Buried Dreams Read online

  “Very quickly,” Ray Cornell recalls, “within a matter of months, he became number-one cook, or lead cook on the afternoon shift.”

  Cornell worked in the library, which he soon discovered was not a prime job in the prison hierarchy: you can’t trade prose and poetry for aftermovie tickets or protection. Guys just come in and check out books: you give them what they want, and that’s it. Cornell thought Gacy “enjoyed considerable power because of his control over one of the necessities of an institution, which is food.”

  Working in the kitchen, John was able to see that certain prisoners and members of the staff got special dishes: steaks sautéed in mushrooms, extra desserts, good stuff the assholes never saw. In return, Cornell noticed that Gacy got “cigars, not available in the prison commissary, that were brought in to him by employees. He got extra movement, pop tickets, and movie tickets that were often given in exchange for special things such as steak sandwiches and that sort of thing by officers on the evening shift.”

  In his freshly pressed white shirt, Gacy would come into the library where he’d sit and read The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. “The quality of the clothing that was available to him,” Cornell remembers, “was superior to what the rest of us wore.” The white shirts, Cornell said, “were a token of privilege in the institution.” Gacy said he needed them to keep the kitchen sanitary. Cornell said he “got them from an officer.”

  Wherever he went inside the walls at Anamosa, John carried a black briefcase. He was a busy man. Anamosa was one of the first prison institutions in America with an all-inmate Jaycee chapter. John Gacy, Cornell recalls, “was the best Jaycee I ever saw.” Initially, when Gacy joined, there may have been 50 Jaycees out of 650 inmates. In less than two years, there were over 230 Jaycees at Anamosa, the bulk of them directly recruited by John Wayne Gacy.

  John was also active in the prison Jaycees’ efforts to improve conditions at Anamosa. He and others worked through the legislature to get the rate pay for prisoners raised from twenty-five cents a day to fifty cents per day.

  It was just as Ma always said: Hard work leads to success. John was elected chaplain of the Anamosa Jaycees. He won the Spoke Award, the Spark Plug Award, and Jaycee Sound Citizen Award. John Gacy, Cornell says, “is the hardest worker I have ever seen.”

  Take the miniature-golf course:

  When an elderly couple in Anchany, Iowa, decided to give up on the miniature-golf business, they donated the structures to Anamosa. John Gacy made arrangements with the warden to have all the little windmills and open-mouthed dragons brought 120 miles to the prison; John worked on getting the cement foundation poured and personally supervised the actual assembly of the course. It was John who contacted a local department store and talked them into donating several rolls of indoor-outdoor carpeting so that prisoners could rehabilitate themselves playing miniature golf on a proper surface.

  The Jaycees helped with the work, but Gacy personally put 370 hours into the project.

  In the summer of 1969, the Des Moines Sunday Register ran an article about the golf course. In the picture that ran with the story there are four men posing in the middle of the course, with the stone walls of Anamosa rising behind them. John Gacy stands out in this photo. He is the only inmate not in prison blues: Gacy is wearing a pressed white shirt. He looks as if he might be a supervisor or a guard and not a convict at all.

  Gacy’s heart kept acting up on him at Anamosa. Cornell personally saw one of the attacks the Jaycee chaplain suffered there. John, Cornell, and a man named Larry were coming out of the movie that showed on Saturday afternoons at the reformatory. Something was brewing, Cornell thought, between his two friends John and Larry. “We went down from the prison auditorium to the area where the golf course was,” Cornell recalled, “and John had gone down ahead of us ... and was already on the golf course. When Larry got to the golf course, all of a sudden, just as he stepped across the sidewalk onto the grass, he took his shirt at the collar and ripped it off and the buttons went flying everywhere and he was moving across the golf course to where John was.”

  Larry was a normally “gregarious individual,” very “outgoing,” but now he was in a fit of rage, running toward John Gacy, bare-chested, out of control, and Gacy had a heart attack. At least Cornell thought it might be a heart attack because John’s “face went ashen and then gray. He began to shake and stumble. Obviously something was wrong. But, of course, he was the target of an attack by an individual—or at least an impending attack—by an individual somewhat larger than he. He stumbled and appeared to be on the verge of going down.”

  Gacy was gasping for air, clutching at his chest, hardly able to stand. Larry might have wanted to hit Gacy, punch him out, but he obviously didn’t want to kill him. “At that time,” Cornell said, “the entire incident ended in terms of any physical confrontation. And we walked to the prison hospital with Mr. Gacy.”

  John couldn’t fight because of his bad heart, and he used his kitchen power base to secure the services of various bodyguards. One of his biggest fears was rape, homosexual rape, a sad and brutal fact of prison life. Ray Cornell remembers that Gacy expressed contempt for prison “punks,” that he “hated” and “loathed” homosexuals. The idea of being forced to commit unnatural acts: everyone could see it scared the shit out of John Wayne Gacy.

  The Old Man cried when they sent John away. It was the only emotion anyone had ever seen him display. John Stanley Gacy never cried, even at family funerals: the Old Man sitting in his chair, sobbing.

  John never saw that. The family lived through it but John was in jail, building miniature-golf courses. “When I was sentenced,” John said, “my dad, I don’t think he was even surprised. It was like he always expected it, like he knew it was going to happen. Right around in there, when I was sentenced, he said something about how I had to work twice as hard now to wipe out the blot on my good name. Except it was his fucking name he was talking about. Just like, I was the one who put the blot on his name.”

  John worked to clear his name for the Old Man’s sake. “In Anamosa,” John recalls, “I did the impossible. I finished high school in seven months: twelve credits in seven months. I earned four college credits, psychology. I was head of the inmate student council, I was the legal counsel for the Jaycees, I got two bills passed in the state legislature, I ran the whole kitchen. I was the most decorated inmate. A model prisoner.

  “And my goal was to learn more about John Gacy the individual. Why I got involved with the kid. I couldn’t figure it out. I mean, I had a wife, I had two children, I had wealth. So why get involved with Voorhees? If I wanted a whore, I knew where to go. They even had some boys there, that’s what I heard.

  “I did everything I could to figure it out. I took individual analysis and transactional analysis and group therapy, and about the only thing I could come up with was just what the doctors had already said, that it was curiosity on my part.”

  In later years, when fear and depression grabbed him by the throat, when anger, like steel bands, tightened around his chest and squeezed his heart, when thoughts of suicide, like pus or poison, flooded his brain, in those bad, down times, John was willing to believe that his “innocent curiosity” had finally killed the Old Man.

  John was having a portrait done of his father, by an inmate at Anamosa with some painting talent. The guy was a killer—not murder one: something about a bar fight—and he lived in North House while John was in South House, but everyone came through the chow line together. John just approached the guy one day and asked him to do a portrait of the Old Man.

  “I do ‘em from photos,” the guy said. “You got to get me a photo.”

  John wanted the painting done for the Old Man’s birthday. He wrote Ma, and she sent a picture. The painter didn’t seem to think the fifteen dollars John offered was enough to bust his ass on the work. “I had to keep on him, and keep on him about it,” John recalls.

  Fucking artist: it took him over three months to complete th
e painting, and John Stanley never saw it. On Christmas Day 1969, the Old Man died. He’d been sick and they wouldn’t let John out to be by his side and that was a pain he’d never forget. It felt like God was running his heart through a wringer. After the Old Man passed on, they didn’t tell him for a day or two, like the assholes didn’t want to spoil his holiday in prison. “Merry Christmas, John, your old man just croaked.” And then . . . then they wouldn’t even let him out to attend the funeral.

  He spent that day, the day they laid the Old Man to rest for the last time, with correctional counselor Lionel Murray, who recalled that John was “emotional about it. He requested to see me. He cried in my office.”

  John called Ma, who remembered that John was in the office of “a consultant or something. He was out there with him all day. He was all broken up. They would not allow him to come for the funeral, and that made it worse for him.”

  Years later, John found he couldn’t talk about that day, really talk about it, without breaking down. “Yeah,” John said, and there were tears in his eyes, “my dad was right about a lot of things. I let him down when he died.” John made no effort to wipe away the tears, and he spoke in a choked whisper. “I let him down. And I’ve paid for it. My whole life . . . “

  The words in John’s mouth were injured things with no life of their own. He couldn’t go on, couldn’t talk about the Old Man’s death anymore. He winced, as if something had suddenly ruptured deep inside. “The shame,” John said, but he was unable to complete the thought. Impossible to say it: the Old Man died of shame.

  In fact, the tumor Ma said was inside John Stanley’s brain had held out to the last. It had never burst. The Old Man had died of cirrhosis of the liver, and all John had to remember him by was a portrait painted by a killer.

  Christ, Ma could piss him off. He loved her, but she just got these dumb, wrong ideas and wouldn’t let go of them. Just like Ma always thought that she got John out of jail. “I asked the governor, I wrote a letter to ask him to come home because I was alone. And I got a call that the parole officer wanted to see where he was going to live. This was on a Wednesday. And Friday the doorbell rang and John was there.”

  The way it happened, John said, “I was a model prisoner and I earned my release.”

  In May 1969, five months after being sentenced, John applied for early parole consideration based on his outstanding work with the Jaycees, his adjustment to prison life, and—as he explained to his counselor, Lionel Murray—his confusion over the crime he was supposed to have committed. Murray recalled that Gacy protested “being incarcerated. He felt that politics and power had a lot to do with the fact that he was there.”

  The parole board replied with a standard one-year kick, which meant they’d consider parole for Gacy again on the May 1970 docket.

  In March 1970, Gacy made another request for early parole, and—since Gacy said he planned to live with his mother in Illinois upon release—a supplemental progress report was written for the out-of-state parole board. Gacy’s request was considered on the May docket, and he was paroled in June 1970. Any prisoner whose record was clean might have expected parole on the same charges after five years. But John Gacy was a worker, and he served a mere sixteen months of his ten-year sentence.

  As his parole date neared, John was transferred to the Riverview Release Center in Newton, Iowa. On the day of his release, Gacy was picked up by his friend Charles Hill, who still believed the colonel had been framed. Gacy had written frequently to Hill and continued to insist upon his complete innocence. He said it made it all that much harder for him, doing time with a clear conscience.

  Hill and his wife took Gacy to dinner. The colonel said prison had been “awful rough” on him. He talked about his father’s death and choked up a little, right there at the dinner table. The prison administrators hadn’t even let him go to the funeral; they wouldn’t even let him see his father one last time.

  The conversation continued deep into the night, and somewhere toward the end, Hill said, “John, now that it’s over, keep your nose clean.”

  Gacy stared at Hill. “I’ll never go back to jail,” he said.

  There’d never be another Voorhees.

  * * *

  * * *

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  * * *

  MA HAD MOVED OUT of the house on Marmora, to a condominium at 4343 North Kedvale, where she and John Stanley had planned to live in retirement. The Old Man, so careful with money, had completely paid for the condo before he died.

  John got a job as a cook at Bruno’s Restaurant and Lounge on Wells Street, near Chicago’s Loop. He was just out of the reformatory and “dating broads, having normal sex.” Two of the busboys at Bruno’s were real screamers, and one of the other cooks didn’t like them because they were gay. But John defended them. He said, “Look, it’s their life, what they do in private, they don’t bother you.”

  So one of the gay guys said, “I like the way you think.”

  And John had to lay it on the line with this fruit picker, right there in the kitchen, in front of everyone. “Don’t assume nothing with me,” John said. “I respect you as an individual but that doesn’t mean I get into any of that shit myself. Put your hands on me just once"—John was mad and everyone in the kitchen could see it—"and I’ll split you wide open with a meat cleaver.”

  Still, the gay guys liked him. He remembers them well enough to imitate their voices in high-pitched fruity little women’s tones: “Oh, John, you’re so organized. We get more done when you’re in the kitchen.” John could make people in the kitchen laugh doing that, talking like the queers who worked there.

  Bruno’s customers would have laughed at what went on in the kitchen, because it was pretty macho out in the bar. They got a lot of business from the Black Hawks, Chicago’s professional hockey team, and off-duty cops from the nearby Hubbard Street station.

  There was one cop, back in the fall of 1971, who’d come in for a drink after his shift. James Hanley wore civilian clothes, so you could assume he was a detective. At least John thought he was a detective, and this guy Hanley came in with a lot of other officers who sat at the bar.

  The night bartender introduced John to Hanley (all the cops used their last names—"Hey, Hanley, your round"), and sometimes John’d say hello, have a short conversation. Small talk. Hanley thought that when John came out of the kitchen, he sort of hung around the bar area, listening in on all the cop conversation. There are a lot of people like that: cop groupies.

  It wasn’t like they were friends, or even drinking buddies, John and James Hanley. They just passed a few words every now and again during the year and a half that John cooked at Bruno’s, and then John Gacy never saw James Hanley again. In fact, John’s memories of Hanley, in subsequent years, were factually flawed. John always believed, for instance, that Hanley was a homicide detective, but the man worked with the hit-and-run unit.

  He always thought James Hanley’s first name was Jack. A homicide detective named Jack Hanley, hard and muscular in a way John had never been, a tough cop but fair. John may have even invented certain attitudes for “Jack” Hanley. “He hated queers,” John said. “And he talked about his theories on homosexuals.” It would be unfair to attribute these attitudes to the James Hanley of the hit-and-run unit. John was talking about Jack Hanley the homicide detective, Gacy's imaginary version of a good cop.

  In later years, cruising the homosexual haunts of Chicago, John would identify himself as a homicide cop named Jack Hanley. Up in 3 North, in Cermak, Doc Freedman -would ask John about the use of the name. “All I remember about him,” John said, “was that he was a homicide cop, which relates to death, and he was bent on removing all homosexuals and hustlers from the street.”

  On February 12, 1971, less than eight months after the day he was paroled, John was arrested and charged with assault of a teenage boy, who said that Gacy had picked him up at the Greyhound bus terminal. The boy admitted that he was homosex
ual, but he said Gacy had tried to “force” him into the act.

  What happened, Gacy said, was that he had picked up the kid, who was hitchhiking, and that in the course of their conversation, the kid had made a sexual proposition. Gacy said he got so mad that he threw the kid out of the car.

  Up in 3 North, in Cermak, John told the docs what made him so mad was that the fucking kid picked him out as someone who’d “get into it. And I didn’t want to do that shit. The cop asked me, ‘Couldn’t you tell the kid was gay?’ Well, no. Because at that time I was trusting and naïve. I didn’t know one fruit picker from another.”

  “Jack” would have taken the kid on, though. John thought the reason he didn’t was “simply because there was no Jack then. Jack didn’t take over until 1975.”

  It was John Gacy who was arrested in 1971. He told people that the charge was “assault on a sexual deviate.” He wanted to make that clear. Some people, they could hear the charge and think it was “assault, sexual deviate.”

  The case was dismissed when the boy didn’t show up in court to testify. This proved, John contended, that the whole thing had been bullshit from the start. Assault on a sexual deviate: who’d ever even heard of such a charge, anyway?