John Wayne Gacy (13 page)

I looked at my own son and thought of the Piest family. What were those poor parents going through right now? My son was ill, but he was right there beside me, and he was receiving the constant care that he needed. What would it be like to not know where he was, not know whether he was alive or dead? I couldn’t fathom it. The thought of it made me shudder.

I had almost dozed off when Mary walked in with a nurse.

“How’s he doing?” she whispered.

“At least he is sleeping,” I said. I smiled at the nurse.

“Did you get any sleep?” My wife was concerned. She was looking in my eyes. I could see it.

“Some,” I lied.

“Well, you can go. Try to lay down before you go to the office.” “I will,” I lied again.

I kissed my son. I kissed my wife, and I left the hospital, ready to do battle. The sun was just peaking over the blue water of Lake Michigan nine miles to the east. It was dawn on the first full day of my representation of Mr. John Wayne Gacy. I was walking alone through the parking lot to my car, and I realized just how alone in the world I really was. If it was true that Gacy had done what they thought he did, then he was not going to have anyone on his side. I would be criticized for defending him. But I would be his one and only voice. I was just one guy. I felt the endless sprawl of the
great city of Chicago all around me. I was a dot. I felt the miles of corn and the quaint little towns out there in the vast state of Illinois. I was a speck. I knew that the world would find it hard to appreciate my position. Perhaps many would not understand. That was OK with me, though. I knew my job. I had a job to do, and I knew what it was.

If the People of the State of Illinois thought that my client was guilty of these horrible charges, these accusations, then they were just going to have to damned well prove it.

8

I
REMEMBER SAYING IT
when we were walking out of my office. I did say it. I had no way of knowing, however, that he was going to take me quite so literally. I said it, though, so I’m to blame. I said, “John, call me anytime.”

From that day forward, I talked to John Gacy more than I talked to my wife.

I needed to find out everything that I could about the investigation of my client. I talked to John about Leroy Stevens. Stevens had represented Mr. Gacy’s corporation, PDM Contractors. He had also worked with John on some relatively minor scrapes that John had gotten himself into.

I determined that Mr. Stevens was on a weekend hunting trip, and I would have to wait until Monday to speak to him.

I talked to everyone I could think of that might have information about the case. One thing that became clear as a result of this preliminary investigation: Elements of the press were becoming interested in the story. One of the suburban papers, the
Daily Herald
, was running stories about Rob Piest as a missing person. They had also gotten wind of the Gacy angle. Although the
Herald
was a strong publication, it had regional editions that were specific to certain segments of Chicagoland, referring to the greater Chicago metropolitan
area. Many of the stories were quite local in nature. Not every story that was reported in the south suburbs was reported in the north suburbs. Therefore, the story had not yet spread to all of their editions.

However, I also determined that a reporter from Chicago’s ABC affiliate, Channel 7 News, Sylvia Cesneros, had been speaking with Terry Sullivan about the case. Chicago is the third largest television market in the United States. If the press grabs hold of a story and slants it a certain way, the public believes it. If Channel 7 reported the story and named John Wayne Gacy as the primary suspect in a case concerning a missing teenager in the Chicago suburbs, it could then be reported nationally. If that happened, my client’s thriving construction business would be history, and it would not matter one whit if he did it or not. Perception has a funny way of becoming fact in our society.

I began to research the law regarding temporary restraining orders and police harassment. If a story concerning the harassment of a citizen by the police was reported instead of one about a missing teen, that could save my client’s business.

The Des Plaines police, however, together with the entire prosecutorial arm of the State of Illinois, had other ideas.

The items found as a result of the execution of the first search warrant of Mr. Gacy’s home were bearing fruit, as were other items of information that the investigation had unearthed. The investigation of one Robert Jerome Piest, a missing teen from Des Plaines, Illinois, was about to take on a life of its own; and the participants in that investigation would never be the same again.

A young man named Jeffrey D. Rignall had reported an incident that allegedly occurred on Chicago’s Near North Side. Mr. Rignall was a resident of the state of Florida, but he claimed that he was visiting a friend here in Chicago. He said that he was walking alone at approximately 1:30 a.m. on March 22, 1978, when he was picked up by a man in a black Oldsmobile with spotlights on it. He and the driver drove around the side streets in the Lincoln Park neighborhood and shared a joint.

According to Mr. Rignall, when the marijuana was gone, the driver suddenly covered Rignall’s mouth and nose with a rag that was soaked with a substance that caused him to pass out. When he awoke at 4:30 a.m., he was lying behind a statue in Lincoln Park with burns and bruises to his face and pain and bleeding from his rectum. He felt that he had been raped, although he had no recollection of the experience.

Rignall actually went so far as to take matters into his own hands. He rented a car and cruised the area where the incident took place. He finally saw the car that he was sure he had gotten into that night. It was a black 1979 Oldsmobile with spotlights on its doors, bearing the license plate number PDM 42.

John Wayne Gacy was arrested for battery four months later on July 15, 1978. The case was still pending in court.

During the first search of the Gacy house, the team recovered a Main West Highschool class ring with the initials JAS engraved on it. By coincidence, Main West Highschool was where Rob Piest was a student, and that intrigued the hell out of the boys in Des Plaines. Was there a connection between the Piest boy and the owner of that ring? John Wayne Gacy had no children living with him in the house, nor had he ever had a child or relative that attended Main West Highschool. Where the hell did the ring come from?

Through diligent detective work (actually, it was a process of elimination—which students had the initials JAS and where were they) it was discovered that the ring belonged to a student named John Szyc.

A quick investigation into the whereabouts of Mr. Szyc determined that John Szyc was last seen on January 20, 1977; he was another missing person.

Now there were two missing young men connected to Gacy and one that claimed that Mr. Gacy had raped him. What had started out as a simple missing person case was expanding into something much more sinister.

Then Michael Rossi called the Des Plaines Police Department. He had been interviewed as part of the investigation, and it seems that he decided to cooperate more fully. Maybe he talked to a lawyer, or maybe he talked to his wife—who knows? However, he had information that made your skin crawl.

Gregory Godzik, seventeen years old when he disappeared, was last seen December 12, 1976. Young Mr. Godzik once worked for John Gacy.

Finally, and perhaps the most frightening of all, James Mazzara who once worked for Mr. Gacy, was found floating facedown in the Des Plaines River approximately seventy miles southwest of the city of Chicago.

When the investigators talked to Mr. Gacy’s former wife, Carol, she told them that a person that previously worked for John, a person whom she always liked, might be someone with information for them. The young man’s name was John Butkovitch. Only problem—nobody had seen him in quite some time. When asked, Gacy had said that Butkovitch had left town.

The eerie, frightening, nagging, undeniable truth was this: If you were a young man and you had a connection to John Wayne Gacy, chances were that you might turn up missing in short order. The investigation had turned from a search for an individual, a single missing person, to a full-on murder investigation centered on several cold-case files from all over Cook County. However, the team remained tight-lipped about what they knew because they did not want to tip off Gacy before they had the necessary evidence to arrest him. They also did not want me to go running into court and get a restraining order that could cripple the investigation. They did not want this story to explode in the press or in some other way get back to Gacy, because they didn’t want him to flee the jurisdiction. But the names Piest, Rignall, Szyc, Godzik, Butkovitch, and especially Mazzara began to haunt the dreams of each and every member of the investigation team.

9

W
HEN THE POLICE
investigate a crime or pick over a crime scene, they never know which tiny piece of evidence will be the piece that finally tips the scales, that cinches it once and for all for the prosecution and convicts the defendant. So they bag everything. They try to leave no stone unturned, no speck or hair or fiber uncollected. Such was the case with the execution of the search warrant on Gacy’s home.

The circumstantial evidence against John Wayne Gacy was mounting. Gacy had a past that involved untoward advances on a young boy. Missing employees and others with complaints connected to Mr. Gacy were turning up like bad pennies. Claims that Mr. Gacy had committed violence against others, sometimes with a sexual intent, had come to light. This information was quite sufficient for the team investigating him. They knew that they had the right guy. Unfortunately, no item of evidence that had been discovered so far that tied Mr. Gacy to Rob Piest. And after all, at present, this was a missing person investigation. The team was supposed to be finding out what happened to Rob.

During the search of Gacy’s home, Lieutenant Kozenczak noticed a small piece of paper sticking out of the kitchen garbage bag. It was orange in color and had a serrated or perforated edge
where it had been torn from the other side of a form. It was a receipt for photo development. When you drop off film to have it developed, you get a receipt. It was that kind of receipt, and it had a number on it, 36119, along with the name and address of Nisson Pharmacy stamped on it. Naturally, this begged the question: Did Gacy have his pictures developed at Nisson Pharmacy, a store that was nearly ten miles from his house?

That was an interesting question, because it seemed unlikely that anyone would travel that far just to have pictures developed. There were places to have pictures developed on nearly every corner, weren’t there? Maybe Gacy simply wanted to do business with a potential customer of his. One hand washes the other and all that. But if not, if that receipt was not Gacy’s, then whose was it? It had certainly been recently discarded. It was lying on top of all of the other trash.

Other questions plagued the nights of every person involved with this case.

Many, many questions, very little time. When Terry Sullivan heard me say that I was considering, or, more precisely, that I was recommending a petition for a TRO, he knew that he had a very specific time configuration. A TRO would seriously gum up the works for his investigation. Not only would he and his men lose the ability to follow Mr. Gacy wherever he went, it would, in some sense, shift the burden to the State to show that they were not harassing Gacy. Complaints for search warrants might come under a bit more scrutiny. The filing of any document or petition in court is by definition a public record, as are the hearings that flow from the filings. Once I filed documents in court, the press could discover all this information and report on his every move. Witnesses could be put on notice that they didn’t necessarily have to talk to his investigators. Those witnesses might run out and get their own pain-in-the-ass attorneys. Nothing worse than a bunch of goddamn defense lawyers milling about, looking over
your shoulder. Terry turned the intensity of the investigation up to eleven.

Members of the investigation team were running themselves ragged. Long hours and total dedication to what had become a cause, a mind-set among the team; this was the norm. Wives and children temporarily lost Dad. Where was Dad? He was working. When would he be home? When the case he was working on was finally over!

For the officers that had no families at home, the investigation became pretty much 24-7. They slept when they could. They would get a good night’s sleep when this creep was behind bars.

Investigators headed out in every direction to chase leads.

Officer Adams went with an Officer Kautz to speak to the parents of John Szyc. They spoke to Mrs. Richard Szyc, his mom. She told them her son was last seen January 20, 1977, almost two years prior. She explained that she and her husband had searched for their son to no avail. They had gone to his apartment and found that it was undisturbed, that no foul play was evident; but it was also clear to them that their son had no plans to leave town. The apartment had all of his things in it. There were even tax forms, which were half completed, laid out on a table. John was in the middle of filing his taxes for the year 1976. That was certainly not indicative of a person planning to leave town.

The Szycs paid the rent for the month of February on their son’s apartment and left things as they were for their son, believing that he would return.

However, they were told by the Chicago police officers that were assigned to the case that John had been seen since January at various places. These “spottings” are common in missing person cases. This erroneous information that had turned up during the Chicago police investigation did two things: It gave the Szycs hope. They believed that John was somewhere and would someday be in touch. It also caused the investigation of John Szyc’s disappearance
to be dropped to a very low priority. Why would the police keep looking for a person that was alive but obviously did not want to be found?