The Man Who Killed Boys (14 page)

A couple of tantalizing reports of people who reputedly saw Greg after his disappearance reached the Godziks, but none of them was confirmed. A security guard at Taft said he talked to the boy in the school lunchroom on Monday, December 13, two days after he was last seen by his parents. The guard said that Greg left after he was asked if he was supposed to be in class.

The Godziks also visited the editorial offices of their neighborhood weekly newspaper,
The Lerner Times
, and talked reporter Carolyn Lenz into writing a story about their son. Reporters don't often write stories about missing teenagers unless there is strong evidence to indicate that violence or an abduction have been involved. Like police, they are aware that tens of thousands of boys and girls leave home every year.

But Greg didn't fit the mold of the typical teenager who runs away because of trouble at home, school, or with a sweetheart. His parents had come to her for help, and the reporter, a slender young woman with rust-colored short hair, didn't turn them down.

On February 9, 1977, the story of the disappearance of Greg Godzik appeared in
The Lerner Times
under the reporter's byline. Among other people, she had talked to his former employer, misspelled in the article as "John Gasey."

Gacy told the reporter that, contrary to what the boy's parents believed, Greg had been talking about quitting school and running away. He said he last saw the youth on a Friday afternoon, the last day Greg attended school, and that he had left hurriedly, apparently angry. He didn't say why the boy was upset.

The contractor confided that Greg had not come to work regularly and that he was rebellious. Charitably, he added, however, "I don't think he's a bad kid." The reporter thanked him for his assistance. He had been very nice, very cooperative.

The reporter later recalled that Gacy handled the conversation smoothly and appeared to be anxious to help. "I had no reason to think he wasn't telling the truth," she said. "He wasn't at all evasive."

The newspaper story didn't help. Greg still didn't show up. His parents talked to a Navy recruiter, and with his help checked all the branches of the military service to determine if their son had enlisted. They knew he had previously taken and passed a Navy aptitude test. But Greg wasn't in the service.

By the time Carolyn Lenz wrote a follow-up story about Greg nearly a year after his disappearance as part of a series on teenage runaways, his parents had hired private investigator Anthony Pellicano to search for their son. Although Pellicano was said to have located some four thousand missing persons, he could not find Greg.

On January 20, 1977, less than two months after Godzik vanished, John Szyc was reported missing. The nineteen-year-old youth had known Godzik and Butkovich. He had also been an acquaintance of John Gacy, although he hadn't worked for PDM Contractors.

Szyc graduated from Main West High School in Niles in 1975, the year that Butkovich dropped out of sight. Soon after completing school he found a job in Chicago, moved to an apartment on the north side where he had friends, and bought a 1971 Plymouth Satellite.

A car can be an important extension of a teenage boy's personality. Buying a first car is a sign of the transition from childhood to manhood, a move out of the nest, and a readiness to begin accepting adult responsibilities. It also helps to get a date. Young Szyc was understandably proud of his car, and when he dropped out of sight the car vanished with him.

Although he was living by himself, he had kept in close touch with his father, Richard, a truck driver, and his mother, Rose Marie. When they didn't hear from him for some time and they learned that he hadn't been seen at his apartment or by his friends, they notified police. Police recorded the information and filed it.

Like Butkovich and Godzik, who had earlier disappeared so mysteriously, Szyc had no history of running away and had nothing to run from. He had independence, privacy, his own apartment and a car. He had no reason to run. Yet, despite an agonized search among his friends and hangouts, the Szycs could find no trace of their son.

It was nearly nine months before an incident occurred that reminded police of the missing boy and provided a solid clue linking him to the same man thought to have been one of the last people to see or talk with Butkovich and Godzik.

Police picked up Mike Rossi after a service station attendant accused him of filling the tank of a 1971 Plymouth Satellite with gas and then driving away without paying. The eighteen-year-old motorist told police that the man he was living with could explain everything. Once again authorities were drawn to the house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue.

Gacy's loquacious salesmanship paid off and he not only took care of the problem about the tank of gasoline, but also convinced the policemen that he had purchased the car from Szyc and sold it to Rossi. Neighbors had seen Rossi around the house for weeks, and other employees said they were as close as "father and son."

The contractor said that Szyc sold the car to him in February because he needed the money to leave town. Oddly, although investigators obviously did not bother to check, there was no resemblance between the signature that Szyc signed on the title when he purchased the car, and his name as it was written on the title transfer eighteen days after his parents reported him missing.

A few days after investigators talked with Gacy, police sent a letter to Szyc's parents advising them that although they had been unable to locate the boy, they had learned that he had sold his car and told the buyer he needed the money to leave town.

The police made no effort to explain why, if Szyc needed money, he had left behind two paychecks, all of his personal possessions, and had purchased new license plates for the car on January 20, the day he vanished.

Footnote

⁹
Chicago Tribune
, January 7, 1979.

5...
Lavender City

It was June 13, 1976, the nineteenth birthday of his brother Robert, and Billy Carroll, Jr. slept until mid-morning before rolling out of bed and pulling on a pair of blue jeans and a tight-fitting orange T-shirt.

Officially it wasn't yet summer, but a few blocks away trees and shrubs along the lakeshore were splashed with green and vibrantly alive. People were lounging or strolling in cutoffs and bikinis or languidly lobbing tennis balls back and forth.

In the Carroll apartment it was stuffy and hot and the rooms were stifling. There was no breeze in Uptown and the air was moist and putrid, hanging heavily over the moldering streets where garbage and dog droppings sprang up as profusely as spring flowers might bloom in tidier, less soiled neighborhoods.

Shadows cast by the streetlights were stealthily shifting in the early evening gloom by the time Billy slid into a seat in an old green car and rode away with three friends. He had promised his parents that he would be back in an hour. He never saw the apartment or his family again.

The last time Frank W. Landingin, Jr. saw his cabdriver father, they quarreled. It was shortly after an acquaintance posted a one-thousand-dollar bond on November 3, 1978 to get the young man out of jail, where he had been held on a charge of assault and battery for beating up his girl friend. His girlfriend, like most of his peers, called him Dale. It was a name he chose for himself, bastardizing it from "Del," the nickname his father had given him because he was born in Delaware.

When father and son met outside a restaurant on an Uptown street corner, they quarreled over Dale's failure to hold a job, his abuse of drugs, and his unsavory friends. The angry words they shouted at each other were the last words they ever exchanged.

Billy Carroll and Dale Landingin had much in common, even though they apparently did not know each other. They were about the same age. Billy was sixteen when he disappeared, and Dale was nineteen when he vanished two years later. Both were precocious children of the streets. And both were apparently sexually straight but used their good looks, youth, and charm to take advantage of men who cruised Chicago streets looking for boys. Billy specialized in procuring other boys for adult homosexuals for a commission. Dale accepted cash and gifts for promises of sex and then slipped away before the payoffs.

Both youths were living in Uptown when they disappeared. Much of Uptown would be described by social scientists and urban planners as blighted. The worst sections are for the defeated or for the newly arrived who go on welfare or work at day labor agencies, and settle into cheap hotels or festering apartments owned by absentee landlords.

The lucky and the industrious are eventually able to move to better neighborhoods like Rogers Park, Wicker Park and Lakeview or to pleasant middle-class homes in the northwest suburbs of Norridge, Des Plaines, Harwood Heights, and Park Ridge.

Most, however, are trapped in Uptown, where they live miserably in a physical environment that is intrinsically hostile to them. There are areas of Uptown where mothers hang beds from ceilings with ropes to keep their babies from being chewed on by rats, fathers worry about getting shoes for their kids to wear to school, and the winos parade as unsteadily as a shell-shocked army.

The people are poor Appalachian whites, blacks from southern dirt farms or backwoods bayous, American Indians who have left the security and poverty of reservations and a polyglot assortment of foreign immigrants from countries as diverse as India, Vietnam, Mexico, Jordan, Poland, and Yugoslavia.

The Appalachians account for one of the largest ethnic groups. Between 1940 and 1960 more than 350,000 people from Appalachia migrated to Chicago. Thousands more followed in the nearly two decades since then. And most of the wave of new urban poor settled in the cheap, crumbling apartment buildings of Uptown, squeezing themselves in next to the rainbow host of poor already there.

The adjustment is difficult. Most of the newcomers have no training to help them make the transition from what was basically a rural agricultural society with strong familial, church, and neighborhood ties, to a new urban existence of factory work, fearsome unfriendly streets, and a social life tied more closely to dingy corner saloons than to church.

In the city, bars with jukeboxes blaring country tunes by Conway Twitty, Willie Nelson, or Loretta Lynn have become the center of cultural activity for the newcomers and a refuge where they can go to escape northern prejudice against "hillbillies" who talk funny, ride in old cars, and listen to shitkickin' music. They have become crisis-oriented, living from job losses to apartment evictions to victimization by burglars, muggers, and sneak thieves. Their world has turned upside down.

If adapting to urban life is difficult for adults, it can be totally devastating for teenagers. Told to attend schools where integration is more important than education and it may be necessary to fight their way to and from classes, where their southern accent is about as easily understood as Ethiopian and they are mocked for their redneck image, the boys and girls become truants and dropouts. The streets are waiting for them.

There are areas in Chicago where boy prostitutes favorably compete with, if not completely overshadow, females. Uptown is one of them. Dressed casually in blue jeans and T-shirts, the sallow-faced young men slouch insolently in front of bars and restaurants waiting for dates wearing business suits who drive in from the suburbs in big cars. For a few dollars the boys climb into the passenger seats and ride to secluded side streets, the murky shadows under elevateds, or a few blocks east to parking lots in the park along the Lake Michigan beach. A few minutes later, after completing a single surreptitious act, the boys are dropped off again to await their next date.

In New Town, a few blocks south, the atmosphere is less defeating, the boys are younger, and the action is even more open. Prostitutes of both sexes work the gaudy, bustling neighborhood near the lake. New Town never sleeps, and the girls who parade along Broadway in hotpants or miniskirts, filmy nipple-punctuated blouses, and boots are available morning and night. They are as close as a street-corner meeting, a telephone call—or a wrong number.

More than one New Town couple has awakened at 6 or 6:30
A.M.
and, after sleepily groping their way to a door buzzer, been greeted by a voice over the intercom announcing: "This is Karen. Did you send for me?" In New Town it is easier to get a hooker to make a house call than a doctor.

Residential New Town is a neighborhood of young singles, many of them gay males and females who moved to the city seeking jobs and the society of people who accept them for, or regardless of, their sexual preferences. The gay life-style comes closer to total acceptance in New Town than in any other part of the city, than probably anywhere in the Midwest. Public behavior is tolerated in New Town that would be totally unacceptable in other areas. There are gay weight watchers, over-forty clubs for gays, political and gay rights organizations, groups for gay alcoholics and Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish churches and temples for gays. One summer a "gay patrol" was organized from among gays trained in karate and kung-fu who volunteered to douse the enthusiasm of young toughs who had developed the disturbing habit of prowling the streets of New Town on weekends and evenings looking for homosexuals to pummel.

New Town has been called a gay ghetto, but in reality it is a free and easy mélange of gays and straights. A few blocks east of Broadway, New Town's main promenade, Lake Shore Drive accommodates high rises occupied by doctors, lawyers, bankers, wealthy real-estate investors, and retired professional men and their wives.

On Broadway, Belmont, or Diversey, a few blocks west of the high rises, wives and daughters of the more conservative residents of the area have been mistaken for prostitutes and propositioned while shopping for groceries or clothes. When the vice activities began interfering with commerce, a neighborhood association complained to police and a crackdown was initiated. In less than one week shortly before Christmas, in a vice sweep incongruously dubbed "Operation Angel," police picked up some thirty males and females accused of prostitution and more than six hundred men identified as prospective clients.