The Man Who Killed Boys (19 page)

Amazingly, the problem can become even stickier when older children are involved. Such bewildering laws and regulations have been passed to protect the civil rights of juveniles that it is becoming increasingly difficult to protect them. One of the problems preventing police from making the most effective possible use of computers to locate missing persons is fear of violating rules of confidentiality.

Youth officers are prevented by the confidentiality rule from circulating lists of missing children under seventeen across the country to brother police departments, according to the commander.

"You cannot expose the child according to our law. And I understand this," Thomas says. "They assume that this child is going through a problem period, a troubled time. And if we have the services for this child we can turn him around before he is an adult. We don't want to label him or stigmatize him by putting his picture in the paper."

Nevertheless, a Federal Bureau of Investigation computer network lists more than 21,000 disappearances, most of them juveniles and young adults, and the information is available to local police departments. Indications of foul play are considered serious enough in only about 5,200 cases to justify automatic notice to local law-enforcement agencies. There is also a state computer as well as the local Chicago police department computer, but by the beginning of 1979 none had been programmed to pinpoint common denominators in seemingly dissimilar cases.

Parents can publicize information, including pictures of their missing children. Policemen cannot. Police departments do, of course, exchange information about missing children, but according to Thomas, most of the data is passed by personal contact or by telephone. Other youth officers have been quoted as saying that sharing of information between departments in Chicago and the suburbs is practically nonexistent. The problems that exist between overlapping police jurisdictions are especially troublesome in missing-persons cases.

A good-looking, even-featured man with a smooth acorn-colored complexion, Thomas leans forward in his chair at the Police Administration Building on South State Street and looks people confidently in the eye, talking in firm, sincere tones when he discusses the job of protecting minors in a city of more than three million people.
¹³

"Somewhere along the line I think we've said that children have the same rights as adults and that's the way it will be," Thomas says, shaking his head. "But children are
not
adults, and they need help."

Jon Prestidge was neither a runaway nor a juvenile. Nor was Russell Nelson. But like Jon, Russell made the innocent mistake of visiting Chicago's New Town at the wrong time.

Both young men were about the same age. They were each from Midwestern towns much smaller than Chicago. And they had been in the city less than a week when they disappeared.

One thing they didn't share was scholarship. Russell graduated as an honors student from his high school in Cloquet, Minnesota, a small town located between Duluth at the southwest end of Lake Superior, and the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation. Most of the town's 8,700 inhabitants trace their livelihood to one of the three large lumber mills that produce wood and paper and are the foundation for the area economy.

Russell's father, Robert, is a crane operator for the Continental Oil Company in a nearby community. One of Russell's older brothers found a job as a baker and the other a job as a laborer on a Burlington Northern Railroad construction gang, but Russell planned to be an architect.

He was bespectacled and bookish. He admired the work of architect Mies van der Rohe. He liked the music of singer Donna Summer, and teamed with a girl friend to win several disco contests. A slight five-foot, eight-inches tall and 130 pounds, he shied away from his high school hockey, football, and ski teams and elected instead to apply himself to reading, art, photography, and drama. In his junior year he acted in
Oliver
, and the next year he was in the cast of
South Pacific
. He managed to sandwich activities as a Boy Scout and work as a stock boy in a Cloquet store between his studies without hurting his grades. In his senior year he won both a community scholarship and a VFW scholarship.

In September 1974 he enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis as a major in pre-architecture. A few weeks after beginning classes he met Thomas Maurer, a sixty-year-old clergyman with the United Church of Christ and a lecturer in sexuality at the university's medical school. Russell moved into Maurer's condominium in the Towers, a posh apartment complex.

According to reporter James Warren in an article in the
Chicago Sun-Times
, Maurer acknowledged that he is homosexual, but insisted that he never had sexual relations with his young roommate. He said that their ties were closer to a father-son bond. It was a relationship approved of by Russell's parents. "I think Russ became the son Tom never had," Mrs. Norma Nelson was quoted as saying.
¹⁴
Maurer went so far as to change his will, making Russell the sole beneficiary.

But Russell had sprung from people and a community where youngsters are taught to make their own way. He interrupted his classes after two successful years and told his friends that he planned to make as much money as possible and return to school in the fall. Still living with Maurer, he began working eighty hours a week as a custodian at the medical school and as a waiter at the First Street Station, a popular restaurant. His mother said he had also once worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, as a draftsman, and established trust funds for nieces and nephews. He told her several times that if he died young he wanted to donate his eyes to science.

His work at the restaurant was so impressive that he was promoted to combination waiter-host in the evenings. His fellow employees overlooked occasional subdued boasting about living the good life in the Towers. He also liked to give the impression that he was street-wise and knew his way around, a not too unusual bit of posturing for a college boy.

The young man avoided alcohol, tobacco, and coffee. "Yet it is clear, despite the parents' protests to the contrary, that Nelson did socialize in the city's gay community," Warren reported. "To gay friends he affected the name 'Parker' Nelson . . ."
¹⁵

Despite his crushing work schedule, he was young and full of energy and after completing his night shift at the restaurant he sometimes stopped in at The Gay 90s, a onetime strip joint converted into a gay bar. It was apparently there that he met Robert Young, a twenty-eight-year-old from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, who reportedly worked at a variety of jobs, including carpentry. Russell called his new friend The Cowboy.

In October 1977 Russell quit both his jobs and drove nearly six hundred miles to Belle Fourche with his new friend. They stayed with Young's parents for a few days before returning to Minneapolis. Russell then told his parents that he and his companion were going to travel to Chicago, Canada, New England, and Florida. The youth took $2,600 in cash and traveler's checks with him when they left in Young's van on their way to their first stop—Chicago. The Cowboy knew a contractor in Chicago and had other friends there.

One of the first people they met in Chicago was Jim Burnett, a waiter at a north-side restaurant and a friend of Young's. Russell and The Cowboy were apparently sleeping in the van and Burnett agreed to permit them to take showers at his apartment. They stayed overnight on Tuesday, October 18.

Burnett was impressed with the aspiring young architect from Minnesota and considered him to be intelligent and sensitive, but naive. Russell was excited about investigating the architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the prospect of looking over Chicago buildings which Mies van der Rohe had worked on.

He and his friend made the visit to IIT on October 19. The moon was full as the two men, who had been in Chicago fewer than seventy-two hours, headed for Crystal's Blinkers in New Town that night. There is something about the full moon that science has never quite been able to cope with. Countless phenomena associated with it have occult overtones. They range from the old beliefs linking it with werewolves to scientifically documented studies which have shown that postoperative surgical patients bleed more profusely and birth rates rise when the moon is full. Almost any policeman who has been on the job long knows that people act more irrationally than usual during the full moon, and murder and suicide rates often go up. Sexual desires are also believed to be heightened.

The full moon that hung over the city that night was apparently the last ever seen by Russell Nelson. Young later told police that after some time in the bar he and his friend left and were standing outside when he was distracted by some other people. When he turned back Russell was gone. The Minnesota youth didn't return to the van or to the apartment, and Burnett said that thousands of dollars and valuable personal possessions were left behind.

Young filed a missing-persons report with the police and contacted the Nelson family, asking for money to finance a search.

The Nelsons refused to give him the money, but Russell's older brothers met him in Chicago when they arrived there to search on their own. The effort was fruitless. The brothers rejected an offer by Young to get them jobs with a local contractor while they were in the city.

Young didn't mention the contractor by name, but John Gacy was in Roseville, Minnesota remodeling the Setzer Pharmacy in June 1977—only four months before Russell Nelson's fateful trip to Chicago. Roseville is a suburb of St. Paul, the twin city of Minneapolis.

Gacy's work was increasingly taking him outside the Chicago area to other communities in Illinois and to dozens of states. The Grexas were socializing with him less frequently, and other friends saw less of him. Occasionally they would see him and he would say that he was flying to New York the next day, to Minnesota a few days after that, and then to Texas or New Jersey or Florida. He once told the Grexas that he was expecting to receive an award for flying one hundred thousand miles. Several times he returned to Springfield, where he had lived from 1964 to 1966, to do remodeling jobs.

Although he was branching out to other states, Gacy still managed to find much of his work in his home area. One of the stores he remodeled was the Ksiazek Pharmacy on Chicago's southwest side. Owner Ed Ksiazek later observed that although pharmacists try to guard against thefts, it would be possible for someone to help themselves to handfuls of drugs without the owner noticing when construction or remodeling is underway. There is no law requiring all prescription drugs to be locked up out of sight.

Czarna once agreed to pour the foundation and concrete floor for a pharmacy for Gacy, and Gacy escorted him through the back door to introduce him to the owner. They were surrounded by thousands of pills and capsules as they waited for the pharmacist, and it would have been simple for either of them to have helped themselves to handfuls of drugs without anyone knowing they were missing.

Gacy subcontracted twenty-five or thirty drugstore remodeling jobs with Ted Gladson, a respected contractor from a far Chicago suburb. Operator of the P & E Systems in Lisle, Gladson specialized in drugstore and supermarket jobs and referred several young men to Gacy for jobs, when he himself didn't have work for them.

Gacy had plenty to keep them busy. Amazingly, after so many years of fixing up his own home, he still had jobs for them to do at 8213 West Summerdale.

His photographer friend, Martin Zielinski, was at the house one day when Gacy had a teenager crawling through the space under the house to repair a minor plumbing leak. Gacy put both Rossi and Cram to work digging out sections of the crawl space at other times. He told them where to dig, explaining that he was having drainage problems and wanted to install tile.

It was awkward, nasty work. The crawl space was narrow, cramped, and musty. A sour odor mixed with the sweat of the teenagers as they hacked at the dank earth with trenching tools provided by their boss. It was not an ideal working space for a man with Gacy's humpty-dumpty build, or with his reputed heart ailment.

Yet, Zielinski had once joined him on a job that required them to work in a crawl space similar to the one under Gacy's house and the young photographer was amazed at his boss's performance. Despite Gacy's corpulence, he worked in the cramped tunnel for eight hours on his knees. He grunted and sweated but he showed surprising physical endurance for a man of his size.

The day the boy repaired the plumbing leak, Zielinski crawled after him just to see what the underside of his friend's house looked like. The tunnel was lighted by a single bulb that shriveled and bent the shadows as they played over the smooth dirt. Zielinski wasn't aware of any particular odor, although there were dark puddles of standing water.

Zielinski's relationship with the man he called "Johnny" was often turbulent during the half dozen years they knew each other. In addition to the photographic work he did for Gacy, Zielinski also occasionally helped out on construction jobs.

The money came in handy because Zielinski was working toward a degree in business administration at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus. But even though the money was welcome, it didn't always come easy. There were constant differences about the pay or working arrangements. Working for Gacy eventually became more trouble than it was worth and the young photographer began avoiding him. But not before he had gotten an inkling of his friend's unorthodox sexual attitudes.

Gacy once asked him to go to a porno movie, and Zielinski agreed. He was surprised when he got to the theater and discovered that the film had an all-male cast. He was also bored, and showed it. Perhaps, he reasoned later, that was why Gacy never made a pass at him.

Another time Gacy asked him to shoot revealing pictures of homosexuals, and Zielinski refused, saying that it was illegal. Gacy told him that if he was smart he wouldn't get caught, Zielinski recalled, and that he should consider it because there was good money to be made and homosexuals love to be photographed.