John Wayne Gacy (42 page)

“Now, the first part, the life and death witnesses. Well, you know that State started this case the same way they ended it—sympathy, sympathy, passion, prejudice, hate Mr. Gacy. There are twenty-two identified victims, twenty-two. They put more than twenty-two life and death
witnesses on that stand. A life and death witness is put on the stand for the purpose of telling you, of putting into evidence that somebody lived and somebody died. That’s the purpose. Do you think that was their purpose? No. Their purpose was to make you cry. Their purpose was to arouse your sympathy. That’s what their purpose was.

“You think it’s easy to sit here and watch mothers cry up there? It’s just as hard for us as it is for you. Nobody likes to see it. Do you think it’s easy to see friends and family crying up there? It’s not easy, but it’s not evidence. An example is—”

At that moment, Judge Garippo stopped me. “If I can interrupt one minute, we’ll take a brief recess.”

I wish I could tell you that the interruption was for something profound. However, the judge just wanted to give everyone a pee break, including himself, I’m guessing. I suppose he had come to know me over the last six weeks, and he figured that I’d be up there for a while.

“May I proceed?” I asked after we had reconvened.

“Yes,” said the judge.

“OK, I believe I left off where I was talking about the beginning of the State’s case, the life and death witnesses.

“They put more than twenty-two on there, and I was going to give you an example of the way in which the State attempts to arouse your sympathy without going into the facts.

“First, let’s look at Mary Jo Paulus. Remember her, the little girl with the brace on her neck? This girl was straight from the hospital. No pain medication. Mr. Motta asked her about it. She said, ‘No, I didn’t take any medication.’ In pain, she sat up there—in pain.

“Mr. Motta also asked her, ‘Were you the last one to see William Kindred alive?’ She says, ‘No, a guy named Weedle saw him last.’ Where was Weedle? How come Weedle didn’t come in here and testify? Did he get in an automobile accident too, or was it better to see this poor girl suffering, in pain, so your hearts could go out to her?

“What about Donita Gannon? Remember Donita Gannon? That’s the little [Asian] registered nurse. Now, you think the State came out and told you that Ms. Gannon was really Mr. Ganzon? Oh no. No. They left that up to the defense. Let the defense lawyer be the bad guys. ‘We’ll put this poor little girl up there, say she’s a registered nurse, talk about how much she misses Timothy O’Rourke, but don’t say anything else.’

 “So then, we have to get up and expose this poor person to the whole world. Why do we have to do that? Why did we have to look like the bad guys? Because we are concerned with the facts—the facts, the evidence.

“Talking about Ms. Gannon—now here’s a person who actually is having a sex-change operation. She shouldn’t have any fear, any worry, or anxiety about people thinking anything about her. Maybe she was intended to be that way; she was intended to be a female. So she’s having a sex-change operation. If that’s what she wants to do, fine, but she should not have to be afraid of it. She should not have to not want to say it on the stand there.

“Another person, Roger Sahs, I asked him, where did you meet the person you dropped off at Bughouse Square? Did you meet him in a gay bar? Wouldn’t admit that, wouldn’t admit he met him in a gay bar. These are examples of the way people feel about homosexuals.

“Now, this girl, Ms. Gannon, I guess you can say, is a blatant homosexual, or whatever—transvestite, whatever you want to call it.

“Objection, Judge.” It was Kunkle. The judge never bothered to respond or rule. I elicited the exact reaction out of Kunkle that I wanted, the visceral reaction that still existed at the time in opposition to the very mention of gay or transsexual persons. I let that reaction hang in the air for a beat. Then I continued.

“Well, whatever it is, you could imagine—you could imagine the torment, the torture that goes on in the mind of a man like John Gacy, a man whose father was a real man, his mother said. A man
whose father was a good provider, a tough man. John Gacy wanted to be like his dad.

“John Gacy slowly found himself going more and more and more the other way. He did not want to. He hated the whole idea of homosexuality. He hated himself for being a homosexual, and he still does. He still does.

“As Dr. Reifman said, he is a homosexual, but he won’t admit that to himself. Why? Because he does not want to—the torture, the pain.

“In the voir dire, a few of you indicated that you were repulsed by the idea of homosexual conduct. Picture yourself, use your common sense, what if you suddenly found yourself going the other way, becoming a homosexual, becoming a homosexual, becoming something that repulses you, something that you do not want? Think about the confusion of identity, think about the inner conflict you have. That’s what the doctors were talking about up there, and I want you to keep that in mind. Keep in mind the evidence.

“Think in your mind the kind of person John Gacy was—a construction worker, a guy who wanted to make his marriage succeed, a good daddy. Yet he caught himself going farther and farther the other way. Mr. Sullivan said it’s by choice.

“In May of 1975, he cut off his wife. He said, no more. Then—why was it later on he buried his head in her lap when he could not have sexual relations with her? He cried, he cried, and he said, ‘I’m afraid I have gone the other way completely.’ He did not want that. It was a horrible, horrible thing for him.”

 The conflict that raged internally in this sad specimen of a human being, our client, had to be brought home to this jury. Gacy was the poster boy for the argument that homosexuality is not a choice. He was raised by a rough, tough, hard-to-deal-with tool-and-die man—a man’s man, a guy who hated homosexuals, the classic homophobic. Gacy was raised to do the same, to be the same.
When John Gacy acted in any other way, if he cried or played with the dolls, or girls, his father called him a sissy, a fruit picker. He was teased relentlessly, often shunned entirely, this by the one man from whom Gacy most wanted acceptance and love. Gacy fought desperately against this predisposition toward homosexuality with every fiber of his being, and lost that battle. This conflict was basic to his psychosis, to his derangement. I hoped the jury understood this essential fact. I wasn’t getting a lot of confirmation in the faces that I saw in front of me. I plodded on.

 “Anyway, beyond those types of witnesses, there [were] some other interesting facts brought out by the life and death witnesses about John Gacy.

“Mr. Marko Butkovitch said, ‘Well, when I met John Gacy, when I talked to him, he seemed like a good man, a good man.’ He didn’t say he was evil. He didn’t say he was vile. He seemed like a good man.

“Mr. Butkovitch also begged and pleaded with the police to investigate John Gacy. ‘My son worked for him. Find out, please find out for me,’ [he pleaded.] Did the police do anything for him? No. No. Had they done something, we would not be here today, but they did not want to investigate John Gacy.

“Gregory Godzik’s sister said that John Gacy used to ‘make my brother laugh.’ Her brother enjoyed working for John Gacy, and then Gregory Godzik’s girlfriend said, ‘John Gacy said he was in the syndicate.’ This is way back when. Was John Gacy planning the insanity defense? Was John Gacy planning and having these ideas and feelings of grandeur—or, as the doctors called it, grandiosity? Was he in the syndicate?”

Of course, John Gacy was not in the syndicate. I wondered if these fine men and women could see how crazy that was, how telling. Gacy was a pudgy, sickly cream puff that desperately needed acceptance. Did they see that? I took in their faces one at a time. I searched. I wished that for just one second I could read minds.

“After the life and death witnesses, we go into the police investigation. And the police investigation starts off with Officer Pickell, I believe, and Lieutenant Kozenczak; and there was a man named Kirkpatrick from Kirk’s Towing in LaGrange, and another officer named Loconsole, and it started with Pickell and Kozenczak going over—after we see in the reports on the missing boy, Robert Piest, they went over to John Gacy’s house, after hearing that he had been at Nisson Pharmacy.”

I described in some detail the events that occurred the night Kozenczak and Pickell visited Gacy’s house the very first time, while young Rob Piest’s body was hidden in the attic. It was impossible, in my view, to interpret this any other way. Our client was insane. Think about it. His house was a ghoulish, gruesome, illegal morgue; and he was inviting the cops in for a chat.

 “Then as Lieutenant Kozenczak and Officer Pickell are walking out the door, he gets a dislike for Kozenczak, and the reason he got a dislike for Kozenczak, which he carried on all the way through his statements, he did not like Kozenczak, and that was because he said Kozenczak did not show any respect for his uncle who died. He’s sitting there with twenty-nine bodies, thirty bodies in that house with no emotion, but yet he’s worried that Kozenczak did not show any respect for his uncle.

“Is that the act of a sane man, of a normal man? Does a rational man let the police into his house with all those bodies? He may have appeared rational on the outside to his neighbors. A rational man would not do that; an intelligent, rational man would not do that.

“Then he got stuck—well, apparently he said that he took the body of the Piest boy out to the Des Plaines River, and again, by the way, that was supposed to be the fifth body he threw in that river, all in the same place. Patterned—obsessive, compulsive pattern. ‘The crawl space is full. I have to find another space.’ Pattern, that’s not plan. Pattern is not plan. Pattern is sick, and pattern was sick,
and it was based on an obsession. Why at the same point? Why did he drop them off at that same point?

“He rode out there, and on the way back this alert, awake man goes off the road. He gets stuck in a ditch. What did he look like at that time? Kirkpatrick couldn’t even recognize him in the courtroom. He’s looking around, looking around; he looked at me for a little while, and finally he said, ‘I’m sorry, I cannot positively identify him.’ Why not? Well, he looked different that night. He looked different. ‘When I went up to the car, he was slumped over at the wheel. He was groggy. He looked like he had been under the influence of something.’

 “Time and time again people had seen and then later testified to the transformation that took place in John Gacy. One minute, John was congenial, with an ear-to-ear smile that would light a room. The next minute, he would turn dark hearted, evil, scary. Rob Piest had seen this transformation just before he died. Stevens and I saw it that night in my office when John confessed his dastardly deeds—the flutter in the eyes, the apparent switch from Jekyll to Hyde that made John Gacy unrecognizable, that turned him into a different person.

“When asked on redirect examination, well, was he under the influence, was he drinking, he said, ‘I didn’t smell anything.’ Why did he look so groggy? Why did he look like he was under the influence? Beats me. I don’t think the State has the answer, but he certainly did look different, and that’s when he disposed of that body of Robert Piest.

“Now, he was supposed to have gone on to the police station at eleven o’clock. He disposes of the body of Robert Piest, and on the way back he gets stuck, and as soon as he gets pulled out, he remembers. I had an appointment with Lieutenant Kozenczak. I better get to the Des Plaines police station. Rational? Walking into the Des Plaines police station at three o’clock in the morning, covered with mud, when you are under the investigation of a missing
boy? You are under suspicion for kidnapping and possibly murder. Do you do that? Do you walk in a police station at three o’clock in the morning and say, ‘I’m here, I’m going to talk to you?’

 “That is not the act of a rational man, as Mr. Sullivan would have you believe. If anything, it’s that act of a man who wants to get caught, a man who was reaching out, saying, ‘Stop me before I kill again.’ It’s a man who wanted to be stopped, but could not control himself to stop himself.

“He was reaching out at that point. Sure, he was caught in a web. Mr. Sullivan said he was in a web. He wasn’t in any police web; he was in his own web. He was tangled in that web of his mind, encased in his flesh for so many years, and the killing had to stop. It became more and more frequent all the time.

“The reason it had to stop was because, by his own statement, John Gacy said Robert Piest was different. He did not fit the mold. He did not fit the pattern. He wasn’t picked up in Bughouse Square. He wasn’t picked up on Clark Street somewhere. He was snatched out of a drugstore where he worked. He’s a boy who John Gacy never saw before. You tell me that’s planned? You tell me that’s premeditation, that he went there purposely to get Robert Piest, he didn’t even know his name.

“That is the drive of a madman, a driven man, driven by perverted obsessions and compulsions, but perverted obsessions and compulsions that he could not control. Why Robert Piest?

“So it went on. He was sent home from the police station at three o’clock in the morning. He then returned at 11:40 the next day. Again now, this is a man under suspicion of kidnapping. He voluntarily goes into the police station and says, ‘I’ll give you the statement now.’ He talks to Officer Pickell again, gives him a statement, exactly the way Officer Pickell wanted him to do it. He not only gave the statement, but—I’ll show you the exhibit. I don’t know which one it is. He signed his name in the wrong place.”

I found the exhibit and showed it to the jury.

“In the statement he gave, the first statement, he said he could account for just about every minute of his time. Maybe he was lying. Maybe he was lying at that time. He signed his name in the wrong place, and he also signed PDM Contractors. You tell me why, for what purpose the man would sign his name and put PDM Contractors? When you sign your name to something, do you put the name of your job or your company below your name? It makes no sense.