John Wayne Gacy (18 page)

“But you were talking about that kid in the picture … the boy in that picture. He wanted a job. He wanted to work for me. He wanted to buy a Jeep. I really don’t know what happened there. That wasn’t like me. Normally, I would be out cruisin’ … you know, looking for someone to have sex with … late at night. I don’t know. That kid wanted a job. He said that he would do anything for money. He was all hopped up on buying this car … a Jeep or some shit. I thought he was hustling me. We went back to my house. It didn’t go well at all. He wasn’t a hustler … he was just a kid. He was just a kid. I really don’t know what happened there.

“After that first guy, the guy that I just told you about, the Greyhound guy, I got married—you know, pretty soon after that, I got married to Carol. She moved in and then we got married. I wasn’t with any guys after that for a long time, a long time, ya know. I had a wife and two little girls and a fuckin’ mother-in-law. It was like Grand fucking Central Station around there. I was working my ass off trying to build up the business and stuff—you know, trying to get jobs and doin’ jobs, working all over the city. Plus, I was volunteering for everything with the party, the Democratic Party in my neighborhood, and I started having my parties. Like, I would have these “yard parties.” But they were bigger than that. They were huge parties that politicians and everyone would come to. We would have hundreds of people, sometimes like four hundred people—four hundred people. And I had my self-made family … I called it self-made family. I had two beautiful little daughters, Tammy and April. They were Carol’s kids, you know, but I loved them too. They were like my kids too. In 1974, we had the Luau party, a party with a Luau theme, grass skirts, and shit like that—Hawaiian, ya know. People dressed up Hawaiian.

“In 1975, we had the Western barbecue party, and it was a big one. Hundreds of people came. But by then, Carol and I were fighting all the time. It was becoming clear that we would probably not stay together. Other good stuff was happening, though. The
business was good, and my political connections were better. I got on the county board. But I also got divorced. I had been having sex with guys for a pretty long time, and I had learned that it was pretty easy to pick up young boys in the city … like in Boystown area by Diversey and Broadway, also in Bughouse Square and in Uptown. These areas were good. Uptown had poor kids that needed money real bad, and Bughouse Square was full of hustlers that were there to sell their shit … sell themselves. Now, that didn’t make me no fag, though. I still had sex with Carol … sometimes … not that often … but we did till we started fightin’ all the time. I hated her mom … plus, I was never home. I worked ten, twelve, maybe fifteen hours, and then I would go downtown a lot … cruising around in the middle of the night. I drank a lot and smoked pot. Sometimes, I would bring those kids back to my garage. My garage was my private place. Carol rarely went out there. After she was gone, I could bring people home as much as I wanted to.

“Also, Carol was going off to stay with friends a lot, and once she went down to stay with my mom in Arkansas, after Ma broke her hip. So, she wasn’t there a lot … even before we got divorced. That’s when this thing happened … this thing I have to tell you.

“I had this kid working for me, John Butkovitch. Carol knew him. Little John, she called him. Cuz … you know, I was Big John … he was Little John. He was at the house all the time, all the time … playin’ with the kids, you know, over for dinner. Carol liked him. He was with me for about a year or so when we got into an argument over money. Money … ya know … the root of all fuckin’ evil. He said I owed him money. He said I owed him back pay, but I … I … I didn’t. I … I … I showed the kid where he owed me money. He owed me money. I didn’t owe him money. He had this apartment that his dad got for him, and he bought a rug and some stuff on my account, on the PDM account, so he could get a contractor discount and shit, you know. He was fixin’ up his place, and he got carpeting. Now, he was paying me back just fine. The
bill started at around $600, and he had paid it down to $300. So, I was fine with all this. No problem, as far as I was concerned. But John got it into his head that I owed him a couple a hundred bucks or somethin’, and this was bullshit, I tell you—pure bullshit. But he comes over talkin’ shit, brought a couple of buddies with him, yellin’ and screaming about how I better pay him, or there is going to be trouble. Like I’m gonna get my ass kicked. I just got everyone high. We smoked some pot … drank some beers. We calmed the whole thing down. No big deal, you know … Next thing I know, he’s lying on my floor … dead.

“I was cruising—you know, driving around, just driving around. This is the same day … only at night … the middle of the night. John, Little John, had left my house with those guys, all his buddies. They all left, and they were all drunk and high when they left, and everything was fine. I thought. That’s what I thought. Then I see him in Uptown, while I’m drivin’ around. He shows up. He’s like in the street, in the middle of the fuckin’ street, waving at me and yelling that he wants to talk to me. We are not through yet about this money thing. He’s in the middle of Sheridan Road, and he is ranting about money. So, I tell him to get in … inside the car … he’s blockin’ traffic. We go back to my house to drink … you know … drink some more. Carol’s not home, so … what the fuck, right? Now, we start drinking, and he’s hammered, he’s real drunk, and I’m feeling no pain at all. I’m drunk too, I guess, you know. And the damn argument starts up again, you know, all over again. So, then, we start fighting, arguing back and forth. I got a heart condition, plus, he’s a kid, a lot younger than me. So, I trick him into a pair of handcuffs that I use for my clown act. I’m a clown, you know, a registered clown. I do parties. You knew that, I think, Leroy. Did you know that, Sam? Did I tell you that?”

I just shook my head. I didn’t want to interrupt, frankly. Continue the story, I was thinking.

“So, he’s in these cuffs. I tricked him. But now he is very pissed off cuz I’m not taking the cuffs off of him. I don’t want to take them off until he sobers up, stops screaming at me about this fucking money, you know, stops his goddamn yelling. I don’t want him hittin’ me or some kinda shit like that. I don’t need any kind of shit like that. Now, this is where it gets a little foggy. I’m not exactly sure how this all happened, but I must have strangled him—you know, with this rope.”

My client was obviously a bit drunk as he sat there. I had just watched him guzzle about sixteen ounces of straight whiskey right in front of me, two eight-ounce cupfuls. Plus, he was drinking previously that night. But this wasn’t just a drunk man on a rant. We were listening to a killer, a true killer. I could never describe properly how offhandedly he said those words. “I must have strangled him—you know, with this rope.” It was as if he was telling us that he had brushed his teeth that morning, mentioning some kind of inconsequential part of the overall point that he was making. Stevens and I could not believe what we were hearing. We just kept looking at one another, awestruck.

“Yeah, he was laying on the floor when I woke up. He was blue in the face, ya know, like they say, and he had a rope around his neck and the handcuffs—he still had the handcuffs on. I don’t remember everything, but I think I tricked him, you know, cuz that is what I did with a lot of the others. I would use a rope, the rope trick, and I used it kinda like a tourniquet around their necks. That’s how I would do it. That’s what I did with that kid you were pointing to, that kid in the paper. What’s his name? Robby … or somethin’ like that. I did the rope trick on him. He was crying, scared. I didn’t really mean to scare him. I thought he was something very different. I thought he was a hustler like the others. But, really, he was just a kid. The kid had his hand on the door to leave. He even said that he was so scared that he thought I was going to kill him. I knew I couldn’t let him leave. I knew I couldn’t … That would not have
been good. That would not have worked out. He was too scared … too fuckin’ scared. I thought he lied to me, but maybe he didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t lying. Maybe he just wanted a job, ya know?

“These other kids weren’t like him, that’s for fucking sure. They were hustlers, greedy little liars and hustlers. One was a bigger liar than the next. I used to go down to the park, Washington Park. They called it Bughouse Square, and these kids would offer blow-jobs for money. Sex for money, and then they would try to hike up the price after they had already told me a certain price. They would try to hike it up, you know, raise the price up. Extortion, plain and simple. Or, this was something else, I would take these guys back to my house, and they would see that I was a successful businessman in a nice neighborhood, and they would figure out that I couldn’t let everyone know that I was bisexual or shit like that. They could see that I wouldn’t want my neighbors to know about these guys. They could see that. And then they would start to threaten to tell the neighbors. Right then, they would say they were going to go right out and tell the neighbors everything. They should have kept their fucking mouths shut. They didn’t know who they were dealing with. So, they would get the rope trick. I wasn’t afraid of the neighbors. Lots of them knew me. They knew what I did. They have eyes. They can see my house from theirs. I just hate fucking liars, greedy lying homos. Fuckin’ fagots!

“I had to get rid of this guy, though. I had to get rid of Little John. Then Carol, before I could do that, Carol came home. I had wrapped him in a tarp and put him in the garage … in the garage, ya know. Then Carol came home, so I couldn’t bury that one in the crawl space. So, I have to figure somethin’ else out. So I buried him out in the garage. There was already a place that I was gonna use for drainage out there. So, yeah, he is out there.

“There … well … after I got divorced. There are a lot under the house … like out under the bedrooms, down there. I can show you. I’ll show you.”

“We did some diggin’ down there. Rossi did a lot. He was down there for eight hours one day. He was down diggin’ trenches all day. I said they were for tiles. I told him tiles … you know … for the smell. We always got that musty smell when it rained. So, Rossi dug up the trenches for that.

“There was this kid with a weird spelling of his name. He spelled it S-z-y-c, but you said it
Sink
… like a sink, you know, in the kitchen. We were partying, drinking, smoking pot, taking pills, ya know. And everyone was runnin’ around half-naked. See, this guy was a female impersonator and a dancer. I don’t know … I don’t know. It’s all in a fog, you know? It’s not that I don’t want to remember … I try … but I can’t remember it all. We did a lot of drinking … see … a lot of drinkin’ and a lot of drugs. But we were partying, and I went to bed, and when I woke up, that kid was lying on the floor in the other room, ya know … the one with the red carpet. He was on the floor. He was naked on the floor, ya know. And Rossi had dug those trenches in the crawl, so he went down there. I threw him down there.

“Rossi was in the living room … sleeping on the couch. He wanted that kid’s car, so we went down … the car was parked on Clark Street, so we just drove down there and got it. We just drove there in the morning and looked for the white Plymouth Satellite with the banged-up fender. It was parked on Clark across from the Newbury Theatre, right there on Clark Street, right down there. And Rossi drove it, and I drove my car and brought it back to my house. Now, I said I wanted $300 for that car. Rossi said he didn’t have it, but we worked that out, and that became Rossi’s car. He drove that car. There was a bunch of stuff in the trunk. There were license plates and women’s clothing, weights, a television, and jewelry and stuff … lots of stuff. So, we cleaned that all out … all of that shit … and Rossi drove that car. So, that guy is down in the crawl space. He is down there. I threw him down there and put him in one of those trenches and covered him up. I only dug like five of those
holes down there. I had those kids dig the rest. They dug them for me. There was trenches dug down there for the drainage … for the drainage.

“So, there are lots of guys down there. They are all in that basement … that crawl space down there under the house, ya know. Maybe twenty or thirty. Some are in that crawl, but a few are in the river. I put some in the river … five … ya know … it was five of them that I took out to the river. There were five of them … and that kid that you were asking about is one of those five. He was the last one. We can go there. I’ll show you. That kid was not supposed to happen, ya know? But when it did … I had to go out to the bridge.

“Yeah, when I took him out there, I heard that a smokey was around, so I had to drive back and forth. You know, go down to the next cloverleaf and turn around. Then I figured out that it was me … ya know … it was my car. Oh, and there was a barge too. I didn’t want to drop the fucker on that.”

Gacy was starting to slur his words even more than he did at the beginning of this diatribe. His whole demeanor was beginning to wilt. It was clear to me that the massive amounts of alcohol that he had ingested both in front of us and before he arrived were beginning to beat the shit out of him. He was not going to last much longer. How right I turned out to be.

“There was this little fucker from Franklin Park—Joe or something … I forget. My memory is for shit … total shit. I cannot hardly remember anything … nothing. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and find strangled kids in my house, dead strangled kids, and I have no idea how they got there … no fuckin’ idea what happened. I remember heading down to the park … Washington … you know … Bughouse Square … I told you that. I said that already. I remember goin’ there, but I don’t remember coming home, no idea … ya know … how I would get my ass home or what happened while I was out. But I have to get the bodies out of there. They don’t belong there … ya know … ya know …
They don’t belong there, do they? Sometimes, I get little flashes of memory, though. Like watchin’ a movie that isn’t a good copy. It keeps coming in and out, ya know. It is in bits and pieces … bits and pieces … little bits and pieces of life.”