John Wayne Gacy (28 page)

“I hate to admit this because I am as idealistic about the Constitution as anyone on the planet. You know that. But that’s not the worst part—that house is our fee. Our fee is in that house! Nobody is going to pay this guy for work that he has already completed, so his accounts receivable are worthless. He has basically nothing to speak of in his bank account. His cars, trucks, and virtually any other big-ticket items that he owns have been confiscated. That house is Gacy’s only asset. It’s the only thing that he has left to pay us with.”

Hmm … this was serious.

The thought of starvation hung in the air. I had two little kids and a wife. Bob had a child, an ex, and child support. Plus,
we
had to eat. That is not being selfish, is it? That’s not too much to ask? We needed sustenance in order to have the energy necessary to defend this guy. We would pass out right there in the courtroom if we didn’t eat, right? That would never do; that would be a bad thing. We had no savings. Public defenders aren’t paid enough money to save any of it. Both of us were fresh from the PD’s office. We could barely pay the day-to-day bills, let alone save. Now we were on our own, which was worse. We had no other clients, and Gacy had sucked the air out of any other potential ones. We didn’t have time to do anything else but work on this case. Just ask my wife about that one. We barely saw each other anymore, and she was none too happy about that, by the way. Wait until I got home and tried to explain to her that we were destitute. Fireworks were in my future.

So like I said, this was a bit of an emergency.

What we did not know was that the rumor that I had heard was actually much more than a rumor. It seems that a notice of a court appearance had actually been sent to Mr. Gacy and to his civil lawyer, Mr. Leroy Stevens. A pending court action had already been filed and a hearing was scheduled on Tuesday, March 27, in
housing court in front of the Honorable Judge Richard H. Jorzak. Bob and I were completely unaware of this pending court date. The petition before the court alleged that the excavation process had rendered the structure unsound, that the whole structure was on the verge of collapse, and that it was a danger to the men working as part of the excavation process and to the residents of the neighborhood.

For some unknown reason, Leroy Stevens failed to appear at that Tuesday-morning hearing. As a result, Judge Jorzak entered an order that the house be razed, having heard no evidence whatsoever opposing such an order. Huge yellow bulldozers, a towering crane, together with several imposing dump trucks and other items of demolition equipment, had positioned themselves in the front yard and in front of the house on Summerdale Street. Our client, Mr. Gacy, was about to become financially insolvent.

Wednesday morning Bob and I appeared before Judge Jorzak on an emergency motion to stop the demolition. We explained that we had not been informed of the hearing that was held the previous day and argued that the demolition of the structure was an unconstitutional taking of property. We insisted that a full hearing be held to determine whether or not the structure was actually unsound. The judge agreed. He would not have entered his original order if someone had only stepped up to represent Gacy’s interests.

Armed with an order of court, essentially a flimsy little piece of paper, we careened through traffic at dangerous speeds and slid to a stop in front of Gacy’s house amid the hulking trucks and bulldozers. There were always gawkers in front of Gacy’s house, curiosity seekers huddled behind yellow police tape. Today, however, the crowd was unusually large and included at least one camera crew. The demolition of the Gacy home was big news. We waded though the pack of onlookers and ducked under the police barricades, waving the court order and hollering a single word. “Stop!”

Hard-hatted construction workers holding clipboards and screaming over the rumble of diesel engines were pointing and planning where to begin the teardown. Bob and I slogged through the mud and slop that was once the meticulously manicured yard and circular drive in front of our client’s house, looking for the guy who seemed to be in charge. We presented the order to the foreman on the job, who shrugged, shook his head vigorously, then zipped a flat hand back and forth in front of his throat, signaling the guys in the bulldozers and trucks to cut their engines and stand down.

This disappointed many in the crowd and the boys with the TV cameras. A collective groan could be heard. As the crowd groused and grumbled and then slowly dispersed and the camera crews packed up and went on their way, Bob and I silently basked in our minor victory. You really have to stand in front of a huge wrecking ball hanging from a crane, feel the earth rumbling under your feet from many idling diesel engines, smell the burning fumes, hear the deafening sound of it all, and confront a big, burly man in dirty dungarees and wearing a hard hat, who is totally committed to his mission, with an 8½ × 11 piece of paper before you can fully appreciate the feeling. It was a feeling that says that this country and the people in it still live pursuant to the law, pursuant to a constitution, which was more powerful than all the swinging wrecking balls, all the huge towering cranes, and all the rumbling dump trucks. It had nothing to do with Bob or me. This was much bigger than a couple of young lawyers. This was the best parts of our system of government, of our laws at work. We were proud to represent that system that day.

A victory, yes, but a hollow one as it turned out, because on April 4, just eight short days later, the date on which the matter was set for full hearing, we appeared with our expert witness, Paul Gordon, an independent, private structural engineer. The State’s primary witness was William Harris, the Cook County building commissioner. There, a battle of the experts took place in which
Harris testified that the structure posed a hazard to the health and safety of the public in that the house could collapse or flood or both. Gordon testified that the particular clay-laden soil that existed below the house had stiff characteristics and that due to this, the excavation had resulted in no damage to the footings, foundation walls, or the concrete piers that supported a steel I beam, and therefore, the structure was sound, in spite of the extensive damage that had been done to it.

The judge ultimately ruled in favor of the State and ordered the razing of the house. Again, our system of laws had worked. We just were not on the winning side.

This presented a huge problem for Bob and me. We hit the books.

____________________

I
N THE STATE
of Illinois, as in many other states in which the death penalty is available, if a defendant is indigent, the presiding judge may appoint outside or private counsel on behalf of the defendant, and that counsel is paid by the county essentially as a public defender, although the private attorney is not an employee of the County or the State. The hourly rate is set by statute and is far less than that which a private attorney would normally charge. However, a private attorney would pay many of his or her own expenses out of the fee that would be charged to a wealthy or well-off client. Subject to court approval, a private attorney that is appointed by the court may apply for the payment of certain expenses, including the sometimes rather-exorbitant fees charged by expert witnesses.

After a great deal of research, many long hours, gallons of coffee, and several packs of cigarettes, we emerged from the office with another emergency motion to present to Judge Garippo. This was becoming routine of late, nothing new; however, this time it was quite personal.

We must have done our homework because, without much fanfare, we were appointed as counsel for the defendant, Mr. Gacy. We breathed a collective sigh of relief. We would now be able to continue on the case
and
feed our families, which was a good thing. I don’t think I would have stayed married very long if I had come home and announced that although I would still be working twenty hours a day, I would not be getting paid for it.

Appointment as counsel had other very positive results. I say positive because it was positive for our interests and the interests of our client. There are those individuals that held the opinion that any funds spent by the State or the County on Gacy’s defense was a travesty, a waste, money spent in the devil’s defense.

We would now be able to proceed to provide our client with a proper defense. In the long weeks and long months that followed, Bob and I would turn over every rock, every stone to ensure that our client had that proper defense. As those days became weeks, and those weeks became months, an entire year would pass before both sides of the case would be prepared to collide in a battle that would be reported worldwide and cause the very tenets of our democracy to be tested—nearly to its breaking point. Passions would flare at each and every turn. Criticism of our efforts was relentless. Gacy was the most hated man in America, and by proxy, so were we. He was the monstrous clown killer that did not deserve to breathe the same air as normal folks. He certainly didn’t deserve to be defended.

24

T
HE YEAR
1979
passed in the blink of an eye; a whirlwind of day-to-day investigation and preparation blurred together like a pipe dream. The Gacy file—a small cluster of papers, written interviews, a few court documents, and various notes written on a yellow legal pad, all of which once fit into a single-file jacket and could be carried under my arm or in my briefcase—had ballooned into a mass of paper, documents, exhibits, photos, and paraphernalia that filled an entire corner of our small Park Ridge office. Boxes stacked haphazardly on top of other boxes threatened to push the ceiling tiles through the floor of the office above.

Suddenly we had a trial date staring ominously, stubbornly at us from the calendar on the wall. Gacy had consumed our existence for an entire year. We were both totally committed to the defense of this man’s life, and now it was time to lay it all on the line. Every waking moment had been dedicated to the investigation and preparation of this case.

Don’t get me wrong, Bob and I did not spend all of that time cloistered in a dark office with our noses buried in law books. A large part of the job was spent very much out in public. We were being stalked by the print media and interviewed on TV almost nightly. We had meetings with psychiatrists and psychologists,
investigators, jury consultants, and witnesses from every walk of life and from all parts of the country.

Our small, shared office space was a bustle of activity and excitement, which included a few extra members of the team. A young, freshly graduated female paralegal, Julie Weiss, had volunteered as an intern, and the public defender’s office had assigned us two investigators, Nick Mestousis and Lindy DiDomenico, to help with the overwhelming workload.

Nick and Lindy had traveled all over the country interviewing witnesses and taking statements from any and all persons that had ever had a connection to John Wayne Gacy. This included all the people who knew him in Springfield, in Iowa, in Las Vegas, any out-of-state job on which he ever worked, anyone anywhere that had met Gacy was sought out, contacted, and statements were taken. We were looking for anything that could lead to a better understanding of our client, to help in his defense. Boxes were filled and stacked with the results. We left no stone unturned.

Our days and nights were chaotic.

Flashing camera bulbs and shouted questions often began in the morning on the way out to our cars in our driveways and didn’t end until we locked our doors behind us at night. It was fun … for the most part. If you loved the law and the insanity that accompanies a high-profile, internationally reported press case, if you didn’t mind giving your life over to the scrutiny of the public eye, if you didn’t mind being associated with America’s most hated citizen and being personally scorned and hated for it in some circles, it was great fun. We were the center of attention in all of Chicago. Not everybody hated us. After all, we really were becoming local celebrities—hell, national celebrities. We got along with all the press people who followed us around all day and night. Most people had stayed awake in civics class. They knew that everyone is entitled to a defense and a trial. We were just lawyers doing our jobs to the majority of folks, just lawyers being lawyers. There were even
“Gacy groupies,” women who were interested in us just because they had seen us on TV. Of course, that didn’t matter to me. I was married … but Bob wasn’t. Bob was quite single, quite available. So if you viewed it from a distance, it probably looked fun. In truth, it had its ups and downs.

Nobody likes to be relentlessly vilified, especially when you know deep in your soul that the job you are doing is absolutely necessary to the administration of justice. Wives and family members were involuntarily swept up in the tornado of activity that came with the territory. They hadn’t signed up for this level of crazy. The death threats and late-night telephone calls from the truly stupid and cowardly became part of our lives. Members of the press at times bothered my wife, and even my parents. Our kids were occasionally teased and chided at school. Everybody on the planet seemed to have an opinion on what we were trying to do, and they were none too shy about sharing that opinion, sometimes at the most inconvenient times and in the most inconvenient places. People would stop us in the supermarket or the church parking lot on Sunday morning to let their opinion be known. We actually could not take a piss in a public restroom without hearing the wellreasoned pontifications of some drunken expert on the subject of John Wayne Gacy.

But all in all, considering that both Bob and I had always had dreams of being retained on that really big important case that made a difference, that mattered, the whole experience was exciting, and yes, it was fun.

However, in spite of the mind-numbing roller-coaster ride that we had been on, this was only the beginning, the preparation stage of the case. Now we had to try that case in a court of law. A man’s life was at stake, and the true gravity of it all grabs at you when you look at that calendar and see those days ticking off. Had we done everything? Had we turned over every rock and every stone? Did we interview every witness, search our client’s past, hire the
appropriate experts, categorize each and every piece of evidence, take every available step in the furtherance of our client’s cause? Were we ready?