John Wayne Gacy (29 page)

The resounding answer to each and every one of those nagging questions and a hundred more was quite simply
yes
.

Bob and I had done our part.

In spite of what the world thought about John Wayne Gacy, in spite of the efforts and the protestations of the cuckoos and the crazies and the uninformed, Mr. Gacy was going to receive a fair trial in accordance and in keeping with the dictates of our Constitution.

Then it would be a jury of his peers that would decide his fate.

_______________________

I
T WAS A
tumultuous year, and it started off with a bang. On Friday, January 12, 1979, it started snowing blizzard-style, and it didn’t let up for two full days. On top of approximately 10 inches of already-accumulated snow, there fell another 20.3 inches of freshly fallen white stuff, setting new records in our fair city. By the end of January, there was an approximate accumulation of 47 inches of snow and compacted ice covering all of Chicagoland and making travel next to impossible. Every time you left the house, it was an adventure.

Amid this external chaos, Bob and I were sinking our teeth into the specifics of our task. After researching, preparing, and filing the numerous preliminary motions, we began the search for some of the best psychiatrists and psychologists in the country. Gacy had confessed to his crimes. His crimes were hideous and unprecedented. He had painted himself into a very small and very specific corner, and he was caught holding a very wet paintbrush. His one and
only course of action, aside from simply pleading guilty, was to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

After having spent a great deal of time with John in recent weeks, I was convinced that this plea was not only his best and only course of action and in his best interest, it was absolutely true. As far as I was concerned, John Wayne Gacy was bonkers. He was clearly insane. I had watched him go to places in his mind I had never seen anyone go. I had represented hundreds upon hundreds of criminals during my years as a PD, and this guy took the cake.

The disjointed and rambling tale of horror that he had disclosed to Stevens and me on that eerie, crazy night in my office the night before he was arrested was evidence enough. On that night, when Gacy spoke, it was as though he was not even present, like he was not even there. I saw his eyes flutter, and it seemed as though he became a body inhabited by another, something unholy. He didn’t even remember telling us about his endless, disconnected dissertation of the grotesque events of his life over the past two years.

Of course, I’m no shrink. As far as I was concerned, this determination was a job for professionals. Bob wholeheartedly agreed on both counts. Bob was quite sure that our client was crazy as a bedbug, and he thought a professional head shrinker should confirm his “diagnosis,” for the record.

What began as a rather routine, offhanded statement of fact by a couple of young lawyers about their client—“We will have to start looking into who are the best psychologists and psychiatrists in this field and line up some interviews and examinations for him”—turned out to become a major preoccupation of the field of psychology. Every local member of the fine profession of men and women who were involved in the field of the study of the human mind wanted a crack at him. It was not hard to find shrinks to become involved in the case. During that year, our client was subjected to psychological and psychiatric probing and poking on a level beyond the imagination. While incarcerated, he was drunk, drugged, hypnotized, interviewed, and cross-examined. He saw charts, graphs, inkblots, story lines, and forms of all color and description; he drew pictures, looked at pictures, analyzed pictures, and became a picture. They talked to him while he was standing, while sitting, and while lying
down, while sleeping, waking, half-asleep and half-awake, while in conscious, semiconscious, and unconscious states—all this in an effort to determine that which Bob and I knew in an instant. Gacy was nuts.

The big question, however, still remained unanswered: Was he nuts enough? Could John Gacy appreciate the criminality of his conduct and conform said conduct to the requirements of the law? That was the question for the jury.

When all was said and done, there were almost as many opinions on that issue as there were psychologists and psychiatrists who were studying it.

One fact unearthed during all of the interviews and interrogations by the various renowned shrinks that hit home for me and which always anchored my belief that my client was insane on a level sufficient to have him found not guilty by reason of insanity was this: When John Wayne Gacy was five or six years old, he developed a fetish for his mother’s silk undergarments. He said he liked the feel of them. He would fondle his mother’s lacy panties and rub them on his little body. When he was done doing what he did with these items—and this made the hair on the back of my neck stand up straight when I heard it—he would bury them under the house. When John’s mother began looking for several pairs of underwear that she thought she had lost, she found a small bag filled with panties partially buried under the porch of the Gacy home.

John was punished by his parents, and his mother’s panties stopped disappearing. However, by the time John was a teenager and reaching puberty, he had graduated to stealing these coveted items from neighborhood clotheslines. He now was old enough to use these items during masturbation, which he regularly did; and when he was finished, he would revert to his original behavior and bury those items, often under the house.

This simple revelation, especially when taken in conjunction with everything else I knew about this sad, sad excuse for a human
being, which appeared in report after report from doctor after doctor who had interviewed him, basically cinched it for me: John Gacy, my client, was on a psychological choo-choo train that went off the tracks many years before. The destination of that train had been predetermined. The normal synapse that happens in your brain and my brain and the brains of everyone else we know just did not happen in the brain of Mr. Gacy. He had, in fact, been miswired at the factory. He had a broken brain, and that brain had been broken long ago.

That was my opinion then, and it still is, and I sleep very well at night while holding it.

The theory that allows me to comfortably hold this opinion is surprisingly simple and has been stated in many ways throughout time. Here is one.

If a person who has reached the age of majority becomes angry with another person and says, “I’m going to kill you,” then that person methodically walks into another room with plenty of time to think about his actions, grabs a loaded shotgun from the closet, walks back into the first room where the other person is standing, and proceeds to blow this person’s brains all over the wall behind him, we call that murder.

However, if the same set of circumstances occurs and the perpetrator is a minor—let’s say he or she is seven years old—it becomes a terrible, tragic accident, like lightning striking or a collision in traffic. Why? Because we don’t blame small children for their actions no matter how sad and terrible, no matter how horrific the results may be. We know that seven-year-old children are not responsible for their actions. This is not a hard concept to grasp. Their little brains have not matured enough. They cannot understand the consequences of their actions. Hell, the Catholic Church takes the position that they cannot even commit a sin.

Everybody understands this.

Where the waters become muddy, where understanding becomes fleeting is when the “child” is six feet tall, weighs two hundred pounds, and has a five o’clock shadow or has long blonde hair and big perky breasts and chain-smokes. That is when the problems arise.

However, the brain of an adult can be so broken, so dysfunctional, that it is of no more use to that adult than the brain of a seven-year-old child. It just does not work properly—it’s broken, and it causes the adult to act in ways that are unacceptable without the willing consent of its owner.

25

I
N SPITE OF
the very serious nature of the matter at hand—the trial of a man accused of the murder of thirty-three young boys—when you live with something every single day, no matter how serious the subject matter, one must break free of the solemnity on occasion just to remain sane.

At the outset, in any trial where the mental heath of a defendant might be an issue, a determination as to whether the defendant is mentally competent to stand trial must be made. Counsel for the defense usually makes a routine motion, and the judge will then order that basic psychiatric and psychological evaluations be administered to determine whether the defendant is mentally capable to assist in his own defense. Bob and I made the motion early on in this case, and the judge immediately ordered the tests, all quite routine.

When the results of the tests were completed and were available, Judge Garippo called in the lawyers, both defense and prosecution, because he intended to make a ruling as to the competency of the defendant—nothing unusual.

What the judge didn’t know, but what everyone else in the room did know, was this: A very special report had been transmitted to the esteemed Judge Garippo.

Another judge and dear friend of Judge Garippo, a person that shall remain unnamed because Judge Garippo still doesn’t know who was ultimately behind the ruse, and I refuse to be the one to break the silence, had a phony report prepared and delivered to Garippo in place of the real one. The delivery was made in the normal course of business and in a manner that would lead the judge to suspect nothing. The sealed, official envelope, embossed with the characteristic markings of the Psychiatric Institute, Circuit Court of Cook County, R. A. Reifman, MD, Director, was lying on Judge Garippo’s desk in his chambers. It was the normal practice that the report remain sealed until opened in the presence of counsel for both sides of the case.

So there we were, six lawyers—with straight, solemn faces—and the judge, whom everyone in the room respected greatly. He opened the envelope and pulled out letterhead stationery indicating that the letter was from Robert A. Reifman, MD, Director.

It read,

Dear Judge Garippo:

Pursuant to your honor’s order, the above named defendant was examined by the undersigned psychiatrist.

Based on the above examination, it is my professional opinion that the above named defendant is COMPETENT to stand trial. Further, it is my professional opinion that the said defendant was legally INSANE at the time of the alleged offenses. He did NOT have the substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.

However, the above defendant is now legally SANE and in no need of further treatment at this time.

Very truly yours,

The judge stared at the letter in front of him for a very long time. He seemed to be reading it over and over again. He looked up at all of us with a look that none of us will ever forget. “This
can’t be right. Something is wrong here,” he mumbled, shaking his head slowly. He put the letter down on the desk. He looked back at us.

“It says that he is competent to stand trial, insane at the time of the offense … and sane now.” We watched as he contemplated what that meant. He seemed to be somewhere else as we watched him trying to imagine just what it was going to be like to declare that he had no choice but to find the defendant not guilty by reason of insanity, but that because the defendant was now sane and in need of no further treatment, he was free to leave the courtroom. He was a free man.

“Well, Judge, in that case, I think we will opt for a bench trial,” I said, with complete sincerity.

We watched as the judge saw the headline in the
Chicago Tribune
and then the
New York Times
flash before his glassy, bespectacled eyes: GARIPPO FREES GACY!

We all felt the laughter welling up inside. We fought it as long as we could.

Then Garippo said with a slowly creeping smile, “You guys are in on this, aren’t you?”

Lawyer jokes—ya gotta love ’em.

_________________________

I
TELL THIS
story as a prelude to the truth, which was that Dr. Reifman found just the opposite when it came to Gacy’s sanity at the time of the offense. He found him sane. Of course, this was only one man’s opinion. However, it did guarantee a jury trial. We also knew at least one of the experts who would be testifying on behalf of the State.

As the weeks and months passed, one by one, the judge ruled in favor of the State on the majority of our pretrial motions. We challenged the indictment, the warrants—we challenged each and every step the police and the state’s attorney’s office took during
the initial investigation, the collection of the evidence, and ultimately the arrest of our client.

During a hearing on one of our motions to quash the warrant and suppress evidence, Judge Garippo threw us a bone when he declared from the bench that many of the warrants had been “inart-fully drawn,” by which he meant that the warrants were, in some cases, flimsy. However, he allowed the evidence into the case in spite of the weakness of some of the warrants.

While we were having hearing after hearing on our motions, body bag after body bag were being dragged out of Gacy’s house, all of this in front of TV cameras, which broadcast their gruesome tale to the world. The brighter the light that shines on a case, the harder it becomes for a judge to exclude evidence that is found, whether that evidence is found legally and in keeping with the Constitution or not. Although I would strenuously argue—and Bob and I did so argue—that this should not be a consideration, sometimes it cannot be helped. Judges are human beings.

However, in my humble opinion, if the constitutionality of a search of the residence of a United States citizen is at issue, the Constitution should always win—always, no matter what. If the Constitution says one thing and our emotions say another, the Constitution should be followed rather than the emotion, every single time. It is that very Constitution that protects those rights that we like to call inalienable.