John Wayne Gacy (23 page)

My wife, Mary, was among the folks that were uninterested in having their fifteen minutes of fame happen right then and there. She preferred her privacy. She had enough on her plate. Her husband had been consumed by the whirlwind surrounding Gacy. Her older son was in the hospital and her younger son was an infant who needed constant attention, as infants invariably do. So imagine her surprise when she walked by our front window, dressed in a housecoat and pajamas, curlers in her hair, with Jimmy, our infant son, in her arms, and saw one of those big cumbersome media trucks screeching to a stop in front of our house. Her jaw dropped as she watched John “Bulldog” Drummond, a truly famous face in Chicago and a crime-beat reporter from CBS News, scurrying up our front walk, trying desperately to untangle power cords that connected him to his camera crew, all of whom were also excitedly scurrying behind him.

She had to think fast.

“Ma’am, I’m John Drummond, CBS News, sorry to bother you, ma’am, but is this the home of Sam Amirante, the lawyer, the one that is representing Mr. Gacy? Are you his wife, ma’am? What a cute baby … is that Mr. Amirante’s son, ma’am? Do you have a moment, ma’am? Can we ask you some questions, ma’am?” A microphone was being waved about precariously close to her face and to the baby, and a four-inch camera lens was staring at poor Mary. She hadn’t signed up for this, but my wife was no slouch. She was fast on her feet.

“I’m sorry, who?” she asked innocently. “No, no, no, I’m just the babysitter. No one is home.”

The dejected Mr. Drummond dropped the microphone to his side and waved off the camera. The little red light went off, and the camera was suddenly pointed downward.

“Do you know where they are … where the Amirantes are, ma’am?”

“At work, I guess. But this is not the Amirante lawyer’s house. I think they are a cousin to the lawyer … a cousin or something.”

The Bulldog turned slowly on his heels, dejected, shaking his head, with his little clipped bulldog tail between his crooked bulldog legs, and trudged back down the walk toward his truck. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said over his shoulder.

Mary had to giggle a little at the sight as she closed the front door, but she was not about to go on TV for the first time ever in a housecoat and curlers. Sorry.

____________________

A
FTER RETURNING FROM
Joliet and the bridge over the Des Plaines River, with Gacy incessantly begging to go to the cemetery, the next stop was Gacy’s house. Gacy had admitted that there was at least one body buried on his property that was not in the crawl space, and the prosecution wanted to know exactly where it was. Further, when an accused person points out where the bodies are buried, whether figuratively or actually, it strengthens the State’s case. In the event that the defendant later recants and denies his involvement in a crime, the prosecution has evidence that the defendant knew or was aware of information that only the perpetrator could possibly know.

I had advised against all of this, of course, but Gacy was on his “frolic.” No one could convince him that he should stop doing the job that the police are paid to do. Frankly, as crazy as this sounds to you and me, Gacy loved the limelight; he loved the attention. It didn’t seem to matter that the reason that he had the limelight trained on him was that the prosecution was building a case for murder. He was in his element. How weird was that?

Gacy’s entire block had been cordoned off from all except public officials, cops, and those that were unlucky enough to have a house on it. There was a lull in the activity because jurisdictional concerns were being sorted out and new warrants were being obtained to allow a complete and extensive search of the house and excavation of the crawl space. We pulled up, and a brand-new flurry of activity
was generated throughout the members of the press and others that were hanging around on the fringes of the crime scene.

Gacy was brought into his garage.

If you’ve ever wondered what your first concern would be when you are brought back home after being charged with the murder of a missing boy and you are the prime suspect in the murder of many, many others, well … apparently, if your name is John Wayne Gacy, your first concern would be the fact that the police that had been conducting a search of your home had left some things—some tools and some other items—out of place in your meticulously kept garage. Gacy immediately started bitching about this mundane issue as if he was going to be back in an hour or so and he was going to have to clean up the mess all by himself. He began picking up items and placing them gingerly into their predesignated spots on walls and in drawers. If not for the solemn gravity of the situation, which was completely lost on this strange little man, it would have been hilariously funny. What was wrong with this guy?

Finally, someone reminded my client that he was not there to clean the garage.

There were moments during this time, this experience, that stand out in my memory. It is all an incredible experience, of course, a tornado of activity. My first case as a private criminal defense attorney was becoming quite an interesting ride. But some moments stand out. What Gacy did next caused one of those moments.

He took a can of black spray paint and drew a box on the concrete floor of his garage. Then he drew an
X
in the middle of the box.

“Dig here,” he said. It was like he was pointing out the spot where a buried water meter could be found. If the foreman of a crew charged with the responsibility of digging a trench for a water main was totally bored with his job, he couldn’t have said it more nonchalantly, more offhandedly.

“Do you know who is buried here?” one of the guys asked.

“Yeah … Butkovitch.”

John Butkovitch had eaten dinner at John Gacy’s house. This kid was a particular friend to Gacy’s ex-wife Carol. Little John, she called him. There was Big John and Little John. What a kooky pair, always together. John knew this kid’s father. John had helped decorate Little John’s new apartment. Little John was a regular visitor, a valued employee, a friend.

Now he was under concrete in Gacy’s garage.

What was wrong with this guy?

18

A
FTER WE RETURNED
to the Des Plaines police headquarters, after I had bitched loudly enough, a bond hearing was scheduled.

Gacy was brought to the tiny courtroom that was in the same building as the Des Plaines police headquarters. This courtroom’s most common use was for the traffic call for the City of Des Plaines. It was small, and it was not secure. Anyone could walk in, so there were uniformed patrolmen at the door checking credentials.

The hallways outside the courtroom, together with the miniscule gallery where a few rows of churchlike pews existed, were packed with people, mostly reporters; but other government workers and politically connected observers would someday brag that they were in that room. Again, Judge Marvin Peters presided.

I battled my way past cameras and reporters from all over the world. I saw cameras from Greece, England, Germany, France—those were the ones I noticed—together with every network from the United States, as represented by their Chicago affiliates. Microphones were poked and shoved at me, and questions were shouted at the top of lungs.

I had not been home, except for ten minutes for a quick shower that I had taken Thursday morning when I had to return to the
office to take my client to his appointment at the Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital, or so I thought.

I hadn’t changed clothes, shaved, or seen water that hadn’t been filtered through ground coffee beans since the wee hours on Thursday. I looked more like a defendant than the defendant.

Gacy was ushered into the courtroom, surrounded by police officers, amid murmurs, yelling, shouted questions, and popping camera bulbs. He was positioned next to me, and the judge slammed his gavel and called for quiet.

The courtroom hushed.

“People of the State of Illinois versus John Wayne Gacy, number 78-3-008080,” the clerk called as she passed the file to the judge.

If this scene had occurred during centuries past, the throngs of people that were inside and outside of that courtroom would not have been holding cameras; they would not have been holding pens and paper or tape recorders—they would have been holding pitchforks and torches. They would not have been shouting relatively polite questions from behind invisible lines of demarcation; they would have been attacking, pitchforks and torches raised, and calling for Gacy’s head. So to say that my position in that courtroom was unenviable would be a colossal understatement. I was representing the scoundrel, the ne’er-do-well. In the eyes of many, that made me the scoundrel too.

Fortunately, I was unaffected by all of that folderol. In fact, I saw myself as riding the white horse in that situation. As far as I was concerned, I was the person in that courtroom with the moral high ground. It’s funny, the people that wrap themselves most snugly in the American flag, the ones that scream the loudest about their freedoms and their constitutional rights are often the very people that lose sight of the meaning of all of that wonderful rhetoric as soon as push comes to shove, as soon as the precepts that we as a people so cherish come to be tested. When the very constitutional concepts that they claim to support are challenged by a hard case,
an ugly case such as this one, they run for cover. They run for the comfort of man’s basest instincts. It’s much easier to hate the bad guy than it is to support the hard reality that if we are to continue to enjoy our freedoms, if our Constitution is to survive, it has to be supported in all circumstances, even when to do so seems hard.

So my job was simple. All I had to do was argue in favor of setting a reasonable bond for Mr. Gacy and see if we couldn’t get him released after posting it. No problem.

It seemed that Judge Peters saw things differently.

I argued that a charge of murder could not stand without a body. There was no evidence that the alleged victim of the murder, one Robert J. Piest, was, in fact, dead. Plus, the State was attempting to proceed on a complaint for preliminary examination. My client had not yet been formally indicted. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a cogent, valid argument and would probably
have been sustained by the court. In this case, however, the defendant had pointed out where he had disposed of the body only a couple of hours earlier in front of many police officers and the assistant state’s attorney, so the argument was rejected by the court. Go figure.

I was successful in having my client transferred to Cermak Hospital, the hospital that served the Cook County Jail inmate population, rather than into the general population. I strongly believed that Gacy needed psychiatric help, and although Cermak was basically jail hospital and not exactly famous for its compassionate care, it was better than nothing. It was certainly better than the alternative—having Gacy housed in the general population of Cook County Jail, one of our nation’s most notorious and dangerous of jails. Frankly, I don’t think he would have survived that. He was not only a sickly, blubbery cream puff of a man, he was also suicidal. He hadn’t shut up about how he wanted to “do things my way” since the all-night session in my office when he spilled his guts.

The case was continued for further motions and for assignment to December 29, 1978, at 9:30 a.m.