Criminal Minds (13 page)

During two concurrent life sentences in prison, Schaefer developed a reputation as a scammer and a snitch. His narcissism caught up with him when someone slit his throat and stabbed him forty-two times with a prison shank. Various prisoners were suspected of silencing Schaefer for good, including Ottis Toole, but two-time murderer Victor Rivera was convicted, earning an extra fifty-three years in prison in addition to the life-plus-twenty he was already serving.

JUST AS MOST SERIAL
killers murder within their own race, killers driven by sexual compulsion tend to murder within their own orientation. Heterosexuals like Ed Kemper and Gerard Schaefer kill females, bisexuals like Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole are not so particular—although depending on which version of Lucas’s one believes, he might have killed only three people, all female—and male homosexuals kill men.

 

 

THE CHAMPION
of male-oriented sexual predators is Chicago’s John Wayne Gacy Jr., the Killer Clown. Gacy, one of the most prolific U.S. serial killers, rates passing mentions in a couple of episodes of
Criminal Minds
: “Natural Born Killer” (108) and “The Angel Maker” (402).

Gacy was a man of many facets and seemingly many personalities. He was a successful businessman running a contracting company called PDM Contractors. He was active in local Democratic politics. He was appointed to city office, marched in parades, and was photographed with First Lady Rosalynn Carter. As Pogo the Clown, he made appearances at hospitals and children’s parties. He was a family man who threw huge bashes for the neighbors.

But a deep, dark river flowed beneath that outgoing surface, and the disappearance of fifteen-year-old Robert Piest finally exposed it. Piest worked at the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois. When his mother, Elizabeth, came to drive him home from work on her birthday, December 11, 1978, he said he needed to talk to a man in the parking lot about a summer job. He went outside and never returned.

Des Plaines Chief of Detectives Joe Kozenczak knew Piest. He didn’t think Piest was the kind of kid who would just run off, so he launched an investigation. At the drugstore, he learned that local contractor John Wayne Gacy had been in the store that day. When Gacy denied knowing Piest, Kozenczak said he’d been seen talking to the boy in the parking lot. Gacy amended his tale, admitting that he might have run into Piest out there. Kozenczak sensed that Gacy was lying and got a search warrant for his house.

The first search was superficial. Some clothing that was obviously far too small for the heavyset Gacy turned up, as did a receipt for a roll of film from the drugstore at which Piest worked, in the name of a third party. The film belonged to a friend of Piest’s, to whom he had lent his jacket; when she gave the jacket back, the receipt for the film had still been in a pocket. Other items were found that put Gacy in a suspicious light: driver’s licenses and a class ring that belonged to other people, marijuana and Valium, gay pornography, handcuffs and other sex toys, a pistol, and more. But it didn’t amount to much in terms of evidence.

Without having enough evidence to arrest Gacy, Kozenczak put him under close surveillance and interviewed his friends and neighbors. Gacy filed a lawsuit charging police harassment.

Kozenczak finally got his hands on paperwork showing that Gacy had been sentenced to ten years in jail for sodomizing an adolescent boy in Iowa in 1968. Gacy had served only eighteen months of the sentence. In 1972, there had been another complaint: a teenager had accused Gacy of picking him up in an area where homosexuals hung out, taking him home, and trying to hurt him. Gacy was charged with aggravated battery and reckless conduct. The young man didn’t appear in court, and the charges were dropped.

More information surfaced to support charging Gacy in the Piest case. Jeffrey Rignall—whom Gacy had chloroformed and raped, then dropped off in Chicago—had reported his assault and was able to identify his attacker. Rignall waited near a freeway exit that he half remembered from his drugged state during his car ride with Gacy, and he finally spotted his assailant’s car. He followed Gacy home and reported his address to the police. The investigators were running down the few leads they had found in Gacy’s house, and they identified the class ring as having belonged to John Szyc, a teenager who had disappeared the previous year.

Kozenczak got a more extensive search warrant and returned to Gacy’s home. Gacy once again denied having anything to do with Robert Piest’s disappearance, but he claimed that he’d had to kill one of his homosexual lovers in self-defense. He said the body was buried under the concrete floor in his garage, and he used spray paint to mark the spot.

Before the authorities dug, they checked out the crawl space under the house, where they found a strange mound with a body underneath. The Cook County Medical Examiner came out and sniffed the air. He smelled death and told them to keep digging. By the time the search was finished, nothing remained of the house but the outside walls and the roof.

In custody, Gacy talked freely. He had raped and killed thirty-three young men between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, beginning in 1972. Twenty-seven of them were buried under the house; the rest he threw into the Des Plaines River because he ran out of room. Although he was forthcoming at first, his attorney advised him to clam up.

In “Seven Seconds,” the BAU team, including Garcia, J.J., Hotchner, Prentiss, and Reid, helps to locate the abductor of a child at a mall.

Gacy’s usual approach was to pick up a young man in a gay cruising area in downtown Chicago and ask him over to his house. At other times he invited one of his own employees to come home with him. He offered the young man liquor and dope and brought out some heterosexual pornography. Soon he switched to gay porn. At some point he would offer to show the boy a handcuff or rope trick, and he would use this to confine the boy before the victim realized that what was happening was not just play. Once the victim was immobilized, Gacy would render him unconscious with chloroform and sodomize him. His preferred murder method was to wrap a rope around the victim’s neck and twist it with a stick, often while quoting the Bible. He also shoved underwear, socks, or paper towels down the victim’s throat to make sure that he didn’t vomit and thus leave traces of bodily fluids in Gacy’s house.

Once Gacy had put the bodies in the crawl space, he buried them and covered them with lime to aid decomposition. It didn’t entirely kill the odor, however, which was often mentioned by his guests.

Gacy’s father was an abusive alcoholic. When Gacy was eleven years old, a swing hit his head, forming a blood clot that gave him occasional blackouts until he had it treated at age sixteen. He claimed to have been molested as a boy, first by a teenage girl and later by a male contractor. At seventeen, he had a heart ailment of some kind.

Shortly after Gacy’s first marriage, he was given a job managing one of his wife’s family’s Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa. It was in that job that his homosexuality started to become an issue; he hit on young employees and eventually went to jail for sodomy. His marriage crumbled, and while he was incarcerated, his father died of cirrhosis. After Gacy’s parole in 1970, he returned to Chicago and lived with his mother until he could afford to buy his own house.

Gacy’s first known murder occurred on January 3, 1972, when he stabbed a young man he had picked up at a bus station.

In June 1972, Gacy married again. His new wife and her two daughters moved into the house with him—never knowing that there was a permanent lodger under the floor.

He killed again in 1975, the same year that PDM Contractors got off the ground. His marriage began to suffer from his odd hours, his seemingly newfound obsession with gay pornography, and his utter lack of interest in sex with his wife. He told her that he preferred sex with boys to sex with women, so they divorced in 1976.

Then he stepped up the pace of his killing. Between April and October of that year, he murdered at least eight young men. Eight more were killed in 1977. There may have been additional murders; he never confessed to any beyond those whose bodies were found, but by 1978 the crawl space was full.

After Gacy was arrested and immediately confessed, his story changed a number of times. He tried to claim insanity. He tried to claim that the victims had suffered accidental deaths while engaging in erotic asphyxia. He insisted that although he had some knowledge of five of the deaths and may have been complicit in two, the real killers were other people. He said that his house was a combination home and business office, with people coming and going all the time. He blamed alcohol and drugs.

In the end, the jury bought none of his stories. It took barely two hours to reach a guilty verdict, and Gacy was sentenced to death.

During his time on death row, Gacy gave interviews, wrote thousands of letters, and created some oil paintings—many with grisly themes, like fellow serial killers (although he hated being lumped in with them, he didn’t mind capitalizing on their likenesses). He denied any culpability for his crimes and showed no remorse for his victims. The narcissistic Gacy had an enormous ego and a conviction that the world revolved around him. Society’s rules and laws applied only to other people. He used his garrulous personality as a lethal weapon, literally talking his victims into a position where they had no chance to survive.

Shortly after midnight on May 10, 1994, Gacy was executed by lethal injection. His last words were entirely in character: “Kiss my ass.”

 

 

BOB BERDELLA
is one of the subjects of David Rossi’s book
Deviance: The Secret Desires of Sadistic Serial Killers
. The book, of course, isn’t real, but Berdella was—real and dangerous, hence his nickname, the Kansas City Butcher.

The police were tipped off to Berdella in the spring of 1988. This was actually the second time that Berdella had come to their attention; he had been questioned earlier in connection with a young man who had disappeared, but that investigation never went anywhere. The tip in 1988 came from Christopher Bryson, who had climbed out of a window of Berdella’s Kansas City, Missouri, house and run down the street wearing nothing but a dog collar. When the police caught up to him, Bryson told a terrifying tale of torture. Berdella had picked Bryson up in a neighborhood where male prostitutes worked, brought him home, and then hit him over the head. Once Bryson was unconscious, Berdella bound him, drugged him, and began his “experimentation.”

Berdella kept precise notes and a photographic record of every young man he treated in this way—before Bryson, however, none had survived the treatment. Berdella used to invite men to his home only for sex, and they had not been mistreated. But once Berdella decided to torture and kill, there was no turning back.

When the police performed a thorough search of his home, what they found astonished them. The implements of torture that Bryson had described were in plain sight. They also found audiotapes, notebooks and photographs detailing Berdella’s abuse of his victims (including Bryson), a human skull, teeth, and a bag full of human vertebrae. Digging in the backyard, they turned up another head, with flesh and hair still attached. Berdella admitted to cutting up bodies with knives and a chain saw, putting the body parts in plastic bags, and leaving them out with his trash. Most of his victims were never found.