Buried Dreams (32 page)

They were driving toward the bar, and when Rignall turned to accept a second hit off the joint, he was hit in the face with a wet cloth or dishrag. “It had a cold feeling to it,” Rignall said, “and I immediately started having like a buzzing-bee sensation in my head, and I went unconscious.”

Chloroform, a heavy, toxic fluid with an etherlike odor, can be used as a general anesthetic. It is also a good solvent that contractors use in cleaning buildings to be remodeled.

When Rignall came to, he found himself strapped to his seat and saw “amber lights going out the car window above, like they were a spaceship flying by, one right after the other.” The lights of an expressway. The driver put the rag over Rignall’s mouth and nose again, and he passed out. Once, when he regained consciousness, Rignall noticed an exit sign: “Cumberland.” Chloroformed again, he felt his
head bump against the window as the car turned left off the expressway onto Cumberland.

When Rignall awoke, he felt that the man was “carrying me. My head was against some kind of screen door. . . .” Rignall felt the rag again, and when he woke, he was on a couch. There was a bar in the room, and a picture of a clown above the bar. Little Christmas-tree-type lights were blinking around the picture. The driver was fixing a drink, and Rignall asked, “Why did you do that to me?”

The driver “came back with a very stern, deep tone in his voice and said, ‘There is a gun under the bar and I’d just as soon kill you as look at you.’ “

The man—Rignall could see now that he was very fat, pear-shaped—walked toward the couch and lit up another joint. He seemed entirely relaxed and even offered Rignall a hit. The second time he passed the joint, the man fell on top of Rignall and put the dishrag to his face.

The driver was slapping him in the face, bringing him to consciousness once more. Rignall had been stripped, and he was restrained in a kind of pillory device: it seemed to be a flat wooden board with three holes in it. His head was locked into the hole in the center of the board, his arms were extended and locked into the holes at either end. The device seemed to be affixed to the ceiling with chains. Rignall felt that his feet were locked into another device.

The driver was standing in front of Rignall and was nude, and masturbating, talking all the time, “making it clear” to Rignall “that he had total control of me and he was going to do what he wanted with me, when he wanted, and how he wanted, and he had the power over me.” Rignall noticed the man’s stomach protruded almost over the genitals—folds of fat there—and veins and stretch marks covered his belly.

On the floor between them, Rignall saw “several long leather whips curled around wood and leather handles.” Some of the metal instruments looked like fireplace tools, and they were scattered among several plastic and rubber dildos.

The driver forced Rignall to perform oral sex and ordered him to say, “I love it, I love it.”

Rignall felt the rag over his face again. When he woke, his face was burning from the chloroform. The driver “picked up one of the instruments, told me what he was going to do with it, and started injecting it until I showed physical
pain. . . .” Rignall tried not to moan or scream; somehow he felt that might excite the man.

“You love it,” the man said. “I want to hear you say you love it.” It was a voice full of contempt. Another, larger instrument was shoved roughly into him.

“Say you love it.”

The rag went back over Rignall’s face.

When he came to again, Rignall felt the driver’s “head on my shoulder. He was behind me and inserted something anally. I believe it was himself. And there was someone on his knees in front of me.”

All Rignall could see of the accomplice was that he had brown hair and that it was parted in the middle. When the one in front realized that Rignall was conscious, “I was put out again.”

Rignall woke in the snow at the base of a statue of Alexander Hamilton in a park near where he’d been picked up. His pants weren’t zipped up, and he “was in total pain. My face was burning, and I was really unaware of what had happened to me at that time.”

Rignall managed to get back to his girlfriend’s apartment. His face was badly scarred, and he was bleeding. He reported the rape to the police, then spent a week in Grant Hospital, where he was treated for facial burns, rectal bleeding, and pain. Later Rignall discovered that the chloroform had severely damaged his liver.

The police told Rignall they could do nothing with the information he gave them. There were thousands of black cars with spotlights and customized license plates in Chicago. Rignall, however, “wanted revenge.” He and two friends rented a car and spent a month parked by the Cumberland exit off the Kennedy Expressway. They were waiting for the Oldsmobile sedan John bought to fuck over the Other Guy.

Jeff Rignall is, perhaps, an easy man to underestimate. A reporter who interviewed him after Gacy was arrested said, “He comes on sort of dingy, a little spacey.” Just the kind of guy Bad Jack turned loose to teach goody-goody John a lesson.

John Gacy had absolutely no recall of the incident, and it seemed awfully farfetched to him. Sure, the police had found a bottle that might have contained chloroform in his house; John used it as a commercial solvent. But you wouldn’t use it
to kidnap someone. What if a cop stopped you? How would you explain a guy passed out in the seat, the smell in the car? The Jack John knew, either of the first two Jacks, would never use a gun, never carry drugs in the car.

And then what about this “rack gadget"? John never had anything like that in the house. And the blinking lights around the clown picture: cheap shit you’d see in some wop bar or something. John wouldn’t have blinking lights around a picture. Jesus.

And who was “the guy with brown hair parted down the middle” supposed to be in front of Rignall while “I was poking him in the ass"? Rossi had brown hair and parted it that way: so did a lot of guys. Sometimes John, calling himself Jack, got into three-way sex—all by consent—with a pickup and an employee.

But John had no recall at all of Rignall. John didn’t like anal sex. John didn’t have a rack. John would no more use chloroform than he’d use a gun.

What John figured is that this Rignall was a friend of some hustler John might have neglected to pay. The two of them—this disgruntled hustler and Rignall—could have gotten together and cooked up the rack-and-fireplace-poker story to sue John Gacy. Rignall might have been a guest at one of the summer yard parties; John never knew everyone there. That’s how Rignall could describe some of the house.

That was John’s main theory on Rignall: It never happened.

But what if it did? Say Rignall’s story was even partially true. John “theorized” that the Other Guy, from what he’d been able to “suppose” about him, would “be smart enough” to let Rignall go because there was a witness present. Some employee, maybe, or a second pickup, who might report a murder.

Or maybe Bad Jack planned it that way to outsmart John, since the Donnelly thing had been so easy. Two potential witnesses. A clear warning: “Stay away from Carol and the kids.”

In late April 1978, Rignall and his friends finally spied the big Olds pull up off the Kennedy onto Cumberland and followed it to 8213 Summerdale. The license was PDM 42: three letters, two numbers. Rignall gave the license number and address to his attorney, then notified the police.

At the Area 6 station, where Gacy had been questioned on the Donnelly matter only three months before, Rignall was told that Gacy had a sex-offense conviction in Iowa and that the police would get a mug shot for him.

“At that time,” Rignall said, “they asked me if I was gay. I was honest with them. I said, ‘Yes.’ From that point on I got no cooperation at all.”

Rignall called the police daily, sometimes twice daily, about the mug shot. After two or three weeks, he was allowed to look through several books of mug shots. He identified John Gacy because “I will never forget his face.”

After positive identification, Rignall met with an officer and an assistant state’s attorney who clearly didn’t believe his story. “When I started getting into the physical aspect of what the man had done to me,” Rignall recalled, “they began to make me believe
I
was the crazy one, that he was quote unquote a model citizen.”

Once again, an assistant state’s attorney at the Area 6 police station refused to charge John Wayne Gacy with a felony. Rignall was told that he could issue a civil assault warrant if he liked, and on May 7, 1978, Rignall’s attorney wrote Gacy informing him that Jeff had issued a warrant for his arrest.

The letter might just as well have been signed by the Other Guy. Not that John was aware of Bad Jack’s existence in the spring of 1978. “The conscious John Gacy” knew only that “I was just constantly fighting with myself. I was thinking: Do what you want to do. But then I didn’t know what I wanted to do. If I woke up cruising, I must have wanted to do that somewhere inside my mind. Even though I hated what I was doing, I must have wanted it, or I wouldn’t have been doing it.

“But then Carol and I were becoming close again. It’s so hard: everything has double meanings; I loved her and thought she could save me, but then I had to protect her, too.”

John hadn’t been to bed with Carol since the divorce, but one spring day in May—just about the time John Gacy got a letter from Jeff Rignall’s attorney—they drove up to Wisconsin with the girls, a family again, enjoying the warm spring weather, the sense of a world reborn, everything new, the promise of summer. They got home at about nine that night, and Carol remembers that “John and I had both, I
think we were looking very forward to the time again to be together, and we started, tried to start to make love. And John broke down and cried.

“He couldn’t do anything and he said it didn’t have anything to do with me, that he waited for this, for the day for me to be back in bed with him. And he said he was afraid he was going the other way.

“Well, when he said that I just figured that he was having sex more with men and couldn’t do anything with a woman anymore.”

Years later, John Gacy would look back at it as the worst moment of his life. He could still feel the pain of failure, of weakness, and he remembered the tears, like surrender. . . .

“Going the other way.”

It wouldn’t work with Carol because Bad Jack was beginning to take control, able now to bubble to the surface whenever he wanted. The Other Guy: he took what he wanted when he wanted it, and he destroyed what he hated. At that moment of failure with Carol, Bad Jack killed John Gacy’s dream of a new life. The bastard destroyed everything: the little restaurant in the South, a quiet family life with Carol and the kids, a decent work schedule. No more drugs, no more cruising, nothing bad . . .

John cried, and it was as if something inside had ruptured and he was in physical pain. Carol didn’t know what to do, “so I held him and he cried. We just didn’t—he didn’t talk anymore, and I just let him finish out his crying, and that was it. We ended up going to sleep.”

CHAPTER 19

WHILE JEFF RIGNALL WAS
going through mug shots, Gacy was making preparations for the most important parade he’d ever direct. He even had Secret Service help on this one. It was the Polish Constitution Day parade, and it consisted of fifty-four floats, twenty bands, and, as John recalls, “twenty thousand marching Polacks,” though the actual number of marchers was closer to half that.

The parade was held on May 6. Rosalynn Carter, wife of the President of the United States, was a special guest of honor, on hand to improve her husband’s relationship with the Chicago Democratic machine. As far as John was concerned, he told friends one night, she was just another of those political flies buzzing around the big turd. No—he wanted to take that back—the parade wasn’t a turd. Or if it was, it was clockwork turd: two hours, exactly, of precisely positioned Polacks hitting their marks when John cracked the whip; Polacks like lions hopping through hoops. It was the best ethnic parade in Chicago, and John was proud of the job he did.

Because Mrs. Carter would officially review the parade along with about fifty others, John recalled that “the Secret Service came from Washington.” There were, John doesn’t remember, half a dozen, maybe more of them, gray guys in gray suits who wore sunglasses on gray days so you couldn’t see their eyes. He sat with them around a big conference table, and together they hammered out the protocol for the parade.

And John told them—maybe he was bragging a little bit
about this little speech, exaggerating—he said, “Goddamn it, there’s a wrong way, there’s a right way, and there’s my way. I been running parades for fifteen years, I been running this parade for three years, and this is gonna be done my way.”

It was a matter of attitude and experience, and John let Mrs. Carter’s Secret Service contingent know who was running the show. He thinks they respected him for that, for telling ‘em they could can the big-deal White House shit right there because John Gacy was the man in charge. “Look,” John said he told the Secret Service, “this is how it’s going to be done. . . .”

John was wearing his special “S” pin, a sign that he’d already been cleared by the exhaustive Secret Service checkout procedure. The Secret Service was expected to examine the credentials of the fifty or so people who’d officially review the parade with Mrs. Carter, and of the dozens who’d meet her later at a reception in her honor at Daley Center. Gacy’s name, Social Security number, and birth date were all on a list given the Secret Service.

As is standard procedure, this list, including Gacy’s name, was checked for subversives, criminals, and potentially embarrassing crazies known to local Secret Service and FBI agents. The name “John Wayne Gacy,” apparently, was run through the National Crime Index. Years before, upon his parole, Iowa had provided Chicago police with Gacy’s record as a felon and convicted sex offender.

Somehow John Gacy slipped through the interstices of the system, and the Secret Service decided he was a fit man to meet Rosalynn Carter.

The “S” pins, indicating clearance up to and including personal contact with the President’s wife, were sent to the Polish National Alliance and distributed before the planning session in which John told the guys in the gray suits how it was gonna be.