Buried Dreams (38 page)

“Nothing that big,” the officers said. They were just Des Plaines police officers trying to find a missing boy.

Well, shit, John said. He had already talked to the Des Plaines police. He gave them a signed statement and didn’t know anything about the Piest kid. What he was going to do, John was making arrangements to take a lie-detector test, on his own, which would clear him in the matter and let the cops get on with more important work.

Kozenczak “was barking up the wrong tree,” John said. Hell, he was a clown—"a registered clown"—and he entertained bedridden children in hospitals all over Chicago. Would a registered clown, a man who publicly loved children, have anything to do with a missing boy? John had a special affection for sick children: he understood their fear and pain and loneliness, because he himself had “leukemia” and wasn’t expected to live long.

Gacy, friendly as at a convention of insurance salesmen, paid the bill.

Hachmeister and Albrecht followed Gacy to a Northwest Side bar, where John had his third or fourth drink since midnight. After an hour or so, Gacy led the officers to another bar, where he sat at a table with two women. When one of the officers followed Gacy to the rest room, John began talking about the women’s bodies and what he’d like to do with them. At about four, the caravan set out for another neighborhood bar, the Unforgettable, where Gacy sat with three men and discussed, in a loud voice meant to be over-heard,
local politicians and high-ranking police officials who happened to be his personal friends.

At about five that morning, the officers followed Gacy into the Golden Bear Restaurant, where all three sat at the same table.

“C’mon,” Gacy said, “you guys are feds working on a drug bust, right?”

Gacy, with six or seven drinks in him, started getting tough. He was suing the city of Des Plaines, Kozenczak, Sullivan, and a few others: a big goddamn harassment suit that would ruin reputations and put the city in hock. His lawyers, Sam Amirante and LeRoy Stevens, were in the process of preparing it.

The suit would go through the courts like shit through a goose: John told the officers he was “one of the heavies” in North Side Democratic politics. His cousin was another heavy: Gacy mentioned the name of a notorious Chicago underworld figure. Gacy let the cops know he wasn’t going to take this shit: he was going to come at them from both sides of the law. See how long Kozenczak could stand up to that kind of pressure.

And the surveillance teams should watch their asses, too. Gacy said he’d hired a real “bodyguard,” a guy named Nick who “carries a three fifty-seven magnum and wouldn’t think twice about wasting you.”

John didn’t seem to be striking much fear into Dave Hachmeister’s heart, though. “You get back to your bodyguard, John,” he said, “and advise him to look over his shoulder because there may be more guys on our surveillance team than he knows about.”

John went off on another tack. “You guys sure you’re not feds?”

“Just Des Plaines police officers on a missing-person case,” Hachmeister explained for the second time that night.

Gacy suddenly wanted to be pals again—it was all on a first-name basis now: John and Dave and Mike having breakfast after drinking all night. About the kid, John said, he was just as concerned as Mike and Dave were. He himself hired young boys: they were good workers, energetic, and they’d do the work the way John wanted it done. They weren’t set in their ways. Oh, sure, he had to browbeat them, but that was only so the work would get done on time. He paid them well, and it was intricate work, the drugstore stuff where you constructed the shelving so the impulse-buy items were at
eye level, trick stuff like that. It was a good business, John said, and he’d fixed it so that all the money was in PDM. He himself wasn’t worth much, but his companies were worth a small fortune.

Gacy talked for an hour, with no prompting, and went home at six in the morning. It had been a remarkable performance. The guy babbled incessantly, and he was firing all his guns, all at once, in every direction. It looked as though John Gacy was beginning to come apart at the seams.

The next day, December 17, was a Sunday, but no one at the Des Plaines police station was taking the day off.

Rafael Tovar confirmed that Gacy’s employee John Butkovitch had been missing since July 1975. A set of trained police dogs were given articles of Rob Piest’s clothes for scent, then set loose in the police garage where Gacy’s truck and car were arranged among fourteen other vehicles. Terry Sullivan, in
Killer Clown,
a book he cowrote about the Gacy investigation, said, “I got a chill down my spine” when one of the dogs got in Gacy’s black Oldsmobile” and lay down on the seat. That was the “death reaction.” Rob Piest—the officers almost felt as if they knew the boy—was dead.

Meanwhile, officers Bob Schultz and Ron Robinson, the day surveillance team, spent the afternoon drinking beer with John Gacy at a restaurant bar and then a bowling alley, where Gacy made a point of grabbing the women he bowled with and feeling them up. “Nice tits and ass,” John confided to the officers, “and that one’s an easy lay.” Later, Gacy took Schultz and Robinson to dinner at a North Side restaurant.

“Would you answer a question honestly for me?” Gacy asked Schultz.

“Depends on the nature of the question.”

“Why are you guys following me?”

Schultz said it had to do with a missing boy, but Gacy felt it “had to be bigger than that.” His guess was that “the FBI put you onto me for narcotics.”

Schultz denied that, but John was already off on another subject. Babbling. He’d actually hired his own detective to find the Piest kid and get this bullshit out of the way.

“What caliber guns do you guys carry?” Gacy asked suddenly. Did their guns carry as much stopping power as, say, a .357 magnum? Because John had hired a bodyguard
who carried a .357. It would be nothing for a guy like that to blow away a couple of cops, anytime.

Not that John was a bad guy. He was pals with a mayor, a good friend of Rosalynn Carter’s, and he clowned for sick children in hospitals. Clowning in parades was fun. You could run along the sidelines, walk up to some broad, feel her up, and she’d just slough it off. Okay, it was a little naughty, but a clown could get away with shit like that.

Gacy looked directly at Schultz. “A clown can get away with murder,” he said.

At midnight, when Hachmeister and Albrecht took over, John took them back to a restaurant, where he talked about his marriage to Carol, and Hachmeister thought, just for a moment, that John Gacy might break down and cry.

The guy was definitely losing control.

CHAPTER 22

ON MONDAY, DECEMBER
18, one week after the murder of Rob Piest, Rosemary Szyc gave police her son’s papers, which included a warranty for the small TV. Officer Tovar recalled that Gacy had a small Motorola TV in his bedroom.

Pickell and Adams had traced the Nisson Pharmacy photo stub that had been found in Gacy’s garbage to Kim Byers, and they were attempting to contact her.

Gacy spent the day racing the rented car all over the North Side of Chicago. Had the police talked to Richard Rapheal? Gacy had to get up to Glenview, quick. Were they talking to Rossi? Cram? Gacy was now running a step or two behind the police, trying to find out who they’d talked to, what they knew. He drove like a man on fire, and the surveillance team ran more than one car into the ground
chasing him around Chicago. They wouldn’t cite Gacy for speeding, though, wouldn’t harass him, give him ammunition for a possible suit. Rob Piest was dead, and they wanted him for murder.

That evening, at his house, Gacy, who had been trying to elude officers all day, suddenly wanted to be buddies again. Schultz and Robinson were invited inside for dinner. John said he’d been a chef for the Chicago Black Hawks. He had a lot of pals who were hockey players. Tough guys who got in fights and went out with lots of women.

The officers were given a tour of the house. John pointed out pictures of himself with the mayor, with Rosalynn Carter. He explained how the collected clown photos made him feel warm inside. Jesus Christ, why the hell were officers following him, anyway? He was a good guy, with political connections: the kind of man who hung out with hockey players.

Why did the cops want to harass a man with leukemia? They were killing him, killing him, destroying his business, his reputation, everything. Even his closest friends were beginning to wonder if maybe he didn’t actually have something to do with the Piest boy. Guys asking him over drinks and shit about a kid he never met. Wondering if maybe he wasn’t queer or something. Him, John Gacy.

On Tuesday, December 19, while Gacy was meeting with one of his lawyers, Kim Byers told police that she had left her photo receipt in Rob Piest’s jacket the night he disappeared. Sullivan and Kozenczak knew that Rob was dead. Now they could place him in Gacy’s house.

There had to be something they missed on the search of the house, something that would tie Gacy irrevocably to the death of Rob Piest, of John Butkovitch, of John Szyc, of Greg Godzik. They desperately needed to search the house again, but getting a judge to sign a second search warrant on a complaint of murder, even multiple murder, was extremely difficult in the absence of a body. Sullivan thought he could use Kim Byers’ photo receipt as the basis for the warrant, but he wanted more than that. He needed a strong backup. The procedure had to be clean all through this one. Irreversible.

Once again, the day surveillance team of Schultz and Robinson were invited into Gacy’s house. Schultz asked if he could use the bathroom. Robinson kept Gacy talking—no very difficult task—while Schultz went into the bedroom to
get the serial number off the Motorola TV. Later, police would see if it matched John Szyc’s warranty number. There was a faint, sickly sweet odor in the hallway.

After copying the number, Schultz went back to the bathroom and flushed the toilet. As he did, the central heating system forced warm air up out of the vent beside the toilet. The odor Scultz had noticed in the hallway was stronger now, here in the bathroom. Whatever it was that made the house smell had to be coming from the basement. There was probably a break in the ductwork down there, and the forced-air system was pumping that sick, damp basement smell all over the house. It was a nauseous odor, not seepage exactly, and Shultz thought it was familiar, something he’d smelled before, somewhere else: an odor that didn’t belong in a guy’s house. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

On Wednesday, Gacy’s lawyer Sam Amirante gave Terry Sullivan a copy of a $750,000 suit that had already been filed in Federal District Court and was set for hearing on Friday. The complaint named the city of Des Plaines, Kozenczak, and several other officers. Gacy, according to the suit, had been subjected to unreasonable search of his home, unreasonable seizure of his vehicles. The surveillance was ruining his business.

Sullivan thought Amirante was likely to win a temporary restraining order on Friday. The police would have to cease and desist. No more surveillance. If there was evidence inside the house that tied Gacy to the death of Piest or anyone else, it would surely be destroyed while Des Plaines and Sullivan were occupied defending the suit.

Sullivan had one more day to put together an ironclad search warrant. He needed a backup for the photo receipt that placed Piest in Gacy’s house.

At noon, when Schultz and Robinson relieved Hachmeister and Albrecht, Gacy ran out of a store he was inspecting and began taking photos. Four officers, four disreputable-looking cars; the photos could be used in a harassment complaint.

Later that afternoon, Gacy shifted gears again and offered Schultz and Robinson—his friends Ron and Bob—the services of a hooker. It looked like a blackmail situation, but Gacy backed out of the deal, claiming that the woman he had in mind wanted too much money.

No doubt about it: Gacy was beginning to crack. Police interviews with Cram or Rossi seemed to piss him off even
more than the surveillance. Every time the officers talked to one of his employees, Gacy exploded. He pushed his rental car to a hundred miles an hour, speeding through residential areas to get to them. To find out what they told the police. Kozenczak and Sullivan decided to tighten the screws.

Rossi and Cram were asked to report to the Des Plaines police station, one after the other. From the outside, it must have looked as if the cops had put something together. Like they were tying up a few loose ends. Like they had stumbled onto a nice little secret. By playing a hunch.

Kozenczak leveled with Rossi, trying to shake something out of him. John Szyc probably was dead, Kozenczak said, and you’re driving his car. The lieutenant was going to put Rossi on the polygraph. Did he want to say anything first? Michael Rossi, according to Terry Sullivan in his book, broke down in tears. Rossi admitted to having sexual relations with Gacy and said that he thought Szyc’s car had been stolen. That’s what Gacy told him. On the polygraph, Rossi swore that he knew nothing about Rob Piest. Kozenczak told Sullivan he thought that Rossi was “basically truthful” but that the “test results were hard to interpret.”

Sullivan and Bedoe talked with Cram. They told him about Szyc, the sodomy conviction, everything they had up to that point. David Cram was cooperative.

“You been in the crawl space, David?”

Cram said he’d been down there a couple of times, spreading lime and digging.

Digging?

Cram told them about the trenches he’d dug for the pipes that Gacy was going to lay to drain the crawl space to get rid of his seepage problem. Cram drew a diagram of where he’d dug. The trenches didn’t go to the sump pump. No, Cram had never actually seen any pipes.

How big were they, these trenches?

About two feet by two feet. Really long.

Trenches that didn’t go anywhere, that were too deep and too long for pipe that didn’t exist, anyway.

They knew now. The son-of-a-bitch was burying them in the crawl space!

John was waiting outside Rossi’s house when Rossi got home from the Des Plaines police station. Gacy was smiling, but Rossi didn’t want to be alone with him and asked Schultz
and Robinson inside. As he had done with Russell Schroeder in Iowa, Gacy told Rossi he’d get him a lawyer. He wasn’t to talk to the cops again, John said, not without a lawyer present.