The Man Who Killed Boys (3 page)

The mass murder had been carried out with almost unbelievable ferocity. Cook County Coroner Dr. Andrew J. Toman, working with a half dozen pathologists and investigators manning a mobile crime laboratory, quickly determined that Miss Davy had been strangled. All the other victims had been stabbed. Some had been both stabbed and strangled. One nurse's throat was slit. Another had been stabbed in the back, neck, and eye. Newspapers described the massacre as the most bestial crime in Chicago's history.

Three days later, concluding one of the biggest manhunts ever mounted in Chicago, police picked up a Texas drifter who drank too much alcohol and shot too much dope and charged him with the crime.

A sketch by a police artist made from a description provided by Miss Amurao, and a tattoo, "Born to Raise Hell," on the left arm, led to his capture. Richard Speck, a sometime maritime worker who had been trying to book working passage to New Orleans, was arrested after he had slashed his wrists in a skid-row hotel and was recognized by a doctor at Cook County Hospital. The doctor had seen the police sketch and read of the tattoo in a newspaper, just before being called to the emergency room to work on Speck.

A young lawyer with the States Attorney's office, Louis B. Garippo, handled the administrative details of the trial, which was moved from Chicago to Peoria, Illinois in an effort to dilute the circuslike shenanigans and the effect of publicity to ensure a fair trial for the defendant.

One of the most difficult aspects of the task was accommodating the unruly horde of reporters who fought each other for seats, while still managing to keep a few spots for other members of the public. But Garippo, whose deceptive easygoing manner and meticulous workmanship were honed during three years in Army intelligence, calmly did his best. Before the judge and jury were halfway to a finding of guilty, and sentences for Speck totaling from 400 to 1,200 years in prison, there were empty seats in the courtroom almost every day. Even the shock of murders coming eight at a time can pale after a few months, especially if they occur in Chicago, where hundreds of people die violently every year.

John Wayne Gacy, Jr., was born twenty-four years before the butchery committed by Richard Speck. He was the offspring of a forty-one-year-old machinist, John Wayne Gacy, Sr., a Chicago native, and his thirty-three-year-old wife, born Marion Elaine Robinson, in Racine, Wisconsin.

The father-to-be checked his wife into Edgewater Hospital at about 9:30
P.M.
on March 16. Barely three hours later their first and only son was delivered by their physician, Dr. David S. Levy. Dr. Levy would periodically continue to provide medical care for members of the family, including the healthy baby boy, for more than thirty-five years.

The baby was a Pisces, with the same birth date as Rudolf Nureyev and the same astrological sign as George Washington, Albert Einstein, and Charley Pride. On the birth certificate, his mother's profession was listed as "housewife." It was an occupation she had followed for more than three years after a depression-year wedding in 1938.

When the new baby was taken home a few days later, it was to a family that already included a two-year-old sister, Joanne. Two years later the third and last child, Karen, completed the family.

The world of war and urban violence seemed far away from that of young Johnny Gacy as he grew up on the north side. His mother had inherited a Danish respect for cleanliness from her Scandinavian ancestors, and he lived in a neatly kept home, attending neighborhood Catholic schools with his sisters until he was eleven.

The family moved at about that time and he transferred to public schools, earning a reputation as a student ranging from good to indifferent. He was a well-behaved child and got along well with his teachers. He had a newspaper route and worked part-time in a grocery store after school hours. Everywhere the family lived, his relationship with his neighbors was good. He was a typical neighborhood boy who joined the Boy Scouts, romped with his dog, and played stickball and other street games with his friends.

He hit his head on a playground swing when he was eleven, and suffered occasional blackouts until he was about sixteen, when the trouble was diagnosed as a blood clot on the brain. The clot was dissolved with medication and the blackouts stopped.

There were other encounters with the medical profession, however. The boy was hospitalized for five days to have his appendix removed when he was fifteen, and in 1958 he began taking medication for a heart ailment.

But his health was probably as good or better than many of the youngsters he went to school with. Perhaps the most significant aspect of his school experience was the fact that he attended four high schools and never completed his senior year.

The first was Carl Schurz, a huge coeducational high school on the far north side. At Schurz, Johnny Gacy was no more and no less noticeable than any other student. He was never one of the popular boys. Nevertheless, he made friends and he got along well enough with his schoolmates to earn a reputation as a generally easygoing young man, although years later he told his first wife that he was taken out of school in a straitjacket a couple of times after flying into uncontrollable rages.

His grades could have been better, but those of many of his schoolmates were worse. If there was anything outstanding about him during his student years, it may have been his neatness. Many of the other boys his age were careless about their dress. He wasn't. His clothes weren't expensive, but they were always neat and carefully chosen.

His manner of dressing was one of the things about him that most impressed a girl friend of his sisters, Carole Kotowski. Carole was petite and perky, with a kind of vanilla-ice-cream beauty, and she giggled with John's sisters about the fact that he kept his room cleaner and neater than theirs.

Even though they dated only once, when they were both sixteen, she remembered his neatness. She was a student at Schurz, and he had just transferred from there to Providence St. Mel High School.

As a high school student, he did better in some classes than in others. He made better grades in English and science than in print and auto shop. Soon after his date with Carole, he transferred again, this time to Cooley Vocational High, and signed up for business courses. But a year later he had again changed schools and enrolled at Charles A. Prosser Vocational. His enthusiasm for classes changed along with the shift of schools. At Prosser his attendance was spotty, and after a couple of months he dropped out. The restlessness that had been growing within John Gacy until it culminated in his leaving school led him to a brief separation from his family. It was perhaps overdue.

Although he respected his father, signs of strain had been increasingly developing between the two men in the family. The young man resented what some were to later describe as the senior Gacy's tendency to be a little too strict and demanding of his son. Perhaps because he was the only boy, his father was less tolerant of his problems than of those of the girls. In later years the son talked sadly of his love for his father and his disappointment that they weren't better friends. The teenager was closer to his mother and sisters. The bond between the young man and his mother was particularly strong, and she affectionately called him "Johnny."

The day finally came when Johnny Gacy, still a teenager, left home. He headed west and eventually wound up nearly broke and alone for the first time in his life without family or close friends nearby. He landed in Las Vegas, where newcomers are appreciated more if they arrive with money than without. Jobs weren't easy to find for a teenager without so much as a high school diploma, but he finally found part-time work as a janitor, cleaning up at the Palm Mortuary.

Twenty years later, funeral director George Wycoski recalled that Gacy was a good worker, who cleaned about two hours a night when he showed up. "He was trying to get money to get back East," said Wycoski. "That's all there is to it. He was just a transient."
²

Gacy saved enough money within a few months to pay for his transportation, and a couple of nights later he was at home with his family, being fussed over by his sisters and eating his mother's cooking.

His parents would have been pleased if he had returned to high school to earn a diploma. Although he had not graduated, he enrolled at Northwestern Business College. This time he applied himself to his lessons, and on graduation day he celebrated on campus by posing with his parents for pictures.

If there was any trouble ahead for the young man, it seemed that it would involve his health. He was developing a weight problem, and the heart condition that had intruded into his life was still bothering him. In one period of three years he was doctored or hospitalized several times with heart trouble. In 1961 he spent twenty-three days in the hospital with a spine injury.

Nevertheless, his future looked rosy, and he left business college optimistically looking forward to carving out a place for himself in the business world. A position in the sales profession was perfect for him. He loved to talk. Words spilled topsy-turvy from his mouth, and few people listened closely enough to realize how little meaning the motley collection of words and phrases often had. He was articulate and ingratiating. Those qualities, along with his natural gregariousness, made him a good salesman.

So it wasn't long after his graduation from business school that he went to work for the Nunn-Bush Shoe Company as a management trainee for sixty-five dollars per week. He did so well that by 1964, just before his twenty-second birthday, he was transferred to Springfield, Illinois, to manage the company's retail outlet at Roberts Brothers, a leading men's clothing store.

The March 8, 1964
State Journal Register
in Springfield reported that Gacy was with Nunn-Bush several years in the Chicago area, where he attended school. The new manager of the shoe store held a degree in accounting and business management, the article said, and "... up and until his transfer (he was) very active in youth work and young adult clubs, of which he is a member of the board for the Catholic Inter-Club Council and membership chairman for the Chi Rho Club."

The article added that Gacy was an officer of the Holy Name Society, served for three years as commanding captain for the Chicago Civil Defense, and was a member of the federal Civil Defense for Illinois. The introductory spiel concluded by saying that Gacy was living in Springfield's Sherwood subdivision with an uncle and an aunt.

Springfield was good to the young shoe salesman. He worked there only a few months before he had met, courted, charmed and—in September 1964—married a pretty co-worker, Marlynn Myers, in a Catholic Church ceremony. Short, stocky, and pudgy-faced, Gacy was nothing special to look at. He made up for what he lacked in good looks with personality and generosity. The young woman whom he married was an only child and was impressed by the big spender from the city who talked of being so amazingly well traveled and accomplished, despite his tender years.

Marlynn felt a personal pride when she watched him charm customers. He sold shoes as spiritedly as he sold himself. It was important to him and he applied himself to the task with the same charm, persistence, and roguish bluster that he had brought to his romance.

Fortune smiled on the young couple when Marlynn's parents purchased a string of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in Waterloo, Iowa, and moved there. The family home was left for the newly weds.

Springfield offered more than a bride to the dynamic young Chicago native. It was in Springfield that he discovered the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and joined the local group of energetic young business and professional men working to make their community a better place to live in by carrying out a never-ending series of activities.

As devoted to improving their communities as Jaycees may be, they also believe in publicizing their accomplishments. Jaycees are not known for their modesty, and for every public-spirited project they are involved in, it seems that there is also a dinner or awards banquet where members are publicly and profusely thanked, recognized, and rewarded for their various achievements.

The Jaycees was the kind of organization that Gacy could relate to. By dedicating himself to club activities, he found that he could win recognition and acclaim as one of the up-and-coming bright young men in the state capital and manufacturing center of ninety-six thousand. Instead of being a faceless shoe salesman in Chicago, through commitment and strict attention to club politics he could acquire the recognition as a Jaycee that was so important to him. He worked hard, and the recognition came to him. Only weeks after his arrival in Springfield, he was chosen as the Jaycee Key Man for April for helping plan the annual boss's night banquet and in recognition of his work on a project promoting purchase of U.S. savings bonds.

In 1965, only a year after arriving in Springfield, he was elected first vice-president and the chapter's outstanding man of the year. Jim Selinger, chapter president in 1965, considered Gacy to be a devoted Roman Catholic who took his marriage vows seriously, and the most energetic, ambitious, and outgoing of the three vice-presidents then serving.

Sometimes it appeared that the ambitious shoe salesman worked almost too hard. Friends kidded that he was becoming a borderline workaholic. The jokes were not considered so funny when he was hospitalized for three days with nerve problems.

Years later, Ed McCreight, one of Gacy's fellow Springfield Jaycees, recalled that he was bright, a rapid talker, and a good family man with a firm handshake. They were all qualities valued by Jaycees. McCreight thought that Gacy looked so much like Eddie Bracken that he could have been the actor's double.

The only incident involving Gacy that McCreight could recall as being at all unusual occurred when the former Chicagoan put a flashing red light on the dashboard of his car while they were working on a parade route. McCreight asked him why he was installing the light. Gacy replied that he had a card authorizing him to use the device, which is normally reserved for police agencies, the military, or emergency vehicles. McCreight told him to take it off. He might be entitled to use it in Chicago, McCreight said, but that didn't mean it could be used in Springfield.