theorize” about “a trigger” that caused Bad Jack to split from the third Jack. Maybe the victim said something that Voorhees had said and that caused “the switchover.” It could have been something as simple as money. Maybe the kid tried to take advantage of the compassionate cop, tried to outsmart him for money. Then the fourth Jack took over and outsmarted the kid with death.

Another theory: Maybe Bad Jack was still a cop, but not a cop who was “bent on getting his rocks off,” like the second Jack. He may have been a cop who hated homosexuality because he knew what it had done to him in Iowa. What if the sex act itself switched on a cop who was “bound and determined to exterminate homosexuals,” a cop who wanted to punish boys for prostituting themselves, for tempting him, a cop who killed to reassert his own “manlihood"?

John told the docs he was bringing more and more pieces of the Other Guy in, out of the fog. Even in the fourth Jack, John was beginning to sense some deep well of compassion. This guy could actually have given his victims the gentle gift of death because they were lost, because they wanted to die just the way John Gacy wanted to die when he was their age. This was crazy in a way, because that meant he was killing himself, committing a kind of suicide, except that a stranger, some boy he’d picked up on the street, had become young John Gacy.

John couldn’t get the new pieces organized. How could the victim be Voorhees and John Gacy at the same time? The Other Guy, what the hell, he could be as complicated as John Gacy himself. Maybe he had a dozen or more characters in his breakdown, too; maybe he split off into different aspects. Just like there was an aspect of Bad Jack that John began calling “Stanley.” No reason. There was just some hazy quality to the Other Guy that John thought of as “Stanley.”

When someone pointed out that Stanley was his father’s middle name, John said he almost slapped his forehead like a
dumb Polack in one of those jokes. Of course: the Old Man! He’d been telling the docs all along that he suspected that there was a lot of John Stanley in the Other Guy.

But if the victim became young John Gacy, and if the killer was the Old Man, then maybe Bad Jack had a father’s interest in teaching hustlers right from wrong. Just like John Stanley thought punishment was teaching. And John Gacy, when he took a word-association test the docs gave him, “correlated punishment with teaching.” Follow it through: death was the ultimate punishment, the final lesson. You kill someone, now you’ve taught him: he won’t do that again.

This new guy: John told the docs that he didn’t think Stanley was another personality. He was only a character part of Bad Jack, just the way Pogo was a character in John Gacy.

Stanley, Hanley—they were the same guy. They were both Bad Jack.

The puzzle was coming together, but John still couldn’t see the whole picture. These character aspects of the Other Guy wouldn’t fit together in an organized pattern. Did he kill for different reasons? Did he give one boy the ultimate lesson and another the gentle gift? Were boys murdered because they said something that reminded Jack of Voorhees? What if all the character aspects came together in one compulsive bundle at the moment of the rope?

It was almost done, the thirty-seven-year puzzle of John Gacy’s life. There were only two things left to do to complete the picture. John had to work with the docs to “find the trigger that makes the Other Guy split off of Jack number three.”

If one of the docs could find that switching mechanism, isolate it, he would be able to talk to Bad Jack. Then you could do a breakdown of Jack Hanley, just like the breakdown of John Gacy. The docs could analyze that, the killer’s personality, and use it to help John, with therapy. They could take the breakdown to his trial and explain murder to the jury with science. Docs sitting up there in the witness stand saying something like, “After an exhaustive search and with the help and complete cooperation of John Gacy himself, we find the defendant to be suffering from a type of mental illness that involves a dual personality, and we emphatically recommend that he be found innocent by reason of insanity.”

Before that could happen, though, the docs would have to find the trigger and pull it. The trial was bearing down on
him now, and John knew the prosecution would surely ask for the death penalty. He began a frantic search for the trigger.

Releasing Bad Jack so the docs could talk to him: it was worth John Gacy’s life.

CHAPTER 18

ON JANUARY
6, 1978, Chicago police investigator Ted Janus, who worked the homicide and sex detail in Area 6, the North Side of the city, pulled near the house at 8213 Summerdale, spotted the Oldsmobile in the driveway, and noted the license number: PDM 42. Janus went down two houses and parked by the curb, motor running and lights off as he called for a backup unit. Suddenly a portly man came out of the house, got into the big black Olds, and began backing out. Janus put his own car in gear and blocked the driveway. He got out, told the man in the Olds to put his hands on the dash, and placed him under arrest for kidnapping and deviate sexual assault.

The man, John Gacy, listened to Janus read him his rights, then said he knew nothing about a kidnapping and invited the investigator into the house for a drink. Instead, Janus took Gacy to Area 6 police headquarters, where they went into an interview room. Gacy was again advised of his rights and agreed to talk. No, Gacy said, he didn’t need a lawyer.

What happened last week, early on the morning of December 31, John Gacy explained, is that Robert Donnelly, this nineteen-year-old kid making the complaint, was walking along Montrose Avenue a little after midnight. Gacy pulled over, offered the boy a lift, and as they were driving, a
sexual bargain was struck: They would perform a kind of slavery-sex thing, and Donnelly agreed to a certain price for his services. It was all “consensual.”

The “slavery sex” took place inside the house on Summerdale. Gacy said they bound one another with handcuffs and chains and committed various sexual acts using chains and dildos. The slavery continued through the night, about seven hours, and at eight that morning, Robert Donnelly took a shower and Gacy drove him to work. That must have been when the kid got the license number off the Oldsmobile.