The Man Who Killed Boys (24 page)

It was a few minutes after 10
A.M.
, and Czarna was in the washroom when Gacy pounded at the door. Lydia Czarna let him in and was appalled by his haggard appearance. His eyes were sunken deep under his brows and shone wildly from his tired sallow face, which was darkened by at least a day's growth of whiskers. He looked worse than she had ever seen him and he was moaning, "I've been a bad boy." Perplexed, she motioned him to a seat at the kitchen table. He had barely sat down when he asked for a drink of Scotch. That was surprising because lately he had been turning down drinks, explaining that he was trying to lose weight. She had never seen him drink so early on a workday.

Czarna had walked into the kitchen and was staring at his friend. "John," he finally asked, making no attempt to hide the exasperation in his voice, "what's your problem?"

Gacy reached for the glass on the table and lifted it to moist lips, his trembling hand causing the ice to clink as he swallowed deeply. He set the glass back down on the table and turned to Czarna. "The end is near," he intoned, his voice cracking.

"What the hell are you talking about, 'The end is near'?" Czarna exploded.

"The end is near," Gacy repeated.

Czarna couldn't figure it out. It sounded like his friend was expecting to die. "What are you gonna do, kill yourself?"

"No," said Gacy. "They're trying to pin a murder rap on me." He sipped the Scotch again, got up, and began walking toward the door. Czarna asked where he was going and Gacy replied that he had a job to do.

"I thought you had something you wanted to tell me," Czarna spluttered. Gacy walked outside without answering but immediately turned and walked back in. The words were forced out in a hoarse croak as he approached his friend. "I killed thirty people," he said, "give or take a few."

Czarna was stunned, but managed to ask who the victims were. "Bad people," Gacy said. "They were blackmailing me. They were baaaad people." Leaning his head on Czarna's shoulder, he began to cry.

By 10:55
A.M.
, Gacy had left his bewildered friends and driven again to the service station, where he stayed a few minutes before heading to the home of David Cram. Rossi was also at Cram's house. Both youths had lived with Gacy for a time. As he entered the house, the policemen overheard him tell Rossi, "I'm glad you could make it. Come inside. This is the last time you'll ever see me."

Rossi left the house alone at about 11:30
A.M.
About fifteen minutes later, Cram left with his friend and former boss. Before getting in the car, Gacy approached Schultz, who was tailing him by that time, and announced that Cram was going to chauffeur him "if it's okay with you." Schultz was puzzled that Gacy would ask him but indicated that he had no objections.

Gacy added that he and the youth were going to a restaurant in northwest Chicago for lunch, and the policemen followed them there. Gacy slid from his seat and began walking to the restaurant, but as he reached the door, he apparently changed his mind and returned to the car. Cram walked to the police car and leaned toward the window to talk to Schultz. The boy appeared to be frightened. "We're going to Maryhill Cemetery," he said. "John wants to say good-bye to the grave of his father."

Schultz noncommittally nodded his head. "Don't you guys know?" Cram asked. "When John was with his attorney all last night, he admitted to him that he had killed at least thirty people. He's practically suicidal. I hope you stay close to us."

The man and the boy never reached the cemetery. Unknown to them, Schultz was notified by radio moments after talking to Cram that other officers had been ordered to arrest Gacy for possession of marijuana, a charge stemming from the incident at the service station. Less than five minutes after Cram drove away from the restaurant, officers from the Des Plaines Police Department, Cook County Sheriff's Department and the Illinois State Department of Law Enforcement, Division of Criminal Investigations, stopped the car and took Gacy into custody. A companion charge of possession of a controlled substance (Valium) was later added to the marijuana offense. During arraignment in Circuit Court, bail was set at a total of one thousand dollars on the two counts. Until his arrest on the drug charges, Gacy had still been free on nominal bail awaiting action on the misdemeanor charge filed earlier in the Rignall case.

In a Chicago restaurant early Thursday evening, December 21, Florence Branson consulted the cards again. Czarna had asked his wife to have a reading on his behalf. He was worried that he would be drawn deeper into the legal problems of his friend, and he wanted to know the true nature of Gacy's troubles. Although the Czarnas were not directly involved, the reader advised, there was serious trouble affecting a person close to them. The problem involved drugs and the disappearance of someone. The advisor warned that their friend was shady, dishonest, and had an obsession that had entangled him in the predicament. His distress would grow still greater
.

At about 7
P.M.
, the Grexas noticed police cars again collecting in front of the house next door. Another search warrant had been obtained and Des Plaines's and Sheriffs police returned to the house with Gacy. This time, Ed Grexa didn't bother to go next door to ask what was going on, and the family spent most of the evening at the back of their house where they had their family room and television.

Investigators had already looked through all the rooms in the house, including the attic, and they told Gacy that it might be necessary to rip up the flooring in their search for the missing high school student. Obviously alarmed, Gacy blurted out that he had killed a man in self-defense. But it wouldn't be necessary to rip up the floorboards of the house to find him.

Gacy said he had buried the body under his garage and offered to show detectives the location of the makeshift grave. Flanked by Assistant State's Attorney Lawrence Finder, a half dozen policemen and his own counsel, Gacy led the group to the garage, where he pinpointed the burial site with an "X" drawn on the concrete floor with spray paint.

Instead of immediately breaking up the concrete, the investigative team returned to the house for a look at the crawl space. A few minutes later, everyone understood why Gacy hadn't been anxious for them to poke around under the flooring.

Back in Des Plaines, Gacy was complaining of chest pains, and fire department paramedics were called. His blood pressure was checked and was slightly high. He was taken on a stretcher to a local hospital, examined more closely, and returned to the police station the same evening.

Investigators worked into the night. At 10
P.M.
, Cook County Medical Examiner, Dr. Robert J. Stein, answered his telephone in north suburban Highland Park. He is traditionally an early riser who plans to be at his office near the Cook County Hospital by 5:30 or 6
A.M.
on weekdays, and a few minutes later he would have been in bed. The telephone call changed that.

"There's a body or something in the crawl space of a ranch house near Norridge," a sheriff's policeman told him.
²⁰
Stein telephoned an aide and instructed him to bring disposable coveralls and meet him at the house in Norwood Park township. Almost a dozen law enforcement officers were waiting when he arrived. Sheriff Richard J. Elrod had designated Deputy Chief Richard Quagliano and Lieutenant Frank Braun, head of the Major Investigations Unit, and others, to work with the town policemen because Gacy's house was in an unincorporated area and the investigation was reaching into various jurisdictions within northwest Cook County.

Officers repeated the information that remains of at least one human body had been found in a crawl space, and led Stein inside the house. He was met by an odor familiar to anyone who has worked with dead bodies. It was a death house. As soon as he had slipped on the coveralls, Stein dropped through the trap door into the dankness below. An evidence technician pointed to material that appeared to be human hair. At the other end of the tunnel, another technician called out that there was a bone for Stein to look at. The yellow beam of a flashlight illuminated skeletal human remains of at least one human being. Bones that had been part of two human arms were uncovered. Other suspicious mounds were crowded elsewhere in the dark space.

Stein crawled out of the tunnel and sat down at a table for a conference with other law enforcement officials. The medical examiner is in legal charge at the scene of any death he is investigating. It was quickly determined that efforts to recover the remains would be postponed until the following day. At that time, Stein said, the bones would be disinterred as carefully as if the site were an archaeological dig to insure that all possible evidence was preserved. He ordered the house sealed overnight and guards posted.

While Stein and other investigators were preparing to continue their probe of the nauseating horrors of the thirty-by-forty-foot crawl space, the man police believed to be responsible for the atrocity was still talking at the Des Plaines police station. He had engaged Amirante as the second attorney to represent him, and the thirty-year-old lawyer was present during questioning. Sheriffs department officers were standing by along with Des Plaines police. Assistant State's Attorney, Terry Sullivan, chief of the Northwest Suburban Divison and County Sheriff's Investigator, Greg Bedoe, who was assigned to the State's Attorney's staff, were also helping with the interrogation.

The tightness had been closing in on Gacy more intensely every day and he appeared to be relieved that the chase had come to an end. Investigators confronted him with evidence they had been collecting, read him his rights, and he made a rambling verbal confession. By early Friday morning, he had confessed that he had murdered at least thirty people. He told of using his experience as a clown, offering to show his victims "a trick" to lure them into permitting themselves to be handcuffed, and after they were helpless, sexually abusing them and forcing them to perform unnatural acts. He killed them by moving behind them and throttling them with a rope or a board that he held at both ends and pulled back against their throats.

The bodies were interred in the crawl space or elsewhere on his property until a combination of poor health, that prevented him from doing more digging, and a lack of space in the makeshift burial ground forced him to seek a new method of disposal. Consequently, he dumped the last five victims into the Des Plaines River. Piest was one of those, and Gacy confessed that the body was still in the attic when Kozenczak was downstairs on December 12. Gacy admitted keeping the bodies in the house for several hours but would not say if he sexually molested them after death, one investigator told newsmen.

He said he was so unnerved by the appearance of the detectives that after they left, he crammed the body into the trunk of his car and drove to the Kankakee Bridge on the Des Plaines River south of Joliet. He dropped his grisly cargo into the water and tossed the boy's clothing after him. The bridge is about fifty miles from Gacy's home.

The story was given some credibility when a tow-truck operator from the town of LaGrange reported pulling Gacy's Oldsmobile from a two-foot snowbank on the Tri-State Tollway at about 2
A.M.
on December 13. Bob Kirkpatrick, who held a contract to tow disabled cars on a section of the highway, said he didn't record Gacy's name because the twenty-dollar towing fee was paid in cash. He identified Gacy, however, through a photograph provided by Cook County Sheriff's police who contacted him.

The garage operator said that after he was directed to the car by Tollway police, he had to rap on the window to awaken the driver. The stranded motorist acted as if he were on dope or coming off a drunk. He was unshaven and tough-looking, Kirkpatrick added. After the car was back on the pavement, Gacy drove north in the direction of his home.

Police were still searching the house when Ed Grexa got out of bed about 5:30 Friday morning, washed, had coffee and a light breakfast and left for work. By 6:45, Lillie Grexa was up and peering out the front window at a television-station news truck that had pulled up next door and parked among the clutter of official cars. She was just shaking her youngest daughter awake to tell her that "something's really wrong next door," when someone knocked.

A television reporter was standing on the stoop. "Did you hear," he inquired, "they found three bodies?" Her husband telephoned from work a few minutes later. "Did you see the news?" he asked. "They just found a body over at John's."

On Friday afternoon, Gacy was formally charged with murdering Robert Piest. Wearing a black leather jacket and rumpled trousers that looked like they had been slept in, he was escorted under heavy guard across a short walkway from the Police Headquarters to the Des Plaines Branch of Cook County Circuit Court for a bond hearing. All elevators were stopped while he was in the building, and he was walked up three flights of stairs to the courtroom of Judge Peters. At least another two dozen lawmen were scattered throughout the room. During the seven minutes Gacy was inside, he stood with his head up and his hands clasped behind his back, chattering amiably with the officers surrounding him. Peters ordered him held without bail and scheduled formal arraignment for the following Friday.

Gacy's hands were cuffed behind him at the conclusion of the hearing and he was walked to the elevator. A half dozen policemen who couldn't jam inside the elevator with him dashed down the stairs. They crowded around him, protecting him from a throng of media men and women, escorting him back across the walkway to security rooms in the police headquarters.

He continued to cooperate and talked freely to lawmen on Thursday and Friday. One detective disclosed, however, that Gacy did not sign a statement, and said notes weren't even taken of much of the conversation. Gacy was so talkative that investigators were afraid to interrupt or to take notes because of fear that he would stop.

The suspect provided the time, place, and description of the slayings but said he didn't know or couldn't recall the names of many of the victims because they were people he met in casual encounters. He said he killed them because he was afraid of retaliation or possible extortion attempts.