UNFINISHED NIGHTMARE
The Search for More Victims of
John Wayne Gacy
by Chris Maloney, author of
EATEN ALIVE: Five Killer Croc Attacks
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
Unfinished Nightmare
Copyright © 2012 by Chris Maloney
“Find the bodies if you can.”
-John Wayne Gacy, death-row message
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter 1 - The Colonel
Chapter 2 - Disappearance of Robert Piest
Chapter 3 - One Less Cub’s Fan
Chapter 4 - More Victims?
Chapter 5 - Gacy-Miami Part One
Chapter 6 - Gacy-Miami Part Two
Chapter 7 - Why?
Chapter 8 - Gacy-Miami Connection
Chapter 9 - Gacy’s Legacy
Epilogue - New Gacy Investigation
Appendix - Exclusive Gacy Timeline
Acknowledgments
Secondary Sources
Author’s Note
Unfinished Nightmare started out as homework for a grad school writing class at Roosevelt University in September 2009. The assignment was to write a Q&A piece.
I decided to interview an ex-Chicago Police Department homicide detective – I figured a big-city cop who solved murder cases would be an interesting subject.
After a few days of online research, I found Bill Dorsch. Dorsch was a private detective with Northern Lights Investigative Services and had been a CPD officer for 25 years, most of which were spent in the homicide division.
Dorsch granted my interview request, which we conducted at his home. While discussing some of his past cases, he brought up his ties to a 1998 CPD investigation related to the search for more victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
Intrigued, I decided to write a separate article about that investigation and the possibility of undiscovered Gacy victims.
Dorsch was kind enough to grant me several more interviews and access to his Gacy case files. From there, I spent about 10 months thoroughly researching the 1998 CPD Gacy investigation and the original Gacy case that started with his arrest in 1978.
In December 2010, I finished the story – “Find the Bodies If You Can: Should the John Wayne Gacy Case Be Reopened?”
But at 10,000 words, no magazines were interested – it was much too long. Since I was not going to cut the article just to make a sale, I decided to self-publish on ShadowReports.com.
ShadowReports is my start-up site where I publish some of my stories and various creative works. “Find the Bodies” was posted on February 7, 2011.
In March 2011, several Chicago and national media outlets reported on the new developments in the Gacy case – based on my story – but most failed to credit ShadowReports or myself as the source.
However, WGN-TV was one of the few news organizations that did credit ShadowReports with breaking the story in its report, “More Gacy Victims?” – March 17, 2011.
As a result of the ShadowReports article and related follow-up stories, there was renewed interest in the Gacy case, which culminated with the Cook County Sheriff’s Office reopening the case in October 2011.
Also in October, I decided to expand “Find the Bodies” into the 16,000-word eBook, Unfinished Nightmare.
Unfinished Nightmare is based on dozens of interviews and hundreds of sources.
The original Gacy case background for Chapters 1-3 are based on interviews with Des Plaines Police Department investigators, Cook County Sheriff’s Office investigators, Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office investigators and prosecutors at the 1980 trial, and on newspaper, magazine and television stories, and the books Killer Clown (Windsor Publishing 1983) by Terry Sullivan, The Man Who Killed Boys (St. Martin’s Press 1980) by Clifford Linedecker, I Have Lived in the Monster (St. Martin’s Press 1997) by Robert Ressler, and The Chicago Killer (Xlibris 2003) by Joseph Kozenczak and Karen Henrikson.
The first quote by Joseph Kozenczak in Chapter 3 is from his book, The Chicago Killer, but it is presented as a direct quote with permission from the author. The purpose is to enhance story flow.
The same device is used for Clifford Linedecker’s quote in Chapter 7, who also granted permission as the author of The Man Who Killed Boys.
Prologue: A Late-Night Encounter
It was 3 a.m. and Bill Dorsch looked forward to getting home.
As a 31-year old tactical officer in the violent crimes division of the Chicago Police Department, Dorsch had spent the past eight hours working the streets on Chicago’s northwest side.
The 1971 CPD graduate discovered that after a year or two on patrol you get a feel for the streets. There’s a smell and taste distinct to each city block.
And during an average shift in the summer of 1975, Dorsch would drive endlessly up and down the streets observing suspects, snaking his unmarked 1974 green Dodge through dimly lit alleys chasing the bad guys – all his senses on high alert.
He would make between 20 and 30 stops a night ranging from drug deals, prostitution, and gang activity to armed robberies, bar fights, and murder.
Dorsch embraced it all. He especially loved the adrenaline rush he got from a “hot call” – that is, a crime in progress.
But at this moment, Dorsch was exhausted. He couldn’t wait to crawl into bed next to his wife and put the night behind him. His lower back ached, his shoulders slumped and his bloodshot eyes felt heavy as he stared through the windshield of his yellow Plymouth Duster.
But as he was about to turn into the side road by his home near O’Hare Airport, Dorsch noticed something strange. He saw a short, husky man lumbering across the street with a shovel in his hand.
“John, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning, what are you doing?” Dorsch asked the man, whom he now recognized.
“Bill, you know me, not enough hours in the day,” John said with a laugh. “You get it done when you can.”
Dorsch shook his head, smiled and went on his way. He didn’t give the incident much thought until three years later when John Gacy, independent contractor, became John Wayne Gacy, America’s worst serial killer.
And no one could have imagined that 1975 random late-night encounter would be the catalyst for a controversial 1998 search for more Gacy victims and spark a mystery 36 years later about the true depths of Gacy’s murderous rage.
Chapter 1: The Colonel
Named after the legendary movie star, John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago on St. Patrick’s Day in 1942.
He was close with his two sisters and mom, who called him “Johnny.” And he enjoyed a relatively normal childhood with the exception of a volatile relationship with his alcoholic father, John Wayne Gacy Sr.
In the early 1960s, after dropping out of high school and spending a few years as a drifter, John Jr. took a job managing a men's clothing store in Springfield, Illinois.
Young Gacy, who possessed a natural talent for sales, excelled in the position. He also began dating pretty co-worker Marlynn Myers.
The couple married in 1964 and moved to Waterloo, Iowa where Gacy managed three KFC restaurants owned by his father-in-law.
Nicknamed “the Colonel,” Gacy was an active member of the community and a leader in the Waterloo Jaycees.
However, in 1968, Gacy’s idyllic middle-class lifestyle and social status were shattered when two Waterloo boys – age 15 and 16 – accused him of sexual assault (one of the boys would later commit suicide).
The felony charge came as a shock to his wife and friends.
“It was all so hard for us to believe,” said Waterloo Motel manager Charles Hill in a 1979 Newsweek interview. “He was such a good doggone Jaycee.”
Gacy, 25, pleaded guilty to sodomy and was sentenced to 10 years in state prison. Marlynn filed for divorce after his conviction. The Colonel would never see his wife or two children again.
***
During his incarceration, the stocky 5-foot-8-inch, 210-pound Gacy was a model prisoner and was paroled in June 1970, after serving just 18 months.
He immediately returned to Chicago hoping for a fresh start – but time in prison did little to change John Gacy.
Within 18 months of his release, he was arrested twice by Chicago police for violent sex crimes involving teenage boys. But the charges – unknown to Gacy’s Iowa parole officer – were eventually dropped.
On June 1, 1972, Gacy married his former high-school sweetheart Carole Hoff, who along with her two daughters, moved into Gacy’s house near O’Hare Airport.
Gacy, who now had a second chance at a happy family life, focused on being a good husband and father. And he supported Carole and the young girls by running PDM Contractors – a small, but modestly successful construction company.
As the years went by, it appeared the charismatic and charming Gacy had conquered his demons – he was a respected business owner and neighborhood celebrity who would host elaborate theme parties for hundreds of guests; he did volunteer work and would entertain at children’s parties and hospitals dressed as his alter ego, “Pogo the Clown,” and he was photographed with First Lady Rosalyn Carter during the annual Chicago Polish Day Parade, an event he helped organize.
But below the surface, a dark and insatiable sexual rage was consuming Gacy. And once again, his life began to unravel.
In 1976, Carole filed for divorce saying she could no longer deal with her husband’s unpredictable moods and obsession with pornography.
And two years later, the high school dropout would find himself at the center of a small-town police investigation that would make his name – John Wayne Gacy – synonymous with evil.
Chapter 2: Disappearance of Robert Piest
In 1978, 15-year-old Robert Piest, a clean-cut kid who worked at Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois, went missing around 9 p.m. on Monday, December 11.
And local contractor John Gacy – who was in the store that night scouting a future construction job – was the last person to see him.
When the Des Plaines Police Department checked Gacy’s criminal record the next day, they discovered the 1968 Iowa sodomy charge.
On Wednesday, December 13, the police executed a search warrant for his home, located just outside Chicago city limits.
“The house had an aura of coldness and neglect and it didn’t take us long to realize that Gacy lived in a world of deviant fantasies embellished through books, tapes, all kinds of kinky aids, and drugs,” says Joe Kozenczak, the former Des Plaines police lieutenant who was in charge of the Gacy investigation.
“I remember just before checking out the crawl space, I had an image of finding Rob Piest down there, bound but still alive,” Kozenczak continues. “But we found absolutely nothing. I looked around for signs of a fresh grave, but the ground was like settled clay, and there was no indication it had been disturbed. There was nothing – only the usual smell of a damp basement.”
After the three-hour search, which didn’t turn up any obvious incriminating evidence, Kozenczak’s team returned to headquarters to run tests on the items they collected.
During their review, the detectives discovered two key pieces of evidence – a ring that belonged to another missing teenager and a receipt for a roll of film that a girlfriend of Piest’s had put in his jacket.
On Thursday, December 21, authorities – armed with this new evidence and a tip from a Gacy employee that the crawl space might contain bodies – obtained a second search warrant for Gacy’s home.
Kozenczak – who described Gacy as unshaven, unwashed, and usually dressed in rumpled clothes that made him look like the definition of a slob – says he started to realize the possible enormity of the case just days before the second search of Gacy’s house.
“We never suspected we were in the middle of a serial murder case,” recalls Kozenczak, whose son was a sophomore in the same class as Piest at Maine West High School in Des Plaines.
“We approached it as a missing persons investigation. We were just looking for one kid,” Kozenczak says. “But as the case evolved, we pieced together evidence and discovered other reports of missing kids that had ties to Gacy. And we realized we might find more than one body buried under the house.”
Around eight o’ clock Thursday night, less than an hour after they began digging in the 40-foot crawl space under Gacy’s home, investigators uncovered the first body.
And later that night at the Des Plaines police station, Gacy, 36, confessed that for six years starting in January 1972, he lured young men and boys to his home for sex – then tortured and strangled them.
Gacy, who possessed an above-average IQ, explained to the stunned officers how he would lure a victim into his car by pretending to be policeman “Jack Hanley,” or by promising a high-paying construction job.
After Gacy got his target home, he would offer alcohol and drugs and eventually bring out a pair of trick handcuffs he used in his clown act. Gacy would put them on and quickly get free. He would then dare the boy to try it.
Once his victim was securely manacled, Gacy would tell him the trick was to have the key. He would then take his time raping and torturing the boy before eventually killing him.
And adding to the morbid nature of his crime, Gacy would sometimes have sex with the corpse and sleep with it for a day or two before disposing of the body.
Gacy, who was fond of saying “a clown can get away with murder,” went on to make voluntary confessions to more than 30 murders.
He also drew a detailed map to the location of 27 shallow graves beneath his house, which he called his “burial grounds,” and one each under the concrete in his garage and patio.
In addition, he admitted to dumping four other victims – including Robert Piest – into the Des Plaines River.
***
During the dig, investigators discovered the trenches in the crawlspace were about three feet wide, six feet long and two feet deep and were dug by Gacy and his crew – who thought the holes were for a drainage problem.
And because Gacy murdered some of his employees, it’s likely a few of them actually dug their own grave.
By February 1979, the crawlspace excavation uncovered 27 bodies.
“One of the most disturbing aspects of the case was the fact that some of these kids were probably buried alive,” says Rafael Tovar, one of the 10 officers who worked on the excavation team. ”And every day parents were devastated, receiving the ultimate bad news that their kid was dead. Families could no longer hold out hope that their missing loved one might still be alive.”
In April 1979, the body of Robert Piest was found along the banks of the Illinois River. Gacy confessed he strangled Piest in his home shortly after abducting him from the Nisson Pharmacy parking lot.
Gacy also said Piest’s body was still in his house when four Des Plaines police officers questioned him the next day in his living room.
After concluding their investigation, the police charged Gacy with 33 murders – 27 in the crawlspace, one each in the garage and patio, and four in the river. And authorities discovered all his victims were young men in their early teens to early 20s.
Chapter 3: One Less Cub’s Fan
Gacy’s trial began on Feb. 6, 1980, in the Cook County Criminal Courts Building in Chicago and lasted just five weeks. The jury took only two hours to find him guilty on all 33 counts of murder.
The next day, Gacy was sentenced to death by electrocution and sent to Menard Correctional Center, a prison located in southern Illinois. He would remain there for 14 years until he was transported to Stateville Correctional Center for execution.
Gacy, who began a campaign of innocence after his trial, spent much of his time in prison working on appeals, playing cards, writing letters and painting.
His works – which brought in sales of over $100,000 from such collectors as Johnny Depp and John Waters – included clowns, the Seven Dwarfs, Jesus, Hitler, Elvis and fellow serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
During his time on death row, Gacy never expressed a hint of remorse for his crimes and called his victims “a bunch of worthless little queers and punks,” and joked, “I should never have been convicted of anything more serious than running a cemetery without a license.”
Robert Ressler, a retired FBI profiler who has interviewed more than 50 serial killers including Gacy, said in his book, I Have Lived In The Monster (St. Martin’s Press 1997), he found it perverse that Gacy was allowed to keep a scrapbook of his victims while in prison.
“The authorities permitted Gacy to collect photos of the murdered young men as part of gathering material for his own defense,” said Ressler, who coined the term “serial killer” in the 1970s. “But the way he kept these photos in his cell, in a scrapbook, had – to me – far darker implications.
“For Gacy, these photos were pornographic,” Ressler continued in his book. “He could look at them and relive his crimes, the way he had killed each and every one of them, and become sexually excited. His having these materials in his cell was one last instance in which this paranoid murderer was able to con the authorities.”
On May 9, 1994, the 52 year-old diehard Cubs fan sat down for his final meal: a dozen deep-fried shrimp, a bucket of original recipe KFC chicken, French fries, a Coke and a pound of fresh strawberries.
As midnight approached, a crowd had gathered outside the Stateville prison – located about 40 miles southwest of Chicago – and chanted slogans such as “Death to the clown” and “We want the body.”
Inside, there were 41 witnesses to the execution. None of the victims’ families were allowed to attend.
British journalist William Cash, one of the 41 in attendance, described the last moments of Gacy’s life for a story in the Daily Mail:
As he was wheeled into the chamber, he made no eye contact. Almost his last sight of this world was an Exit sign over the door. As the poison began to work – a deadly cocktail of sodium pentathol, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride – there was a reflex jerk of his head, followed by a loud snort. For three minutes, his puggish, wide-open eyes bulged in their sockets. His flabby belly heaved in and out.
Then, as if in a surreal black pantomime, an official stepped calmly forward and closed the theatre-like curtains.
What had happened, it seems, is that the Illinois State death machine had malfunctioned. A technician had to replace the tubing because some of the poison had ‘gelled.’ When the curtains reopened, Gacy had turned purple and was still twitching. Instead of taking 10 minutes to execute him, it took nearly 20. He was finally pronounced dead at 12:58 am.
But even after Gacy’s execution, the case is not closed in the minds of many criminal experts who are convinced Gacy left undiscovered victims.
Chapter 4: More Victims?
“There’s no reason to believe Gacy didn’t kill 100 people,” says former Gacy prosecutor Terry Sullivan, who called Gacy the “worst of all murderers” and “an evil, vile, diabolical, cunning man” at his 1980 trial. “We knew there were 33, but in my mind I’m pretty certain he had other victims.”
According to Rafael Tovar, a former Des Plaines police officer who helped break the case in 1978, Gacy would only give up information authorities already knew about or were going to find out anyway.
“Once he knew that we found bodies in the crawl space, he said, ‘I don’t want you guys to mess up my house. I’ll draw you a map where they all are.’ And he did,” Tovar recalls. “But if you asked Gacy about something he didn’t think you knew about, he was coy and would not cooperate.”
Tovar – who was the liaison for the Des Plaines Police Department when the Cook County Sheriff’s Office took over the investigation – says he remembers his last conversation with Gacy, which took place during a 45-minute car ride while he was transferring Gacy from the Des Plaines police station to a Cook County jail:
Tovar: John, we’ve been running around and I don’t want to be running around forever. How many bodies are we looking for?
Gacy: Well, you know, I told my lawyers there’s about 30, 30 some odd. You know what, the number 45 sounds really good.
Tovar: Really.
Gacy: Yeah, sounds really good.
Tovar: Well, where are the rest of them?
Gacy: That’s for you to find out.
“So, I honestly believe there are more victims,” Tovar says. “But, where and how many? Who knows?”
Gacy himself challenged investigators when he scrawled the haunting message, “Find the bodies if you can,” on the back of a death-row painting depicting an Arkansas farmhouse.
Joe Kozenczak, the former Des Plaines police lieutenant who was in charge of the 1978 Gacy investigation, says he viewed the painting and doesn’t doubt the sincerity of Gacy’s words.
“I am convinced Gacy killed a lot more than 33 people,” says Kozenczak, who served on a federal task force that was responsible for establishing the first set of guidelines for investigating serial killings in the U.S. “I think there are other victims out there, not only in the Chicago area but other parts of the country.”
Legendary FBI profiler and Chicago native Robert Ressler – whose real life experiences have been the inspiration for several books and movies including Silence of the Lambs and Copycat – said in his book, I Have Lived In The Monster (St. Martin’s Press 1997), “Gacy is responsible for far more homicides, in many more locations throughout the country, than those for which he was convicted. But the prosecutorial authorities in Illinois refuse to acknowledge this possibility.”
Ressler, who had several interviews with Gacy over the years, also said in the book, The Chicago Killer (Xlibris 2003), that Gacy’s final statement to him was, “Why should I play ball with the State of Illinois that wants to kill me.”
For the record, Gacy, “a brilliant manipulator” and a “serial liar” according to Ressler, never admitted or denied committing other homicides.
And remarkably, Gacy claimed his 1978 confession at the Des Plaines police station never happened and often called himself, “the 34th victim.”
“People don’t want to know the truth,” Gacy told Chicago CBS 2 television news anchor Walter Jacobson in a 1992 death-row interview. “Then fine, then go ahead and kill me, but vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, because you will have executed somebody that didn’t commit the crime.”
Serial killer expert Mark Safarik – a former FBI profiler and current executive director of Forensic Behavioral Services International in Virginia – says such denials are common among serial killers.
“It’s the ultimate control when you’re obviously guilty to say you’re innocent, that you’re executing the wrong person,” explains Safarik, who also serves as a consultant for CSI: Las Vegas. “Gacy was playing with people. It’s what he liked to do. It was all part of the game. It was a way for him to continue his control and manipulate the system.”
Safarik, who spent 12 of his 23 years at the FBI working as a senior profiler, also says most serial killers don’t give up all their victims and if Gacy had committed other murders it makes sense he didn’t talk about them.
“Not giving up other victims runs true to his pattern because Gacy denied guilt for the original homicides, so why would he admit to additional ones that are unknown. His behavior was consistent,” Safarik says.