John Wayne Gacy (41 page)

“He became a clown, he became precinct captain, he became a good husband and a good daddy.

“He wanted … [tried] so hard to be good, but he could not be good. There was a bad side to him, an uncontrollable side. He was caged in his own flesh. He was eaten up by this raving, or raging, disease in his mind. He just could not control that. He just could not control that!

“He,” I said, pointing at Terry Sullivan, “talks about temporary insanity. He talks about temporary or episodic psychotic states. That’s not the case here. You didn’t hear the psychiatrists talk about temporary. They came up here and told you he was a sick man—he’s psychotic all the time. Dr. Reifman himself told you, about the only good in this he said was that a psychotic person can plan, a psychotic person remembers his acting out, remembers his overt psychotic episodes like a normal person remembers a dream.

“Mr. Sullivan talked about Mr. Gacy’s memory, how good his memory was. How many cases did he talk about? He kept going over the same three or four cases all the time.

“He did have a good memory.” I pointed at Gacy. “The man does have a good memory, his wife told you that. He is intelligent. The psychiatrists told you that. So when he can’t remember the kind of details that the police were looking [for], when he can’t remember the kind of details that would help out, there’s something wrong somewhere. He’s remembering it like a dream. Think about the statements he gave to the police.

“He told them things as if they were coming out of a dream. Some things of the cases he remembered vividly, just like if you have a dream. Sometimes you remember it vividly; sometimes you have a dream and you only remember parts of it. Other times you have a dream, and you don’t remember it at all. That’s exactly the way Mr. Gacy related the story to the police, to the psychiatrists, to everybody.

“Mr. Sullivan didn’t talk about these things. All he talked about is sympathy, anger, hate Mr. Gacy, hate him, hate him, hate him, put him to death.”

 I had to take these good people to a different place. They could still hear Terry Sullivan’s “murder, murder, murder” tirade ringing in their ears. I had a plan, though. I would take them to a place where injustice reigned as the result of groupthink, as a result of fiery speeches, as a result of hateful rhetoric.

“Well, you know, back in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, it was July of 1692 that a lady named Sarah Good went to trial. She went to trial accused of being a witch, and when she went to trial, after the evidence was heard—and the judge’s name was Nathaniel Corwin. Now, Magistrate Corwin, or Judge Corwin, sat over the evidence. Sarah Good sat at her trial, and the evidence went in; and after the jury deliberated on that evidence, they came back with a finding of not guilty.

“When Judge Corwin heard that, he became enraged. This was the first of the Salem witch trials. He became enraged; the courtroom became enraged. People were shouting. ‘Put her to death, put
her to death.’ The jurors became frightened. Judge Corwin had no other choice but to send the jury back into the deliberation room, send them back in there. He said, ‘Please reconsider your verdict, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.’

 “They went back in there. They reconsidered based on all of that anger, based on all of that witch hysteria. Then came back out. They did not decide that case on the evidence; they decided it on emotion, and they found that lady, Sarah Good, guilty, and they hung her three weeks later, and everybody was pleased.”

I noticed that this analogy was getting through to a couple of jury members. I could see them thinking, contemplating. This was a witch hunt, after all, wasn’t it? This was an emotional exercise. When all was said and done, who in that courtroom was actually listening to the evidence unaffected by the overall horrific nature of the case, the gruesome pictures of all those boys? I had to try to get the members of the jury to focus on the testimony, the evidence. I wondered, was that possible?

 “Well, we have come a long way in this country since 1692. It is now 1980, and we don’t have judges or magistrates of the caliber of Jonathan Corwin. We have fine judges like Judge Louis Garippo. We have judges like Judge Garippo who can control and guide the attorneys through the mass of evidence that you ladies and gentlemen have to picture when you go into the deliberation room; and we also have what we call now, we would hope, impartial juries, and we selected you way back in the beginning of this case.

“We asked each and every one of you if you could put aside the emotion, if you could put aside your bias, your prejudice, if you could listen to all the evidence and give both the State and my client, Mr. Gacy, a fair trial. That’s all we ask, and when you say that, and when you are selected as jurors, you then take an oath, and that oath swears you to the duty of being a fair and impartial juror.

“Now, that concept of duty and impartial jury did not develop overnight, because less than a century or a little more than a century
after that travesty in Salem, Massachusetts, the United States government passed the Constitution of the United States, and that was in 1787; and just four years later, the government added to that Constitution the first fourteen amendments, and those amendments are commonly referred to as the Bill of Rights.

“Among the first fourteen amendments, we find the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. The Fifth Amendment guarantees my client, and every man in this country, whoever stands accused of a criminal act of any sort, guarantees him a fair trial, guarantees him not to have to take the stand and testify against himself.”

 Terry Sullivan had given a very powerful closing argument. It is common during trials that after one lawyer has completed a strong, persuasive close, the jury is predisposed to his or her point of view. It is the job of the opposing attorney to remind the jurors that there are two sides to every story. I could feel that happening. I could see it in the eyes of many of the jurors seated in front of me—not all of them, but many of them—an almost-imperceptible subtle shift. At least a few of these fine men and women had decided to listen to another point of view.

I walked toward where John Gacy was sitting at our defense table, pointing at him.

“The Sixth Amendment guarantees him the right to a fair and impartial jury, and it also guarantees him the right to be represented by counsel. Now, those two amendments have been in our laws now for [over] two hundred years, and they have not stood up easily. It’s been tough; it’s been tough to keep the ideals, the American ideals going.

“Now, in how many countries in the world can a man charged with thirty-three murders stand before a jury and get a fair trial? Not many. I’d go so far as to say this might be the only country where he can. In Iran, he probably would have been beheaded already. In many countries he would have been strung up as soon as it happened, but here he has an opportunity to tell his side of the story.

“One of your fellow citizens way back in the beginning of jury selection told His Honor, Judge Garippo, ‘I have a philosophy that will straighten you out. Don’t judge a man unless you have walked a mile in his moccasins.’ And that’s really what we’re doing here. You have to sit back and listen to all the evidence and reach a fair and impartial decision based on the evidence.

“With regard to that concept of duty, I said it hasn’t been easy. There have been wars, wars with England, a Spanish War, the Civil War, the great world wars, Korea, Vietnam—an unpopular war, but the men and the boys, the women who were over in Vetnam, did those people who died, did the people who became maimed, did they worry that it was an unpopular cause when they were there? They might have thought about it, but they did it, and they did it out of a sense of duty. They were there—they were there fighting for the ideals. No matter how unpopular the war itself was, they were fighting for the ideals in the body of the Constitution and in the amendments to that Constitution; and I’ll tell you, I never really felt that sense of duty until about ten years ago.

“Ten years ago I stood on these yellow footprints over in a place called MCRD, and you stand there shivering and shaking and scared to death, and you are standing there scared, and the drill instructors are yelling in your ear, and you see a sign above you. There’s a big red sign with yellow letters on it, and that sign says, ‘Duty to My God, Duty to My Country, Duty to My Corps,’ and I’ll tell you, as scared as you are, you get that sense, and you feel—you feel the sense of duty that men and boys and women have felt for two hundred years now.

“Again, it is something that has not come easy, and the duty that you have in the courtroom right now, as jurors, is no less serious, no less serious than the duty that every marine or every sailor or every person that ever served in the armed forces of this country ever had. It’s no less serious, because you are keeping the ideals of the country going, and you have to keep that sense of duty in mind
all the time. That’s why you have to wipe passion, wipe hatred, wipe emotion as best you can out of your minds, because the men and the boys and the women who have died over the last two hundred years, as Mr. Sullivan has said, ‘these boys shall not have died in vain.’ Well, all those thousands of people shall not have died in vain either, and we’re here to see that they should not; and referring to these boys, they should not have died in vain, and if you do what Mr. Sullivan wants you to do, if you use your anger, if you use your vengeance, if you take it out on John Gacy, if you bury your head in the sand, if you blind yourself to the facts, if you don’t want to find out what makes this man tick, if you don’t want to study him, if you don’t want to prevent something like this from happening again in the future, then you will do what Mr. Sullivan asks. You will find him guilty.

 “You either trundle him off to the side and forget about him, or you will later have him put to death and forget about him, and you never, ever, will find out what makes a mind like that work, what makes it tick. Then, if you trundle him off to the side, then these boys shall have died in vain, because the next Robert Piest, or the next Gregory Godzik, or the next boy or girl, or anybody who falls prey to a mass murderer—whether they be my children, your children, your grandchildren, if we don’t do something about it now, God help us. We can hang our heads in shame.”

 I was pacing now, pointing at my client when appropriate, walking over to him, and then pointing at Sullivan and the prosecution team when necessary. Occasionally, I would walk right up to the jury box and lean in to make a point. I wanted these selected, dedicated people in front of me to feel the passion that I felt. Killing this man was not the answer. He had to be studied, probed by the greatest minds in psychiatry and psychology in an effort to learn how to recognize a damaged mind such as his in the future. Perhaps, armed with the knowledge that could be gained from such study, a tragedy like this one could be avoided in the future.

“We have an opportunity here in this court. We have an opportunity to learn what this man is all about, to find out why, to find out how.”

I walked over to the prosecution’s gallery of grief. Standing to the side of that tragic depiction of faces, I pointed to each person to whom I referred.

“Believe me, if vengeance, if passion, if sympathy would bring back any of these boys, if it would bring back John Butkovitch or Darrell Sampson or Randall Reffett or Sam Stapleton or Michael Bonnin or William Carroll or Rick Johnston or Gregory Godzik or John Szyc or Jon Prestidge or Matt Bowman or Robert Winch, Tommy Boling, David Talsma, William Kindred, Timothy O’Rourke, Frank Landingin, James Mazzara, and Robert Piest—you see them up there—if revenge, if sympathy would bring back one of those boys …”

I walked the full length of the courtroom, past the faces of the jurors, past the overpacked, crammed gallery and stopped in front of the doors in the rear of the courtroom. I grabbed the brass handle on that huge oak door.

“If one of them could come and walk through the back door of this courtroom right now, this minute, or if they could ever come back to life, Mr. Motta and I would join hands with you. We would join hands with you in putting Mr. Gacy to death or trundling him off to the side—if we could exchange it, but we’re not here to exchange.”

 I returned to the well of the court.

“As Mr. Motta told you in his opening statement, unfortunately for all of us, the fact of death is a final one. No man is an island, and we all feel it; but again we are here to decide the case based on the evidence, based on the facts as presented to you through the testimony from that witness stand.”

 I reminded the jury again that all of the arguments that they were hearing were just that, arguments. The lawyers were arguing,
trying to persuade, but the evidence had already been heard. The arguments did not constitute evidence.

“Now what about the evidence? How do you take apart a case like this? In five weeks you have heard a lot of testimony. You have seen some witnesses for the prosecution that very well could have been witnesses for the defense. You have seen witnesses for the defense that very well could have been witnesses for the prosecution. You have seen a lot of doctors; you have seen psychologists, psychiatrists, all kinds of people. How do you take the evidence apart? Well, the way I have done it is, I have divided the case in seven parts.”

I began to take the jury through the evidence in an organized, systematic way; step-by-step we would begin to look at the case together. We would review the testimony regarding the following: death witnesses, police investigation, confessions, medical examiners, family and friends, modus operandi, and the psychologists and psychiatrists.

Life and death witnesses are called to elicit evidence that a victim lived and then died. The testimony is normally limited to dry statements in support of that premise. However, over our repeated objections, the prosecution used this opportunity to tug relentlessly at the heartstrings of the jurors. These witnesses were primarily the relatives and friends of the various deceased boys, a very tough part of the case. These were mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, friends, and relatives in the throes of indefinable grief. There is nothing harder than listening to the grieving relatives of the departed in any situation, but it is excruciating beyond description when the departed are the young victims of indefensible foul play.