The Man Who Killed Boys (17 page)

It bothered Czarna when Gacy walked onto job sites with customers and pointed to the workers and equipment pouring concrete and bragged that they were his men and it was his machinery. Czarna had been in business some twenty years, Gacy for five or six. The two friends exchanged a few sharp words over Gacy's habit of assuming on-the-spot ownership.

Gacy did the same with carpenters and other subcontractors. They generally accepted it as merely another of his crazy quirks. It was mildly bothersome, but even Czarna eventually put up with it because some of the jobs he did with Gacy were worth as much as fifty thousand to sixty thousand dollars.

Gacy liked Czarna's work and arranged for him to pour a new driveway at the house on Summerdale. The old concrete was broken up and the earth underneath prepared for resurfacing late one night. When the forms were placed and only the pouring remained to be done, Czarna promised that he would be back the next morning to complete the job.

The next morning when he arrived at the house with his mixer, the forms had been changed. Gacy explained that he decided during the night that he wanted the driveway to cover more area so that cars and trucks could swing wider. He had even planted flowers and set up a bicentennial sign overnight. It was Gacy's driveway. Czarna poured the surface.

Although the two men didn't do more than a half dozen jobs together, they were seeing more and more of each other socially and their friendship was growing. Gacy was considerate and friendly to Czarna's wife, remembering anniversaries and birthdays with gifts and cards. She also developed a fondness for the blustery, busy contractor.

The men hadn't known each other long when Gacy advised Czarna that there was something he had to tell him. "You know," he said, "I've been arrested."

'"So you've been arrested. I've been arrested, too," Czarna replied, unimpressed. "Everybody gets caught with traffic tickets."

"No, not that," Gacy said. "I did some time."

Czarna became more interested. "For what?" he wanted to know.

"Prostitution. It was for prostitution. And there was theft in it too. Yeah," Gacy said, shaking his head as if his mind was boggled with his own daring. "I ran prostitution."

Czarna told him that if he had done his prison time and was released, the debt was paid. There was no reason for Gacy's past to affect their friendship.

Gacy agreed. He said that he had serious problems in Iowa, and divorced his first wife there after catching her in bed with another man. It was a terrible blow to his sense of self-esteem. The trouble was compounded when he had to pay her $250,000 and turn over four fried-chicken franchises to her as part of the divorce settlement.

At first Czarna had been sympathetic, but the story was preposterous. At the time, Gacy was about thirty years old, and by his own admission a few months before, had spent eighteen months of those thirty years in prison. Czarna had built a healthy business for himself and earned good money but it was improbable that Gacy could have accumulated enough to make the kind of settlement on his former wife that he claimed.

The braggadocio got under Czarna's skin at times. If he mentioned that he had successfully bid in a $100,000 job, Gacy would boast that he had bid in a $150,000 job. Gacy always had to be the biggest and best, even if it involved going to jail and negotiating a divorce settlement with his wife.

During the years that they knew each other there were other strains on their friendship. Regardless of his sometime generosity, Gacy could be slow paying business debts. He made his money work for him as long as possible, withholding payments when he could until the last minute. That system worked reasonably well with the young men and boys he employed. It was less workable when he tried it on Czarna.

As Czarna later recalled the incident, Gacy had owed him a couple of thousand dollars on a job for several days, when the concrete contractor telephoned at about seven thirty one morning and said it was time to pay off the debt.

"You'll have to wait and take the right channels. I'm not ready to pay it yet," Gacy said.

Czarna has an explosive temper, and he saw red. "Pal, the only channel you got to take is to write me a check, or you'll wish to hell you had when I get done with you," he bellowed into the phone.

"You can't talk to me that way," Gacy yelled back, slamming down the receiver.

It was the wrong thing to do. Czarna shoved his stockinged feet into a pair of shoes and, with the laces still flopping, grabbed a light jacket and exploded out the door. Gacy's home was six or eight blocks away, still within sight of the imposing domes of St. Joseph Ukrainian Catholic church, a neighborhood landmark on bustling Cumberland Avenue. Czarna's pickup truck skidded to a stop in front of Gacy's house a few minutes later and the angry contractor bounced out of the cab and began pounding his fist against the front door.

Rossi answered the door, his smooth chest bare and his eyes blinking in the glare of the early morning sun. Czarna barely had time to roar that he wanted to talk to Gacy before the owner of the house loomed in the doorway beside his young friend.

Gacy's hair was still uncombed and sprouted from his head in odd angled clumps. He was also shirtless and his hairy belly sagged obscenely over the beltline of his trousers. His face was purple with anger.

"John, I want that money now," Czarna demanded, straining the words through clenched teeth.

"Get out of here or I'll throw your ass out," Gacy shouted back, pushing the youth aside and closing his fists as he stepped forward. Gacy knew that Czarna was left-handed. He was watching that hand when Czarna's right fist buried itself in his belly.

Gacy slid down along the door frame to a sitting position, without making a sound. His eyes were wide in shock and pain. "Call the police," he gasped to Rossi when he finally got his breath. Rossi hesitated, glancing uncomfortably at the fuming cement contractor, who stared coldly back as if he were daring him to move toward the telephone.

The police were never called. By the time Gacy pulled himself to his feet, his anger had abated and he apologized for withholding the money. Czarna left with a check in his hand. Their friendship resumed almost as if nothing had happened, except that Gacy treated his friend with new respect and a certain amount of caution. It wasn't long before Gacy was again calling his friend "Schultzie," the pet name he had coined for him.

Later, when Gacy helped construct a new bathroom in Czarna's summer cabin in Wisconsin and badly botched the job, he didn't argue about his mistakes. He returned and did the job properly.

The fight cleared the air and the men got along fairly well together, despite their blustering ways and volatile tempers. Gacy was a man that Czarna could relate to. Gacy could handle his whiskey, he did healthy outdoor work (even if it wasn't always done well) and he enjoyed the company of other rugged men. The concrete contractor never suspected that his macho pal was homosexual.

Homosexuals were people that Czarna wouldn't tolerate. He once threatened to walk off a job when he saw magazines with pictures of nude men in a house where he was working. He finished the job after the magazines were stowed in drawers and the owners agreed to stay out of his way.

He relishes telling a story about the time when he was a young man and a homosexual made a pass at him. Czarna kicked him in the face, loosening several teeth. "I can't stand he-shes," he explains.

But he had no such suspicions about his friend Gacy, despite the perpetual presence of young boys in and around the little house on Summerdale. That's why he was surprised at the violence of his own reaction when the young man who was engaged to his daughter told him that he had been invited to move in with Gacy.

Steve Katelanos was a tall, good-looking boy with a broad smile and dark eyes who was having trouble at home. He was growing up and away from the ways of his old-country parents, and there were bitter quarrels over early curfews, the amount of money extracted from his paychecks for room and board, and other problems created by the difference in generations and cultures. It was decided that Steve would move in with his future in-laws.

Czarna's first son, the oldest of four children, including two middle daughters and a boy who was the baby of the family, had moved out of the house not long before. The oldest daughter was also married, so there was plenty of room. But Czarna also had house rules. Although they were not as confining as those of Steve's parents, Czarna applied them to his future son-in-law just as he had with his own children. Among the stipulations were understandings that Steve would pay twenty-five dollars per week for room and board, and that he would be home no later than 1
A.M.
It was the same curfew Czarna had set for his son, who was two years older than Steve.

Steve objected, and Gacy told Czarna that he was being too strict with the boy.

"Keep your nose out of my business," Czarna snarled. "This is my house and I run it the way I want to run it."

Gacy backed off, but he and Steve continued to see a lot of each other at Czarna's home and developed a warm, easy relationship. Steve's girl friend was working nights, and he developed the habit of driving to Gacy's home every few days to drink beer and shoot pool or just talk with the host and some of the other youths who habitually hung around.

Czarna didn't like the idea of Steve idling at Gacy's house, and he said so.

"All we're doing, Pop, is drinking some beer," Steve told him.

"You want to drink beer, come home and drink it," Czarna replied.

Steve's fiancée defended his visits to the house on Summerdale, and reminded her father that Gacy was one of his closest friends. It was difficult for her to understand why her father was so opposed to Steve's spending a few hours at the house.

"He don't belong with John. John's too old," Czarna said. "Let him go out with friends his own age."

Regardless of the quarrels it was causing, when things got too quiet at the house, with his girl friend at work and no one to talk to but his future in-laws, Steve would get restless and drive to Gacy's house. Gacy never made a pass at the young man and never acted overtly homosexual in front of him.

One day Steve told Czarna that he was going to move in with Gacy. Rossi was already staying at the house, but there was plenty of room for another guest. Although it went unspoken, Steve was aware that at Gacy's there would be no bothersome curfew.

"Pal, you move in with John and you can forget about marrying my daughter," Czarna boomed. The threat was a knee-jerk response, made without considering the implications. But it was a threat that he was prepared to back up if necessary.

It wasn't necessary. Steve elected to stay where he was, and when he married his pretty dark-haired girl friend a few months later, Gacy and his mother attended the wedding. Marion Gacy stood in her walker and sang for the guests.

The elderly woman sat in on the card games and other get-togethers with her son and his friends when she visited him. Being with him then was almost as comforting as the old days. There was some of the same serene closeness between mother and son as there had been when he was a little boy who played on the floor with his train set, or sat on the neighbor's porch on quiet summer nights singing songs or listening in wide-eyed fascination to stories of ghosts and ghastly murders.

She was pleased with her son's friendship with the Czarnas. It appeared to Czarna that at times she almost looked upon him as an older brother of her son.

"Don," she once said, "you got to watch John."

"Why? He's a big boy."

"I mean watch out to help him," she said. "He's kind of sick."

"Mom, he's as healthy as you or me," Czarna replied. He was suspicious of his friend's reputed heart ailment. Gacy complained about attacks, but he said many things that weren't altogether true. So it was difficult to tell if he actually had a weak heart or if his stories of attacks were merely another plea for attention.

If Gacy sometimes talked about things that weren't true, there were other times when he didn't talk about things that were true. Like the disappearance of Billy Carroll.

When Billy didn't come home the day after his brother's birthday, his parents began to worry. Although they didn't immediately notify police, his brother began moving among Billy's friends in Uptown asking about him. No one had seen the missing boy.

The family speculated for a time that Billy might have lied about his age and joined the Army, Navy, or the Marines, or hitchhiked to North Florida to see his father's kinfolks. But as time went on and they didn't hear from him, those ideas were discarded. He was just missing, like other boys from Uptown and nearby north-side neighborhoods had been missing in recent months.

Seventeen-year-old Michael Bonnin had dropped out of sight only ten days before Billy was last seen. A few weeks before that, fifteen-year-old Randall Reffett and his friend Samuel Dodd Stapleton were first missed by their family and friends.

Rick Johnston wasn't from Uptown, but the seventeen-year-old boy was last seen there when his mother dropped him off on August 6, in front of the Aragon Ballroom where he was going to attend a rock concert with friends.

Michael lived in Lakeview a few blocks south of Uptown and within walking distance of Wrigley Field, the home of the National League Chicago Cubs. Randall and Sam were from farther north nearer to the edge of Uptown, but still within reasonable distance of Wrigley Field. Sam was known among his friends for the bracelet he wore permanently welded to his wrist.

Michael was last seen alive by his family when he told them he was going to catch a Chicago & North Western train to Waukegan and meet his stepfather's brother, Konrad G. Stein. Michael, who liked woodworking and carpentry, had been refinishing an old jukebox for his uncle and was planning to complete the job that weekend.

Earlier he had spent about three weeks sanding and finishing a boat for one of Stein's friends, and was proud of the opportunity it provided for him to practice his skills. Even though his grades were good, he had dropped out of Luther North High School a few months earlier so that he could go to work at the tasks he enjoyed. But he had later begun talking about returning to school in Waukegan and probably living with his uncle in nearby Gurnee.