John Wayne Gacy (21 page)

“Take him down,” Sullivan told Kozenczak.

_____________________

T
HE SCENE WAS
like the filming of a movie. On a rare crisp, cloudless sunlit Thursday in December, four days before Christmas 1978, John Wayne Gacy breathed his last breath of free air. At about 12:15 p.m., near the intersection of Milwaukee Avenue and Oakton Street in the village of Niles, Illinois, it played itself out much like what one that has watched any of the thousands of police dramas produced by Hollywood might imagine. Three unmarked squads carrying five plainclothes policemen—each of whom were men that had given their lives over the past eight long days and nights to the surveillance, pursuit, and apprehension of this particular man—swooped in, surrounding the car in which John rode shotgun and corralling it to the curb with screeching tires, dipping bumpers and appropriate flourish, and, with sidearms drawn, approached the passenger side of the vehicle.

“Get out of the car, John,” Officer Ron Robinson calmly commanded, with his pistol inches from Gacy’s ear. “You are under arrest.”

John was bent over the trunk of his rental car on the busy suburban corner, handcuffed and placed into the back of a police car, in keeping with police procedure and in a way befitting one of fiction’s best melodramas. Gawkers stopped their busy last-minute Christmas shopping to take in the scene and point.

They were only a few blocks from Maryhill Cemetery.

“Why are you guys doing this?” the confused and broken suspect wondered allowed. “What have I done? I thought we were friends …”

This time Mr. Gacy didn’t have a key to the cuffs held between his fingertips in the palm of his hand. This time it was Gacy that was … dumb and stupid.

A ragtag procession of unmarked squad cars and Gacy’s rental car driven by Rossi snaked its way back to Des Plaines police headquarters through the upscale northwest suburban area of Chicago-land. This was just the very beginning of a saga that would grow exponentially and would soon be splashed across headlines and TV screens worldwide.

I didn’t know it then, but I was about to have my fifteen minutes. I was about to become famous.

_________________

A
FTER
G
ACY LEFT
my office early that morning and it was clear that he was not going to follow my advice and allow me to get him the psychological help he desperately needed, Stevens and I just shrugged and shook our heads. What could we do? We both said something about how we would see each other tomorrow for the hearing in federal court and went our separate ways.

For me, I couldn’t remember a time that I felt as tired as I did at that moment. I hadn’t had more than an hour’s sleep in days, what with Sammy in the hospital and this certifiable nutcase that I now represented. I had pulled countless all-nighters in college and
law school during midterms or finals. I had felt pressure before, coupled with a lack of sleep. I had negotiated the gauntlet that was law school. I had studied for the two-day nightmare that was the bar examination. I had been involved in many trials, many of them serious and high profile during my years at the public defender’s office. But nothing compared to this—nothing. I was running on pure adrenaline, and only pure adrenaline. My body needed rest.
Welcome to the private practice of law, Sam.

Alone in my office, I put together the files that I thought I might need before I left to go somewhere—I had no idea where—as the weight of the night’s incredible scenario began to descend like a mountain on my shoulders. Did my memory serve me? Had my client really confessed to the murder, the serial killings of many, many … was this a fucking dream or what? I had to get some sleep. Then I would be able to sort all this shit out. I had to at least take a nap. My head was spinning.

I stopped by my parents’ house, where my ma was watching Jimmy, my younger boy. There wasn’t much I could say to her. I just thanked her for helping out with Jimmy and said that I had to lie down for a little bit. I fell onto the couch in the living room and was dead to the world in seconds, still wearing my suit and tie.

In what seemed like two minutes later, but was actually a couple of hours, my mother was standing over me.

“Sam! Wake up, Sam. They called from the office. They need you. Your client was arrested. You know that client you have … Geezy, Casey … what’s his name?”

I looked at my own mother as though I didn’t know her. “Whaaat?” I tried to focus.

“Your client was arrested, Sam.”

“For what?” I asked, still struggling to come to.

“For pot, she said, the girl at the office. I don’t know what she means. You have to call her.”

“Pot? Pot? What the fu—”

15

“W
HAT? NOW?
W
HY
are you guys holding him?” I bellowed as I stormed into the Des Plaines police headquarters forty minutes after my mother woke me. “You guys are asking for problems, you know that, don’t you? The hearing on our TRO is tomorrow.” I walked up to Terry Sullivan. “Terry, why the hell are you holding him?”

“Possession and delivery of marijuana, Sam—a felony, I might add,” Terry said. “We also found some pills on him in an unmarked bottle. We think they’re Valium. They have to be tested. We probably won’t charge him with that, unless we have to.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my money clip. “OK, OK, what’s his bond? We’ll post it.”

“Not so fast, Sam,” Terry said. “We are running his prints, processing him. You know the drill here. We can hold him until his prints clear. Then he has to go in front of a judge. This is a legitimate felony charge.”

“This is harassment, Terry, harassment, plain and simple. He has a right to post bond, and you know it. A pot charge? Come on, man, really? Let’s get him in front of a judge and have a bond set.”

“All in due time, Sam. We are possessing him as fast as we can, but we are having a small problem with our fax machine. We have to fax his prints to Springfield, you know that. They are looking into it.”

By now everyone in the room knew that the marijuana charge was preliminary, a pretext. Everyone knew that there was a greater reason for this circus. It seemed like every police officer on the entire force was in the room—certainly, all the principals involved in the investigation were there, buzzing around, busying themselves with one thing or another; but actually, they were there to be part of the final process of taking Gacy down. Of course, I still had to do my job. I wanted to speak to my client.

“Well, give me a room. I want to talk to him,” I said.

Soon I was pacing back and forth in front of a shell of John Gacy in a locked interrogation room without windows, drab industrial-color cinder block walls, with a couple of government-issue chairs and a government-issue table where Gacy sat slumped and sullen.

“Keep your fucking mouth shut, John. They told you that you could remain silent, right? That is exactly what you do, remain silent.”

“Sam, it’s over, it’s over … my life is over. I just want to get this shit over with, you know, get it all over with, clear the air.” John’s eyes were dripping, bloodshot, and sunken due to lack of sleep. He had a two-day growth of beard and looked like a hobo. He was in the same clothes that he had slept in last night, and he was in a drug- and alcohol-induced haze, his head rotating on his neck like it was not connected to his body.

“You don’t have any idea what you want. You are in no shape to be making decisions of any kind, let alone decisions that are going to affect the rest of your life. You just keep your mouth shut. You had an appointment with a shrink this morning. That’s where you should be right now, not here. You need help, John. Now, just take my advice, and keep your mouth shut. You are not required to say a word, so don’t! Got it?”

Gacy then said something that threw me. I was about to find out just how crazy my client really was. “I want to get out of here. Do you want me to fake a heart attack? I can do that. I can.”

“John, what the hell are you talking about? No! That’s the simple answer. What’s wrong with you? You cannot fake a heart attack. We have to get you into a facility, a hospital. You need help, John. You are not yourself. You are not making any sense.”

“I have to do this my way, Sam. I know … I know th-th-th-that you are just trying to help me, that … that you are on my side. I know that. But you have to believe me. I have to do this my own way.”

I shook my head slowly. I was concerned that if given the chance, he would try to commit suicide. He still had his belt and street clothes. If a person were determined to do it, there was always a way to do yourself in. I didn’t want him to be left alone. I sat in the other chair in the room and watched my client put his head down in his arms. I stared at him for a very long couple of minutes.

“John, just keep your mouth closed,” I said. “I will try to get—”

I was going to tell him that I intended to get him some help. I never got the chance. John raised his head. His face was an odd mix of ashen gray and vein-popping purple. His eyes were vacant and fixed. It was as if I wasn’t in the room. His eyelids began to flutter much like they had on the previous night in my office, and his eyes rolled back in his head. All I could see was white where his eyes were supposed to be. Believe me, that is a frightening sight. His body began to shudder and shake as he flipped out of his chair and onto the floor. He lay there shaking, flopping around like a fish on a pier. I thought,
Twenty minutes ago he was talking about faking a heart attack, now he’s fucking having one?
I jumped up and ran to the locked door and began pounding on it.

“Hey! Gacy’s having some kind of seizure,” I yelled. “He’s on the ground. Hey, open the door. Someone call an ambulance.”

Immediately, an officer came to the door. “You OK in there, Sam?” I don’t think he knew exactly what to do.

“Call 911! Call an ambulance right now!”

The door flew open, and cops swarmed to the door, gawking. There was yelling beyond that, people screaming to call the paramedics. Gacy kept flopping around on the floor. White bubbly drool was running out of the corner of his mouth, and his color had gone off the charts. It looked as though his head might just pop like a thermostat cartoon.

I loosened his collar and tried to make him comfortable. Police officers gathered around shouting various forms of advice, all of which I ignored.

Paramedics burst through the door with a stretcher. They bent down over him and immediately assessed that it was time to go to the hospital. They put an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and lifted him onto a gurney. Suddenly, my client was being whisked off to Holy Family Hospital with sirens blaring.

I suppose it wasn’t really a surprise to anybody—not to me or to any of the investigation team—when we later learned that Gacy was not really having a heart attack. Upon arrival at the hospital, and after a short examination by hospital staff, it was clear that nothing physical was wrong with him, at least not anything life-threatening.

When I heard the news, it affected me differently than most, though. Most of the police officers believed that Gacy was just a bullshit artist—that was no surprise to anyone. Half of what he said was either bullshit or an exaggerated version of the truth, a Gacy version of things. And I suppose that I was somewhat on that bandwagon. I had described him as a blowhard and a braggart to others before. However, this time my perspective changed. I saw his face. I saw his eyes roll back into his head. I saw the color of his skin, the involuntary nature of his seizure. I was in that room with him. So I now knew something I didn’t know before. My client was not normal; something was very wrong with him that ran much deeper. More than anyone else, I should have been able to dismiss Gacy’s feigned illness as a stunt, a ploy for sympathy, something
very typically Gacy. Hell, he had announced to me his intention to fake a heart attack. But that was no fake heart attack in the way that others might expect. He was not simply pretending. Gacy had experienced a physiological event, a physical response to what he perceived as a threat. He was not just “acting.” The paramedics, trained professionals, determined there to be an emergency. Gacy was in actual physical distress.

Suddenly, I knew that his entire medical history—with all its documented seizures, strokes, and maladies—was likely one long psychological manifestation of a man unlike any other man, a man miswired at the factory, so to speak, a good old-fashioned crazy person, a person that had a lifelong record of known, documented illnesses and hospital admissions. But in spite of the very impressive nature of the charts and notes regarding his health, in spite of the many diagnoses of his condition over his lifetime, I knew that many or most of those problems had originated in this man’s head. It wasn’t his body that was weak or broken, as the charts and the medical history might indicate; it was his brain that wasn’t working right. His problem was in his mind. His brain was profoundly broken.

That was the only explanation that I could come up with to account for the things that I had seen and heard over the past twelve hours. During the previous night, I had seen the same reaction in his eyes that I had seen today. That fluttering of the eyelids, that change in personality—I had seen it twice now, and although I am not a doctor, I know what I saw. This was not something as simple as a guy who faked illnesses or medical emergencies. This was something far more significant.

Once Gacy was out of my presence, he began to start telling parts of his story to just about anyone that would listen. Frankly, his decision to do so pretty much sealed his fate. He began confessing to many of the members of the Delta Unit, guys that he considered his friends, explaining that he had told Stevens and me everything.

To their credit, the officers involved in questioning were careful to continually remind John of his right to remain silent so that his statements would be admissible in evidence one day. It was at this point that Gacy began telling others about Jack Hanley, John’s idea of an alter ego, another personality within him. Although Gacy had never mentioned this name to me or to Stevens in all of our long and exhausting conversations, the name “Jack Hanley” would prove to figure heavily in the Gacy story in the days and weeks and months to come. For now, Gacy was on what lawyers like to call a frolic of his own.