The Man Who Killed Boys (7 page)

He impressed those around him with his business and organizational ability, as much as with his cooking.

Even in prison he managed to satisfy his need for attention and praise. He earned the Jaycee Sound Citizens Award and other honors. His work with the service club was so outstanding that he was featured in an Iowa newspaper article, which brought him statewide publicity. But all other recognition was eclipsed when he finally realized his goal of leading a chapter of the Jaycees. He was elected president at Anamosa.

Gacy had been in prison for nearly a year when his divorce was scheduled for a final hearing. On September 18, 1969, he was back in the Black Hawk County Criminal Courts Building before Judge George C. Heath. The judge was no stranger to Gacy. It was Heath who had ordered the psychiatric examination before Gacy's guilty plea on the sodomy charge. This time, as attorney Donald H. Canning stood by for Gacy and attorney Frederick G. White stood by Gacy's wife, Judge Heath issued a decree of absolute divorce. The judge stipulated that neither the husband nor the wife would be allowed to remarry for one year.

Marlynn Gacy was awarded custody of the children and property, including the house, car, and most of the furniture. When her husband went to prison he left a mortgage on the house, and an unpaid loan on the Oldsmobile in favor of the Waterloo Savings Bank. Gacy was also directed to pay $350 for his wife's attorney's fees.

Property awarded to Gacy included his movie camera, projector, screen and other film equipment, still camera, record albums, adding machine, typewriter, card table, file cabinets, golf clubs, fishing equipment, men's jewelry, portable radio, clothing, personal books, papers, awards, cookbooks and food-service books and Jaycee items.

Gacy said that the pornographic films confiscated from his home belonged to other Jaycees. They were not claimed.

Marlynn Gacy agreed to provide her former husband with photographs of the children twice yearly at his expense. He never contacted her or sent money for photos, however, and no photos were mailed to him. Heath deferred determination of visiting rights and establishment of the amount of child support until Gacy was released from prison.

The woman returned with her children to the comfort and security of Springfield, and obtained her old job back at the store. She told a neighbor that she had been unable to hold her marriage together because her husband was a homosexual and abused the children.

On his ride back to Anamosa, morosely peering out the windows of the police car at the ocher-smeared cornfields and dairy farms of rural Iowa, Gacy must have pondered the changes in his life and the role played by a couple of talkative teenagers. When he told his friends that he had done no wrong, it must have been easy to blame the boys for the problems that were leading him back to a convict's cell and away from Waterloo, where he had been a respected businessman and master of his home.

Gacy had lost his position in his community, his home, his wife, and his children, but he hadn't lost all his friends. Charlie Hill and a handful of other chums still believed in Gacy. Hill was still his friend and he wasn't afraid to say so. He believed unabashedly in Gacy's story that he had been framed and was set up by political enemies.

Hill figured that he knew Gacy about as well as anyone. They had been close friends who worked on club projects together and partied together almost from the day Gacy arrived in Waterloo, and Hill had never seen anything that would make him believe that Gacy was the kind of man who would molest young boys. In fact, Gacy projected an image that was just about as macho as it could be. So Hill accepted Gacy's explanation of why he was in trouble. "Somebody," Hill was convinced, "had to believe in the poor guy."

When Gacy was transferred to the prison release center at Newton, the minimum security institution where he was to spend the last few months of his sentence, it was Charlie Hill who showed up to see him on family day. On family day at Newton prisoners were given furloughs of a few hours outside the gates. Gacy qualified, and his friend Charlie Hill drove him thirty miles west to Des Moines for a steak-and-baked-potato dinner. Gacy ate two.

His friend watched, pleased and only mildly surprised as the burly convict dug into the double meal. He was a man who enjoyed eating good food as well as preparing it. It had been months since Gacy had sat down to a similar meal.

That night, as Charlie Hill drove on the long trip back to Waterloo, he felt better about his friend than he had in a long time. Gacy had been a model prisoner, and he was sure to win final approval for early parole.

He had stayed out of trouble, avoided bad companions as best he could, and never missed attending Mass on Sunday. He was so well behaved and nonviolent that when a quarrel flared and another inmate punched him in the face, he didn't even strike back. John Prenosil, who worked in the kitchen with him and later became an Iowa state corrections officer, watched as Gacy shrugged his beefy shoulders, then turned and walked away, his eye already puffy and turning black and blue. Gacy had no intention of dying in prison with a piece of sharpened mattress spring or a filed-down spoon handle jammed between his generous ribs. And he didn't intend to lose good time by getting into a no-win fight with another inmate. The better he held his temper in check, the sooner he would be a free man again.

Gacy's parole was approved eighteen months after he had begun serving time in the Black Hawk County Jail.

No one consulted judge or prosecutor about the parole. The court's jurisdiction over a felon ends once he or she is sentenced. There are no provisions for the sentencing judge or prosecutor to continue their involvement in the fate of a convicted criminal. The convict's immediate fate is in the hands of the Department of Corrections and the Board of Parole.

"Even if Gacy hadn't been paroled after eighteen months," Judge Van Metre pointed out, "he would have been out in less than five years." The Iowa Department of Corrections has a "good-time" formula, similar to those in most other states, that permits a well-behaved convict to compile slightly more than five years' credit off a ten-year sentence.

When Gacy left Newton on June 18, 1970, he was a passenger in a car driven by his friend, Charlie Hill. Momentarily at least, Gacy's enthusiasm for life was dampened. He admitted to his friend that he was depressed by his experience in prison and by the way he had been mistreated and framed on the sodomy charge.

He was also bitter because while he was in prison, his father had died—during the Christmas holidays—and state corrections officials refused to permit him to return to Chicago and attend the funeral. Gacy had told court investigators before he was sentenced that his father had a history of heart trouble.

His mood changed as they neared Waterloo. Gacy began talking passionately about getting a new job there and putting his life back in order. But first, he said, he planned to go to Chicago and visit his mother.

Less than twenty-four hours after his return to Waterloo, Gacy walked into Hill's office and told him he was leaving for Chicago and would see him again in a few days. Gacy never returned.

Footnotes

³
The full names of the children, who have been adopted by their stepfather, have not been used to protect them from embarrassment.

⁴
Waterloo Courier
, December 24, 1978.

⁵
Ibid
.

3 ...
A Model
Neighbor

The bright splash of freshly cut flowers catching and reflecting the warm rays of the midsummer sun contrasted with the pathetic, hunched figure at the grave. The heavy body was shaking with sobs, causing tears to well from the puffy eyes and slide slowly over fat ruddy cheeks as the head bowed and the thick neck shrank into sturdy shoulders.

To someone who knew John Wayne Gacy, Jr. it may have seemed strange. During his father's lifetime there were harsh words and hurt feelings. Now that the elder Gacy was in his grave, one among thousands at the Maryhill Cemetery in northwest suburban Niles, the old hurts were engraved into the relationship between father and son forever. There could be no more explanations, no apologies. The misunderstandings could not be changed. Yet, it appeared that in death Gacy's father was closer to him than in life.

Gacy was deeply grieved that he had not been able to attend his father's funeral. He was hurt that, as the last of the remaining males in the immediate family, he could not have been there to comfort his mother and sisters. It also distressed him that he could not pay his final respects to his father, whom he loved despite their misunderstandings.

Gacy visited the sprawling cemetery that covers about one tenth of the land area of the attractive Chicago suburb many times during the years after his father's death. Most often he stopped there when he was troubled, bringing fresh flowers to place on the grave.

He always visited the grave on Christmas. Holidays were important to Gacy, and Christmas was the most important of all. It meant good food, gifts, and the warmth of a family that was close and loving. Now the Christmas period marked the anniversary of his father's death. The big man cried at the grave.

But he didn't have time to live in the past. He was still a young man under thirty, and he was energetic and anxious to get on with the task of rebuilding his life.

After driving 250 miles from Waterloo to Chicago, he moved in with his sixty-one-year-old mother in the family home and obtained a job as chef at a restaurant in Chicago's Loop. Cooking was a profession that he understood and was comfortable with. Managing the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in Waterloo had provided valuable experience, and his work at the prison added to his skill. There were other men in prison with experience as cooks, and Gacy had watched, listened, and learned. He was especially proud of his salad bars.

Parole authorities in Iowa and Illinois were understanding and cooperative when Gacy applied for permission to move back to Chicago. Returning home seemed to offer the best opportunity for rehabilitation after his prison term. He had the support of a loving family, and his mother provided a home for him. Most importantly he had a job. Approval was routine.

Gacy applied himself to his new job with gusto. If no one was impressed when he bragged of once being married to the daughter of the man who founded the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain, he didn't seem to notice. He continued telling the story, or other tales, about his days as a U.S. Marine, and of the thousands of dollars he won and lost at the gambling tables in Las Vegas where he said he once worked as an ambulance driver.

Jobs for cooks and chefs are plentiful, and Gacy moved around, finally landing a position at an eating spot popular with members of Chicago's professional hockey team, the Blackhawks. Although he was not an avid sports fan, any job that offered an opportunity to rub shoulders with celebrities was attractive to him.

With his gift for talking and ingratiating himself with others, it wasn't difficult for him to obtain tickets to Blackhawk games from the players. When he passed them on to cronies, he made certain that they knew he had obtained them from chums on the team.

Charlie Hill and his wife watched more than one Blackhawk game with tickets provided by their friend. Chicago was headquarters for the motel chain Hill worked for and periodically he and his wife visited Chicago for a few days on business. Hill looked forward at those times to seeking out his old friend.

Pottinger, too, visited in Chicago with Gacy, although less often than the Hills. But the onetime Iowa convict was busy making new friends and reaffirming family ties. Iowa was behind him and his immediate future was clearly linked to Chicago.

His mother was pleased at the ease with which Gacy was readjusting to civilian life. The prison experience was fading into the past where it belonged. Any worry she may have had of lingering trauma was dispelled when, some four months after his return to Chicago, her son decided that he wanted a house of his own. He had been cooped up for eighteen months in cramped spaces with thousands of other men, and a house of his own would give him some much appreciated privacy and breathing room.

It seemed that there couldn't be a better sign that he was adjusting to his new life. His mother agreed to help with the financing when he found himself a comfortable two-bedroom ranch house a few blocks outside the northwest Chicago city limits. The attractive little house was on a quiet one-way westbound street at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in an unincorporated area of Norwood Park township. Gacy became half-owner, and his mother and sisters were named as owners of the remainder.

It was a good neighborhood to settle in. The homes were as clean and as solidly constructed as the people who lived and raised families in them. Each had its own driveway, garage, and scrupulously manicured lawn in front and back. The street was rarely used except by residents and their guests, but was convenient to busy arterial roads that carry traffic to nearby expressways, towns, and shopping centers.

The neighborhood was family-oriented. Most of the families in the neatly kept bungalows and ranch-style homes were headed by men who worked in blue-collar professions. Many were of East European stock. They were people who kept their houses in good condition inside and out. If the man of the house stretched out in front of the television set with a beer in his hand and a six-pack at his side to watch Sunday afternoon football, it was only after the grass had been mowed, the leaves raked, or the balky carburetor on his car or pickup truck readjusted.

The neighbors knew each other, and it was a good safe place to raise children. Parents didn't have to be afraid of letting their children play outside. Teenage girls looked forward to careers as secretaries, shop clerks, waitresses, housewives, and mothers. They weren't insulted if they were asked to do housework or baby-sit with the neighbor children. Their brothers tinkered with rattletrap cars, pumped gasoline, or got part-time jobs as stock boys in supermarkets. After leaving high school they followed their fathers into jobs as production-line workers, plumbers, carpenters, and mechanics.