John Wayne Gacy (22 page)

“My lawyers work for me,” he would say. “They cannot tell me what to do, who to talk to, or what I can talk about.”

In Gacy’s mind, Gacy knew best. Unfortunately, nothing could have been farther from the truth.

16

C
HUCK
G
ORDAN WAS
nineteen years old and on his first date with a pretty young girl named Ronda, whom he had met the week before at a nearby bar. They sat on her grandmother’s front porch exchanging stories, shivering against the cold, getting to know each other a little bit better before they finally had to say good night. He was fidgeting, contemplating that very first good-night kiss when the night sky to the west of the little Norwood Park bungalow where her grandmother lived was suddenly lit up. “It looked like they had moved Wrigley Field a few miles to the west and they were playing a night game in December,” he would later say. “I couldn’t believe how bright it was.”

Chuck’s memory of that Thursday night, just four days before Christmas, was just one of the hundreds of memories recounted by persons that happened to be in the vicinity of 8213 W. Summerdale on the evening of December 21, 1978, the night that the search warrant on John Wayne Gacy’s home was executed. Chuck was from suburban Elmhurst, and it was by sheer chance that he was in that neighborhood on that fateful night.

I left the Des Plaines police station after they took Gacy away in the ambulance and went home. I had done everything I could as his lawyer, after all. Now it was up to him to follow my advice and
remain silent, keep his damned mouth shut—something John Gacy did not do very well. I would have to wait for the results of the examination from the hospital and, after he was released from care, try to force a bond hearing as soon as it was possible. If Gacy’s condition was serious, that might take some time, maybe several days, depending on his condition. Of course, like everything else about this crazy case, that is not what happened.

I hadn’t been home more than ten minutes when I got a call from one of Gacy’s neighbors. When the surveillance on his home began, Gacy must have bragged that he had hired me to put a stop to it. We were both precinct captains, and people knew that I was a lawyer with some clout, some political friends.

“There are what looks like fifty police vehicles, trucks, lights, absolute chaos over at John’s house,” the neighbor screamed into the phone. “You better get over there, Sam. They look like they are planning to tear the place apart. You’re his lawyer.” I remember thinking that I would have to thank John for giving out my home phone number. Why even have an office if strangers were able to call me at home? Then I remembered that I was still listed in the phone book. Perhaps I should remedy that? I made a mental note, but it turned out to be too late.

When I arrived, the street was secured at both ends of the block by squads with flashing lights, and the scene in front of Gacy’s house looked like something out of a bad disaster movie. Flashing Mars Lights, spotlights, special floodlights constructed on top of evidence vans, and countless uniformed men scurrying everywhere filled my field of vision. There were squad cars from several different jurisdictions parked haphazardly on the street, on lawns, on sidewalks, basically everywhere. It seems that my very first client, my one client, had caused a bit of a stir.

I made my way past the initial challenges to my presence by asserting my right to be there, louder and more convincingly than the uniformed officers that were positioned at the perimeters.

“I’m his lawyer! That’s my client’s house! I represent Mr. Gacy!” I shouted to one cop after another as I stormed toward the nucleus of the beehive. I pounded on the locked front door of Gacy’s house and peered into the diamond-shaped window at eye level. A face appeared that filled the window. It was a face I knew. Greg Bedoe, the seasoned Cook County investigator whom Terry Sullivan had attached to the unit early during the investigation, looked back at me. I will never forget the look on his face as long as I live. It was a look of sheer horror, the look of a man that had seen something gruesome, grotesque, unimaginable.

“Get the fuck out of here, Amirante!” he screamed at me, pointing.

“Hey, Bedoe, fuck you! I want to see a warrant! What the fuck do you guys think you are doing here? You can’t do this! Where is your goddamned warrant?”

“Fuck you, and fuck your warrant, Sam! I said get the fuck outta here! We have a warrant, now get the fuck out of here before I have your ass dragged outta here!”

We were both screaming at the top of our lungs and attracting some attention. I looked around. All I could see were cops … everywhere. I made a quick assessment. I was not going to win this argument. My home turf was in court. This was their home turf, no question about it. I backed away from the front door.

Welcome to the private practice of law, Sam
, I thought once again. I found myself thinking those words quite a lot lately.

___________________

A
COUPLE HOURS
earlier, sometime shortly after 7:15 p.m., which was the time the warrant was signed by Judge Peters, the first of the members of the investigation team arrived at the home of John Wayne Gacy.

There was the static of pure anticipation in the air. They would have loved to tear into the place and rip it apart, especially the
crawl space, but the men knew their jobs. A meticulous process was being followed. An evidence technician named Daniel Genty had the dubious distinction of being the one chosen to go into the crawl space below Gacy’s house. While Genty dressed in coveralls and firemen’s wader boots, some of the others checked out the house. They removed the trapdoor to the crawl space and peered into it. Evidently, someone had unplugged the sump pump. There were several inches of standing water in most of the crawl, making it impossible to do any real investigation down there. The plug for the sump pump was plugged in, and it kicked on. Immediately, the water was being pumped out. While that was happening, the other officers proceeded to search in various other areas of the house.

Officers Tovar and Kautz had long suspected that they would find items of property belonging to others in Gacy’s house. They had been working that angle. During the first search, various officers noticed a small Motorola television on a dresser in Gacy’s bedroom. Officer Kautz was with Officer Adams when they visited and questioned Mrs. Szyc, the mother of one of the missing teens, John Szyc. Among the items of paperwork that were given to them, which included the car registration for the 1971 Plymouth, was a registration form and warranty certificate for a small Motorola television that belonged to Szyc.

Tovar and Kautz made a beeline into Gacy’s bedroom. They checked the serial number on the TV in Gacy’s room. Sure enough, the TV sitting on John Wayne Gacy’s dresser once belonged to John Szyc. It had the same serial number. They also found a clock radio that was once the property of young John Szyc. Chills ran up and down the spines of many officers when they thought about what else might be found in the crawl space in light of this new information. What were believed to be sound theories—speculation really, but informed speculation—about the connection to and the whereabouts of the increasing number of missing teens that were once connected to Gacy were becoming more and more plausible.

The time of reckoning had come. After about ten long minutes of pumping, the sump pump had removed enough water from the crawl to allow for a meaningful search. Officer Genty dropped into the crawl space armed with a bright spotlight and a trenching tool. He had to half-crawl to maneuver in the tiny space under the house. The first thing he noticed was the lime spread all around to absorb moisture. Small pools of water still existed in low spots, and it was discolored, brownish. He picked a spot and plunged the blade of the trenching tool into the soft, moist dirt. An odor escaped with only one shovelful of dirt. This was gross—a dirty, horrifying job. The odor was overwhelming. With the next shovelful, Genty stopped. He had hit something solid. He reached into the dirt to see what it was. Although he kind of expected it, what he saw, what he was now holding, stole his breath. Then he turned and yelled over his shoulder, “Charge him!”

Genty had found the first of what would later prove to be hundreds and hundreds of human bones!

____________________

T
HE WORD SPREAD
like wildfire, as they say. Radios crackled and squelched. Jurisdictions were notified. The cries went into the atmosphere.
 

“Charge Gacy with murder.”

“Call the medical examiner.”

“Get me the mayor.”

“Find out about jurisdiction.”

“Let the chief know … wake him up!”

“See if we can tear this house down.”

“Tell my wife I won’t be home … for a while.”

“This is going to be big … no, huge … no, monstrous!”

“I have never seen anything like this in my life.”

“I don’t know what we are going to do about Christmas, honey.”

The air seemed to echo with the news.

And then … the press arrived.

17

A
S EVERYBODY KNOWS
,
the city of Chicago is the third largest city in the United States of America, which, as everybody knows, makes it the third largest media market in the United States. The force and speed at which this story ripped through that media market and was instantly transmitted on to the rest of the world is epic in the annals of print and electronic media lore.

Friday morning, December 22, 1978, every television set and every radio in every home and car and business in the entire city was squawking about one thing: John Wayne Gacy.

The unusual thing about Gacy was that he was no “person in the shadows.” This was not an anonymous, work-a-day guy who one day snaps and goes to work and sprays his postal-employee coworkers with a hail of bullets, killing ten or twenty. He was a politician, the guy at the front of the parade, the guy who had the yard parties attended by hundreds. Therefore, this story was a textbook example of exponential growth. Four hundred people tell ten friends that they were at a party at Gacy’s house, and suddenly, four thousand people are talking about the guy, and so on, without the help of the press. From the highest reaches of Chicago politics, including the mayor and the governor, to his neighbors and business associates, it seemed that no one in the city had more
than one degree of separation from this man. You could not throw a rock in all of Chicagoland—population nine million—without hitting someone that had his or her own personal Gacy story.

And I was his lawyer.

And many of the venerable members of the fourth estate were looking for me, it seems, but I was babysitting Gacy in the bowels of the Des Plaines police station. I had returned to the station after having visited Gacy’s house—quite the humbling experience—and I was sitting with him, trying unsuccessfully to remind him of his constitutional right to remain silent. John thought he knew better, though. He thought that he was smarter than people like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams. He wasn’t.

He asked that I notify his sister Joanne. She immediately came to the station to be with him. He spoke with her and admitted that much of what was being said about him was true. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for his sister, but she stoically stayed by her brother’s side through the night. By dawn, Gacy had told his story to many of the members of the investigation team. He also said that he would show everyone where he disposed of bodies that were not under the house.

A morbid, sad three-car caravan left Des Plaines, Illinois, as the sun barely showed its first morning light on Friday, December 22. John wanted the first stop to be the Maryhill Cemetery, to pay respects at his father’s grave; and he was told that all efforts would be made to grant that privilege by the boys from Des Plaines, provided that he was cooperating with them. Gacy somehow knew that this would be the last chance that he would ever have to stand at his father’s grave. His father, the man whose every prediction about his son had finally, ultimately come true—in spades.

The group headed out in three squads to the bridge, where Interstate 55 crosses over the Des Plaines River near Joliet, some fifty miles away. Upon arrival, Gacy recounted the story of the night that he drove Rob Piest’s body out to that bridge, ten days previous,
and—with Officers Shultz and Robinson grasping his arms to ensure he didn’t fling himself over the rail—pointed to the very spot where Rob was released into the muddy water below. He also explained that it was at this spot that he released four other bodies of young men after he had run out of room in his crawl space.

Tears streaked his sister’s face, and I think it is fair to say that everyone else on that bridge felt chills. I know I did.

The somber moment didn’t last long, however; because almost immediately, the entire troop saw ABC’s Chicago affiliate WLS TV newsman Jay Levine running, with camera crew in tow, across the bridge. Gacy was spirited into the back of the squad car and whisked away while Mr. Levine tried futilely to keep up, poking his microphone into the dust from the disappearing Illinois State Police cruiser.

_____________________

A
S THIS STORY
exploded in the press, there were people that would rather not have become part of it. Me, I’m a bit of a ham. I always knew that my chosen profession might include some press coverage. Cameras don’t intimidate me. But suppose that you just happened to live next door to Gacy or down the block from him, or that you once worked for him for a summer three years ago, you just might not want to see reporters camped out on your front lawn or chasing you through the mall when all you are trying to do is buy a bag of dog food.

This was such a huge story, especially in Chicago, that the members of the press were generally tripping over each other to get an angle on the story that had not previously been covered. In the days following his arrest, if you had ever met John Wayne Gacy or had any connection to him whatsoever, chances are that you would have the business end of a microphone shoved in your face, sometimes at the most inopportune times of the day or night or in the most inopportune places. People had to become creative in their efforts to avoid being accosted by eager-beaver reporters on a deadline.