Buried Dreams (15 page)

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 homosexual, 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?

Somehow the arrest was never registered with the Iowa Board of Parole. Gacy was released from parole on October 18, 1971. First-time offenders in Iowa routinely earn back their rights as citizens, and on November 22, 1971—less than forty-five days before Gacy’s first victim was to die—the governor of Iowa granted Gacy full restoration of citizenship.

The cooking job was a real dead-ender, and John wanted to start his own business. One thing he knew how to do was paint, and he thought he could talk his way into some jobs in his off-duty hours. He and Ma came up with a name for the business: PDM Contractors, painting, decorating, and maintenance. Or you could call it Polish Daily Maintenance. Or Pretty Damn Messy Contractors.

John had to be in at 10:00
P.M
., but he had so much faith in his vision of PDM that the parole officer allowed him to work nights. This is how he slipped into another bisexual episode. It wasn’t his fault that it happened; he was working at the time.

It was a year after he’d been paroled, and one of the
chefs, Roger,
*
wanted his apartment painted. John thought Roger was “kind of effeminate,” but he would be painting the apartment while Roger was working his second job, teaching dance. There was no danger of the two of them “getting into it.”

So John was working in the apartment when Roger’s roommate, this Latin guy called Manny,* comes home.

The guy says, “Who’re you?”

John told him and the guy says, “I’m Roger’s roommate. I’m gay.” It was weird to have a guy just come right out and admit something like that, but John said, “Hey, that’s your thing.” Because John had always had liberal ideas about sex.

A few nights later, this guy Manny shows John a picture of himself all dressed up like a broad and asks John, “Can I blow you?”

The way John looked at it, there was no love thing there, no affection. It was just like masturbation. Then, when they got talking, Manny told him a whole shitpile of things he never knew. Manny told him how you could go down to the Greyhound bus depot and pick up boys. He told John that the corner of Clark and Broadway was a big gay area where you could pick up hustlers and pay them to have sex anytime you wanted it.

It “floored the shit out” of him, that’s what John told the docs up there in 3 North. Imagine; hustlers at the bus station.

Except that he had been arrested four months earlier for “assault on a sexual deviate” he’d picked up at the bus station.

About a month after meeting Manny, around late July 1971, at Clark and Broadway John approached a young man named Mickel Ried. Ried was new to the city, from Ohio. They talked a bit: mostly about construction and John’s business and how much money a guy could make that way. Ried said he needed a job. The two of them ended up at the condo on Kedvale, where they talked some more and, according to Ried, had sex. John paid for it.

They met a few more times and talked more about forming a partnership in PDM. The work was going along pretty well now, and John thought he might need more help.

“He had a nice growing business there,” Marion Gacy
recalled. “He started from the condominium. He had boards and everything, painting in my storeroom. And they wouldn’t allow that, so that’s why we bought the home, so he would have his business.”

The Old Man thought he’d been smart paying off the condo, but John had a hell of a time selling a place with no assumable mortgage. John Stanley outsmarted himself, with money, in death.

John and Ma finally found a place at 8213 West Summer-dale, in Norwood Park township. It was a solidly constructed tract home built in the 1950s. There was a garage for John’s tools, and a low crawl space under the house that could be used for storage if the Gacys could find some way to keep it from flooding. John, as co-owner, made monthly payments to his mother who, along with Karen and JoAnne, owned the rest of the house.

Ma and John moved out to the house on Summerdale on August 15, 1971. Mickel Ried helped them move, and because he was new to Chicago, John offered him a room. There was another guy living there, some guy from Bruno’s named Roger, Manny’s ex-roommate, whom Ma thought was “gay.” John’s Aunt Florence also moved in a little later, for three months. Everyone paid rent.

Mickel Ried stayed for a couple of months, and during that time he had sex with John Gacy “once in a while.” Together they did several jobs: painting, house maintenance, little things. Sometimes they argued, mostly about money. Ried remembered a lot of quarrels about money.

Money was tight in the early days of PDM, and Gacy was able to save on landscaping by stealing shrubs from a local nursery. Once, after a money-related argument, Gacy took Ried to a desolate area, where he said they would break into a house. Ried got out of the car, and when he turned, he saw Gacy coming at him with a tire iron. Gacy stopped, the tire iron dangling from his right hand. It was, according to Ried, a “desolate” area, no one around, and he asked Gacy why he had the tire iron.

“In case there’s trouble,” Gacy said.

Ried was confused. It was dark. There was no one there. What kind of trouble could there be? Gacy went back to the car. Suddenly he didn’t want to break into the house anymore.

Not long after that, Ried and Gacy went out to the garage to unload some equipment. “It was dark,” Ried recalled,
“and we got out of the car and the lights went out in the garage and John told me to get some fuses under the workbench. So, as I was doing that on my hands and knees, I got hit on the head. With a hammer.

“I stayed down a couple of seconds and I stood up and I saw that John was looking like he was going to hit me again. I put my hand up to stop his hand from coming back down, and at the same time I asked him what he was doing or why he wanted to hit me.”

Gacy, Ried said, had a “strange look in his eyes,” and they stood like that for a moment, the boy holding the man’s arm, until Gacy’s expression softened and he put the hammer down.

Just as he had done in Iowa after stabbing Edward Lynch, Gacy became very apologetic. Ried said “He patched up my head. He said he was sorry he did it.” They went into the house and talked for an hour, or at least Gacy talked, apologizing profusely while Ried listened.

The boy couldn’t think how he might have provoked the attack. He and Gacy fought frequently over money, that was true, and sometimes the arguments turned into wrestling matches, a kind of horseplay with some serious intent behind it. Ried was living in the house, he was eating with the Gacys, and there was some infrequent sex, but they were supposed to be partners, and Ried said, “I never got that many payments.”

That’s what the fights were about, every single one of them. Ried thought there might have been one of those arguments just before John Gacy hit him with the hammer. Some argument about money, with just a little bit of sex wrapped up in the core of John’s anger.

The next day, Mickel Ried moved out of the Gacy house.

Carol Lofgren had just gone through a divorce, and the later months of 1971 were not good ones for her. She had two daughters—Tammy, who was one, and April, who was three. It was tough making ends meet, frightening being out on her own, and she visited the Gacys often. She had gone to school with Karen and “became very good friends with the family. I felt like one of the family. I was at the house quite a bit when I was fifteen, sixteen years old.”

John Gacy “felt like a brother” to her, but they did have
one date when Carol was sixteen, and the two of them went to a drive-in.

Later, after her divorce, when Carol would visit at the condo and then the house on Summerdale, she found John to be “a very warm, understanding person, very easy to talk to, knew a lot of things. It was very easy to just listen to him. I always felt he knew what he was talking about. And I met a lot of interesting people through John.” John knew hockey players and could get free tickets. He knew a dozen cops: he never introduced Carol to any of them, but he talked a lot about the police officers he knew, how they worked, cases he had heard about.

He was good with the girls, especially Tammy, the baby. Carol remembered that they called John “Daddy,” even before she and Gacy were married. He had a soft, gentle way with the kids.

Later, Carol would say, “He swept me off my feet. I don’t think I loved him, but I was still mixed up about my first marriage, and he treated me well.”

For a while, there was a lot of mutual comfort in the relationship: Carol just coming off a bad divorce, John just out of jail. But when it seemed as if they were getting serious about each other, John told her about what had happened in Iowa.

“He told me,” Carol said, “he did spend time in Iowa for pornography dealing with younger boys. He didn’t go into too much detail about it. He said he served sixteen months and got out on good behavior.”

Because it looked like they might marry, John felt a moral obligation to tell Carol one more thing about himself. “He told me he was a bisexual. At first I didn’t understand what a bisexual was. So he explained it to me and I just kind of looked at him. I said, ‘How do you know you’re a bisexual? How can you just say, “This is what I am"?’