John Wayne Gacy (26 page)

Unfortunately, size doesn’t matter in the arena of the courtroom, especially when precedent and case law are on your side. The judge ruled that he could not see a compelling reason to bind the hands of the press or the doctor to air or state an opinion prior to the stating of it.

Bob didn’t have time to be too dejected, however. As soon as he exited the courtroom, he was besieged by a throng of screaming reporters, with microphones and camera lenses recording his every word. Yesterday, Bob was a relatively obscure but happy young lawyer who had recently opened his small office in Oak Park, Illinois. Today, his rugged face, with his trademark bushy mustache, would be plastered across all three local network news broadcasts as each covered the story on the evening news.

Bob stopped by my office the following day to debrief and discuss the case. He had done a great job with the motion and with the press. He had really stepped up to the plate on short notice and without much help from me—without any help from me, let’s face it. I told him that I could use help on the case in its entirety. We talked about how it would likely be an unusual ride with an unpredictable ending. I mentioned the steady flow of death threats and criticism that had been leveled at me and would now be leveled also at him. I explained to him that John Gacy was a lot of things and that one of those things was pure crazy. Bob was not intimidated or concerned. I made a formal offer to him to become cocounsel on the case, pending approval by the client, and we shook hands. From that moment on, we were partners on the case titled
People of the State of Illinois v. John Wayne Gacy
, and we never looked back. The handshake was enough for us. Now we just had to hold on tight because the ride was starting.

21

W
E HAD TO
go out to Cermak Hospital to visit Mr. Gacy. Motta had no idea what to expect. He had been up most of the night before agonizing over this first meeting with his new client. It is only natural to wonder a bit about what the country’s worst, most prolific serial killer might be like.

Parking your car and strolling into the Cook County Jail is an experience that you will never forget. You travel through several levels of chain-link fence, topped with gleaming rolls of razor-sharp barbed wire, enough barbed wire to slice a fly in half if that fly is foolhardy enough to attempt a buzz through it. The pea gravel crunches under your feet as you approach the first of many gray cast-iron doors that clank behind you, much as you might expect they would if you have ever watched a prison movie. Only a jail door sounds like a jail door. The clank sounds quite final, quite irreversible. The doors are guarded by uniformed men or women that block out the sun with their size. When they ask for your ID, it is not a request, it’s a command. They smile sometimes, but you know from their tone that not one thing that they say is in any way negotiable.

Motta and Gacy hit it off just fine, or as fine as anyone gets along with that unusual little man. Gacy smiles and shakes your hand, but
that doesn’t mean he won’t talk shit about you behind your back. That depends on what suits him at the time. What surprised Bob was the level of cream puffery that he met. Gacy strikes you upon first meeting him more as the old Polish plumber who, like an old
Saturday Night Live
skit, exposes his butt crack every time he bends over to fix the toilet. He is not an immediately intimidating person by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, you are more likely to laugh. He is more of a wimp with a thick Chicago accent, who obviously spent a great deal of time caring for his mother.
This is the monster that everybody has been talking and writing in the papers about?
Bob was thinking. What Gacy did more than anything else during their first meeting was whine and bitch like a little old lady in a bad restaurant. He had complaints about nearly everything. Bob and I just looked at each other, incredulous, as if to say, “Yeah, John, it’s
jail
.” We refrained from stating the obvious. After some time, our actual mission was finally accomplished in that Gacy approved Bob Motta as my cocounsel.

One problem that loomed ominously in the distant future was a simple concern about how we were going to get paid. Money was not our first concern; but we had to pay the rent, we had to eat, and we had to feed our families. Gacy had paid me a retainer when he had an ongoing business. Now he had jobs lined up that he would never finish. He had accounts receivable that he would never collect. And most of his other semiliquid assets, tools, vehicles, and the like had been confiscated and were being held by the State as evidence. His primary asset, his house, was being systematically destroyed as body after body was excavated from the crawl space. No one was suggesting that the investigation and excavation of the crawl space be interfered with; however, there was talk about getting court approval to raze the structure to make the investigation easier. That we would have to oppose. Otherwise, how would we get paid?

______________________

T
HE CASE HAD
been up in court on the twenty-ninth, and the following orders had been entered by the court:

The case was continued by agreement of the parties to January 10, 1979, where the matter would be reassigned by the chief judge. Now the case was being transferred to the Criminal Courts Building at 26th Street and California Avenue, one of the most famous courthouses in the country. Clarence Darrow, among other noted attorneys, argued cases in its hallowed courtrooms.

The night before that court appearance on the twenty-ninth—the night of December 28—was a lesson in humility for me. I was in my office feverishly trying to prepare motions—motion to dismiss, motion to transfer, et cetera, et cetera. These were preliminary motions that I needed to file with the court. And in general, I was attempting to prepare for this big, important case. I was feeling pretty full of myself. My picture had been in the paper, and I was the hotshot criminal defense attorney charged with representing the defendant in this huge case. Hell, it was going to be the trial of the century. Everybody said so. My secretary, Erlene, and I were in the office well into the evening hours. Even she was proud to be working for such a famous guy, and on such a famous case.

Suddenly, panic struck. I looked at the clock on the wall and realized that my suit—my one and only suit—was at the cleaners. I had dropped it off to be cleaned in anticipation of this big day. If I didn’t pick up that suit, I would have nothing to wear to court the following morning.

I begged Erlene, “Would you please pick up my suit while I finish making copies and getting everything ready for court?”

“I suppose,” she said, teasing me. “But don’t get used to it.”

“I’ll meet you at my house,” I called to her as she hurried out the door all bundled up in coat and scarf against the weather.

Erlene had her own problems getting the suit. First, the snow and ice were making driving a chore. Then, when she finally arrived at the cleaners, it was closed. Luckily, she saw a light burning in a back room. She pounded on the door. The owner responded, shaking his head and pointing at the “Closed” sign in the window, pantomiming his regrets.

“Please, sir,” she pleaded through the glass. “You have to help me! My boss is Sam Amirante, the attorney representing John Wayne Gacy, the guy in the news, that guy with the bodies under the house. He has to have this suit for court tomorrow. He needs it!”

Erlene was proud. The guy was totally impressed. He immediately opened his doors and made the extra effort to help. She was working for a pretty important guy. How cool?

With perfect timing, Erlene and I arrived at my house at the same moment; we both pulled up to the house together. I thanked her profusely as she ran up to meet me with the suit. We stood there on the walk, surrounded by piles of snow, both of us excited about this important case and all that was happening.

The porch light came on, and my wife, Mary, appeared in the doorway.

“Hi, Erlene,” she said politely, smiling at her. Then she turned to me. “Honey,” she said, still smiling brightly. “We need toilet paper. Go buy some toilet paper.”

Did you ever hear air escaping from a balloon? That is the sound that my ego was making as I dutifully trudged through the snow back to my car as the two women in my life silently giggled. I drove away.

No job is finished until the paperwork is done.

________________________

B
OB AND
I huddled and began to plan strategy and assign ourselves specific areas of concentration. We began to see the path on which we would attempt to walk through the minefield that lay ahead. We immediately became a team of two—partners.

________________________

T
HE CASE WOULD
ultimately be assigned to the Honorable Judge Louis B. Garippo, which was a testament to the wisdom of the chief judge, the Honorable Judge Richard Fitzgerald. It was well known that the normal process of computerized assignment of judges was circumvented just this once by the chief due to the particular sensibilities and temperament of Judge Garippo. Nobody questioned
this assignment—with good reason—because Judge Garippo was clearly the right man for the job.

The evening before my first appearance before Judge Garippo proved to be an interesting one. The death threats and criticism in the press were increasing as more and more bodies were recovered from the crawl space beneath Gacy’s house. I tried hard to ignore the onslaught, but it was wearing on me. I had always tried to keep a reasonable relationship between myself and the venerable members of the press. However, I was fielding questions that didn’t sound right to me, not in a free society where a defendant’s presumption of innocence is paramount.

Finally, it was time to set the record straight once and for all.

After being asked a particularly snotty question by a particularly snotty, faceless reporter somewhere in the back, I finally went off. I wanted the sad little anonymous commentators out there, the purveyors of the ugly threats to my kids and to my wife, hiding in their homes and fortified with a bottle, to hear me clearly. I looked squarely into the lens of the camera in front of me, pointed at it, and by extension at each and every one of the little cretins hiding on the other side of it, and screamed a tirade at the top of my lungs. I went on and on, paraphrasing the Constitution, railing on about how every person in the country was entitled to a trial in which he or she was able to confront his or her accusers and the witnesses against him or her no matter what the charges may be. I talked about the sanctity of the right to a trial by a jury of our peers. I was worked up. It finally ended as follows:

“I will defend this man, my client, until the last drop of my blood, if necessary! This is America!”

It is my understanding that this interview was widely disseminated. It seems that everyone saw it, and that included Judge Garippo.

Therefore, when I approached the bench the following day on my first day in front of the esteemed judge, the following exchange took place:

“Good morning, Your Honor, Sam Amirante representing the defendant, Mr. Gacy—”

Before I could say anything else, Garippo interrupted.

“Excuse me, excuse me, is someone talking. Stand back a little farther so I can see you.”

I backed up.

“Yes, back up some more,” said the judge, motioning to me.

Needless to say, this threw me just a little. I took another step backward and eyed the judge. He smiled down from the bench, peering through wire-rimmed glasses with what I thought to be a particularly mischievous look, a smirk, maybe.

“Well, Mr. Amirante, I expected to see some kind of six-foot-four gargantuan kind of guy, based on what I saw on the TV last night. That was you pointing and screaming into the camera, right? Now here you are, and I could hear you talking, but I couldn’t see you. You are not six foot four, are you?”

“No, Your Honor, I’m not.”

I guess the camera shot on the news the night before was a head-and-shoulders shot, and the judge could not get a perspective on my actual size. We stood there, appraising one another for a long moment. It was a moment that I will always remember. But I had something up my sleeve that I believed would cause him to always remember the moment as well. I handed up a piece of paper, a small card, passed it up to him as he sat perched on the bench.

“Well, Your Honor, allow me to present our first motion.”

Here’s what I handed to him: