The Man Who Killed Boys (22 page)

Gacy had always been considerate of his family. He kept in close telephone contact with his mother and visited at least twice a year. He never forgot birthdays or Christmas and was generous with his sisters and their children. When his older sister's home needed repairs, he gave her money to help with the expenses. And when his younger sister's deep freeze broke down, he purchased her a new one. He was always available with help when family members needed it.

During the Thanksgiving holidays in 1978 he traveled to Arkansas to visit with his mother and his sister's family. It was a relaxing break in his busy schedule and he went Christmas shopping with his sister to buy presents for his nieces and nephew, his mother, and other family members.

The family of James Mazzara also spent Thanksgiving together. Like Gacy, James was a considerate and loving son who remembered birthdays and holidays and called his parents at least once a week. But he slept only occasionally at the family home in suburban Elmwood Park—preferring to exert his independence and stay with friends.

Carrying 110 to 120 pounds on a five-foot, two-inch frame, he was small for a twenty-year-old, but he had been taking care of himself by working at a variety of part-time and unskilled jobs since dropping out of Elmwood Park High School a couple of years before. The youth, who was called "Mojo" by his buddies, was good-looking, healthy, and genial, and it appeared that there was still plenty of time to get serious about carving out a career. So it was a happy occasion when he sat down to Thanksgiving dinner with his family. When he left that evening it was with the understanding that he would be home again for Christmas, if not long before. His older sister, Annette, didn't begin worrying about him until well into December after James hadn't telephoned or visited his parents' home. She asked a few of his friends if they had seen him recently, and when some of them replied in the affirmative, she was somewhat relieved and settled down to wait for Christmas or earlier to hear from her errant, dark-haired brother.

Meanwhile, Rignall's persistence was beginning to pay some dividends in his drive to elicit satisfaction from Gacy for the March 22 abduction and rape. Police had finally arrested the contractor on a misdemeanor charge of battery of July 15. They refused to file a more serious felony charge, despite the urging of Rignall and his attorney Fred Richman. It was explained to the perturbed young man that if he had been chloroformed as he claimed, it would be difficult for him to positively identify his assailant even though he had talked with the man outside the car and for several minutes while smoking the marijuana.

Rignall had also moved, through Richman, to recover some of the expenses he was piling up for medical attention. He was continuing expensive treatments for the liver damage, he had lost forty pounds, and his vitality was sapped as a result of the ordeal. He was admittedly saddled with serious emotional disturbances and was facing financial ruin. There were nights when he would awaken at 3 or 4
A.M.
and sit staring blankly at the wall of his bedroom. When he went to the hospital for the shots that were making road maps of his arms and legs, he fidgeted, his nerves humming like hot wires, as he struggled to understand why he had been singled out to be the victim of a madman.

Richman notified Gacy that he planned to file a civil suit on behalf of his client to collect for the medical bills. Gacy at first suggested that they meet to talk things over in a west suburban restaurant, but later agreed to come to Richman's office. The attorney had arranged for Rignall to wait in the outer office. As Gacy walked in, Rignall got his first good look at him since March 22. Rignall was certain he recognized the man he believed to have attacked him. But Gacy gave no indication that he recognized his reputed victim.

At the meeting, Gacy assumed an air of muddled innocence as he listened to a reading of the proposed suit. When he left he indicated that he wasn't worried about the possibility of the suit being filed, but in a subsequent telephone conversation advised Richman that the matter had been referred to attorney LeRoy Stevens. Stevens was the registered agent for PDM Contractors, Inc.

When Stevens talked with Richman, he reportedly remarked that he didn't believe Gacy was capable of carrying out the acts described in the proposed suit. Nevertheless, about ten days later Gacy offered a settlement of $2,800 through Stevens if Rignall would promise not to file the suit. At that time, Rignall had already run up $7,000 in medical bills and he had no medical insurance. He was worried that without police cooperation he would have difficulty proving that Gacy was the person who had attacked him. After negotiations, he agreed to accept $3,000. He also obtained a promise that Gacy would drop a counter-complaint charging him with battery. The battery charge against Gacy, of course, still stood.

Gacy continued to maintain his usual facade of self-confidence, but privately he may have been beginning to feel the pressures of the problems building around him.

Even his reputation as a man who could always hold his drinks was beginning to slip. It was late fall when Zielinski ran into him at the Harlem-Irving Park Plaza Shopping Center a few blocks from Gacy's home. Gacy was drunk, Zielinski said. When Zielinski asked his friend how business was, Gacy replied that it was good. Zielinski should have continued working for him, Gacy said, because he was paying his employees big money.

Lillie Grexa had a short conversation with her neighbor at about the same time. He told her that his house was becoming too small for him and he was thinking of building on another floor and adding three rooms.

That was foolish, she said. If he felt that way he should sell the house and buy a bigger one.

Perhaps she was right, he agreed, nodding his head in assent. It might be better to sell the house and move on.

Footnote

¹⁸
Chicago Tribune
, January 7, 1979.

8...
The Apocalypse

Robert Piest didn't want to be late for his mother's birthday party, so she was anxious to be on time to pick him up at the pharmacy when he got off work.

Elizabeth Piest was forty-six years old on Monday, December 11, 1978, and she and her husband Harold had two other children. Kenneth, twenty-four, was a medical student at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus, and a daughter, Kerry, twenty-one, was an office worker.

But Robert was the baby of the family. Mrs. Piest was not being overly protective when she picked him up at school and drove him to work, nor when she promised to give him a ride home so he wouldn't have to wait at bus stops and walk the dark streets of the northwest Chicago suburbs. He was an intelligent, active, and adverturesome boy, but he was, after all, only fifteen.

He was the kind of son that any parent could be proud of. Descriptions like "clean cut" and "All American Boy" were coined for youngsters like Robert. He earned good grades at Maine West High School in Niles, and even though he was an underclassman, he was already a letterman in gymnastics. He had always made his parents proud of him in every way.

At about the time the new school term started, he was working a part-time after-school job at the Nisson Pharmacy in nearby Des Plaines and saving his money to buy a car. Elizabeth Piest was proud of him, as she was of all her children, and looked forward to returning home with him so that the family could cut her birthday cake.

She arrived at the store with ten minutes to spare before her son was to finish work at 9
P.M.
A couple of minutes before he was to leave for the night, he asked Kim Beyers, a fellow employee, to watch the cash register a few minutes because "that contractor guy wants to talk to me." Then he turned to his mother.

"Mom, wait a minute," he said. "I've got to talk to a contractor about a summer job that will pay me five dollars an hour." He was earning $2.85 at the pharmacy, and the new job would mean that he could buy a car sooner. Mrs. Piest agreed to wait inside the store for a few minutes, and her son pulled on his light-blue hooded ski jacket and walked out the door.

When his mother realized that it was almost 9:30
P.M.
and he hadn't returned, she went outside to look for him. He wasn't in the parking lot or anywhere else in sight. Alarmed, she asked inside the store if anyone there knew what might have happened to him. No one could tell her much more than she already knew. Her son had apparently gone outside to talk to the contractor about a job. Her anxiety growing every minute, Elizabeth Piest drove home to tell her husband about Robert's mystifying disappearance. He wasn't the kind of boy who would deliberately walk out on his mother without saying a word about where he was going, and she knew he had been looking forward to the cake cutting. At 11:30
P.M.
, after they had waited three hours for their son to come home, the Piests reported to the Des Plaines Police Department that Robert was missing. Officer George Konieczny filled out the report, making careful note of the suspicious circumstances of the boy's disappearance—and including the name of the contractor, John Gacy. Information about the missing boy was entered on state and national computers at 1:54
A.M.
, December 12.

Tuesday morning Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak walked into his office in the Investigations Division of the Des Plaines Police Department and began checking over the previous night's reports. Konieczny's report about the missing Piest boy was among them. Minutes later, Kozenczak was talking to Mrs. Piest, who had come to the station at 9
A.M.

The five-foot, eight-inch, 140-pound Boy Scout didn't fit the description of a typical runaway. Kozenczak had three children of his own, one of them a fifteen-year-old son who was a fellow student of the missing Maine West sophomore. The hard-nosed, analytical-minded police lieutenant was aware that the similarity between his own son and the missing boy may have influenced him to focus on the Piest case. But he also realized that Robert was a "straight kid" who had never been in trouble or given his parents problems.

After spending most of his career in patrol work, Kozenczak had been named chief of detectives less than a year earlier when Lee Alfano moved up to head the department as chief of police. As the new division head, Kozenczak instructed his detectives to carefully scrutinize all missing-persons reports and to pursue especially closely those that did not resemble routine runaways. Robert was not a casual runaway. He was obviously a well-behaved, industrious boy with no problems in school or with his family.

Kozenczak took personal charge of the case. He was a no-nonsense investigator who understood and accepted the value of dogged attention to detail in police work. He immediately launched an in-depth investigation and search for the missing boy. Detectives began questioning everyone at the pharmacy in Des Plaines who had known the missing youth—clerks, customers, and the owner. A clerk said that Robert had left to speak with the contractor, who was parked outside in the lot in a pickup truck, and was described as a gray-haired, middle-aged man. The owner of the pharmacy disclosed that Gacy, who owned a pickup truck among various other vehicles, had done some remodeling work at the store. Furthermore, he was in the store on two different occasions Monday night and apparently talked to Robert and offered him a job. That afternoon, Detective Ron Adams of the Juvenile Bureau telephoned and asked Gacy if he knew anything about the missing boy. Gacy said he did not.

By 9
P.M.
, however, Kozenczak was in Norwood Park township, accompanied by three other investigators, and was knocking at the door of 8213 West Summerdale Avenue. When Gacy answered the door, Kozenczak asked him to come to the police station for questioning. Gacy replied that he had to wait at home for an important telephone call from his mother in Arkansas, regarding an uncle who had just died. A boy was missing, Kozenczak pointed out, and stressed that it was imperative that Gacy talk in detail to investigators as soon as possible. He asked Gacy either to telephone his mother immediately or to leave the telephone call until later and go to the station to give a statement. Gacy didn't like being pressured, especially so soon after losing a beloved uncle. He accused Kozenczak of having "no respect for the dead."

The hefty contractor was obviously upset but he finally agreed to take care of his business and report to the station in a couple of hours. He stumbled into the police department sometime after three o'clock the next morning with his shoes and clothing caked with mud. The detectives who were to take his statement had left hours before and he was told that he could return home, but to report back to the station later that morning.

By 9:15
A.M.
, Gacy was in the Investigative Division offices being questioned extensively about possible connections to the missing boy. He emphatically denied that he knew anything about Robert's disappearance, and was eventually permitted to leave. Soon after that, routine background checks Kozenczak had ordered on various people believed to have known or come into recent contact with the boy paid off. He was notified that Gacy had a criminal record and had served eighteen months of a ten-year term in an Iowa prison on a sodomy conviction. The charge involved a teenage boy. Kozenczak went to Circuit Judge Marvin J. Peters for a search warrant, citing Gacy's criminal background, the boy's exemplary reputation, and other factors to show probable cause.

Lillie Grexa was coming home from a shopping trip and although it was only four o'clock in the afternoon, the heavy December sky was already gray and sodden, hinting of new snow in the early winter that was about to settle over the Midwest. But she was used to gray skies and cold winters. She was more interested in the assemblage of cars in her neighbor's crescent drive. So was her husband.

"What's up next door?" he asked, as his wife walked inside and began unloading packages.