The Man Who Killed Boys

by Clifford L. Lindecker

  Apparently sobered by the blood and the scream, Gacy rolled off him and stood up, helping the boy to his feet. They were both panting. Gacy put down the knife. Dabbing at the blood with a paper tissue, Tullery stumbled dazedly from the bedroom and with the older man made his way shakily downstairs.

  His employer was acting as if he were oblivious to the events that had occurred a few minutes earlier. The chunky businessman was already boasting that he had taken several courses in sex education and was so knowledgeable that he had written a book on the subject. Some people, he confided, were sexually stimulated by bondage, being tied with ropes and manacles of various types.

  Gacy offered to demonstrate. He explained that Tullery could better understand about bondage if he permitted himself to be chained. Unresisting, the boy put his hands behind his back and allowed Gacy to chain them together. Once his hands were securely manacled behind his back, Gacy pushed him onto a chair, then unsteadily climbed astraddle of him. Alarmed, Tullery jerked backward and Gacy toppled off.

  The boy said that he remembered being lifted roughly from the chair and half-carried, half-pushed up the stairs and back into the bedroom. Again he was shoved violently onto the bed, and from somewhere chains were produced and fastened around his legs.

  Moments later, Gacy's hands were around his neck, choking him. Tullery struggled momentarily, then slumped. As Gacy felt the body become limp under him, he removed his hands from around the youth's neck, lifted himself up, and unshackled his victim. Tullery left the house a few minutes later.

  Gacy was not charged with attacking the boy. The sodomy charge involved Mark Miller, another youth—who, according to court records, committed different deviate sex acts with Gacy in the late summer of 1967.

  Gacy denied to his wife that he had engaged in sexual relationships with boys. At one point, a court official said Gacy insisted on taking a lie detector test to prove his innocence. He failed it. Eventually he admitted to authorities that he had submitted to acts of oral sex with Miller, a sixteen-year-old West High School sophomore. Not surprisingly, Gacy's recollection of the incident differed from that of the boy.

  Gacy said he was driving with Miller in his car one day when he remarked that he had heard that the boy was known to perform fellatio. Miller admitted that he had, and offered to take care of Gacy for forty dollars. Gacy objected that the price was too high. They finally agreed to five dollars as a reasonable fee. He was nervous. Despite the boy's efforts, he couldn't maintain an erection and was unable to reach a climax. The youth was understanding and agreed to try again later for the same price.

  A few days later, Gacy told investigators, the boy came to his home on a Saturday morning and again performed fellatio. More comfortable in his home surroundings, this time Gacy was easily brought to a climax. He had oral sex with the boy once more the following month, Gacy said. He claimed that the youth approached him for a loan and at Gacy's suggestion again agreed to perform fellatio for five dollars.

  In another statement to authorities, Gacy described the offense as an experimental situation only, an act that happened only three times. Gacy said that he and his wife practiced mutual oral sex during their marriage. Attempts to talk with Mrs. Gacy and obtain either confirmation or denial "met with stiff resistance and no cooperation from the woman or her parents," Parole and Probation Officer Jack D. Harker reported to the court.

  Miller told the grand jury that he was forced to perform oral sex. Much later his statement mysteriously disappeared from the court files, although Tullery's statement was untouched.

  Regardless of whose version of the incidents police and the courts believed, Gacy was in serious trouble. At home, his heretofore solid marriage was wrecked. Newspaper stories and gossip about his troubles had shattered his reputation in the community, although a few loyal friends refused to believe the reports.

  Some of his friends accepted his claims that the accusations of the boys were part of a plot to defeat him in his campaign for the presidency of the Jaycees. Miller was the son of a man who was prominent in state politics and was previously thought to be unfriendly to Gacy.

  Incredibly, Gacy was still thought by some to have a good chance of winning the club presidency after his arrest. He had never before been in trouble with the law for anything more serious than a traffic ticket and he certainly didn't fit the popular image of a homosexual. It was hard to believe that the burly fellow who boasted of his appeal to women was not sexually straight.

  He insisted that he was being framed and had been set up to keep him from leading the Jaycees. He remained in contention for the presidency right up to the late May election meeting in the Isaac Walton League Clubhouse in the nearby town of Washburn.

  Hill recalled that his friend waited until he was nominated to face Burk for the presidency. Then he stood up and, in an emotion-filled voice, announced that he was withdrawing "in the interests of the organization and my family."

  "I think he didn't withdraw sooner because he always liked a contest, a race," Hill surmised. "And he always felt the charges would be dropped, that he would be cleared of that thing." Hill believed that Gacy would have easily walked off with the election if he hadn't gotten into trouble.

  Burk became the new president and responded by describing the Waterloo Jaycees as one of the leading chapters in Iowa, and announcing that the local unit would host the next state convention. The new officers were dedicating themselves to attracting new members and to keeping those who were already active, he added.

  Gacy was an exception to the effort to retain existing members. At the July meeting, Gacy was one of four Jaycees, including Burk, who received Key Man awards. But his troubles were burgeoning and bringing unwelcome publicity to the service club. Even Pottinger had to admit that the sexual nature of the charges made them especially difficult to contend with. "If he'd been caught embezzling, nobody would have said anything," he observed. Unfortunately, Gacy was accused of seducing or otherwise inducing one or more of the community's sons to commit homosexual acts. That was an offense that even the friendly and charitable people of Black Hawk County found difficult to tolerate.

  "And of course," said David Dutton, the first assistant county attorney who was selected to spearhead prosecution of the case, "it wasn't just one incident. It was going on for some time, a few months before it was brought to our attention."

  There was more trouble on the way, and it would become increasingly difficult for Gacy's friends to maintain their faith in him. In September, approximately four months after his initial arrest, Gacy's friends were dismayed to learn that new charges had been filed accusing him of hiring an eighteen-year-old boy to beat up Miller.

  Filed by Black Hawk County Attorney Roger Peterson, the new charges accused Gacy of going armed with intent, malicious threats to extort, and attempting to suborn perjury.

  He was freed from custody after posting a one-thousand-dollar cash bond in Black Hawk County District Court.

  Still dazed over the newest charges, Gacy's friends were further distressed three days later when an additional count of breaking and entering was filed against him. This time he was accused of breaking into the Brown Lumber Company in Raymond, a town about five or six miles east of Waterloo along U.S. Road 20, while he was free on bail on the sodomy charges.

  Gacy went to jail, and when he couldn't raise bail, he was kept there. The burglary charge was apparently unrelated to the sodomy offense and stemmed from an incident involving his work in a merchant security operation. The job gave him a perfect excuse to outfit his station wagon with spotlights and to play policeman. The trouble at the lumberyard was not nearly as disturbing to Gacy's friends as the other alleged offenses.

  First Deputy Black Hawk County Sheriff Robert Aldrich told local newsmen that Gacy had hired eighteen-year-old Dwight Andersson of Waterloo to beat up Miller. The motive behind the attack, Aldrich drawled, was Miller's involvement in the sodomy case. According to the story pieced together by Andersson, Miller, and
Aldrich, Gacy gave the tough eighteen-year-old ten dollars and promised to pay off a three-hundred-dollar lien on his car if he would carry out the beating.

  The new semester had just begun at West High School and it was one of those fragrant late-summer days that make students tarry outside on campus until the last minute before capitulating to the responsibilities of the real world and going inside for classes. New to the high school, Miller was pleased when Andersson approached him after classes and explained that he had been selected to act as Miller's big brother for the first few days of the new term. Andersson said it was school policy for upperclassmen to show incoming sophomores around the campus.

  Miller eagerly accepted when Andersson asked if he would like to take a ride with him. Not many eighteen-year-olds were willing to take younger students for rides in their cars unless the passenger was a girl, and the flattered sophomore chattered animatedly with his new friend as the car carried them past chartreuse fields of corn and forests of trees that were swelling with healthy color in the late summer sun.

  He hardly noticed where they were headed until Andersson slowed the car and pulled it to a stop in Access Acre Park, a remote wooded area near the town of Hudson. Miller, his eyes squinting into the bright sun as he slid from the car seat, joined his companion, still talking as they walked together into the woods.

  At that point, the stories told by the two boys conflict. Miller said he was told that Andersson had been paid ten dollars to kill him. Andersson said he told Miller he was paid ten dollars to beat him up.

  The next moment, Miller said, Andersson produced a can of Mace and squirted him in the eyes. Mace is a disabling chemical spray used by police and the military to disable unruly crowds and rioters. As Miller lifted his hands to dig at his smarting eyes, fists began crashing into his head and body.

  Miller screamed and struggled furiously to get away. He was kicking and swinging wild when he landed a fist on Andersson's nose, causing the older youth to fall back. Miller broke away and plunged through the trees. He left his shoes, shirt, and sweater behind. His glasses, which were hanging lopsided on his face, also dropped to the ground. Miller didn't stop to look for his glasses or at Andersson, who was holding a hand to his nose and trying to stop the blood that was seeping between his fingers.

  Breaking through the copse of trees, the frightened boy scurried into a field of sturdy Iowa corn that towered two feet over his head and quickly hid himself behind its heavy green stalks and broad leaves. In a few weeks, the cornfield would be a silent plain of rust-colored stubs marching row after row across the field like ragged tombstones. But for the time being, the plants were full and thick and provided ample cover for Miller to hide, rabbitlike, from the older boy.

  He cowered there for long minutes, until he heard the sound of the car starting up and moving away. When he felt it was safe, he ventured out and waded into a river to wash the chemical from his smarting eyes. Then he walked to a farmhouse, where he knocked on the door and told the people who lived there that he had just been beaten up.

  The occupants of the house called the Hudson police and the Black Hawk County Sheriffs Department. Andersson was picked up and booked for assault with intent to commit great bodily injury. Then he was released to the custody of his parents.

  By now just about everyone except Hill and Pottinger was ready to give up on Gacy. His protestations that he was innocent of the new charges, just as he was innocent of the earlier accusation of sodomy, went virtually unheeded.

  "I am guilty of none of these," Gacy told the court of the newer charges, "except for making a verbal threat to Miller when he came to me in December of 1967 and wanted me to give (sic) an amplifier or else he would tell his father about this offense."

  Time was running out. Dutton, who was later to move up and replace Peterson as county attorney, was committed to obtaining a conviction on the sodomy charge.

  In September and again in October, Gacy was referred by order of Judge George C. Heath, of the Tenth Judicial District Court of Iowa in Black Hawk County, to psychiatrists for evaluation of his mental health. Copies of their reports would be provided for both the attorneys for the defense and for the prosecution.

  The chunky businessman was first sent to the State Mental Health Institute at Independence in adjacent Buchanan County. A month later he was transported to the Psychiatric Hospital at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, about eighty miles southeast of Waterloo.

  The prognosis was not very favorable to the defendant. Although Dr. Leonard Heston, assistant professor of psychiatry at the State Psychopathic Hospital, and Dr. L. D. Amick concurred in finding Gacy mentally competent to stand trial, it was recommended that he receive firm and consistent external controls.

  "We regard Mr. Gacy as an antisocial personality, a diagnostic term reserved for individuals who are basically unsocialized and whose behavior pattern brings them repeatedly into conflict with society," the psychiatrists wrote in a letter to Judge Heath. "Persons with this personality structure do not learn from experience and are unlikely to benefit from known medical treatment."

  At the request of the judge, Heston later elaborated that "Predicting the future behavior of an individual must be based on the known performance of other persons similar to him." Individuals similar to Gacy, Heston added, appear to do best "where there are firm, consistent external controls on their behavior. Intensive parole supervision might accomplish this end as well as any other method."

  Gacy was described by the psychiatrist as apparently a bisexual, and based on his personality, a person whose behavior "is usually regarded as thrill-seeking or explorative and not as an absolute fixation on abnormal sexual objects."

  Dutton had been conferring with Gacy's attorney, D. A. Frerichs, and going over the charges and evidence against the defendant. On November 7, 1968, in an appearance before Judge Peter Van Metre in the Tenth Judicial District Court of Iowa, Gacy waived formal arraignment and entered a guilty plea to the charge of sodomy. The other charges were dismissed a few weeks later.

  A guilty plea to one charge in return for dismissal of others is not unusual in the nation's courts. Nor is pleading guilty to a charge that has been trimmed from a more serious offense, such as a reduction from murder to manslaughter. The process is called plea bargaining.

  Overworked prosecutors, struggling to keep their heads above the jam-up of cases overcrowding criminal court dockets everywhere, may find it convenient and appropriate to accept a finding of guilty to charges that are less serious than those originally filed in order to avoid long drawn-out court battles. There can be other reasons as well. A prosecutor may be unsure that evidence will support a guilty finding if a case goes to trial. Or an agreement may be reached to avoid calling a witness whose safety or activities as an informant or law enforcement officer would be jeopardized by being identified in open court.

  Defense attorneys may advise their clients to plead guilty to a single offense if their case is weak, or if they fear conviction and sentencing on a series of charges. In the matter of the charges against Gacy, discomfort to the boys and to their families could be avoided if the youths did not have to appear in open court and recount potentially embarrassing testimony.

  There is nothing illegal or unethical about plea bargaining. It is a device that has become increasingly necessary and prevalent in the criminal courts. It should not include agreement on sentencing. Sentencing is another matter.

  Judge Van Metre, who was selected to preside over the Gacy case, is today a boyish-looking, unassuming veteran of twenty years on the bench. His father once presided over the same court, and the son moved up to the job some six years after graduating from law school at the University of Iowa.

  Judge Van Metre takes the traditional image of the scales seriously and strives to temper the justice he metes out with mercy. A number of times during his career as a jurist he has lost sleep and agonized over the sentencing of a defendant, particularly young first offenders, when he was ca
ught in the dilemma of deciding between a suspended or deferred sentence and attempt at rehabilitation, or imprisonment for the protection of the public. At times, prosecutors have grumbled that he tempers his judgments with too much mercy.

  That is understandable to the judge, who concedes that he is not punitive. "My reputation is the other way around," he says. "I've run afoul of the law-enforcement people for being too lenient."

  Consequently, it was mildly surprising when he rejected the recommendation of Harker, whom he had directed to make a pre-sentence investigation. Harker recommended probation on the sodomy charge, pointing out that Gacy had said he planned to return to Illinois and resume his old occupation, selling shoes.

  "It appears to this agent that this is a valid plan if the State of Illinois will accept him, as he apparently has written confirmation of a job and home situation there," Harker wrote. "What psychiatric help is available for this type of offender could be obtained there as well as in Iowa."

  In the report, prepared on November 14, 1968, Harker pointed out that Gacy came from a strong family where the father was "considered a strict disciplinarian, but fair." Gacy was pictured as being assiduous with good work performance, although he had indicated there was some conflict with his father-in-law, whom he considered to be too dictatorial in their business relationship.

  Frerichs also pleaded eloquently for his client, reminding the court that Gacy was a married man, father of two children, and a citizen whose deportment and employment record were excellent until his recent "bizarre behavior."

  The attorney insisted that probation would restore his client to society as a better person, while prison would return him to society "worse than when he went in. He would be exposed to many problems by a term in prison," Frerichs argued. "He will be taken back into the safekeeping of his family if given probation, and he is assured of employment."