Buried Dreams Read online

  Gacy was ten years older than the boy and about 50 pounds heavier, but Lynch, who stood six feet and weighed 160 pounds, was strong for his age, and there was blood running down his arm. He forced Gacy off his body, turned him over onto his back, and hit him twice, hard. Gacy dropped the knife.

  The boy had disarmed the man. Gacy, breathing hard, asked Lynch to turn on the light. He seemed very apologetic.

  “Did I cut you?”

  “Yes.” In the light, Lynch could see that it wasn’t really a bad cut, just a little puncture wound, without much blood. Gacy got up and got a Band-Aid. As Lynch peeled the Band-Aid and put in on his arm, Gacy continued to apologize, saying he was sorry about the incident. Lynch believed him. It was just a bit of harmless horseplay that had gotten out of hand. Lynch may have even been made to feel that he brought it on himself, that he had overreacted to what amounted to a little joke.

  Gacy couldn’t stop apologizing. He was, Lynch knew, a man under a lot of stress. He worked long hours in the restaurants, where things were never quite right, never satisfactory. He was always working on community projects, burning himself out, and on top of everything else, his wife was in the hospital, having a baby.

  Still, Lynch wanted to get out of the house, and when Gacy said, as part of his continuing apology, “Come on, let’s go back downstairs. Let’s watch this other film,” the boy declined.

  “I better get going. It’s kind of late.”

  Gacy insisted, as if watching the last film was a way for Lynch to show that he had accepted the apology. John Wayne Gacy was the boss on the first job the boy had ever had. Lynch followed him downstairs. During the film, Gacy went into another room in the basement and returned with a length of chain and a padlock. The film was over in about ten minutes, and Gacy said:

  “Stand up a minute. Just let me try something here.”

  Lynch looked at the chain and padlock. He felt very hesitant but may have actually believed he had overreacted to the earlier horseplay. He wanted to keep his job, and Gacy’s tone was reassuring. “I ain’t going to do nothing,” the man said.

  “I don’t think I’m interested,” Lynch said.

  “Come on, just let me try something. Put your hands behind your back.”

  “No.”

  “Ah, come on,” Gacy said. “I ain’t going to hurt you.”

  Recalling the incident a dozen years later, Lynch said, “I had just turned sixteen. He reassured me. I was very gullible. I believed him.”

  Lynch put his hands behind his back, one crossed over on the other, and Gacy wrapped the chain around them once and secured it with the padlock.

  “Is it secure?” Gacy asked. “Can you get loose?”

  “No, I can’t,” Lynch said, and when he sat back down in his chair, Gacy sat on his lap in a suggestive, straddle-legged posture. It took Lynch less than five seconds to realize he had made a bad mistake. He gave Gacy a head butt to the face and stood up, toppling the man off him.

  Gacy struggled up off the floor and disappeared into the room where he had gotten the chain. In less than half a minute, Gacy came back into the rec room pushing a fold-up cot on wheels. Lynch stood watching, his hands locked behind his back, as Gacy unfolded the bed between the screen and the projector. Then he began walking toward the boy.

  “Don’t come near me,” Lynch said. “I want this chain off.”

  “It’s okay,” Gacy said. All at once he was apologetic again, very reassuring. “Here,” Gacy said, “I’ll take it off.” He walked around behind Lynch as if to remove the chain, then shoved him, savagely, face first down onto the bed. Gacy had both his big hands around the boy’s neck and he began to choke, bearing down hard. Lynch felt his throat being closed off: he couldn’t call out, he couldn’t even breathe. He struggled, but Gacy kept his full weight on the boy’s back, and it was no contest.

  After about a minute, Lynch felt “consciousness teetering” and realized, with a shock of horror, that Gacy might actually kill him. He stopped struggling, and the man relaxed his grip somewhat but then continued to choke the boy for a period of time Lynch was never able to determine.

  The boy felt himself falling off into a whirling darkness. There was a “dizziness,” a “blackness,” and in some remote corner of his mind, Lynch felt himself lose control of his bladder and urinate in his pants. He was dying. He knew he was dying.

  Lynch never could say whether he was absolutely conscious at all times. He only knows that he was lying still, his soul falling into some dark, spinning void, when he felt himself being rolled over onto his side. Then his hands were free and he was gasping for breath, trying to swallow. It took some time before he was able to stand.

  “Are you okay?” Gacy asked. It seemed a question of little significance, and there was no apology in the man’s tone.

  Lynch swallowed, unsteady on his feet, and said, “Well, yeah.” Then, with the blackness receding and the breath back in his body, he advanced on the man, his fists clenched. Gacy backed up, staying out of reach. “I’m sorry,” he said, and his tone was now one of abject apology.

  “I think you just better take me home,” Lynch said, threateningly.

  “Sure,” Gacy said. “Okay, okay, I’ll take you home. I mean, I’m sorry. Are you okay? I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry.” Years later, Lynch would tell an Illinois jury that Gacy didn’t apologize until “after I threatened him.”

  “I really didn’t mean to do that,” Gacy said. “I’m very sorry.”

  A few days later, Edward Lynch was fired from his job at the Park and Broadway Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

  At first, Gacy denied all the accusations, insisting that he be given a lie-detector test. People in Waterloo—his colleagues in the Jaycees, his family and friends—must have been reassured by this request. Generally, guilty men do not demand lie-detector tests.

  On May 2, 1968, John Wayne Gacy was given a polygraph test in nearby Cedar Rapids. He was asked a series of gentle warm-up questions so that the operator could measure his responses. The examiner read the lines on the graph, noted the readings on emotionally neutral questions, then asked Gacy if he had ever indulged in homosexual activities of any kind with Donald Voorhees. Gacy insisted that he had not. The polygraph noted increases in his blood pressure, respiration, and pulse as well as an aberration in his psychogalvanic skin response. The official results say flatly that Gacy’s answers were “indicative of deception,” which is to say that he failed the test.

  A week later, on May 10, the grand jury indicted John Wayne Gacy on a charge of sodomy.

  Even after failing the lie-detector test, John loudly and publicly maintained that he was innocent of all charges. The Lynch kid’s testimony was a joke. “He says I attacked him with a knife,” John said later, laughing at the absurdity of it. “Then he says he sat down and watched more films with me. Then, get this, then he says he let me chain his hands behind his back. That’s real believable, after I just supposedly attacked him with the knife. What happened is he got fired and wanted to get back at me.”

  According to John, there was a transparent conspiracy in the works, a blatant frame. Ask anyone in Waterloo: John was going to be the next president of the Waterloo, Iowa, Jaycees.

  The truth is he had never really gotten along with Voorhees, Sr.—there had been some public friction—and Voorhees probably had been backing his opponent for Jaycee president all along. John blamed himself for being too naїve to see this. At the time, however, Voorhees was running for statewide Jaycee office, and he was influential. John was willing to let bygones be bygones. Voorhees was the best man for the job he had in mind. How dumb. How dumb and stupid.

  Those who opposed John for the presidency could see he had a lock on it, and they had to stop him somehow. The Lynch kid and the Voorhees kid were good friends, by their own admission. Anyone with a nose could smell a frame-up.

  There were people who believed John without question, influential people such as the Jaycee president, Charles
Hill. Many people thought the charges absurd on the face of them: Christ, the colonel had been a marine, and if he wasn’t making jokes about “fruits” and “queers,” he was bragging about how many women he had laid last week. “Listen to John,” one Jaycee said, “and you’d think he slept with a hundred women a month.” The guy went to strip shows, for Chrissake. No way the colonel was queer for boys.

  John’s friends gathered around him in his time of need; they believed him. He could see it in their eyes as he talked. And talked. And talked. John could wear you down, just blow right over you with sheer verbal energy. People got tired of listening to an innocent man defend himself against the manufactured charges. It was less exhausting to capitulate completely, to believe him.

  However, John’s political enemies made the most of the charges. The Jaycees were now split pretty evenly among those who bought John’s story and those who didn’t. The colonel had been indicted on May 10, 1968. The charges, he thought, would surely be dropped before he was nominated for the presidency in late May. John thinks he was naїve back then. He was just a young man, barely twenty-six years old, and so dumb and stupid he really believed he could beat the frame-up.

  Unfortunately, a young assistant county attorney named David Dutton had been named to prosecute the case. The guy was politically ambitious, looking to run for office himself. John could see it all very clearly. A prominent businessman indicted on charges of sodomy: it was a headline-grabber, a reputation-maker. “The charges weren’t dropped,” John explained later, “because Dutton turned me into a political football.” The sodomy charge was still pending when the Jaycees met to nominate their choices for office.

  It was a very tense gathering, and John could see the continuing controversy was harming the image of the Jaycees and of Waterloo, Iowa. There was no point in running if his candidacy would just rip apart everything he was trying to build. He made up his mind to do the Right Thing. He waited until he was nominated—no use not to accept that honor at the very least—and then, with all the considerable courage at his disposal, he stood and declared that he was withdrawing from the race for the good of “the organization and my family.” It was a very emotional speech, a speech tinged with a certain sad nobility.

  Thinking about it later, John remembered that he had never been very worried about what the Lynch kid had to say. The story sounded idiotic, and even if it was true—which, of course, it wasn’t—anyone could see how it could have been a kind of practical joke that got out of hand. Edward Lynch never said he was raped. He was just a kid who got fired for sloppy work and had a gripe.

  No, it was the lying little fuck Voorhees who landed John in the shit. It was Voorhees whose testimony led to the one charge he could never ride out. It was Voorhees who accused him of sodomy; it was Voorhees the blackmailer who cost him what would have been his highest honor, the presidency of the Waterloo, Iowa, Jaycees; it was Voorhees whose testimony before the grand jury generated all those reputation-shattering headlines in the Waterloo Courier. Because of Voorhees, half the people in town thought he was some kind of goddamn fruit picker.

  Because of Voorhees, he lost everything he had ever worked for: his reputation, his standing in the community, everything. Because of Voorhees, he would never be president of the Jaycees. Refusing the nomination had been a sacrifice John Gacy felt honorbound to make. Because of Voorhees.

  Voorhees!

  ***

  Despite the indictment and the results of the polygraph test, Gacy continued to proclaim his complete innocence. In July, a month after the total collapse of his presidential campaign, he was one of four Waterloo Jaycees to receive Key Man awards. When you are facing a trial where it’s going to be your word against someone else’s, the heft of an award like that adds weight to your testimony.

  Apparently encouraged by this evidence of acceptance, Gacy agreed to take a second polygraph test. The lines on the graph showed Gacy’s responses rising from the flat land of neutral questions to a mountain range of “emotional disturbances indicative of deception” each time he answered “no” to questions about having either oral or anal sex with Donald Voorhees.

  At the county attorney’s office, investigators were astounded by the results of the two tests. The man had insisted that the first be administered, had readily agreed to the second, and he had failed more miserably than anyone in recent memory. “The only thing Gacy got right,” the joke in the county attorney’s office went, “was his name.”

  At this point, the colonel began to change his story. First of all, he wanted investigators to know that what had happened was really just a matter of curiosity on his part. It wasn’t as if he was “queer,” but, yes, he said, he had picked up the Voorhees boy that summer night in 1967. Gacy had heard that the boy hustled blow jobs for cash and had simply asked the kid if this was true. Voorhees, in this version of Gacy’s story, not only admitted that he engaged in acts of prostitution for money, he also made a proposition. The price for oral sex was forty dollars.

  There were some negotiations then, and the price dropped to five dollars. Voorhees, according to Gacy’s postpolygraph story, attempted to consummate the act right there in the car. Gacy said that he couldn’t even maintain an erection. It was all just curiosity on his part, and he didn’t find the act all that exciting. He said the Voorhees boy offered to try again, some other time, but he wanted to be paid another five dollars. It was Voorhees who kept coming on to him.

  A few days later, Voorhees stopped by the Gacy house. It was a Saturday morning and, in his own house, for some reason, Gacy was more successful. A month or so later, in this version of the story, Voorhees dropped by to ask for a loan. Gacy worked for his money, and he expected others to do the same. He told the boy that he already knew how to earn five dollars. It was more a fatherly gesture, a lesson in economics, than a desire for sex on his part.

  That was it, according to Gacy: three acts spread out over a month-long period, all of them initiated by Voorhees for financial gain, and committed, on John’s part, entirely out of curiosity about homosexual relations, a type of sex he had never indulged in before. He didn’t like homosexuals, but he was liberal-minded and didn’t condemn them. With that sort of attitude, was it any wonder that, when the opportunity presented itself, he would try a little experiment? A man should know what he’s talking about. Voorhees provided the opportunity. For a price.

  Gacy’s second story still didn’t mesh with testimony the grand jury had heard. Donald Voorhees, testifying under oath, said that he had been working for Gacy, spreading gravel on the driveway, when the man invited him to take a break in the downstairs rec room. There the two of them engaged in oral sex, and Gacy had attempted and failed to perform anal sex. He said the acts had been forced upon him. He was then sixteen years old, a sophomore in high school, and he seemed very troubled.

  It was still a question of the word of a man—a Key Man—against a boy’s, but the fact that Gacy had amended his statement to the police and had made limited admissions did not look good. And the results of the two separate lie-detector tests were damning.

  Gacy may have been working behind the scenes, applying leverage in the places where it would do the most good. There was a feeling in the county attorney’s office that there was a certain amount of foot-dragging involved in the case, that certain individuals who had pledged to uphold the law weren’t particularly interested in seeing John Wayne Gacy go to trial. Gacy, the prosecutors knew, had not only been involved in wife-swapping, he also was neck deep into the prostitution and gambling rackets at a local motel. What if he had a list of names, a nice little secret list showing who did what with whom? It would explain why the case was being allowed to drift into a land of limbo.

  Gacy, however, didn’t know of the prosecutors’ frustration, and it is likely that he saw only one way out of his troubles. If Donald Voorhees were to recant his testimony, or refuse to appear at the upcoming trial, Gacy was home free. There had to be a way to scare the kid away fro
m court. On August 30, 1968, the colonel set his plan in motion.

  Russell Schroeder, an eighteen-year-old West High School senior, had been employed for two years as a night cook at one of the restaurants Gacy managed. On the night of August 30, Gacy, after work, invited Schroeder to ride with him on the Merchant Patrol route. At each stop, Schroeder helped check doors to see if they were securely locked. Brown’s Lumber Company, for one, was locked up tighter than a drum, but it was there that Gacy took an iron bar from under the seat of his car.

  “You can get into any place with one of these,” Gacy told the boy. He seemed very proud of the iron bar, and it took only seconds to break into Brown’s. Once inside, Gacy gave Schroeder the bar, then told him to open the Coke machine and take what money was there—three dollars. Gacy insisted the boy keep the money. Schroeder had never stolen anything in his life, but he did as his boss said, putting the coins in his pocket. The colonel stole an extension cord and a can of paint.

  Gacy and the boy drove around for six hours, checking some businesses and burglarizing one other. At the Oldsmobile lot in downtown Waterloo, Gacy asked the boy to get out and pop the hubcaps off a few of the cars. The colonel would monitor his police radio, checking to see that there were no police patrols in the neighborhood. Once again, Schroeder did as he was told. It was the first time he had ever ridden with Gacy on the patrol route, and within about two hours, he had committed two crimes. It changed his relationship with the boss. Now there was a nice little secret just between the two of them.

  The boy didn’t have any experience at theft, and he wasn’t particularly good at it. “Don’t make so much noise,” Gacy counseled. “Quiet, quiet.”

  After stealing the hubcaps, Gacy and the boy drove around listening to the police radio and talking.

  “You want to steal anything else?” Gacy asked, as he would to a confederate, a partner in crime.