John Wayne Gacy (4 page)

To Rob, it felt as though the walls of the room were closing in on him. He had no deep-set prejudice against gay people. That was not the problem. If Gacy had said that he was gay and came on to him, he could have sidestepped that without an uncomfortable incident. He had done it before. Most people had. But he was in handcuffs! This was different! He tried not to insult his captor.

“John, that type of activity is just not in me,” he offered meekly. “It’s just not me.”

Gacy looked at him. At first he looked surprised, as though he had not expected that reaction, as though he just assumed Rob would go along. Then it looked like he was getting angry.

“I have a lot of money. I could help you get that Jeep,” he said.

“No,” was all Rob could muster.

“Suppose I just fucking rape you, you little fucking liar,” Gacy growled. “You said that you would do anything for money. You led me on! You lied to me!”

Gacy moved toward Rob, reaching out at Rob’s pants, at his fly. He grabbed Rob by the waistband of his jeans and pulled him
closer. Rob was unable to resist. He yanked at the handcuffs. They would not give. Gacy unzipped Rob’s zipper. He reached inside and touched him, grabbed at him. John tugged down on Rob’s jeans. Rob could feel his buttocks and thighs being exposed. No matter how hard he struggled, the handcuffs made it impossible to fight off this crazed man twice his size. Rob was now past terror. Was this a nightmare, or was it real? Why couldn’t he just wake up?

At this point, Rob started to break down. He began to sob uncontrollably. “Stop this! Please don’t do this!” he screamed.

He looked at Gacy, whose face immediately began to soften. Then to Rob’s amazement, he began to apologize profusely, over and over again.
What the fuck is this
, Rob thought,
a goddamn roller-coaster ride? One minute this fucking nut is scaring the shit out of me, and the next minute he’s Mr. Nice Guy.
His heart was returning to its normal beating.

John removed the handcuffs, and as Rob rubbed his wrists a bit to restore his blood flow, he said, “I hope you understand, Mr. Gacy.” He didn’t want to set him off again. He chose his words carefully. “I would do it if I could, but I can’t. I am just not that way.”

“Don’t say anything. It was a dumb idea,” John said. “Dumb and stupid. I’m really sorry if I made you feel uncomfortable or scared. I ain’t no fag, Rob. You have to believe me. I am no kind of fruit picker.”

“You had me going there.”

“Forget about it. Let’s never talk about it again, OK? You still want the job, right?”

“Yeah, yes, I do. I really need the money.” At this point, Rob would say anything that he thought John wanted to hear. Wild horses could not have dragged him back to that house, but he had to say something.

“OK, then, we start from scratch. This never happened, right? And it will never happen again, OK?”

“OK, John, but I really have to get home. Is that all right?”

Suddenly, John was all for the idea. He began moving around as though he was getting ready to leave, mumbling, making sure he had everything, patting his pockets. Rob was somewhat relieved, but still frightened. It had been an interesting first meeting, to say the least. That was the understatement of all time.

“Make sure you bring those papers. We can fill them out in the car,” John said offhandedly, pointing at the bar.

Rob grabbed the papers from the bar as he watched John Gacy walk around his house, preparing to leave. He thought it ironic that after all that had occurred, the papers were an afterthought. That was ostensibly the main reason they had gone to John’s house in the first place. Unbeknownst to Rob, he was about to learn another reason that he was there—the real reason.

Rob had his hand on the doorknob. “I thought you were going to kill me, John. I thought you were some kind of crazy person.” Rob looked back at John Wayne Gacy, who was standing behind him.

“One second, I’ll show you one quick trick for the road. Put down your coat for a second. You’ll love this.” Gacy had a length of rope in his hand and the handle of a hammer without a hammer-head on it. He was tying knots into the rope, very meticulously. He had done this before. He was practiced. He slid the handle of the hammer between the knots. “Now, watch this,” he said.

Gacy slid the rope over Rob’s head. It was loose, not threatening.

“Why are you putting it over my head?” Rob asked, nervously laughing.

“Just watch,” Gacy whispered.

Those were Rob Piest’s last words.

In a split second, Gacy had twisted the hammer handle twice, instantly tightening the rope around Rob’s neck. To struggle was a mistake, because that made the rope tighter. To panic was fatal. Unfortunately, Rob panicked. The hammer handle was lodged
tightly, permanently against Rob’s back. Gacy no longer had to hold on to it. The rope would not unwind; it would not loosen. Rob’s eyes bulged as he gasped for air and clawed at the rope. He was free to scramble and struggle as Gacy passively watched, thumbs in his waistband. The more he struggled, the tighter the rope got.

Gacy whispered again, “Dumb and stupid.” He shook his head as though he was looking at the proverbial two-year-old caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Dumb and stupid.”

Rob fell to the floor. He thrashed, he struggled, he fought valiantly, but, as stated, Gacy had done this before. He was practiced.

The last thing Rob Piest heard out of the velvet blackness of approaching death was Gacy’s telephone ringing.

John Wayne Gacy left Robert Jerome Piest lying on the floor gagging, surrendering, sucking in his final breaths of oxygen as he went to answer his telephone. “You think you can fool me, you fucking little lying homo,” Gacy spat out as he lumbered off.

It was just past ten. Rob and John had been in John’s house a little over a half hour.

On the phone, Richard Raphael was angry. John never showed for their meeting. Gacy made several disjointed excuses. His uncle was sick. His uncle might die. He might have to go to the hospital. He was too tired. He forgot. They would meet at John’s house tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. “Don’t be late.” Gacy was completely unaffected by the night’s tragic, morbid occurrence. Richard Raphael noticed nothing whatsoever wrong or different about Gacy’s voice when they spoke. Same old John.

Gacy closed Rob’s eyes and manipulated his face in an effort to soften the grotesquely contorted frozen facial features of the strangled boy and stuffed a wad or two of paper into Rob’s mouth because he didn’t want him to leak fluids all over the place. He lifted the limp corpse of Rob Piest, carried it down the hall, and placed it onto his own bed in his bedroom.

Again the telephone rang.

“Now what?” Gacy mumbled. He answered the phone while Rob Piest’s body lay quiet.

On the line was Gacy’s aunt Leone Scow, his mother’s sister. “Uncle Harold has taken a turn for the worse,” she said. “They don’t think he will make it through the night.”

Gacy looked at his silent houseguest. “I have a few things to attend to, but I will be at the hospital as soon as I can get there, within the hour.”

“Hurry, John,” Aunt Leone said through stifled tears. “It’s time.”

It seemed that John Gacy was surrounded by death, a death merchant that drew death toward him. Now he had to go and perhaps watch some other poor schmuck gasp his last breath, unless he kicked it before John arrived. “Fuck, this is bullshit,” he grumbled as he lumbered grudgingly down the hall back toward the rec room.

He surveyed the room. There were two half-empty bottles of beer, one on the small table next to his chair and one on the bar; some IRS forms and an application for employment, which had floated to the floor when Rob involuntarily released his grasp on them; and a light blue parka draped over a barstool. Otherwise, the room was in its normal meticulously kept condition. Gacy was a fastidious housekeeper, a “Felix,” a place for everything and everything in its place. He emptied the beer bottles into the kitchen sink and pitched the empties into the garbage. He groaned as he bent down to pick up the papers off the floor and groused silently about how he was getting older.
I can’t even touch my toes anymore
, he thought. He put the papers back in his office, in the filing cabinet where they belonged, passing Rob’s corpse on the bed in his room as he wandered about as if it wasn’t even there. He picked up the parka and checked the pockets. He pulled a piece of paper from the right one. It was a receipt from Nisson Pharmacy for photograph development. “I guess the kid won’t be picking up those pictures,” Gacy was muttering to himself.

He wasn’t crazy about the fact that he had to go out into the cold winter night to Northwest Hospital to tend to his aunt Leone
and his uncle Harold and any gathering relatives, but he had become the go-to guy in the family, the strong shoulder. He had no choice in the matter. The women needed him. He absentmindedly dropped the photograph receipt into the garbage can in the kitchen and put the blue parka by the back door. He would dispose of that later, when he went out. How incongruous a sight—here was this frumpy, middle-aged community leader wandering back and forth from room to room in his stocking feet, shirt untucked from bending over, scratching his belly from time to time, doing light housework, straightening up his little home, and all the while, the dead body of a young boy was getting cold on his own bed.

Gacy let the dog in, went to his bedroom, and stripped Rob’s clothes off of him, folded them, and stacked them into a neat pile. The underwear had been soiled, so he put them in a separate plastic bag. He picked up the pile and added it to the parka waiting by the back door for ultimate disposal. He got into the shower and scrubbed off the evening’s events and watched them circle the drain, shaved, and dressed in slacks and a shirt suitable for the impending hospital visit.

The telephone rang again. It was just past 10:30 p.m. The voice of one of his valued employees, David Cram, came over the line, saying something about Christmas trees. Gacy explained that he was going out and would call him tomorrow. His uncle was dying. On his way out the door, he picked up the neat stack of Rob’s clothes. He looked at the blue parka.
Why would I throw this away? It’s a nice coat. Someone I know might want it, maybe Dave or Mike.
He brought the coat into the utility room of his house and left it there. En route to the hospital, John dropped the rest of Rob’s clothes into a Salvation Army donation box in a strip mall not far from the house. He tossed the plastic bag into a nearby trash can. Then he continued on to Northwest Hospital.

Rob Piest’s naked young body remained where John had placed it, in the stark, cold bedroom of a madman.

2

J
OHN
G
ACY
W
OKE
the next morning at 6:00 a.m. He had a busy morning ahead. The naked deceased form that was once Robert Piest was lying on the bed next to him. Gacy lay there, momentarily thinking about his situation.

He had arrived at Northwest Hospital at around 11:00 p.m. the previous evening, but when he entered his uncle Harold’s room, it was empty. Nobody was there, not even Uncle Harold. He had passed away during the hour that John had spent tidying up and rushing to the hospital. His corpse had been transferred to the morgue, and Aunt Leone and any other visitors had left the hospital. Now they were mourners, not visitors.

John decided to drive over to Aunt Leone’s house at 7304 W. Cullom Street, but when he arrived there, it was clear that no one was home. The house was dark, doors locked tight. John looked down the block to 7300 W. Cullom, the home of Aunt Leone’s brother. There the lights were blazing, including the Christmas lights.
Everybody must be over there
, John thought, so he parked and went to the door.

John spent the requisite time consoling his aunt Leone and her daughter, Joyce Konakowski. He offered appropriate condolences to all, patted hands, hugged relatives, had a beer with them; but
at about 11:50 p.m., he begged off, saying that he had an early morning. He promised that he would call his mother and his sister in Arkansas first thing after he woke and break the sad news.

Now, with less than six hours of sleep, he was going to be hard-pressed to accomplish all the things that he had to do. Plus, he had the meeting scheduled in an hour at his house with Richard Raphael, the business associate and friend that he had blown off the night before. “That fucker will be right on time too, the punctual prick,” he said out loud to no one. He looked at the corpse lying next to him and thought,
You can’t be here when we start the meeting. That would be a distraction.
But what to do? There wasn’t a lot of time.

John was naked, but for dingy white underwear. No time to waste, though; so he stood up, stretched, shook off sleep, and reached for his bedmate’s arm and pulled the body close to the edge of the bed. He bent down and got under as much of Rob’s corpse as he could. He lifted with his legs, shifted and adjusted until he could hoist the 150-pound body over his shoulder, fireman-style.

It had been eight hours since life had coursed through Rob Piest, and rigor mortis was nearly complete. The sounds of snapping and cracking that emanated from the stiffened body, together with the gurgling of transferring fluids and the release of air from the lungs would have made the average pro linebacker pass right out. Gacy simply considered this whole matter one big necessary pain in the ass, like he considered most physical chores. Grunting and sputtering like a sumo wrestler, he trudged to the hall where the trapdoor to the attic was. He balanced his load, then reached for the tiny rope loop on the trapdoor. The door was enhanced by a spring mechanism, and it opened easily. A telescoping ladder unfolded and came to rest on the floor in front of him.

Gacy was strong, but he was flabby and noticing his age. Beads of perspiration exploded off his face and neck and dripped to the carpet. He took each step of the ladder as though he was working
with free weights, but soon he had Rob’s remains stored just to the right of the trapdoor in the attic. “That is good enough,” he groaned, letting out a huge breath and wiping sweat from his brow with his forearm. He raised the ladder and the trapdoor, and it closed. Nothing looked out of place. John dragged his sweaty, naked fleshy and overweight white body back down the hall toward the bathroom, picking his underwear out of his butt crack and bitching and moaning about what a pain in the ass
that
was. “Why the fuck did I make a stupid appointment at seven fucking o’clock in the motherfucking morning at my own goddamn house? Jeez!”