The Man Who Killed Boys (15 page)

New Town tourists learned then that not every sexy blonde that they approached on the street is female. Many are drag queens and transsexuals who climb into cars, accept twenty dollars for a rapid act of oral sex and leave without their client ever suspecting that he has just had a homosexual experience.

New Town is Chicago Bohemia. The Hull House Association's Jane Addams Center on Broadway offers photography, dance and art classes, and activities for senior citizens. There are practicing witch's covens, Latino Santeros, theater groups, singles bars for gay and straight clientele, head shops, an art fair, boutiques, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and vegetarian restaurants, resale shops, antique stores and botanicas where customers can buy ingredients for magic potions or statues of saints and Yoruba gods and goddesses.

There are meetings of sadomasochism societies, wife swappers, adult bookstores, a boutique for transvestites that carries size-eleven pumps, and the Pleasure Chest—a sex supermarket that features sales on whips, flails, manacles, rubber suits, and giant plastic dildos.

For cruising adult homosexuals, even the exotic offerings of the Pleasure Chest pale beside the lure of the young men and boys who frequent the discos and street corners, lounge in all-night restaurants and coffee shops, or who promenade at curbside wearing skintight trousers or tiny cutoffs and blouses that have been knotted and pulled up at the waist to expose a wink of belly button.

Some of the youths are ethereal and pallid with long bleached hair, earrings, and shrill voices. Others are butch with short hair, work boots, leather jackets or tight black tank tops and jeans that show off their slender-hipped ruggedness and draw the eye to the genital bulge at the crotch. The colored bandannas or kerchiefs draped from the back pockets identify the type of sexual specialty the owners find most enjoyable. There is instant recognition for those who know the color code.

Annually in June, a phalanx of grim-faced motorcycle policemen are drafted to lead the annual gay rights parade of shiny convertibles, floats, musicians, drag queens and chanting gay male and female marchers along the major streets to the park for a picnic along the lakefront. The parade is the climax of gay pride week.

Billy Carroll, so far as any of those who knew him were able to ascertain, was heterosexual. But he knew the streets of Uptown and New Town and familiarized himself with their homosexual haunts and hangouts.

If there was anyone in his family who looked like a survivor, it was Billy. He had a fast, agile mind, and according to a truant officer and others who knew him, fingers that matched his brain in their swift stickiness. He was a child of the city and he learned early that a person, no matter how young, could survive if he was capable of approaching the streets on their own terms.

The lessons he learned best were not those that he learned in school. He attended school fitfully and once was ordered into special classes for truants. The lessons he most readily absorbed were those he learned on the streets.

His brother and his parents, William Carroll, Sr. and Violet, are candid about Billy's talent for getting in trouble. He was an active, mischievous boy. At three years of age he fell from a moving car after pushing the back door open with his foot while the family was driving to North Florida to see his grandparents. Robert yelled that his little brother had fallen out, and when his father turned to look, Billy was rolling end over end down a grade. He was patched up in a hospital with a few stitches in his head.

A few years later there was another visit to a Chicago hospital and more stitches in his head when he fell from a tree. He returned home from the doctor as recklessly adventuresome as before.

He was only nine years old when he snatched a purse and wound up in the juvenile home. His father recalled that his son was more fortunate another time and found himself three hundred or four hundred dollars richer after he reached out the window of a slow moving elevated train and grabbed a purse from a woman standing on the platform.

By the time he was eleven, Billy was in the bicycle business. A local Fagin had organized several of the young boys in the neighborhood, and when the man was finally caught by the police they used three patrol wagons and a squad car to move the bicycles and other loot he had accumulated in the fencing operation. Billy had been one of his most industrious and successful associates.

He had wisely left the wasteland of empty lots, broken bottles, and exhausted lives in Uptown and headed for the suburbs where he found English racers, shiny new Schwinns, and expensive ten-speeds from Holland, Germany, and Belgium. He traded one of the bicycles for a black and silver-haired puppy which he brought home and named King. Most of the bicycles he sold.

Somehow Billy learned to make strip keys, which could be used to open almost any padlock. Eventually he acquired a collection of about twenty-five padlocks, which he tinkered with, experimenting and familiarizing himself with the action of the tumblers.

He was about fourteen or fifteen when he was caught with a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson automatic pistol. Friends told his father that he had been shooting it at people to scare them. He liked to watch them run.

When Billy wasn't roughhousing with King or on the street, he was exercising to build himself up physically. As a teenager he helped keep his body firm and evenly muscled by lifting weights, boxing, and wrestling. At sixteen he was a scrappy five-foot, nine-inches tall and as game as a fighting cock. Even his teeth were good and were marred by only two small fillings.

He had his own boxing shorts and gloves and squared off in the Clarendon Park District's boxing program in matches against other youths in his weight class. Watching the 1972 Olympics on television interested him in wrestling.

The Parkway Cinema near the three-way intersection of Clark, Broadway, and Diversey probably shows as many kung-fu movies or action films starring Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and Burt Reynolds as any other theater in Chicago. Billy and his friends sat through entire afternoons watching Bruce Lee and other heroes, sometimes seeing double features twice. His interest in the Oriental fighting styles stimulated by the movies, he bought books on kung-fu and karate and took a few lessons, earning an orange belt.

At other times he ice-skated or jogged around Graceland Cemetery a few blocks south of his Uptown home. He didn't smoke tobacco, but occasionally sipped from a bottle of wine—and, according to friends, shared a joint if someone was passing one around. But he cared too much about his body to move deeply into alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. He talked vaguely about keeping in good shape so that he could someday strike out on a cross-country bicycle trip.

He liked money and one of the places to find it was at the corner of Diversey, Broadway, and Clark. The corner is constantly crowded with urban commuters waiting for Chicago Transit Authority buses. A blind man who holds a tin cup and dangles a blaring transistor radio from his belt has taken over one spot on the corner, and a newspaper kiosk has another. Shops and stores offer snacks of pizza, ice cream, Cantonese rice and noodles, gyros, cocktails, Big Macs and Yankee Doodle Dandies.

To Billy and his friends, the intersection had other charms not confined to the shops, restaurants, and cinema. They knew they could make money if they hung around long enough. He met street hustlers, a boy named Jaimie, another named Jerry, and others who were less cautious than himself about climbing into cars with strangers when the price was right. Made conspicuous by their short haircuts, neckties and white shirts, the strangers cruised the streets with the driver's window rolled down until eye contact was made with the right person.

The motorists were almost invariably middle-aged or older and lived in suburbia with wives and children or with parents, posing as sexually straight during the day and cruising the city streets at night once a week or so looking for young boys. Avowed homosexuals with nothing to hide had their own friends and frequented their own bars.

Stories were passed around about boys who returned from rides with their eyes blackened and noses bleeding or doubled over in pain from less obvious injuries. The boys had to be cautious. Jerry once climbed into a car with a solid, tough-looking man who was so rough and threatening that the boy jumped out of the car and ran. The youthful hustlers learned quickly from friends or by sad experience that a certain breed of man enjoyed inflicting fear or pain.

Billy knew what went on in the cars, and he sometimes parleyed at curbside with motorists or permitted someone to buy him a taco at a restaurant. But he never got in their cars. He arranged for other boys to go for rides, and when they returned he was waiting for a share of the money they brought with them. Billy Carroll's parents said that their son was too smart to voluntarily ride away in the car of a stranger, and he was too scrappy to be forced.

When Billy was a regular on the corner there were stories about a big, rugged chunk of a man who cruised in a new black Oldsmobile with a spotlight. Young men like Jaimie, who trades on his thick-lipped likeness to Mick Jagger and is a regular at homosexual hangouts, believed they narrowly escaped serious injury or death after encounters with him. He told of a frightening confrontation with the big man in the sleek Oldsmobile in an article by Gene Mustain and Gilbert Jimenez in the
Chicago Sun Times.
¹⁴

The encounter began at Bughouse Square, about a half mile north of Chicago's Loop, when Jaimie was introduced to the man by another male prostitute known on the street as Speed Freak Billy. Bughouse Square acquired its unique name years ago when the block-long park on the near north was a haven for soapbox oratory. Day and night, self-appointed experts climbed on top of wooden crates, overturned buckets, and park benches, or merely stood tall and lectured to anyone who cared to listen on subjects as diverse as Marxism and the evils of big business, to the universal draft, prohibition, or flying saucers.

By the 1960s the park had changed. The speakers were gone and had been replaced by winos with faces and bodies as vacant and exhausted as worked-out coal mines, and by young boys—runaways, truants, or just kids whose parents didn't care where they went and whether or not they came back. It became known as a chicken park where young boys patrolled the sidewalks near the curbs with no underwear on and socks wadded up inside their pants to make their genitals bulge. When a car slowed and a motorist looked interested they might rub the front of their pants suggestively or "throw the basket out," pushing their crotch enticingly forward. They patrol year around in all types of weather until they earn the price of a supper, an ounce of grass or carton of cigarettes, and another night in a hotel room.

Jaimie said he was driven to a house on Summerdale Avenue in Norwood township. The big-bellied man who drove him was John Gacy.

The first meeting was uneventful, even though there was something discomforting about the house. It was almost too still and the young hustler was bothered by "bad vibrations like spirits." He was uneasy being alone with his host. But once they had shared a couple of drinks and talked, Gacy drove him back to Bughouse Square, after giving him thirty dollars and a handful of pills. "See, I'm okay, you can trust me," Gacy reassured him. "You'll be seeing me again."

It was a couple of weeks before Jaimie saw Gacy at Bughouse Square again. A full, gibbous moon had fumbled its way out of the clouds, dimly illuminating the dark shadows of the park in a brackish yellow glow, when Gacy smilingly approached the second time. Gacy's smile groped for the corners of his mouth and his eyes squeezed into pleased slits as the young man climbed into the car and accepted an offer of thirty dollars for mutual oral sex. When they pulled away in the big car Jaimie was embarking on a different sort of evening than he had spent with his companion earlier.

As the story was reconstructed, there were no pleasant interludes of friendly conversation or drinks. Jaimie's husky host led him into the bedroom, where both of them stripped. Gacy told Jaimie to get busy doing what he was being paid to do, but before the youth could comply his head was jolted back with a sudden slap. Suddenly Jaimie was being beaten. He tried to scream but the noise was smothered by powerful hands that closed around his throat.

Jaimie had been a prostitute since he was twelve, and he realized that he was with one of those people who were sexually stimulated by hurting others. The trick was to defend himself but not to fight so hard that it made his attacker even more violent and more dangerous. Tears were welling in his eyes and he was trying to wriggle free when Gacy did something that terrified him even more. From somewhere, Gacy produced a pair of handcuffs. Jaimie picked up a vase and shattered it over the man's head. He grabbed at the handcuffs and hurled them against a window, then gripped Gacy's wrist and bit down until he tasted blood.

As his attacker clutched his wrist and jerked away, Jaimie screeched that a friend had taken down the Oldsmobile's license number. That was how the boys protected themselves, he lied.

Moments later Jaimie was lifted off his feet and heaved onto the bed. The man threw his own heavy body onto that of the youth, smashing him into the mattress. Jaimie couldn't move. He was smothering. The man on top of him was groaning.

Abruptly the man rolled off the boy, got to his feet, and snapped on the bedroom lights. He was panting heavily and smiling. It was time for them to get dressed so that Jaimie could be driven back to the park, he said. Before leaving the house. Gacy gave the frightened boy fifty dollars, the thirty-dollar promised fee and a twenty-dollar tip, and added another handful of pills.

Jaimie was silent on the ride back. After he left the man who had beaten him, he took a month off from the streets. It had been a terrifying experience. Much later Speed Freak Billy casually mentioned to Jaimie that he was a specialist. His clients were sadists, masochists, and bondage freaks.