The Man Who Killed Boys (31 page)

Epilogue

Before all the bodies were pulled from the dark tomb under John Gacy's home, the Chicago Police Department was developing plans for an improved computer system to trace missing persons. Two top police officials were named to head the program, which will make it possible for investigators to match up common denominators in missing-persons cases that are connected. There was also some indication that the new system would comply with recommendations by Carey and Dr. Stein to computerize area-wide data extending well beyond the city limits of Chicago.

During a ceremony at the Des Plaines Civic Center, a grateful and proud community presented awards and commendations for a job well done to police and civilian employees, including communications clerks and secretaries, who worked on the investigation. "I submit to you that lives of persons unknown were in fact saved because of the professional manner in which this case was handled," Chief Alfano told the assembled officers and civilians. "Who knows how many more victims there might have been." Lieutenant Kozenczak was moved to command of the department's Patrol Division and was expected to be promoted to the rank of captain.

Jeffrey Rignall's medical bills had burgeoned to fifteen thousand dollars by early 1979, and he was talking of filing bankruptcy.

Dr. Stein and his staff continued their ghastly task, attempting to learn the names of nearly half the victims who were still unidentified. Parents of the boys and young men whose names were known buried their dead.

Neighbors on Summerdale Avenue complained that the empty lot where Gacy's house once stood was left littered with rocks, pieces of fencing, and other trash. The site was damned as an eyesore, a threat to surrounding property values, and a danger to children.

Others, including parents of some of the victims and much of the media, were looking around for someone to blame. It was difficult to understand how so many murders could occur in one place, apparently at the hands of one man, over such a long period of time. Even more puzzling was how it could happen under the nose of what was ostensibly one of the largest, most sophisticated, best-equipped, and well-trained police departments in the country. Chicago police were publicly criticized for negligence, and named in lawsuits.

Some people focused their anger on homosexuals, confirming the worst fears of some of Chicago's large gay community. The killer may have been afraid of being exposed as a homosexual, as he reputedly claimed, if some of the young men and boys he raped went to their parents or to police. But rape is a crime, regardless of the sex of the perpetrator and the victim, gay spokesmen maintained. They pointed out that not all homosexuals commit murder, just as all heterosexuals don't commit monstrous crimes against children. The boys and young men who died in the cozy little home near Chicago O'Hare International were the victims of a sadist and pederast] who happened to be homosexual.

Blame was leveled at the Iowa Board of Parole. The Board was named in at least one lawsuit arising from the mass murders. But sex criminals walk out of American prisons every day. And John Gacy was one of those people who thrived and did well in the tightly confined area of the prison where he was under rigid control, and his behavior was exemplary. Based on existing standards of judgment, he appeared to have earned parole.

During the eighteen months he was in custody, there was no attempt to cure him or to modify his sexual behavior in anticipation of the day he would be freed. This was neglected, even though both the judge and prosecutor responsible for sending him to prison recognized his potential for violence and aberrant behavior that indicated he could continue to be a threat to young men and boys.

Perhaps some day future generations will look back with uncomprehending horror on the twentieth-century practice of freeing known sex criminals before they have been cured. But in today's society, the Iowa correctional system is little different than those in most other states.

It has been estimated at various times that sex offenders make up anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of the population of most prisons. Yet very little is done to alter the behavior of the sexually dangerous, and, except for the most heinous sex murderers, they are freed time and time again. After the horror in suburban Chicago was discovered, psychiatrists and behavioral scientists attempted to bring the actions of mass killers into focus. Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, an authority on mass murder who was interviewed on Chicago's local ABC television outlet, said the killings on Summerdale Avenue appeared to be classic. "He had the love of power that we all have and he almost has gone berserk, gone wild, gone out of control," Ziporyn said of the murderer, "because he has killed and tasted flesh."
³⁰
Ziporyn continued that, having killed once, a murderer might be surprised at how easy the act is, and be pleased with his ability and power to make life-and-death decisions.

Other behaviorists pointed out that for sexual acts to be fully gratifying for some individuals, they must be tied to aggression and violence.

But Lawrence Freedman, professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, observed: "Mass killings in this country are usually not related to sexual activity . . . The most common mass murders are committed by killers frustrated with society and venting their frustrations against a general populace by killing strangers." He added, revealingly, that "persons who commit mass murders often wish to be liked and admired."
³¹

There has been a tendency by behaviorists pondering factors that cause people to become criminals to blame society as the villain. This can make reformers feel very good, but it is counterproductive because it merely provides the lawless with ready-made excuses for their actions by tracing the genesis of their criminality to fathers, mothers, broken homes, poverty, or some other individual or condition. It seems that no one ever thinks of blaming the criminal himself. Nevertheless, it seems possible that some people are so vicious and devoid of feeling for others that they become thieves, murderers, and rapists merely because they choose to.

Certainly more could be done to protect society from sex criminals. Many sex crimes could be prevented if once offenders were caught they were either executed, sentenced to long-term imprisonment, or provided with effective treatment and rehabilitation—depending on the severity of their crimes and their ability to respond to therapy.

All the approaches have been attacked at one time or another by civil libertarians as, among other things, violating the U.S. Constitution by inflicting cruel and unusual punishment.

The death penalty has been repeatedly assaulted on both constitutional and humanitarian grounds as illegal and barbaric. When John A. Spenkelink was electrocuted in Florida in early 1979, protestors sang civil-rights songs outside the prison and screamed that society had no right to take his life, even though he was a killer with a long criminal record. No one marched outside the house on Summerdale Avenue or protested violation of the rights of the boys and young men who were murdered and buried there or discarded in Chicago-area waterways like so many sheets of soiled tissue.

It is also cruel punishment to make someone spend his life locked behind bars without freedom of movement or association. But who deserves the pity? The individual who has proven he is unfit to walk freely in society because he is dangerous to others, or potential victims who have caused injury to no one?

Castration or treatment with such large doses of female hormones that the sex drive is virtually obliterated might also lessen the dangers from sex offenders. But these approaches can be ruled out for humane reasons too.

There is so much concern for the civil liberties of sex criminals that it is almost illegal to try to protect women or children from them. Emphasis has too often been centered on helping the child molester or rapist, when common sense should dictate that efforts be concentrated on protecting the public. Unfortunately, the law does not deal in common sense.

A complete overhaul of society's approach to dealing with the sex criminals among us is needed. This includes judicial and correctional attitudes as well as initiation of bold new approaches to treatment. There is no reason why the tremendous power of the law cannot be focused on the more effective detection and apprehension of people who sexually prey on others who are weaker than them as well as on treatment and rehabilitation.

When treatment is provided for sex offenders, individual counseling and group therapy has frequently been resorted to. But it doesn't work very well. Sexual aberration, like narcotics addiction, is one of the most difficult medical and behavioral problem to cure.

Narcotics addicts usually drift from one treatment program to another until they finally overdose and die, if they don't first lose their lives by some other means. Sex offenders charm their therapists, confess that they have been bad boys, and walk out of mental hospitals and prisons by the thousands every year, looking for new victims.

Only a few states make serious attempts to provide treatment for sex offenders that have any chance of seriously altering their behavior before they are freed from custody. And some states that do have special programs for the sexually dangerous, bar murderers from participation. But murderers are not necessarily barred from parole.

Illinois has a single treatment program for sex offenders at Menard Psychiatric Center, which is voluntary and handles about twenty prisoners at a time. There is a small waiting list.

Only a handful of states have separate institutions for the study and treatment of sex offenders. There are an enlightened few states, however, that are making significant efforts to deal with the problem. And a few brave and imaginative behaviorists have devised innovative and promising programs utilizing aversion therapy to modify the behavior of sex criminals and other violent felons. Not surprisingly, they have been attacked by civil libertarians and government agencies more concerned with safeguarding the civil rights of men with long records of sadistic abuse, than with protecting the persons and lives of innocent victims.

Aversion therapy is basically an attempt to change behavior or to cure by punishment. Electric shock and drugs that cause nausea or vomiting or brief periods of muscle paralysis and interruption of breathing have at times been employed as essential components of the treatment programs.

Programs utilizing the muscle-relaxing drug were pioneered at The California Medical Facility at Vacaville and at the Atascadero State Hospital. Electric-shock aversion was also used on homosexuals and child molesters at Atascadero. Both programs were halted after a flurry of bad publicity and outraged cries of brainwashing and legal torture.

A nausea-producing drug was used in a program at the Iowa Security Medical Facility at Oakdale near Iowa City, before the courts ruled that the activities were unconstitutional.

At the Connecticut Correctional Institution at Somers, child molesters were reportedly cured after twelve weeks of treatment. The process involved the administration of electrical shocks on the inner thighs as the convicted sex criminals watched series of pictures of naked children. The treatment was reinforced with hypnosis, which was used to associate sexual thoughts of children with things the patients feared such as snakes or heights. The American Civil Liberties Union joined with three convicts, suing the prison and claiming that paroles were denied if the child molester didn't participate.

The Wisconsin Correctional Institution at Fox Lake also instituted a voluntary program of aversion therapy for child molesters, employing electric shock treatment. Prisoners are alternately shown slides of children and of adult women in G-strings or provocative clothing. If the inmates hesitate too long over the slides of children before switching to pictures of adult women they are given electrical shocks. The treatment modalities may appear to be extreme. But so are the costs in lives and emotional trauma for the victims of sex criminals.

No one, of course, has a miracle cure that will suddenly eradicate sex crimes as totally as smallpox. Sex crimes can be reduced materially, however, by providing effective treatment or long-term incarceration for them and boys who have already run into trouble with the law because of sexual misbehavior and assaults on others.

But it is too late for new laws, shock treatment, or nausea-inducing drugs for someone who has murdered thirty-three young men and boys. For this person, there can be only two intelligent alternatives: life in prison—or death in the electric chair.

Footnotes

³⁰
WLS-TV—Channel Seven, February 14, 1979.

³¹
Chicago Tribune
, December 26. 1978.

PHOTOS

Wedding photo of John Gacy and his second wife, Carole Hoff, taken in June 1972. (
Courtesy Chicago Tribune
)