John Wayne Gacy (17 page)

The rambling nature of his narrative was hard to follow. He jumped from subject to subject. However, we could not stop listening.

“We had sex that night … till dawn, me and Carol. In fact, she got pregnant from that night. She got pregnant, but then she had a miscarriage from that night. So then I took her home. I took her home at, like, at seven in the morning.”

“What year are we talking about, John? How long ago was this?” I interjected.

“Oh … sorry … this was 1972, or maybe ’74, no … the very first days of 1972. I remember cuz somebody died. Somebody died in my family. I can’t remember who … but it had to have been on my father’s side. It had to have been a relative of my dad because the funeral home was DeBrecht on Western Avenue. DeBrecht was for my dad’s family. My dad’s side uses that funeral home. I believe I left Carol at seven in the morning … this is Saturday morning, so … Friday was New Year’s Eve, right? That’s right, I think. So,
I go to the funeral … I mean the wake, and you always go back to someone’s house for dinner. I had to have done that. I would say that I did do that. I don’t remember everything, but I am sure that I was drinking at someone’s house, some relative’s house; they were all playing cards and drinking. Everybody always drinks a lot in that crowd, and they play cards for money, lots of money. After a while, the arguments start. This is a routine … it happens every time. I don’t like to argue, so I say I’m gonna go. And I go. I leave my relative’s house, and I decide to take a drive.

“It was twelve or one in the morning when I left. I was wandering around, driving around, and I went downtown. I was right in the Loop, right downtown. I was driving on Clark Street, and I parked on Clark down by the Greyhound bus station. I was down by the Greyhound bus station, and I run into this guy. And I’m trying to fill this in, trying to remember. It was a long time ago, and I was drinking that night; but in my head I can remember talking to this guy. I don’t know his name. I never did, never asked.

“I guess I just said hi to him … started talking to him. I don’t know the conversation verbatim. It’s a little foggy … the memory. But I remember that he was saying he had time to kill … he said he had time to kill. He said he had missed a bus and he was stuck in town … or maybe he was laid over, but he had to kill time until noon … that would be noon the next afternoon … so … like … ten or eleven hours; and he was just fuckin’ around, nothin’ to do till then.”

“What did he look like?” I asked, for no apparent reason. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This guy was telling us about his first murder, the first of many. I was, I hate to admit, enthralled. It was like having a book read to you or watching a movie. It didn’t seem real.

“I think about nineteen or twenty years old, blond headed. He had, I think, Levi’s on, and uh, some sort of uh, uh … lumberjack … jacket-type thing and uh, uh, uh, large belt buckle on his pants.
His jacket or shirt was blue and white checks or green and white … I can’t recall. Blond hair, short haircut, blue eyes, and like a flannel shirt … It’s all kinda foggy, but I remember … I remember.

“He said he had time to kill. I said something about how I was just screwing around, just screwing around. And said, if you want a ride … you can ride with me, you can just ride around with me. And he said that would be cool.

“So, we were just riding around, rode down State Street. There were Christmas decorations. The State Street lights … all beautiful and shit. Just riding … and … I started the conversation. I said to him … I asked if he liked sex or something … if he had ever gotten blown or that … like, had a blowjob. And, I talked about sex stuff. I asked if he had ever gotten blown by a guy. He didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with that.

“He said he was hungry … hungry. We went to my house. We went out the Kennedy Expressway towards my house. And we went to my house. I said I’d make him some food. I made him some sausage. We had some drinks. We sat around eating and having a couple of drinks. This was sometime around … I’d say two in the morning.”

“We went into the back bedroom. This was the one with the green carpeting, the one in the rear, not the present one, not the master bedroom with the red carpeting. This was the one with the green carpet and the twin beds. That was my room at that time. Plus, if my mom ever came home, then we would just hop in different beds … you know … we went back there, and we got into oral sex … or whatever. You know … ah … we blew each other, gave each other blowjobs.”

I had to ask, don’t know why, but I had to ask. “John, this was voluntary on both of your parts? He wanted to do this?”

“Fuck yeah! Fuck yes! He wasn’t any less into it than I was. He had done it before … plenty. You can tell. I can tell. Besides, you really can’t force someone to suck your dick, can you? Not really.
Maybe with a gun or something, but even then … think about it … they might … they could bite your fuckin’ dick off, right? Clean off! In one quick bite! Like a fuckin’ hot dog. Would you risk that? Who would risk that? You’d have to want a blowjob pretty fuckin’ bad to risk that. I never forced anyone to have sex with me. Why would you? Why? What fun is that? Ya know? Who wants that shit? No fun. No fun.

“So anyway, then we fall asleep. Went to sleep. He was in one bed by then and me in the other. Then I wake up, and he has a knife. He’s coming at me with a knife!”

“Wait a minute. He was coming at you … with a knife?” This didn’t sound like a murder to me. I looked at Stevens. He didn’t look like he thought it was a murder either. “What happened next?” I added.

“He tried to stab me. He fuckin’ was trying to stab me!”

“Where did he get the knife?” I asked.

“From the kitchen. It was the knife I was cutting the sausage with—my knife, my kitchen knife. It was lying on the counter in the kitchen. He was just wearing his jeans, but no shirt, no socks, nothin’ else, just pants. And he was coming at me. He was right on top of me. You know … arm raised in the air, knife clutched in his hand … he was trying to stab me. So, I grabbed at him, grabbed his wrist and wrestled him, pushed him off me. I startled him, surprised him, you know. He didn’t think I was going to wake up. I was lucky I did cuz I’d be dead otherwise. He was some kind of hustler. Probably done that hundreds of times before, you know, go with a guy in a strange town, go have sex with him, wait for him to fall asleep … kill him. Whatever, I don’t know. We didn’t fight or anything. We had sex and fell asleep. So, this was some kind of thing of his. There was no reason for it. He was some kind of sleazy, greedy hustler. I wrestled him out of that room.

“I flew out of bed and knocked him off his feet. We fought and wrestled out of the room and all the way into the front bedroom, and uh … uh … then … uh, I think that’s when I, uh … that’s
when I got stabbed, cuz that’s what made me mad, cuz that’s when I got the knife … took the knife from him and stabbed the fucker in his chest four or five times. I was bleeding on him, and he was bleeding, and I was worried that he was going to bleed all over my rug. That really made me mad. The son of a bitch was going to get blood all over my rug! But then I realized we had wrestled into the room with the wood floors, so it wasn’t so bad. I could clean that.”

John pushed his sleeve up and showed us a nasty scar on his arm.

“See this … you see that fucking scar? That’s where he stabbed me or cut me … or whatever. That’s what made me mad … the fuckin’ guy was going to kill me. But, then he started … you know, after I got on top of him … I had my knees in his chest, and I was struggling to get the knife from him … that’s when he started saying that he was sorry, that he really wasn’t going to hurt me. That he didn’t mean it. He didn’t mean it … didn’t fucking mean it … I was bleeding all over the guy from my arm. He said something like he didn’t mean it or something. Stupid fuck! Dumb and stupid. I just kept stabbin’ him till he stopped fighting. Then all you could hear was the, like, the gurgling of blood in his lungs or something, I don’t know. There was gurgling, a gurgling sound.

“So, now I’m scared shitless, right? I didn’t know what the hell to do. The first thing I went and did is I went into the bathroom, I think with the knife … yeah … cuz I washed the knife off and was washing my arm off, or was washing my arm and washing the knife, and I went and put the knife in the kitchen. Then I went back by him … uh … uh … I went back by where he was. I didn’t know what to do with him so …”

“What about calling the police, John? That is when you would have wanted to call the police, don’t you think?” I was dumbfounded at what I was hearing.

“I don’t know, Sam, I was scared. You know … I was scared cuz I had been in trouble before … you know … in prison before.

I thought I couldn’t call the police because of that … that whole thing. I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t know what to do. Then I see that we are right in front of the closet, where the trap … the trapdoor to the basement … the crawl space is … and I just opened the trapdoor and shoved him … I just threw him down there.”

“John! You acted in self-defense! Why the hell didn’t you just call the goddamn cops?” I couldn’t believe this.

“Sam, I don’t know, I don’t fuckin’ know. I was fresh out of prison. I was scared out of my mind. I just threw him down in the crawl space, and then I started, you know, uh, uh, I started collecting all of his stuff, picking up all of his clothes and stuff. That was … his clothes were still in the bedroom … on the floor in the bedroom and on the dresser, and his coat was in the living room—it was still in the living room. Now, I gotta pick up Carol later that day and take her to the wake. Sunday … she was going to go with me … you know … on the second day … the last day of the wake, and then the funeral is on Monday. I can’t have this fuckin’ guy in the middle of all this. I want him gone. I just don’t want to think about all that … you know? I can’t think about it. So, I clean up all his stuff … and he was gone. He was in the crawl space … but he was gone, right? I’ll worry about that later. I’ll worry about that later, ya know? So, I leave him down there, and I straighten up and get rid of his clothes. I found a locker key in his pants pocket … like from the Greyhound station. That was in his pocket. Plus, my arm is cut to shit. I didn’t know what to do. I really didn’t know what to do.

“So, then I do pick up Carol, and she sees this cut on my arm and tells me I might need stitches, and she wants to know how it happened … fuck … what a mess. So, I tell her … I told everyone I was cutting carpet, and, uh … uh … uh, I slashed it with one of those razor things, those razor knives … and that I cut it that way. We go to the wake, and then … after … we go to the hospital. We went to … the wake was on Western Avenue at DeBrecht, I said that … I told you that. So, we just drove down Western to St.
Elizabeth’s Hospital. We went down to the hospital and got the cut looked at. They put a butterfly stitch or a bandage. Then we went back to the wake. Also, my sister—my sister Joanne—said I should go to the hospital, and she’s a nurse … she’s a nurse, so, uh … uh … uh, her and Carol were both saying that I should go to the hospital, so we did, and then we came back to the wake.

“Then after the wake, we went out with my sister. We were out for dinner or something like that with my sister, and I … kinda like … well, I wasn’t thinking about that fucker in the crawl space. He was out of my mind … like … so we just went out to dinner with Carol and my sister Joanne.”

“You didn’t have any guilt, no remorse?” Obviously, this was not a normal person. I remember that as my assessment at the time. This guy needed help. He was not all there.

“No. I just … it just was completely blocked out. Did … did … didn’t think nothin’ of it—not at all. There was nothing. That was the same with the others too. I didn’t feel nothin’. Most of these assholes were hustlers, like that first guy. They killed themselves anyway. Most of them killed themselves. I’ll tell you. But after I got home from dinner with my sister and Carol, I … I … I was just, tired, you know. So, I went to bed, and in the morning I went down in that crawl and buried the guy, ya know, buried him down there. It wasn’t easy either … no way … cuz … cuz … cuz it’s really short down there. Like it’s about two and a half feet to the bottom of the floor joists … those big joists that run the length of the house. You have to chop with a spade and kind of dig with your hands, or what not. But I did it. I got it done. The ground was loose down there, and there was an odor because of the wet clay. There were four houses in that area, on our block, that had to have sump pumps due to the moisture. There was always an odor down there since we moved in. Four houses in a low spot on that block … we were one of the four. We never could completely get rid of that odor.

“I remember that stupid belt buckle, that big belt buckle. He was buried with his pants on and that big belt buckle. I never asked him his name, and if he ever said it, I never got it. I never knew it. Just a greedy, stupid hustler. I put him beyond the uh … uh, he was beyond the second supporting post … uh … uh … going east. I can show you. I can show you guys. I’ll show you everything. I know exactly where they all are. We can go over there.”

That was the last thing in the world that I wanted to do. I looked at Stevens. The look on his face was telling. I changed the subject. “So, John, I guess you are saying that Rob Piest is also dead. You said that, right?” We were all looking at one another. Gacy was not in good shape.

“You mean the kid in that picture. Yeah, yeah … he is. He is dead. He is in the river.”

After he said that, he went somewhere else in his mind.

“Carol moved in a month later … in February of 1972. She brought her fuckin’ mother with her, the bitch. I didn’t like her—not Carol … I liked Carol. I hated her fuckin’ mother, though. Plus, Carol had two kids … two little girls. We got married in July of that year, and my mom moved out because she didn’t think there should be two women running the house. Carol’s mother was supposed to move out in August, after her divorce. In fact, my mother wanted her to move in with her … my mom wanted Carol’s mother and her to move in together. But that never happened. That bitch stayed with us for a year. Well, in June … June 1973 … I had a stroke or somethin’… I almost died. Dr. Levy came out to the house … he was my doctor—he was my doctor all my life—and he was so pissed off because it was four in the morning and I was having this attack, or what not, and Carol’s mother never even got up out of bed. She just laid in the bed, the bitch. And that’s why I had the goddamn attack in the first place. Carol and I were arguing about her still being in the house. She had to go after that, and I had to kick her out. She had to be evicted … kicked out.”