John Wayne Gacy (27 page)

The translation from Italian to English is loosely this: “Sir, please don’t break my balls.”

A hidden smile flirted at the corners of the esteemed jurist’s mouth and filled his eyes as he looked back at me. He kept his judicial demeanor, however, never wavering.

“Hmm, I see. OK, OK, Mr. Amirante, step back. We will proceed accordingly. Any other motions?”

And with that, the case of
the People of the State of Illinois v. John Wayne Gacy
officially began. We had a judge and a courtroom assigned, a place to do battle. Of course, it would be just over a year before the actual trial would start, but the preliminary struggles would start today.

22

A
S IT TURNS
out, Jack Hanley was a real person—sort of. Plus, he was really a cop. It seems that Gacy and Officer Hanley had met sometime while John was working at Bruno’s, a restaurant where he worked for a while as a short-order cook after he was released from the prison in Anamosa. Of course, Officer Hanley’s name wasn’t actually Jack, but in John Gacy’s wandering, lost mind, it was. Officer Hanley was not a homicide detective either. However, if you asked John, he would tell you that he was.

Without explanation, John Gacy would occasionally use this name when cruising Bughouse Square. He always believed that it was much cooler to say he, John Gacy, was a homicide cop named Detective Jack Hanley, a suave badass who solved the unsolvable crimes, rather than the truth—that he was a dumpy, boring smalltime contractor who lived with his mother in the suburbs. Now in his defense, John Gacy was not the first guy in the world who has told a little white lie in an attempt to get laid. I have seen a lot of multimillionaires with really bad shoes and worse haircuts in meat markets and watering holes. Most of these stories fade with the morning sunlight as the alcohol is metabolized and eliminated from the body.

For some unexplainable reason, though, John Gacy decided that it would be in his best interest to claim that Jack Hanley was his alter ego, his second personality. Unlike other men who have lied in pursuit of poontang, John seemed to adopt Jack as a second persona. So when John was flitting from cop to cop and prosecutor to prosecutor confessing his awful crimes like a bumblebee goes from flower to flower, he was telling many of them that John Gacy did not commit these grotesque acts—Jack Hanley did.

Now please keep in mind that Gacy did not mention the name Jack Hanley during the endless drunken ramblings that spewed forth during his soul-searching confession at my office with Leroy Stevens. However, he suddenly had a second personality buried deep inside when he told his story to the police. This was simply Gacy being Gacy. John always knew best, you know, or so he thought. These were self-serving statements—a silly, uninformed attempt to set into motion some sort of flimsy departure from reality.

What this accomplished, together with the fact that Mr. Gacy could not simply just keep his mouth shut, was to set in stone the only defense available to him. Motta and I would have no choice in the matter. We would be required to assert the insanity defense at trial. It was John himself that left us no other alternative. Oh yeah, there was one other reason why we were limited to asserting the insanity defense: John Wayne Gacy was certifiably, without a doubt, with all certainty batshit, bonkers, cuckoo, crazy, insane. This fact would become painfully obvious over time.

_____________________

B
OB
M
OTTA AND
I had our work cut out for us. We solidified as a team and began the process of representing America’s most hated man.

It has been said that when the prosecution builds a case in court against a defendant, it is like building a wall one brick at a time. Each brick has to support the bricks laid on top of it in order
to support the wall. If the defense can chip away at a particular brick, or at several of them, this can cause the whole wall to come tumbling down.

Bob and I sat in the office spitballing, looking over some of the evidence that the State had against our client, tracing the steps that they had taken that brought us all here. It was our job to challenge each and every one of those steps and then to devise some sort of affirmative defense based on our client’s inability to understand his actions or to conform his behavior within the confines of the law.

We started at the beginning, the very first search warrant that, among other things, turned up the photograph receipt that first tied Gacy to Rob Piest, the original item of evidence that put Rob Piest inside Gacy’s home.

“Look at this.” I was waving the very first complaint for search warrant around, which had been drafted by Lieutenant Kozenczak and Terry Sullivan. “There is nothing here about a photograph receipt.”

When a complaint for search warrant is presented to a judge in an effort to procure an actual search warrant, it must be quite specific. The items that the officers and the assistant state’s attorney wish to recover must be delineated in the complaint. Representatives of the State cannot enter a suspect’s home and simply look willy-nilly for just any old thing that they think might help their case. That would fly in the face of the Constitution. If during the course of a legal search the officers conducting the search come across items that are on their face illegal and those items are in plain sight, then those items can be legally confiscated. However, items not delineated on the warrant, which are not per se illegal, are not subject to confiscation.

“There is nothing illegal about a photograph receipt. Why would they have a right to grab that item out of the house?” Bob asked, with full knowledge of my answer.

“They shouldn’t be able to,” I said. “Even if this photo receipt document was in plain sight, it is not contraband. It is not something they can just grab. This item should be excluded. Where did they find this?”

“They found it in the garbage in the kitchen, in the garbage bag. They cannot go snooping in the guy’s garbage, can they?”

“They may be able to, once it is thrown out by the curb. There are cases that say that at that point it is discarded, abandoned. You know all those cases where private detectives go snooping on celebrities, but this garbage was still in his house, under his control. It may not have even been garbage. Maybe it was just a bag of items that he intended to keep. But we don’t even have to get to that issue. This item was not delineated in the warrant, and it could never be considered contraband, so they cannot seize it, right? What possible theory could they use?”

“And look at this.” Bob was now looking at the second search warrant. “They got a warrant based on a smell? A smell—jeez, the smell of putrefied bodies? How can anyone tell the difference between a decaying human body and the decaying body of any other kind of animal—hell, of an old, moldy half-eaten piece of steak in the garbage, for that matter? Decaying flesh is decaying flesh.”

And so it went. We picked through the documents and each item of evidence that we knew about, through every single move that was made in the collection of the evidence. Every day and night we would pour over the minutiae of the case. We were back and forth to Cermak to interview Gacy. Sometimes Bob would go out and talk to Gacy; sometimes I would do it. Often, we would go together.

We told Gacy to write down every thought, every memory, anything and everything that came to his mind that could help us to better understand the case, to better understand him. On one of our visits, he gave us this:

As Bob and I reviewed this disjointed document, we were perplexed. John had included some of the oddest references—references that no one would expect—together with many of the most obscure moments from his life. He also included his most hated activities, his first sexual acts with men. However, he failed to include any reference whatsoever to one very important aspect of his life—the fact that he had killed, that he had killed over and over again. Mundane, minute details from his life were there on each and every page. Yet according to this document, John Wayne Gacy had never taken a life. Was he still attempting to hide this part of his life even though he had confessed it to me and to others, or was it something deeper?

23

W
HILE
B
OB AND
I were preparing and filing stacks of preliminary motions and investigating the case during its early stages and while these various motions were being set for hearing in the months to come, another true emergency arose that required our immediate attention. This turned out to be an emergency of epic proportions because it involved money—our money, our own money.

The excavation process that was necessary to recover the bodies was ongoing. Day after day the body count rose. The staggering number of bodies, together with their location, was causing significant damage to the structural integrity of Gacy’s house. However, at least so far, the process had left the building intact and standing.

In the wind was this nagging assertion about a plan by the sheriff’s department to raze the house entirely, thereby making it easier to search for and recover any bodies not yet found. There is absolutely no question that the excavation process was made more complicated by the fact that a house stood over the hideous burial site, and Bob and I could certainly understand why the guys working on the tedious recovery process would love to work without a house overhead, but we could not stand by and let this plan come to fruition without a fight, a serious fight.

There were constitutional issues at stake as well as other issues of great concern—money.

It was true that our client, Mr. Gacy, had been charged with crimes more grotesque than any in recent memory. Some would say that the charges were unparalleled in all of history. There is a tendency, when an alleged crime is particularly horrifying, to forget the rules or to attempt to bypass those rules altogether. The idea that the sheriff’s department could simply tear down a man’s house in order to make it easier to reach undiscovered bodies was a classic example.

“There is talk that they want to tear down Gacy’s house. I got this from a reliable source inside the sheriff’s office. They want to tear the whole goddamned thing down and cart it away in trucks!” I said excitedly as I burst into the office, shaking and stamping off wet melting snow. I threw my overcoat on the couch. I was freaking out. “This time I think they are really going to do it.”

Bob was alone at the desk we shared with a single lamp burning, buried in books and paper that continued off the desk and onto the floor all around him. He hadn’t even noticed that it had gotten dark outside. He was researching issues that had to do with all of those previously filed preliminary motions—motions to dismiss, motions to quash, motions to suppress. He looked over the top of the mounds that covered our one desk with an incredulous look. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another thing! We had heard talk of this motion, this rumor, in days past; but now it seemed to be imminent—at least that was the buzz.

“They can’t do that.” Bob was shaking his head in disgust. “We still have a Constitution in this country, right? They didn’t do away with it while I wasn’t looking, did they? I think there is something in the Fifth Amendment that has to do with not depriving persons of life, liberty, or
property
without due process of law. I’m sure I read that somewhere, maybe it was in law school.” Sarcasm dripped from the walls. “Oh yeah, I think it goes on to say something about
no private property being taken for public use without just compensation. So there’s that too. Have these people lost their minds?