The Man Who Killed Boys (23 page)

"Oh, maybe John's having an early Christmas party."

"If that's what it is, it's a funny way to have a party," Grexa replied. "His own car isn't even there."

Lillie was opening packages and beginning to put things away. "They might be waiting for him," she suggested. She was sure that whatever her friendly but eccentric neighbor was up to he could take care of himself. Shopping had tied up most of her afternoon and she had work to do. She hadn't even thought about starting supper yet. She was puttering in the kitchen when the back door slammed and her red-haired fourteen-year-old daughter walked in carrying an armload of schoolbooks.

"Mom, it looks like they're searching Mr. Gacy's house," she said. "There's a light on in every room and it looks like people are going through things." Lillie Grexa called to her husband and repeated the story. "Maybe you'd better go next door, Eddie, and see what's what," she suggested. They were used to their neighbor knocking on their door and asking them to keep an eye on his house for a few days while he was away on one of his frequent business trips. He returned the favor when he could by watching their house for trouble while they were away on vacation or visiting.

Grexa, however, said he didn't think he should get involved in whatever was going on. His wife repeated her urging to check things out next door. He shook his head "no." But a few minutes later, when a couple of men walked outside the house next door and began taking photographs, he changed his mind and told his wife that he was going to John's to talk to them.

"What's going on?" he asked, after cutting across the lawn and confronting the men with the camera and waving his arm toward the house. "You know, I'm about ready to call the police."

One of the men reached in his pocket, took out his billfold and flipped it open to show a badge clipped inside. "Don't worry," he said, "we are the police." Grexa was impressed but unintimidated. He asked what they were looking for, and the policeman replied that he couldn't talk about the search. "Well," said Grexa, turning to leave, "if you're searching for something, you know there's an attic and a crawl space in there."

Lillie telephoned Gacy's bookkeeper and said there was trouble next door. She asked how she could locate her neighbor. The bookkeeper said that Gacy was planning to attend a wake that night and promised to try to get in touch with him. Shortly after, the bookkeeper called back and said Gacy hadn't shown up at the wake and couldn't be found.

Meanwhile the search of the house was bearing fruit. When the Des Plaines detectives and an evidence technician from the Cook County Sheriff's Department eventually left, they took with them:

A section of rug with stains on it. Clothing, including a pair of yellow undershorts. Color photos of drug stores. An address book.

More than a dozen books, including
Bike Boy, Pederasty, Sex Between Men and Boys, Twenty-One Abnormal Sex Cases, Tight Teenagers, The American Bicentennial Gay Guide
, and
The Rights of Gay People
. Seven erotic films. A hypodermic needle and syringe. A quantity of crushed green plantlike material and rolling papers.

Bottles of pills, including capsules thought to be Valium, and another containing amyl nitrite. A scale.

A switchblade knife.

A pistol, and a bag containing possible gun caps or rivets.

A pair of handcuffs and keys. A length of nylon rope.

A thirty-nine-inch-long two-by-four board with two holes in each end.

A temporary driver's license issued to Michael B.

Baker.

A Maine High School class ring with the initials J.A.S.

A driver's license issued to James G. O'Toole.

A receipt from the Nisson Pharmacy for a roll of film

being developed.

At that time, police also confiscated Gacy's 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88, the second new car he purchased in 1978; a 1978 Chevrolet pickup truck with the words "PDM Contractors" inscribed on it and the attached snowplow; and a late model van, also identified as the property of "PDM Contractors."

Bits of hair were found in the trunk of the car, which was taken to the police garage. The door of the car and those of other vehicles in the garage were opened and a trained dog that had been given articles of Robert's clothing to smell was released inside the building. He scampered past the other vehicles and jumped inside Gacy's Oldsmobile. The hair, which was the same color as the missing boy's, was sent to the police crime laboratory for further examination.

Investigators were especially curious about the film receipt they had found in a kitchen trash basket. They suspected that it did not belong to Gacy and felt it might be an important factor in leading them to the missing boy. By 9
P.M.
, the Piest family had confirmed that the receipt was for film that belonged to Kim Beyers.

The sixteen-year-old girl subsequently explained that she was with Robert a few days before his disappearance and he had given her his jacket to wear because she was cold. She said she left the film receipt in the jacket pocket and recited the last two digits of the serial number for police. By that time, Kozenczak had few doubts that Robert had been in the house on Summerdale Avenue. The tenacious detective ordered twenty-four-hour surveillance on the contractor, hoping that Gacy would lead them to the boy. Police surveillance teams made no attempt to hide their presence, as other officers spread out to talk to the suspect's friends and associates. Several officers began working double shifts. The Investigations Division, which combines the Detective and Juvenile Bureaus, operated with a total of fourteen policemen.

Czarna was one of the first of Gacy's associates to become aware that his friend was in trouble when Gacy drove to his house in a rented car to complain that police were persecuting him and trying to tie him to a drug offense. Police even parked a few yards away and watched as Gacy sold Christmas trees near an area shopping center, an enterprise he had undertaken for two or three years. The Czarnas believed him when he said he was innocent, and they sympathetically agreed that the around-the-clock surveillance would be nerve-wracking. They were his friends and they listened as he talked of his troubles and joked sarcastically about his police "bodyguard." He was worried that police would get another search warrant and "break in" his house again, and feared that they might be inside even then or have already been inside and left. Czarna couldn't understand Gacy's distress about a search. There should be nothing to worry about if there was nothing to hide, he reasoned.

Nevertheless, Gacy continued to fuss and worry until Czarna finally agreed to drive to the house and check inside just to put his friend's mind at ease. Gacy handed him the keys to the rental car and prepared to wait for his friend's return. A police car slid from its parking place and followed the cement contractor as he drove the half dozen blocks to Summerdale, pulled the vehicle into the rear driveway, and parked. The police car stopped in front. The house hadn't been searched again.

The next day, Gacy knocked at the Grexa's back door. He had some specifications to drop off for a job involving marble installation that Ed Grexa's boss had bid on. Lillie answered the door. Her neighbor was hollow-eyed and drooping.

"I should have been here earlier with these, but I've been kind of busy," he apologized, as he handed the plans to her.

"Yeah, what's going on?" the woman agreed, nodding her head in knowledgeable assent.

"Well . . .I got company wherever I go. I even had to hire bodyguards," he joked.

When Lillie asked him why he was being followed, he replied that the police were trying to tie him to a murder. It took a moment for the remark to sink in. Then she remembered hearing that one of the boys who worked on her neighbor's construction jobs for a while had disappeared. "Is it that kid that used to work for you?"

"Oh, no. Not him," Gacy said. "He's in another state." Gacy indicated that the trouble was drug-oriented, but emphatically denied that he had anything to do with drugs and said the whole incident was a misunderstanding. He knew how strongly she was opposed to drug abuse. Then he apologized because he had to leave, but before turning to go, he told her, "If anyone comes and asks any questions, just refer them to my lawyer." He gave her his attorney's name and office numbers, and told her not to worry because the trouble would all be over soon.

The search for the missing boy was taking other avenues as well as the surveillance of Gacy. Dogs and a Coast Guard helicopter were called out to comb portions of the forest preserve and along the banks of the Des Plaines river in the northwest suburban area. Robert's family and friends circulated flyers with pictures of him throughout Des Plaines. Some were left near the cash register at the Nisson Pharmacy. He was described as having medium-length brown hair and wearing a tan T-shirt, tan Levi pants, and the blue jacket. Several people responded with information that they hoped would be helpful, and policemen were assigned to check out the data for workable leads.

Gacy, meanwhile, took the offensive against the people he claimed were tormenting him, by filing a $750,000 civil-rights suit in U.S. District Court in Chicago against the city of Des Plaines. He asked for an injunction to halt all investigations and sought damages for mental anguish, loss of reputation in the community, deprivation of liberty, and loss of personal property. Specifically naming Chief Alfano and other officers, he claimed that he was being harassed by Des Plaines police and accused the Illinois Bureau of Investigation of participating in the abuse. He and his attorneys were apparently unaware that the state agency had been defunct since 1977, when its functions were assumed by the Division of Criminal Investigations in the State Department of Law Enforcement. The name of Sam Amirante, Gacy's acquaintance from the Norwood Park Township Lighting Commission, appeared on the suit with that of Stevens. It was also Amirante whose name Gacy had given to Lillie Grexa.

The contractor complained that his right to privacy had been violated and he had been exposed to illegal searches and seizures during the investigation. His vehicles were improperly seized and held and he, himself, was detained on December 13 from 1:30 to 9:45
P.M.
Police were additionally accused of harassing his friends, employees, and associates by detaining and questioning them.

Gacy's attitude toward the policemen who were trailing him blew hot and cold. He alternately shot photographs of them, led them on long rambling car chases in apparent efforts to lose them, and invited them into his house. In the early evening of the day the suit was filed, Gacy approached two officers parked in a police car near his driveway and invited them into his home. Officer Robert Schultz, an eight-year veteran of the department, recognized the heavy cloying odor pervading the house the moment he stepped through the kitchen door. Temperatures outside were near zero and the furnace was on, emphasizing the stench of putrefied human flesh. It settled over the rooms like an odiferous blanket. It was an odor that Schultz had smelled dozens of times before at the Cook County Morgue and on other occasions when he was near the cadavers of people who had been dead for some time. The odor of human tissue that has putrefied clings to a room or enclosed space like gangrene.

Czarna was beginning to feel some of the pressure of the intense investigation focusing on his friend. He was interrogated for the first time on the same day that Schultz was invited into Gacy's home. Detectives told him they were investigating the disappearance of the Piest boy and wanted to know if Gacy was a homosexual, if he was known to be violent, and how he treated his employees. The affair was becoming more and more frustrating and difficult for Gacy's friends, and Czarna's irritation was beginning to surface. A police car had been parked outside his own house several times, yet his friend kept assuring him that the investigation was a terrible mistake and that everything would soon be cleared up. Police questioned more than one hundred people during the first four or five days of the investigation.

The pressure on Gacy was also mounting. When Des Plaines detective David Hachmeister relieved other officers and picked up his shift of surveillance one minute after midnight on December 21, he had been with the department's youth division only three days after serving six months in the department's tactical unit "Delta." Hachmeister took over his shift with a partner outside Amirante's law offices in Park Ridge, across the Des Plaines River, a few miles southeast of the town of the same name. Temperatures were again near zero, and Amirante walked out to the car and invited the policemen inside. He motioned them to chairs and poured hot coffee, explaining that Gacy was asleep on a couch in an inner office.

By 8
A.M.
, the plainclothesmen were back in their car when Gacy lurched from the office, apparently highly disturbed and agitated. He climbed into his car and roared out of the driveway, with the officers behind him. The car ripped through speed zones and continued erratically along busy streets until the policemen finally pulled him to the curb and warned him to drive more carefully.

Gacy nodded his head and drove away again, slower and more carefully, heading southeast to a Park Ridge service station near the Niles town line. As the policemen watched from about six feet away, he stepped out of his car and took a plastic bag of what appeared to be marijuana from his pocket and stuffed it into the pocket of one of the station attendants. The officers did not make an arrest at the time despite the virtual invitation because they were still hopeful that Gacy would somehow lead them to Piest. Gacy walked inside the station to talk to the owner, but left a few moments later and drove the few blocks to his house.

He stayed only long enough to take his little gray dog across the street and leave him with neighbors, Sam and Jennie De Laurentis. They were curious and asked him why he was being followed by police cars. Everyone in the neighborhood was aware that he was involved in something serious.

"They're trying to pin a murder rap on me," he said.
¹⁹
Then he joined the couple laughing at the seeming preposterousness of the idea. When he stopped chuckling, he said he would nevertheless appreciate it if they would keep Patches with them until he could get the matter straightened out. It was odd, he said, but the dog was nervous and didn't appear to like being left alone in the house anymore. That night Sam De Laurentis opened the door to talk to a neighbor and Patches scampered outside. He never came back.