Buried Dreams Read online

  Just like Michael Rossi, the employee who sometimes clowned with Pogo as Patches the clown: John said Michael was the first one he remembers using the “handcuff trick” on.

  There is a problem here: John told this story to the docs and to the cops. He told it to a reporter years later, how sixteen-year-old Michael Rossi was the first to fall for the handcuff trick. During the police investigation of the crimes committed by Gacy, Rossi admitted to investigators that he had a continuing sexual relationship with John Gacy and that the sex was a condition of his employment. When Lieutenant Kozenczak of the Des Plaines Police Department put Rossi on a lie-detector test and asked about the disappearance of one particular boy, investigators felt Rossi was “basically truthful,” but the official report read that because of “erratic and inconsistent responses” they were “unable to render a definite opinion.” The question here was not sex; it was murder. Could Rossi, after working for Gacy for two years, have some guilty knowledge? Did he know anything of the murders? The state’s attorney’s office declined to prosecute Michael Rossi. What the boy knew or might have guessed—whether he knew anything at all—was not as important as what John Gacy had done.

  Later, testifying under oath, Rossi denied ever having sex of any kind with John Gacy. Under oath, Rossi claimed that Gacy never got the cuffs on him.

  Maybe John’s story is a fantasy about the perfect employee. A young kid, he wants work, you plant some seeds, slap the cuffs on him, rape him until he shows consent, and then the kid comes back and works for you. That way you can have him any time you want.

  Rossi said he met Gacy on May 22, 1976, when he was working with Max Gussis, a plumbing contractor who was helping remodel the kitchen in the Summerdale house. John was putting in a new dishwasher, and Rossi went down to the crawl space to install the waterline. A week earlier, fourteen-year-old Samuel Stapleton and fifteen-year-old Randall Reffett were killed, probably on the same night, and buried in a common grave under the house. It was dark in the crawl space except for the work light Rossi was using, so he didn’t notice anything unusual down there. Just sort of a damp, musty odor.

  Rossi was doing morning work for Max the plumber at twenty-five dollars a day, but Gacy offered the boy a job at three dollars an hour and promised him a full forty-hour week. According to Rossi, the job interview was held at Gacy’s house around lunchtime. Max the plumber was there.

  Rossi, who was about 5 feet 7 and weighed 160 pounds, had sandy brown hair. According to Rossi, John planted a few seeds at the first interview, asking the boy how “liberal” he was in regard to sex. Rossi didn’t say where Max was while John was planting seeds, and Max later testified that it was two years later when Rossi told him, “John is queer.”

  Max Gussis said, “Mike, you’re crazy. I never seen anything wrong with this man.” So Max, who was sitting in on the lunchtime interview, according to Rossi’s testimony, apparently missed the reference to “liberal” attitudes toward sex and all that the conversation implied.

  Rossi testified that he told Gacy, “I don’t want to hear about that stuff,” and John dropped the subject. Rossi said he never went back to Gacy’s house that night. He said that in the time he knew John, he sometimes saw handcuffs in the house. Gacy, Rossi swore under oath, never put him in handcuffs.

  John’s story is at odds with Rossi’s testimony. He said Max brought two boys to help him with the plumbing work and told John he was going to have to let them both go. John asked which was the better worker and Max said, “Rossi.”

  John told Rossi he might have a job for him but that he didn’t have time to talk just then. As John recalled the conversation, he said, “Tell you what: I’ll be done around ten tonight, I’ll pick you up by your house.”

  Rossi said, “I live on the forty-seven-hundred block of Drake.”

  John said, “Fine. Ten tonight, be standing out on the corner by your house, I'll pick you up. We’ll talk about the job.”

  Rossi was on the corner at ten sharp, and the two drove back to the empty house and discussed the job. Maybe John dropped a Valium. “I told him,” John said, “that I was liberal-minded about sex.” They were smoking marijuana, according to John, and drinking heavily.

  “What would you do if some guy approached you for sex?” John asked.

  Rossi, in John’s version of the story, said, “I don’t know. It never happened.” The boy was behind the bar, where the handcuffs were, and he was “fiddling” with them. John said, “Hey, I’ll show you a trick. You can put these things on and take them off without the key.”

  Rossi didn’t believe it.

  “You can. It’s a kind of magic trick.”

  “Yeah?” Rossi put the cuffs on, snapped them on tight, like John told him, so the trick would work right. “All right, they’re on tight,” Rossi said. “How do I get ‘em off?”

  And then John told Rossi the secret of the handcuff trick. “You don’t get ‘em off. The trick is, you need the key.”

  Rossi didn’t seem scared or upset. “I thought you could slip your hand out or something.”

  John said, “No way, asshole. And now . . . I’m going to rape you.”

  Years later, in this version of the story, John described in detail what he did with Rossi, how he stripped the boy, sat on his chest, forced him to perform oral sex, and how he, John, “got into it orally” with the handcuffed boy. There were orgasms and there was no biting, so actually the whole thing was consensual sex.

  Afterwards John took the cuffs off and they had a few more drinks and talked, John said, about how it wasn’t as bad as people made it seem. Nothing wrong with it: it was bad only if you made it wrong in your own mind. Business, John explained to Rossi, was a process of mutual benefit. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. There were ways a young man could get ahead, make a lot of money, earn promotions at PDM.

  It was getting late now, around 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., and John drove Rossi home, telling him they had to be at work early the next morning.

  “Eight that morning,” John said, “there he was at work.” When he caught Rossi alone sometime around eleven, he asked him how he felt about the handcuff trick. Rossi said that when he got home to his mother’s, where he was living, he thought about finding a gun, coming back, and killing John.

  “So why didn’t you?”

  John, in this version of the story, recalls that Rossi said, “I need the job. I want to get ahead.”

  With the docs, John motormouthed through his “suppositions” about the murders.

  Randall Reffett and Sam Stapleton disappeared on the same day. Since they were buried in a common grave, is it possible they were killed together, on or about the same time? It stands to reason that if one boy was being killed before the horrified eyes of the other, the second boy would surely flee. Unless he was somehow restrained. Unless the Other Guy knew the handcuff trick before John Gacy.

  The conscious John Gacy thought he discovered the trick while raping Michael Rossi sometime during the early-morning hours of May 23. Reffett and Stapleton disappeared on May 14, nine days earlier. Was it possible that the idea—the handcuff trick—rose in John’s subconscious mind and surfaced consciously?

  The trick worked; that was the only thing John knew clearly.

  John Gacy didn’t remember William Carroll, who was last seen on June 10. John Gacy didn’t remember anything about Rick Johnston, who vanished less than two months later.

  John wondered whether there was something about getting the cuffs on these kids, the fact that it was “a trick,” that brought out the Other Guy? John thought, “You’d have to be pretty dumb and stupid to let a stranger put you in a pair of handcuffs.”

  The conscious John Gacy discovered, in the summer of 1976, that the handcuff trick wasn’t foolproof. Not yet. He hadn’t quite perfected it. At least one more boy managed to fight his way out of the cuffs.

  On the night of July 26, 1976, David Cram, eighteen years old, was hitchhiking down Elston Avenue when a chunky ma
n in a silver Oldsmobile station wagon pulled up and stopped. There was a PDM Contractors sign in the window, and Cram, who had been working at a tire-repair shop, asked how a guy got into construction and what it paid. The man, who introduced himself as John Gacy, said he could top Cram’s salary. The boy would start out at $3.66 an hour, with the 66 cents going for deductions. If Cram was interested, Gacy said, he should call that evening.

  Cram made his call, and Gacy had an employee pick him up. They drove to Gacy’s house, where some other employees, all teenage boys, were waiting. They had an urgent job that night, painting Oppie’s hot-dog stand. The other boys drove the truck to the jobsite. Gacy and Cram were alone in the Oldsmobile.

  David Cram felt that Gacy “built himself up” in the conversation. The contractor said he had a degree in sociology but that his other collegiate degree, in psychology, was “good to have” in his trade because you could “manipulate people a lot easier.” A man with a degree in psychology, Gacy said, could talk to you and “plant the seed in your head and let it grow like a forest.”

  Gacy was talking about planting seeds and “describing his company and how an individual could progress,” and then “he just kind of faded into a conversation that he was bisexual.” An employee of PDM Contractors, Gacy said, “could progress in the company on their own standings, or morals.” Cram understood it to be a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” situation. A guy who scratched John Gacy’s back could make a lot more than three dollars an hour.

  That was the end of the conversation on bisexuality. It was either then or soon thereafter that Gacy told Cram he was knocking down about “half a million a year and he projected a million for the next year.” A lot of money there for someone who didn’t mind a little back scratching. Cram was young and “I wasn’t too familiar with construction companies at the time.” The “image he painted for me,” Cram said, “was like, bulldozers and cranes, you know, tall sky-scrapers and that’s what I thought we’d be doing.” They were, however, on their way to paint a hot-dog stand.

  Gacy said he had a fully stocked bar and that he didn’t mind if employees came in for a few drinks after work. He said that he had just given a Bicentennial party at his house and mentioned the names of prominent people—politicians, lawyers, judges, “very impressive officials"—who had attended.

  They arrived at the hot-dog stand and began painting. John told Cram that if he had any questions, just ask. If he made a mistake, it was his own fault for not asking. Gacy was a perfectionist about the work, but he pitched in and did as much physical work as any of the boys.

  Cram worked steadily for Gacy for the next few weeks, and one day, cleaning out the garage beside the house on Summerdale, he found “a couple of wallets with identification in them,” and the physical description on the driver’s license of one fit Cram pretty well. He never could remember the actual name on the license, but he asked Gacy if he could have it. Cram was underage, too young to buy liquor legally, and he thought he could use the license for that purpose. According to Cram, Gacy “just chuckled it off and said that I didn’t want those, those were from some deceased person or something like that, something that had to do with some kind of syndicate.” What he did, Gacy said, besides contracting, he worked for the Syndicate. He set people up for hits. He didn’t do it himself, kill the poor sons-of-bitches, but he set them up.

  Once, after Cram had been slightly late for work, Gacy gave him a watch he said had belonged to “one of the deceased persons” the Syndicate had hit on John’s say-so.

  After knowing Gacy for some time, many people simply dismissed his more outrageous statements as an odd sort of bragging, self-administered fodder for his big-man complex. Syndicate killings: what impressive connections; I certainly better be careful around you, John Gacy. The man tended to exaggerate.

  It’s likely Cram didn’t take all this assassination talk very seriously either, because on August 20, or 21—a couple of weeks after Rick Johnston disappeared—Gacy told his new employee that because of his recent divorce “he had plenty of space in his house. Three bedrooms.” Cram could have one of the bedrooms for twenty-five dollars a week. John made it sound as if the boy would have the whole house pretty much to himself. For only a hundred dollars a month.

  Cram moved in on August 21, 1976. The next day was his nineteenth birthday, and he spent most of the night with a couple of his friends, driving around in a truck and drinking. Cram got back to the house well after midnight, and he was fairly drunk. Maybe a little stoned. Cram couldn’t recall if he’d been smoking any dope.

  It sure must have seemed like it, though, because when he came in the door, John Gacy was standing there “and he had a clown suit on.” All 230 pounds of Pogo, smiling his dark, sharp-pointed smile.

  There was no goofy-clown voice that night. John told Cram he was “preparing for the next day. He said he had some kind of benefit, charity to do with some kids, with the clowning, and he thought it would be rather cute if, you know, seeing as how it was my birthday, that he leave the uniform on. . . .”

  They moved off to the barroom, a kind of sunken living room in the back of the house, where John’s big lounge chair was in front of the TV. Cram was pretty bombed already, but John, still dressed as a clown and acting all jolly, poured them both a couple of hefty shots of pure grain alcohol, the fiery 190-proof stuff. Cram didn’t recall if they smoked any marijuana—it wouldn’t have been unusual for Gacy at that time of night—but Cram remembers that John took some kind of tranquilizer. A Valium, maybe. John had started taking a lot of Valium. They both had a few more drinks.

  Pogo, all made up to entertain kids, was pouring down the drinks, popping pills, probably taking the occasional hit off a joint. Something—the alcohol or the pills, maybe just the costume—turned Pogo into a genuine Jolly Joker then, and he began to perform. Cram said the man in the clown costume “was showing me some of his puppets and so on and so on. Then he came up with a handcuff trick, how you can escape from handcuffs. He demonstrated them, and he shook them off. I was so plowed, I didn’t, you know, really pay attention to it.”

  Pogo asked if David would like to try the trick.

  John Gacy told Cram, “Maybe someday you’ll need it.”

  He held his hands out in front of him for Pogo to handcuff him and show him the trick. He felt cold metal tight around his wrists; he saw a big clown face with a dark, sharp smile, inches from his face.

  Cram couldn’t get out of the cuffs. “The trick was,” he said later, “you needed the key.” The boy held his hands up to the man in the clown suit, said he was locked in solid, and asked Gacy to “get them off.” But the clown “grabbed me by the chain between the cuffs and swung me around the room a couple of times.”

  Cram was screaming, “Get these off me!”

  But Pogo swung him around another time, and John Gacy’s voice came rasping out of the dark mouth on Pogo’s face: “I’m going to rape you.”

  Gacy let go of the chain between the cuffs then and Cram stumbled back against the TV stand, but he did not fall down.

  Huge Pogo, merry as only a clown can be, lumbered toward Cram. The boy was cuffed, and the clown was going to rape him. Pogo moved slowly, very sure of himself now.

  But Cram had spent a year in the Army and knew something about hand-to-hand combat. He kicked high and hard, catching Pogo in the head, smearing the greasepaint there. The clown fell heavily and lay still for several moments. Cram had plenty of time to get the keys and unlock the cuffs.

  By the time Pogo could stand, Cram, who had “sobered up” quite a bit, was standing there, both hands free. The boy and the clown stared at each other for a moment. Nothing was said. Except for the paint smudge where he’d been kicked, Pogo looked like one of the sad-faced clowns hanging on the wall in the front room.

  Cram said he “went and locked myself in my room.”

  More “motormouth suppositions” on Gacy’s part.

  John Gacy, in 1976, knew nothing
of the Other Guy. But what if they learned from each other somewhere below the level of consciousness? What if there was a sort of telepathy going on between them? What if the Other Guy knew about John Gacy? What if he was smarter than John and learned from his mistakes?

  John “rationalized it out” for the docs:

  The conscious John Gacy could use Pogo for a number of things. So then, in the summer of 1976, John Gacy had learned that you could use Pogo to trick people into putting on a pair of handcuffs. This was the conscious John Gacy, who was “totally nonviolent” and interested only in “consensual sex.”

  But what if the Other Guy was watching, learning all the time? Just like with Cram—it was a disaster. A smarter John Gacy would have tricked Cram into putting the cuffs on behind his back. Try to kick with your hands behind you; you’d fall flat on your ass. A smarter Gacy wouldn’t announce he was going to rape somebody. You want to keep tricking them, outsmarting them.

  If the Other Guy was in there—and John was beginning to think he was—then it’s possible that he learned from the incident with Cram. The only thing: The Other Guy was “bent on violence.” Using Pogo, Bad Jack could trick them into being handcuffed, but with their hands behind their backs.

  And that made sense, because that’s the way John found some of the victims in the morning: with their hands cuffed behind their backs.

  And if the Other Guy tricked them into the cuffs—hypothesis again—he probably tricked them with the rope.

  Because John knew something about the other victims: He found them all strangled, ropes wrapped tightly around their necks, fastened with a tourniquet knot John Gacy learned in the Boy Scouts. So the Other Guy was using things John Gacy knew, like the knot.