Buried Dreams Page 2

  In the northeast corner of the crawl space under John Gacy’s house, the officers found more puddles, all swarming with thin red worms. There, two feet from the north wall, they uncovered what appeared to be a knee bone. The flesh was so desiccated that at first they thought it was blue-jean material.

  South of that dig, Genty uncovered some human hair in the soil. The second evidence technician dug along the south wall and found two long bones, human leg bones, both very blackened. Rather than disturb any more remains that might complicate identification procedures or destroy evidence, the officers decided to quit the crawl space and call the coroner.

  At about the same time, John Gacy was being released from Holy Family Hospital. He had been thoroughly examined, and doctors could find no evidence of a heart attack. Gacy’s pulse was a little high, that was all. Under heavy guard—detectives had been told what the search uncovered—Gacy was returned to the Des Plaines police station, where he was arrested and charged with murder.

  Gacy signed a card waiving his Miranda rights, then spoke to detectives David Hachmeister and Michael Albrecht.

  “My house,” Gacy said. “Did you go into the crawl space?”

  “Yeah,” Albrecht said, “we did.”

  “I used lime,” Gacy said. “That’s what it was for.”

  “What was it for, John?” Albrecht asked.

  “For the sewage, the dampness . . . for . . . what you found there.”

  A mug shot, taken at the time, shows a stuporous, uncomprehending man. Gacy’s puffy face and undistinguished features look slack, as if the bones of his skull have no substance to them. He stares into the camera, and his eyes are glassy, dull, and dead. He looks like a man insane. Or on drugs.

  “There are four Johns,” Gacy told Albrecht. “I don’t know all of them.” One of the four, Gacy explained later, was called “Jack.” Jack didn’t like homosexuality, and he detested homosexuals. The bodies in the crawl space? You’d have to ask Jack how they died. John did the dirty work. John, it seemed, had been forced to cover for Jack, to bury the bodies, to live with the stench, to spread the lime.

  In a second voluntary statement, given about three-thirty the next morning, Gacy said there were “twenty-five to thirty bodies.” Detectives found that number hard to comprehend, and they questioned Gacy closely. The suspect said he couldn’t answer every question. Some things, he said, he just honestly didn’t know. “You’d have to ask Jack that,” he explained.

  Piest’s body, Gacy said, had been thrown from a bridge on I-55 into the Des Plaines River. Jack was working too fast for John to keep up. The crawl space was full, and John, with his worsening heart condition, couldn’t dig any more graves.

  The killer was named Jack: Jack Hanley.

  John could tell the police that much.

  The next morning, a fleet of police vehicles and nearly three dozen officers, including representatives from three different law-enforcement agencies, invaded Norwood Park. They were closely followed by about as many reporters.

  The media were hungry and the suspect was in custody, unavailable. As is usual in such cases, the neighbors were interviewed about the accused killer who had lived in their midst. No one could believe it, not at first. The man had a heart condition, after all: how could he have dug those graves, doubled over in that cramped crawl space? He was 5 feet 8 and weighed over 230 pounds.

  There was an odd sense of déjà vu about these postarrest interviews with the accused killer’s friends and neighbors. It was a scene that had been played in 1971 in Yuba City, California, when Juan Corona was arrested and charged with the murders of twenty-five young farm workers, all males; a scene that had its run in Houston, when Elmer Wayne Henley was charged with the sex-torture murders of twenty-seven young men. It was a scene that would play in Atlanta in 1981, when Wayne B. Williams was arrested and charged with the murders of two young blacks. Prosecutors insisted they could link Williams with the murders of twenty-eight young men. Eighty young men dead in all: Eighty murders, all of them, so it seemed, committed in some insane sexual frenzy or in a calculated effort to conceal evidence of homosexual activity.

  These were not mass murders, journalists pointed out. It was a problem of semantics, as well as a difference in method. Richard Speck—who invaded the Chicago living quarters of eight nurses in 1966 and murdered seven—was a mass murderer. The slaughter had been accomplished in a matter of hours, all at once. Charles Whitman, who climbed a tower at the University of Texas and shot twelve in 1966, was a mass murderer. Henley, Corona, and later Williams were not mass murderers in that sense; they were serial killers. All three seemed to lead normal lives, and they killed their victims one at a time, as the mood struck them, over a period of years. The serial killer was a colder, more calculating animal than the mass murderer. Part of the serial killer’s method was façade, the ability to live an apparently normal life between, and in spite of, the accumulating murderous episodes. The serial killer is everyone’s next-door neighbor.

  Serial murderers survive and kill, and get away with the killings, in part because life does not emulate art. It is not the way we expect it to be, not as it is on TV or in the movies, where discordant music hints at some character’s frightening psychological problems, where low camera angles and shadowed lighting can suggest an impending homicide. The serial murderers lived next door, or across the street, or down the block. They talked and walked and laughed like any other man, but they killed, and killed again—and again, and again after that—until they were caught.

  Normal-enough guys; pretty good neighbors; bright, friendly fellows. And when they were caught, their neighbors found themselves squinting into bright television lights, feeling defensive, as if they had to justify themselves; feeling angry or confused; feeling somehow betrayed. The killer, in his frenzy, had destroyed something soul deep in those who lived around him. The viewer sensed it in the troubled glance off camera; the facial tic; the odd, inappropriate gesture: these were innocent people destined to live with a sickly sad, unearned guilt the rest of their lives.

  No, the neighbors and friends said in California, there didn’t seem to be anything troubling Juan. I never thought he might have homosexual tendencies. Never had an inkling. In Atlanta, they would say that Wayne was a bright young man, destined to go places. Elmer Henley was a hard worker, they said in Texas. The neighbors were numb in Texas, stunned in California, staggered in Georgia.

  It was no different in Chicago. The day the story broke, there were shots, broadcast live, of the brick ranch house with the outdoor Christmas lights mysteriously blinking (the owner, after all, was in jail), and the neighbors, in voice-over—or on the radio, or in newspaper columns—described the man who had lived there as gregarious, community-minded, generous. When the snow piled up on the streets, they said, John Gacy hooked up a snowplow and cleared the driveways up and down his block. He had worked long and hard to get streetlights installed in unincorporated Norwood Park. He was a man said to have important political connections, and some neighbors had seen, in the office in his home, those pictures of John Gacy shaking hands with the mayor of Chicago, with the wife of the President of the United States. He was a man who gave an annual summer lawn party for four hundred or more people, at his own expense; a man who organized Chicago’s Polish Day parade and saw that it ran like clockwork. And this—on his own time, and at no pay, John Gacy went to hospitals where he entertained sick children, dressed as a clown. Pogo the clown.

  Even as the neighbors spoke, John Gacy was giving another voluntary statement. At four o’clock on the afternoon of December 22, one day after his arrest, Gacy asked to talk with Larry Finder, of the state’s attorney’s office. In the course of the conversation, Gacy began describing where some of the bodies were buried, and Finder said he was having difficulty picturing the graves in his mind. Gacy asked for a sheet of paper and a pen. Resting the paper on the metal part of the bunk in his cell, Gacy drew a rectangle and began filling it with smaller rectangles he s
aid represented graves, or trenches, where the bodies were buried. There could be as many as thirty of them.

  And while Gacy was drawing his map, the neighbors were being grilled by reporters. No, they said, the man never seemed insane. He drank now and again, no more than anyone else, and if he had one too many, which happened infrequently, he simply became a little louder, a little more friendly. He was proud of himself and his business, maybe even a bit of a braggart, and, sure, sometimes he bullied the teenage boys who worked for him, but the man himself regularly put in twelve- and sixteen-hour days. He pushed himself hard and obviously felt he had a right to revel in his accomplishments, to expect from his employees the same perfection he demanded of himself.

  The crawl-space map was the work of a perfectionist: very neat, very precise, everything neatly squared off on a thin sheet of pink paper. When he finished the work, the suspect’s head dropped to his chest in a sudden, poleaxed bow. His fists were clenched tightly at his sides, but he remained motionless, as if suddenly frozen, unconscious. There was no sound in the room. After about a minute, Gacy raised his head and stared at the rectangles within rectangles on the pink sheet. “What’s going on?” he asked, and there was a grogginess in his voice. “Did Jack . . . I see Jack . . . drew a diagram of the crawl space.”

  The people who lived on Summerdale, of course, did not know then of the map Jack drew, and when they talked of John Gacy, they were, in a sense, defending themselves. The monster of Summerdale? None of the neighbors had met that John Gacy. No one could believe it; no one wanted to believe it. The crimes, if indeed Gacy was guilty, would diminish them, haunt them the rest of their lives. It couldn’t be true. They would wait and see.

  Evidence, the most grisly and final evidence, was being collected and catalogued from the moment Daniel Genty found the first body. On December 23, 1978, two days after the arrest of John Wayne Gacy, the first two bodies were exhumed from the crawl space under the house, and police were driven from the house by methane gas, a product of putrefaction, which caused nausea and a kind of physical dizziness altogether separate from simple moral revulsion. The bodies were taken to the Cook County Forensic Institute, the morgue, for autopsy and identification.

  Several of the bodies had lain for years in the crawl space and had been partially converted to adipocere. The lardlike product of decomposition has a stench so all-pervading that clothes, once exposed to it, must be destroyed; it was a stench that floated, faintly, over the lawns of Norwood Park and lacerated minds like the sounds of screams in the night.

  Some evidence technicians, investigators, police, and coroner’s deputies working in the crawl space below the house wore disposable paper jumpsuits to save their clothes, and gas masks with charcoal filters to mute the smell. The newer bodies, those buried less than a year, had distended, the cavities had ruptured, and noxious gases—methane, hydrogen sulfide, half a dozen others—erupted from the graves as they were uncovered. Putrid fluids escaping from the bodies permeated the soil, and a particularly virulent form of streptococci bred there, so that the danger of working in the crawl space was very great. A cut, even the smallest nick, could lead to gas gangrene. The men who worked in the crawl space under John Gacy’s home shaved after work, at night, and they were careful with their razors.

  Such details weren’t fit for the evening news, and reporters concentrated on official statements. Sheriff Richard Elrod told the assembled journalists that the remains were all those of young males, boys, and that there might be as many as twenty more buried under the house. Investigators still weren’t willing to take John’s count—or perhaps it was Jack’s—at face value. The search was suspended on December 24 and 25, but ten more bodies were recovered from the crawl space when the digging resumed two days after Christmas. There were shots, on the evening news, of investigators carrying body bags out of the house on Summerdale. Some of them seemed much too small to contain the remains of an entire human being.

  The next day, December 28, Cook County medical examiner Robert J. Stein stood in front of John Gacy’s house and said, “I have horrible news. Six more bodies were exhumed today.”

  Morbidity, like a magnet, drew hundreds of people from Chicago and nearby suburbs to Norwood Park. They stood outside the death house, hunched against the cold and shifting from foot to foot. Ropes strung to stakes served as police lines and kept the crowds off Gacy’s property and that of his two adjacent neighbors. When more bodies were carried out of the house and into the glare of the television lights, the crowd reacted as one, surging forward, and their voices, from a slight distance, sounded like the rumbling of a single great beast.

  There were those in the crowd who felt that the stench of death clung to Gacy’s neighbors, that the good people who lived on Summerdale and Berwyn were, in part, responsible for the unthinkable nightly parade of horror. John Gacy had lived among them, killing, killing, killing. Some of those who stood watching knew, for a stone-cold fact, that they could spot a killer on sight. They would have put a stop to it.

  Gacy’s neighbors lived as if under siege. Most of them had stopped talking to reporters. Every day, over the Christmas holidays, the crowd stood out in front of their homes like an angry accusation. “How could you let this happen?”

  Inside the house, investigators found Jack’s map of his own private boneyard uncannily accurate. Bodies had been buried parallel to the foundations on all four sides with the exception of a narrow section between a strip of concrete and the main floor support, where one victim was laid perpendicular to the wall. One body was buried under a slab of concrete. Along the southeast wall, Jack, or John, had worked his way in from the foundation and buried two bodies on a diagonal. Two more, farther in toward the center of the house, lay perpendicular to the foundation. It was, the medical examiner noted, an extremely orderly arrangement, one that made full and efficient use of the space available. The work of a perfectionist.

  None of the victims had been mutilated, but some of the bodies exhumed had been buried in plastic garbage bags. Several of the bodies were found with what appeared to be their own underwear lodged deeply in their throats; other bodies were found with a length of rope wrapped tightly around their necks. Some of the bodies had been buried in common graves and were in a similar state of decomposition, indicating that they had been killed at about the same time, perhaps on the same day. Bodies exhumed along the southeast wall had been buried one on top of the other—one victim lay face down, his head to the west, and below him, a second body lay face up, head to the east—in positions that suggested sexual activities, as if the killer wished to humiliate his victims, even in death.

  Gacy had, evidence technicians discovered, repeatedly spread the crawl space with layers of lime, apparently in an effort to stanch any odors and to hasten decomposition. Lime, ordinary calcium oxide, forms a caustic fluid, calcium hydroxide, when combined with water. The death house had been built over reclaimed swampland, and the crawl space periodically flooded. When that happened, calcium hydroxide seeped into the graves, macerating the bodies and sometimes dissolving organic matter altogether. In some cases, John—or Jack—had doused the bodies with muriatic acid to speed decomposition.

  Water continued to seep into the crawl space during a late-December thaw. Evidence technicians sloshed knee deep through the putrid chemical muck of death. To facilitate the search effort, portions of the main floor had been removed so that the gases could escape and lights could be focused on the crawl space, where the remains of the victims were catalogued with archaeological precision.

  When the excavations were finally complete, when the last of twenty-nine bodies had been removed from the property, when police were finally satisfied that there were no more victims to be found there, the house was little more than a shell.

  Bernard Carey, the state’s attorney general, claiming the house unsafe and a public nuisance, filed suit to have it torn down. That spring, a wrecking crew demolished what was left of Gacy’s house and hauled the scrap
to a dump. All that remained was a flat, excavated plain of yellow-brown mud, slowly reverting to swamp.

  By September of that year, grass had begun to grow again on the mud flat that was once 8213 Summerdale. Once every few weeks that summer, an unfamiliar car—another “tourist"—drifted down the street, coasting past the manicured lawns and formal gardens, past the house with the flowering crabapple trees on the lawn, past the house where a statue of the Virgin stands in its own little shrine. The cars would pull to a stop next to the only empty lot in dozens of square blocks. The tourists seldom got out of their cars. Instead, they sat and stared.

  There was nothing to see that summer, and there is nothing now: nothing of interest in that empty lot. A few steel girders, five or six feet long, lay twisted in the ocher mud, in a place where the grass will not grow. It is a very small lot, actually—too small, it would seem, to accommodate twenty-nine graves. A pair of mourning doves pick in the gravel at the foot of one of the girders. These birds—named for the male’s soft, melancholy call—are common to suburbs throughout the Midwest. Still, the fact that mourning doves should feed here, in this place, where so many died: it is a poetry too rich for the mind’s appetite. The tourists—there are still tourists—never stay long. They drive back up Summerdale, back past the manicured lawns, past the gardens, past the shrine of the Virgin, past the people of Norwood Park watching from their windows.

  Behind those windows, there are Poles and Germans, Lithuanians and Italians: Americans all. Most everyone is Catholic; most families attend church on Sunday. It is a blue-collar suburb composed of frugal, hardworking people whose homes, in many cases, are the embodiment of a life-long dream. Very few of John Gacy’s former neighbors have moved out of Norwood Park. Property values aren’t what they once were on Summerdale.

  Most of the people who live on Summerdale, in constant sight of that empty lot, don’t care to discuss their former neighbor and become angry at the very mention of his name.