John Wayne Gacy (19 page)

His rambling was getting scatological, and his tongue was getting thicker as he continued on. I was watching a man becoming unglued, sluggish. His chin was getting closer to his chest, his eyelids heavy, his head bouncing with every word as happens only with a drunk. The booze was catching up with him in a big way. I wanted him to clarify his rambling monologue. Mainly, I suppose, because I couldn’t believe it all. I’m sure part of me didn’t want to believe it. I looked at him dead in the eye. “John,” I said, “are you telling us that you killed … you killed thirty people … thirty kids? That is what you are saying, right? You killed all these kids and buried them under your house?”

“Well … not all of them … not all are in the crawl space … ya know … ah … some are in the river … you know … you know … ah … in the river … like I said.

“I’ll take care of it, though. I’ll be my own judge, jury, and executioner. I’ll be my own … I’ll handle this myself. I’ll take care of this … I’ll take care of this. I have to handle this my own way.”

I could feel my own heart beating, sense my own breathing. I looked at Stevens. We were both in a clinical state of shock. He looked back, eyes wide, head slowly moving from side to side. He could have been the bad actor in a worse movie watching the mummy approaching.

Finally, the booze won. Gacy’s chin hit his chest. He was sound asleep.

13

T
HE LAWER IN
me immediately kicked in. I began to think solely in my client’s best interest.

“He needs immediate psychiatric help,” I said. We had to find him a shrink—right now. I looked at my watch. It was 3:30 a.m.
Fat chance
, I thought.

“It’s three thirty in the morning, Sam.” Stevens was looking at me like I was as crazy as Gacy.

“We gotta try … hospitals are open all night. I know, I used to work in one, a long time ago. This guy is going to kill himself. You heard him, Leroy. He plans to off himself—‘I’ll be my own judge, jury, and executioner.’ He’s going to commit suicide. What else could that mean? Right? He is a danger to himself and others. He can be committed. That’s the standard.”

Gacy wasn’t going anywhere. He was comatose, snoring and snorting, in a state of complete slumber—let’s be honest, he was passed out—sitting upright but slouched into his chair in such a way as to keep him from falling.

We both got on phones. It seemed a little crazy, but what else were we going to do? If he were having a heart attack, he would need a medical doctor. He was having what I would describe as a
complete breakdown; he needed a head doctor. We had to at least try. We had to try something.

While Gacy snored, while Albrecht and his partner, Dave Hachmeister, killed time just thirty feet away on the other side of a piece of plate glass, we feverishly called hospital after hospital, begging to speak with anyone in the psych department, getting rebuffed time after time. Phone books were open on the conference table, cigarette smoke hung in the air, sleeves were rolled up, and the coffeepot was working overtime. We used whatever clout we could pretend we had, throwing our law degrees around as if they meant something to the poor receptionists who were unlucky enough to have taken the call. Finally, believe it or not, we found a psychiatrist at a hospital on the North Side of Chicago—Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital—who said that he would meet with us at 9:00 a.m. He seemed to understand the urgency.

Stevens and I decided to take turns going home to shower and shave, thereby leaving one of us to monitor our client. Neither one of us knew what Gacy would do when he came to. But we had a plan. All we could do was attempt to implement it.

Stevens was first to leave.

I sat alone with John Gacy, who sounded a little like a walrus in heat.

I pulled a few books on commitment of persons into a locked facility off of a shelf. I couldn’t concentrate on the written word, however, no matter how hard I tried. I thought over and over again about that with which I was going to be faced, about what I had been told. It was a heavy burden. I was trying to play the tape out to its logical end. What was this going to be like? Clearly, my life was about to change. I was defense counsel for a serial killer.

John stirred. He snorted and rubbed drool from the corner of his mouth.

Then it happened. John suddenly sat up—stiff as a board, perfect posture. He opened his eyes and stared out into nothing. The
look in his eyes was unlike any that I had ever seen. He was awake, it seemed, but not exactly.

“John?” I stood in front of him, looked at his eyes. They were vacant, no personality behind them, no person. It was if he didn’t see me although I was standing right in front of him. I waved my hand in front of his face.

“John! You OK?” I wasn’t yelling, but I was speaking at much higher decibels than normal conversation. He ignored me, totally. He started to stand … and I’ll be damned to hell if he didn’t put his arms out in front of him like a terrible movie’s attempt to indicate sleepwalking. It was almost funny. It would have been funny if this guy hadn’t just admitted to killing twenty or thirty people. He was standing now, like Frankenstein, arms extended, stiff as a board, everything, his whole body, rigid. His eyes were rolling around in his head. His eyelids were fluttering rapidly.

“John!” This time I yelled. I was waving both arms, palms facing out, in front of his face. Nothing, no response. I had a baseball bat that was a memento from Comiskey Park, my beloved White Sox. I picked it up and gently put it up to his chest. It looked like he was leaning on it, being led by it. He started walking forward. This had to have been a sight. Gacy was maybe five feet nine. I am five feet two if I stand up straight. He was walking forward, and I was walking backward, bat extended. We looked like Quasimodo and Phoebus.

“John! Can you hear me? John!”

I led him to the couch in my office and herded him gently down onto it. He lay down like a five-year-old, curled up, and went right back to sleep, as though nothing had happened. I was surprised he didn’t put his thumb in his mouth. The only time I had seen anything like it before was with little kids that wander in a half-sleep state at the direction of their parents into a bed. This whole damn night was becoming surreal, absolutely fucking surreal!

“Well, at least we won’t have a problem getting this guy safely behind locked doors in a nice psych ward,” I mumbled to myself. I
decided that Gacy was safe where he was and that I would check on the Delta boys out front in my lobby. I brought a pot of coffee with me. I figured they deserved it. They had been following this nutcase for days. They probably had a few stories.

“How are you guys doing out here?” I asked. “Want some coffee? He’s sound asleep and will likely be that way for a while.”

When Stevens returned, it was my chance to get a shower and a change of clothes. I told Stevens that I would be back as soon as possible. I told him about the “Frankenstein” incident and showed him where the bat was.

When I got home, I said to my wife, Mary, “This case is going to be big—really big. You remember the Richard Speck case? Well, this case is going to make that case look like a misdemeanor. I cannot tell you much cuz of the privilege, but get ready. This is going to be a big case, and it is about to break wide open. The shit is about to hit the fan.”

That actually turned out to be an enormous understatement.

______________________

W
HEN
I
RETURNED
to the office, Gacy was still passed out, and the boys from Des Plaines were still sitting in the outer lobby of my office. Actually, Albrecht was lying down on the floor trying to catch a nap. It didn’t seem to be working because he greeted me with a smile as I came through the doors.

Stevens said that all was well. Gacy hadn’t moved.

We sat there planning how we were going to take our client immediately to Weiss Memorial Hospital, where he would be evaluated and a decision would be made to admit him. That would give us time to breathe, and then on Friday we would have our hearing. It was a good plan. We were proud. We had somehow succeeded on behalf of our client and had made these arrangements, as unlikely as that seemed, at 3:30 a.m. This was all going to work out.

The one variable that we had not planned on was the headstrong Mr. Gacy.

When Gacy awoke, he was Lazarus rising from the dead. It took a while for him to get his bearings. He looked around at his strange surroundings, bewildered, like a lost child.

“Shit,” he groaned, “I slept here … all night? What time is it?” “It’s a little after seven, John. We have got a big morning ahead. We found a place that will take you. We have to take you to a hospital. You have an appointment at 9:00 a.m.”

It’s funny. I had this naive belief that Gacy was simply going to accept my advice, that he was going to appreciate all the trouble that Stevens and I had gone through on his behalf. That was a mistake.

“What the fuck are you guys talking about? Hospital? I got shit to do today. What in the fuck are you guys talking about?” Gacy looked honestly perplexed, confused.

“John, you told us some heavy shit last night. Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what, Sam? What the fuck is with you two guys this morning?” John wasn’t kidding. He had no clue as to what we meant, what we were talking about.

“Look, John, there are two coppers waiting patiently for you out in our lobby. You came here last night with this urgent, overwhelming need to talk. Are you saying that you don’t remember anything about what you told us last night?”

Stevens and I just looked at one another, incredulous. I thought last night was surreal. This was beyond surreal, beyond description. We were sitting in a room with a man that had confessed to the murder of twenty, maybe thirty, people. He had told us that his basement or crawl space or whatever you call it was a fucking graveyard, a gruesome graveyard filled with young bodies. And now … he didn’t remember? I could not believe my own ears. I finally knew what people meant when they said that. I honestly could not believe my own ears.

That’s when I realized just how fucked in the head this guy, my client, actually was. I don’t care how drunk or high a person is—for chrissakes, you cannot possibly forget that you confessed to murder … can you? That’s not possible, is it? I must have looked like some kind of cartoon character, the picture of confusion. I put a hand on each of his shoulders and looked him straight in the eye.

“John,” I said slowly, deliberately, “you told us everything. You told us about the crawl space.”

Gacy, again the confused child, kept looking back and forth, first at Stevens, then at me, then back again for a very long minute. Then he said, “Oh … ah … I … I … I told … I told you guys about that, huh? I told you about that?”

“Yeah, John, you told us everything. You told us about the crawl space, about the river. You talked for hours, John. You told us everything.”

He just shook his head slowly from side to side while he took it all in. He was a study in befuddlement. Then his face took on a complete change. He became determined or something. It wasn’t readable.

“Well, I can’t think about this right now. I’ve got things to do today. I’ve got shit to take care of, you know—work to do, shit to do.”

With that, John Wayne Gacy stood up, looked around for his coat, picked it up, and started heading for the door. I grabbed his arm.

“You need help, John, you need lots of help. We made an appointment for you. You have an appointment with a psychiatrist this morning. You should keep that appointment. We will … Stevens and I will drive you.”

He looked at me. All he said was, “I can’t, Sam. I gotta do this my way. I gotta go. I gotta go.”

He turned and walked out of the office with the two members of his tail scrambling to their feet and rushing out behind him.

14

A
T THE DES
Plaines police headquarters, Terry Sullivan and members of the investigation team were feverishly putting together a complaint for a new search warrant. A review of the newly existing evidence was bolstering hopes of procuring said warrant and allowing for a further search of Gacy’s home. On this Thursday morning, four days before Christmas and just one day before the hearing on the petition for a TRO, the mood was much better than in days past, because everyone believed that a warrant was imminent.

Now, they had the photo receipt.

They also had something else.

It seems that during one of the times that Gacy invited members of the surveillance team into his home for dinner and drinks, Officer Robert Schultz, a member of the Deltas, smelled something—an odor that he believed he recognized. This revelation came to Officer Schultz—and to him alone, in spite of the fact that dozens of members of the search team had crawled all over that house during the first search on December 13, including into the crawl space, and never mentioned anything specific about an odor. In spite of the fact that Lieutenant Kozenczak and Officer Pickell were in the house on the night following Rob Piest’s
disappearance and never mentioned anything specific about an odor. In spite of the fact that Gacy’s house was essentially an open office for his company, where employees were in and out of the home all the time, basically on a daily basis, and no specific odor was ever mentioned. In spite of the fact that Mr. Gacy had yearly parties to which literally hundreds of people came and during which his house was open to one and all, and nobody ever seemed to complain specifically about an odor. In spite of all of that, Officer Schultz was now willing to swear, under penalty of perjury, that he smelled the odor of putrefied human bodies in that house.

This was a gamble on the part of the prosecution because an odor, a bad odor, can be caused by so many different things. It is next to impossible to distinguish between the odor of a dead human body and the odor of the carcass of an animal—a rat, a raccoon, a bat, the list goes on. If every house that had an unusual odor emanating from it was subject to search, almost any house could be searched. That could be the reason that there is a multibillion-dollar industry in products that claim to rid houses of all the various odors that they all seem to have.