Buried Dreams (52 page)

John wasn’t going to take the stand, not after Reifman and the bathtub boy. He’d remain a “mystery man.” Tell the judge he never agreed with the insanity defense. Get his grounds for appeal on the record, right there in the trial transcript.

The only thing the state had proved is that there were bodies buried in his crawl space. They could give him ten years for “concealing a homicide.” Three hundred thirty years served consecutively, but ten years served concurrently. He’d be out in a year and a half, just like Iowa. That’s how the trial should have gone; it’s how his trial on appeal would go.

If he took the stand now it would look like he agreed with the plea. And if he never took the stand, if he was a “mystery man,” he could control the money from the books and films about the “crime of the century” and use it for lawyers and shit on appeal.

Besides, John was “paranoid of Kunkle.”

The last expert witness for the state in rebuttal was Dr. Idiot, James Cavanaugh, the director of the section on the law in the Department of Psychiatry at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. He was a little bit of a surprise because John always figured him for one of the character-flaw, antisocial-personality-diagnosis docs, but Cavanaugh came in with a combination of Hartman and Reifman. Cavanaugh said John had “a mixed personality disorder” and that his was both a narcissistic personality and an antisocial personality. Hitting all the defense bases right there.

It was another “superficial diagnosis,” especially when you compared it to Rappaport’s testimony. But then Dr. Idiot attacked Rappaport without ever mentioning him by name.

Cavanaugh said the major concept behind psychoanalytic theory “is that human behavior is determined by events that
have gone before. It’s a highly deterministic theory of psychology that says if you experience certain things in the past, then it’s possible to predict or to reconstruct the reason behind why, subsequently, certain types of behavior patterns, thoughts, feelings, fantasies occur.

“In this sense, it is difficult, if you accept the psychoanalytic framework, to assess responsibility because in, for example, a matter of breaking the law, the analyst will be able to give an explanation as to why this particular behavior occurred, based on a reconstruction of events, interactions that particular individual had in the past. The law is based on the concept that each of us has a free will. And therefore we are responsible for our behavior in a sense, irrespective of what has gone before.

“You therefore have an inherent conflict between a determinant particular psychology that seems to explain everything on the face of one’s earlier development, in conflict with a legal system that holds everyone responsible in demonstrating a free will. There’s therefore this inherent conflict between the two positions.

“Legally, the only one who had been allowed to escape the judgment of responsibility . . . is when such an extreme situation arises that questions about one’s ability to form an intent to commit a crime are raised.”

Kunkle, on direct examination, referred to Motta’s opening statement and “his desire that the defendant would be put in some mental institution for the rest of his life . . . is it possible to guarantee a person found not guilty by reason of insanity, and then committed to a mental hospital, Department of Mental Health in Illinois, will remain there for the rest of his life?”

“Absolutely impossible,” Cavanaugh said. “. . . We find it very difficult to keep people in hospitals who in fact need to be there because of a concern, which I can understand, that to hospitalize is a deprivation of civil rights. . . .”

Motta and Amirante were objecting, but John knew that it was all over right there. Kunkle was smirking up at Dr. Idiot, who was sitting there like he hadn’t just dropped “the biggest bomb of the trial.”

On cross by Motta, Cavanaugh restated his position. John Gacy “would not meet the state’s involuntary-commitment standards,” Dr. Idiot said.

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*
*

John’s letter to Judge Garippo, written in haste and rage, read, in part, “I . . . ask for a mistrial, as never before has this court allowed a professional witness plant a seed in the Jury head like it was done yesterday.

“I think that you can give them instructions until you’re blue in the face and you won’t take that out of their heads.

“When Cavanaugh said, ‘John Gacy would not qualify for commitment to a mental institution and would have to be set free if he were found not guilty by reason of insanity.’

“As you know, other than so-called statements made by me, and given in a self-serving manner by officers for the prosecution, there is only evidence that I owned the house that was used for the bodies, their safekeeping.

“Until something is done to correct this injustice, I will no longer have anything to do with my attorneys. And I am taking back my word in regards to not saying anything in the courtroom. The prosecution continued to tries to make me mad while the trial is going on with the taking of my PDM Contractor labels and putting them all over the place. That’s receiving of stolen properties. And yesterday Greg Bedoe came up to me in open court and told me I should stop smiling, and swore at me, I don’t have to take that. . . .”

Garippo called John forward. “Are there any tactics your attorneys are using that you don’t agree with?” he asked.

“I was against the insanity defense from the beginning,” John said for the record.

Tobias Brocher, a psychiatrist associated with the Menninger Foundation, testifying for the defense, said he diagnosed John as a borderline personality tending toward schizophrenia.

Dr. Helen Morrison, a psychiatrist in private practice and the editor of
Handbook of Forensic Psychiatry,
said John suffered from a “mixed psychosis or an atypical psychosis.” She talked about splitting and projective identification, all the Rappaport stuff. Jack Hanley, according to Dr. Morrison, was “the policeman, the investigator, the big man, the man who could take care of all sorts of things. He was a protector against . . . inner disorganization. . . . He was a safety mechanism.” Hanley was not an alternate personality, however. “That’s too advanced.”

In cross, Egan asked Morrison if she thought “John Gacy
would have killed Robert Piest if there was a uniformed police officer in the home with him at the time.”

“Yes, I do,” Morrison said.

John felt like screaming at Egan and Kunkle and the jury and all the goddamn families. “There was a police officer there, you assholes! Jack Hanley was there!"

The prosecution brought in Dr. Jan Fawcett, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at St. Luke’s, who said he disagreed with the defense docs and that John was not suffering from a mental disease. Big surprise. Blah, blah. Doctor days.

The prosecution closed by saying John Gacy was evil.

“These murders,” Terry Sullivan said, “were carefully planned, they were calculated, and they were carefully covered up. Seldom if ever has anyone been so cold, so calculating, so cunning over such a long period of time as John Gacy.”

The defense said he was insane.

John Gacy “tried so hard when he was a little kid,” Amirante said. “He tried so hard to be good. But he was caged in his own flesh. He was eaten up by his raging illness.”

March 12, 1980:

The jury returned its verdict in less than two hours.

“Gacy Found Guilty,” the headlines read. “Jury Rejects Insanity Plea.”

March 13, 1980:

They brought back the sentence in two hours, fifteen minutes. “We, the jury, unanimously conclude that the court shall sentence the defendant, John Wayne Gacy, to death.”

There was applause in the courtroom, most of it coming from the area where the families had been sitting for the past six weeks.

“I hope he burns in hell,” one mother said.

CHAPTER 29

THEY PUT HIM IN
the condemned unit at Menard Correctional Center. Condemned prisoner N00921, awaiting execution, worked on his appeal. He was looking hard at the first search warrant. If the high court threw that one out, they’d have to suppress the second search, the one where they found the bodies. No bodies, no evidence. No evidence, no conviction. “It’s the theory of fruit from a poisoned tree,” John Gacy explained after his conviction. “The first warrant is poisoned. All the fruit they got from that is poisoned.” On top of all that inadmissible evidence—all those bodies—there were dozens of reversible errors in his trial. He hadn’t even agreed with the insanity plea. His objection is right there, in the trial transcript. And no way those postarrest statements had been voluntary. His lawyers had been incompetent.

It was intricate work, thinking about the appeal. John’s fellow convicts on the hill, death row, or in the pit, general population, didn’t help. The prison administrators “just bend over backwards to please these guys if they’re black. When we had all-white officers, this place was run real tight. Now all they ask for is minority officers. They got ‘em coming in drunk, coming in selling pills, selling grass. They’re selling sunglasses.”

What bothers John the most is “the head honchos of the black ones. There’s about three or four that lead them. Everything to them is racist. And they say they want to get me Like I’m the one who invented the death penalty. Like if they get rid of me, there’ll be no more death penalty. I said to one, I says, ‘Don’t take kindness for weakness. You’re
wrong. Just cuz I don’t want to fight doesn’t mean I won’t. You’re talking to John Gacy now. You don’t want to talk to the other side.’ “

Gacy said, “I remember them all. I remember all thirty-three of them.”

He said, “I’m the only one who knows everything.” That’s to the Old Man’s credit. Say what you want, John Stanley taught his son something about the world. Life is a contest of wills, of determination and intelligence. The other guy is always bent on outsmarting you. The docs were like that, smart, and John knew they were digging for the root of something they thought grew deep in soul, some dark flower. They were looking to outsmart him with tests, with inkblots, with his own drawings. But John Gacy is not dumb and stupid: he knew that all the psychiatrists—the defense docs included—were actually “witnesses for the state.” He didn’t tell them everything. He held some things back: he tended the dark flower on his own. There were still some secrets, nice little secrets, and all the smart lawyers and docs and cops would never know. It made John feel good, keeping his secrets. But then, secrets aren’t much good unless someone, somewhere knows how you outsmarted them all.

Just like when they searched the house and found the freezer out back, some idiot figured the meat John always bought in bulk might actually be body parts. He could just see these assholes unwrapping a side of pork and waiting around for it to thaw, feeling a little sick to their stomachs.

So they thawed out his whole freezer and never looked twice at the sections of garden hose hanging in the garage. Never figured out that John had a nice little hobby going. “I took a few of them out there,” John said once. “Put them on the table and tried embalming them.”

It was fascinating, the embalming process, and John had watched it often enough at the mortuary in Las Vegas, where he had once worked. The thing about the bodies, it was okay: they were dead, they didn’t care, you could do anything to them. It was like science.

Even when revealing his secrets, John stressed the idea that death and sex had come together in his mind through a series of divine “accidents,” acts of God almost. Just like he bad been fighting his urges—feelings of tenderness toward
his male friends—all of his teenage years. It was a courageous fight, and he had been strong.

Every day he asked himself, “Why was it in me?” Was it something God gave him to overcome, like the trials of Job? Those desires: he’d never done anything to deserve them. He always wondered, when he was young, if people could see it in him. The Old Man could, John knew.

John Stanley had this piercing expression, a look like he could see through his son: see even beyond the urges and night fantasies, see right through to something even darker. The Old Man could look directly into John’s soul, and what he saw there were slop and mud and excrement. John knew it, just by the Old Man’s expression. When John Stanley looked at him, John felt “transparent.” So he had to live with that, and it probably had something to do with the first “accident.”

It had happened in Las Vegas, when John “ran away from home” at the age of twenty. In the mortuary, free of the Old Man for the first time in his life, John could “experiment.” Maybe just do it once. Get it out of his system. See what it was like. “They were just dead things,” John said, “they couldn’t tell anybody.”

And that might have been it. Just once, twice. But then they brought in some kid—a young boy, seventeen or eighteen—and John couldn’t believe it: the dead boy had an erection. Forensic pathologists will tell you certain types of back injuries cause a lingering erection in death. The phenomenon is extremely rare, but the body John remembers did have an erection. Was that John’s fault? That God gave him this?

It was late at the mortuary. Lights out: nobody else there. An open coffin, silver-gray with a white interior. John got inside and arranged himself atop the dead boy.

What if he were the dead one? How would that feel? John wrestled with the body until it was on top of him. He lay there for a moment, feeling the weight of death press down on him and listening to the thudding of his bad heart. Had it skipped a beat?

He could feel his diseased heart swelling inside his chest. He didn’t know, for a moment, whether death, like a gift of love, was coming to him as he lay gasping in the white interior of that silver-gray coffin.

There was a sudden terror so sublime John couldn’t
comprehend it. He was up and out of the coffin then, slapping at his body as if it were covered with crawling, slimy things. He could hear himself, hear the half-choked screams of revulsion and fear. At the same time—this was part of the horror—John knew there was nothing on him at all. It was his body that was repulsive. Himself.