by David Nelson
Outside politics and activism, Chicago’s crime rate had steadily risen since 1957, peaking in 1974 with 970 homicides. The Chicago Tribune put out a report in 1975 discussing the reasons for the rise, from increasing rates of “idle youths” to the depiction of violence in films and TV. One expert argued the depiction was not realistic enough to deter humans from killing other humans.
Chicago by then had a reputation, as did many major cities in America in the 1970s. But if he had been daunted by the city on the lake, Tim McCoy must have felt he was in good hands. John knew his way around the city.
They would have seen the in-progress Sears Tower, its bulky base rising up and giving way to a thin scaffolding of skeletal floors. They could have seen the river, famously dyed green each year for St. Patrick’s Day, which was also John’s birthday. Along the riverbanks sat the squat Art Deco–style Merchandise Mart near the twin corncob hives of Marina City, standing like two alien structures among the city’s other skyscrapers. Ice sculptures in the civic center plaza held fast in the deep freeze of another Chicago winter.
Maybe John took him past Washington Square, known to locals as Bughouse Square. And maybe here, John told him a few crude tales about the type of boys who stood out on the corners, waiting to catch a ride. One can imagine John casting sidelong glances, wondering how the handsome young man might react to these lewd details.
Up on Lake Shore Drive, Tim could look out at the black water of Lake Michigan, choked with ice and foam, and beyond, where the city’s pumping stations blinked faithfully out in the dark.
Through New Town, John might have showed him other places he knew. Bars where men went looking for other men. It was a curious neighborhood, full of taverns and restaurants with cheeky names and imagery cutting a bawdy balance between masculine and effeminate.
Farther still, maybe Wrigley Field, where John sometimes caught a Cubs game, and where the homes began to change. Maybe this was something new for Tim, something stark. Here, the tenement buildings seemed to be falling down, with their missing windows or their burned-out edges. It seemed like so many families were stacked on top of each other. Their faces told stories of poverty, something he knew only from television. In this neighborhood walked the ghosts of Al Capone and other gangsters, who used to own the many taverns and nightclubs now wedged against pool halls and unemployment offices, pizza places and liquor stores. Those former ballrooms had traded the velveteen hum of jazz for the noisy pulse of rock and disco.
At some point along the way, they decided they’d driven enough. Tim had grown hungry, and John was done waiting. It was time to get what he wanted.
They turned west toward the edges of the city, where planes swooped low and neat yards closed off little bungalow houses in a postwar sprawl that seemed endless and orderly.
They arrived at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park Township,* an unincorporated area of Cook County. The ranch home was nothing remarkable, and most likely untidy and unfinished at that point in time, as John had only moved in the previous August. Tonight, it was empty; not only had his mother decided to stay at his aunt’s, but his fiancée and her kids were with her mother.
John, no doubt, was his normal boastful self, talking about his connections and how he intended to turn the house into a proper home that could host parties and guests. John, a drinker, offered Tim 190-proof clear grain alcohol, and they drank together for a while.
As the conversation loosened and the night wore on, John might have finally broached the topic. By all accounts, Tim was straight. Girls liked him, and he liked them back. But according to Gacy, the two had a sexual encounter that evening and, sometime after, went to bed together. Whether this was truly a consensual encounter is unknown.
John had started making a practice of this kind of encounter. Back in February 1971 he had picked up another teenager from the Greyhound station and taken him home. The boy had not been a willing partner, and when he escaped, he promptly went to the police. John was charged with sexual assault.
But the boy never showed up to court, and charges were dismissed.
John’s problems went beyond Chicago. They had haunted his days in Iowa, where even the anchor of a successful career and a wife and two kids could not save him from himself. He’d been the manager of three Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, and active in a local chapter of the Jaycees, an entrepreneurial and civic organization for young men. The group had brought John a lavish social life, one that allowed him to dabble with prostitutes and wife-swapping. But for John, it wasn’t enough.
Donald Voorhees was the fifteen-year-old son of a fellow Jaycee who had caught John’s attention. John often socialized with young teenagers—particularly boys—who worked in his restaurants. They’d regularly come to his home in Waterloo, where he’d set up a social club (with dues) in his basement for them to freely smoke weed, drink beer, and play pool. Sometimes John showed them pornography, or stag films, on a projector. Other times John found creative ways to manipulate his young friends into sexual favors. He would claim he had been hired by the governor of Illinois to perform heterosexual and homosexual experiments in the name of science; other times, he would challenge boys to games of pool, asking them to perform oral sex on him if they lost. After Donald came over one evening, John got him drunk and coerced him into oral sex.
Frightened and traumatized, Donald went to the police, and with pressure from his father, a state representative, John was arrested on charges of sodomy. Immediately after John’s arrest, another youth came forward to tell a similar story.
John insisted on his innocence and requested a polygraph, which proved inconclusive. He might have even beaten the charges, had he not attempted to deal with matters himself.
John had mentioned his legal troubles to a teenage employee, Russell Schroe der, who was eager to pay off a debt on his car and vent off some anger after his girlfriend had dumped him. In exchange for $300 from John, Russell would convince Donald to drive out to a quiet location near Black Hawk Creek, on the pretext of drinking some alcohol he’d stashed nearby.
When they arrived, Russell attacked Donald, spraying him with mace, beating him with a stick, and holding his head underwater in the creek. Donald eventually broke free and ran off through the cornfields, where he found a farmhouse to call the police. He was able to identify Russell, and through Russell, the police found John.
Things came apart quickly. John was given additional charges and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, which concluded he had an antisocial disorder. He pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years at Anamosa State Penitentiary, though he would serve only eighteen months.
By the time he was released, John’s life in Iowa was over. Almost to the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, John’s wife had been granted a divorce and custody of their two children. He had no job, no friends left. So John went home to Chicago.
Inside John’s new home on Summerdale Avenue, Tim McCoy probably knew nothing about this, though it’s possible John used some of his old ploys to get what he wanted. Afterward, John told Tim he could stay the night, and in the morning, he’d drive him back to get the bus. With that promise, the two of them went to sleep with what little remained of the night.
Tim woke sometime before dawn, John recalled. With John still asleep, Tim got up and went into the kitchen. John was usually generous to his guests, especially the teenage boys that came to the home. So Tim helped himself, pulling out eggs and a slab of bacon from the fridge and setting two spots at the kitchen table. He had a long journey back to Omaha ahead of him.
John woke not long after. When he opened his eyes, John saw Tim standing in the doorway of the bedroom, watching him. In Tim’s hand, John saw the long knife from the kitchen.
John did not hesitate and hurled himself out of the bed and at Tim, as if possessed by some instinct that he’d always known was there.
As Tim stepped back and raised his hands as if to surrender, the blade caught John on his arm, m
arking him with a scar he would bear for the rest of his life. They wrestled for a few moments, as John gripped Tim’s wrist to jerk the knife free and Tim fought against his host. They struggled for as long as they could, the young teenage boy against the sturdy man who had begun to notice, amid the threat of violence, a mysterious quiver of pleasure inside himself.
And then they fell to the floor of the bedroom, the knife still poised between them, as what had previously seemed like a simple encounter between strangers became something that would link them together forever.
Aunt Tiny went to the bus depot in Omaha to pick up her nephew. It was now three days into the new year. The bus arrived on schedule, pulling into the lot downtown. But when the doors opened and passengers filed out, Aunt Tiny saw no sign of Tim McCoy.
Phone calls were exchanged between Omaha and Michigan. Was it the right bus? Had Tim missed it? Had he stayed in Chicago?
Certainly he’d call soon, no matter what had happened. The family was not immediately concerned. Tim was sixteen, and he’d spent a significant amount of his young life on the road, taking care of himself.
But in Omaha, he had money in the bank saved up for a car, a job waiting for him after the holidays, and, if rumors were true, a girlfriend and a daughter.
The days of 1972 went on. They lengthened into weeks. No calls, no postcards, no sightings of Tim in the wide country he’d once wandered unbound.
Jack hired a private investigator in Chicago. But what kind of tangible trail leads out from a bus station and into a city? He could have been anywhere. He’d never been known to run away, and though Tim had a rebellious side, often arguing with his siblings or his parents, he always stayed close to home. It had never been bad enough for him to leave and not call.
“You just want to think that he’s lost his memory,” Linda said about the time of her brother’s disappearance. “That one day, it’ll snap back.”
In March of the following year, 1973, Granddad died back in Iowa. At the funeral, some of the cousins watched the doors expectantly, waiting for Tim to stroll in. Some had clung to the hope that he’d just kept traveling on into the Great West, to Colorado, or someplace else where he’d made a life of his own. When he didn’t show for the funeral, some in the family knew he was never coming back.
But the truth was, he’d never left that little ranch house on the outskirts of Chicago. John was his keeper now. Before long, before the police and the news crews would descend upon that house almost seven years later to the day, many other young men, trusting, kind, and sometimes troubled, would come to join Tim on Summerdale Avenue, where people lived quiet lives broken now and then by the sound of a muffled scream in the middle of the night.
* Not to be confused with the nearby Norwood Park neighborhood of Chicago.
2
THE POOR SIDE OF TOWN
ON THE DAY HE arrived in Uptown, on the North Side of Chicago, Samuel Dodd Stapleton went looking for the toughest kid in the neighborhood.
Inside their new apartment on Magnolia, the Stapleton family noticed Sam, the second oldest, was missing. “We didn’t even get the stuff in the apartment,” remembered James Stapleton, his younger half-brother. The family quickly went into the streets of Uptown to look for him. Their mother, Bessie, saw him first and began yelling as she came upon him, not far from the apartment.
As James stepped around his mother, he saw his brother standing over the shape of another boy, crumpled and bleeding on the pavement. The boy at Samuel Stapleton’s feet was Randy Reffett. While neither family is certain of the date, they were somewhere between the ages of ten and twelve, though Randy Reffett had about a year on Sam.
“Sam wasn’t even bleeding,” James said, “but Randy was messed up.”
Randy Reffett had been unchallenged for some time. He’d had scrapes and tussles, but he’d built a reputation in his corner of Uptown, ever since he and his family had moved up from Kentucky some years before.
“He had all the girls,” said Samuel Dodd Stapleton’s youngest brother, also named Randy. “And he could fight, he could handle himself.”
Bessie Stapleton quickly dragged Sam back to the apartment while Randy Reffett picked himself up, still bleeding onto his white T-shirt.
Other kids had seen the fight, and now they would carry the story with them from street corner to street corner, spreading it among the young gangs that lorded over unofficial territories and often went to war with one another in the alleyways or the empty lots or the abandoned buildings of Uptown’s chaotic streets. “You used to fight on the way to school,” James Stapleton explained. “Once you got to school and on the way home, and once you got home, you’d go outside, and you’d fight some more.”
Having bested Randy Reffett, Sam Stapleton had suddenly secured a place as the tough newcomer. If anyone ever gave him trouble, James Stapleton recalled that “all I had to say was ‘Do you know Sam Dodd?’ And no matter who it was, … they’d just leave.”
For both Randy Reffett and Samuel Stapleton, though, the fight did not fester between them. Sometime after the confrontation, the two boys developed a friendship of sorts. “They never had no grudge,” said Clyde, Randy Reffett’s younger brother and another witness to the legendary fight. Clyde admitted that even after that, Sam and Randy would “go at it again. Same day, two, three times a day.”
While perhaps not best friends, as two of Uptown’s toughest kids, they found a way to coexist amid the neighborhood’s patchwork of families who’d come up from the wider expanse of Appalachia to find better opportunities in the city. But the odds were against them.
Uptown was not an easy place to live. Life on those blocks was more like survival. Some families had more means than others, but maintaining that existence was still harder work than some might care to find. Families of various backgrounds lived tightly among one another, in buildings frequently run by slumlords. As a result, apartments were dank and sparse, neglected and prone to fires both accidental and intentional, making life inside just as dangerous as outside. “People that didn’t live in Uptown at the time, I don’t think they ever knew that area existed,” James Stapleton reflected. “I don’t think they knew about what went down.”
But for some, especially young people, Uptown could be an exciting place. Rock bands played in nearby theaters like the Aragon Ballroom, the Riviera, the Kinetic Playground, or the Uptown Theatre. Swaths of beaches spread out against the murky blue of Lake Michigan. Hundreds of other kids ran wild in the alleys, parks, and on the rooftops, looking to get away from troubles at home. They often found that belonging, that excitement among a menagerie of colorful gangs fighting against one another over territory, ethnicity, girls, drugs, and petty vengeance.
“For growing up in a poor neighborhood like that, it was the best place in the world,” said Mike Bowling, who’d grown up in Uptown. “I knew everybody, everybody knew me.”
If you had money, you could walk the streets and grab pizza, tacos, hot dogs, gyros, or empanadas. This was a new world, noisy and crowded by a diverse cast of characters who were mostly down on their luck. Rent was cheap, and work could be found. People of all ages could find trouble. And sometimes it found them.
His name was Billy Kindred, but sometimes people called him “Shotgun.” His girlfriend always thought it was because he rode shotgun in his best friend’s car. But his sister, Syble Kindred, told a different story.
One night, Billy had taken his stepfather’s shotguns out into the street and started blasting out the streetlights, one by one. Police showed up eventually to search for the shooter. They found Billy hiding under a car not far away, still clutching the guns. While they didn’t arrest Billy—then maybe thirteen or fourteen—they did confiscate the shotguns, informing Billy’s stepfather that he could get them back only if he pressed charges against Billy. His stepfather declined.
Living on Gordon Terrace in the Buena Park section of Uptown, Billy had ample opportunity to find mischief and even danger. His best friend, D
anny Jockell, recalled leaping between El train platforms or walking along the tracks, where the third rail simmered like a rattlesnake, waiting to catch them. “Sure enough, I had a can of beer in my hand, and I jumped,” Danny Jockell said of one incident. “When I landed, I fell forward. I lost my balance.… My forearms hit the third rail and beer splashed all over. I thought immediately, I’m a dead man.” Luckily, Danny missed the electric current and when he stood, he saw Billy and their other friends laughing at the near miss.
When they were bored, they carried out random pranks. The boys got together and lifted up a Volkswagen Beetle one afternoon, carrying it up to block the entrance of an apartment building. Another time, at Christmas, they spent all day watching a particularly disliked family load up a moving truck, only to come out at the very end and find the air in the tires had been let out. The boys had sat outside singing a rendition of “Jingle Bells” to taunt them.
Other times, they sat in the alleys and doused a sock with toluene paint thinner and huffed their way to new heights. Sniffing glue, paint, or any type of chemical fumes was an easy and cheap high for kids of the neighborhood. It was such a common activity for Danny and Billy that they gave names to their socks. Danny’s sock was called Bozo.
Mostly, you could find Danny and Billy a few blocks over, hanging out with other kids roosting in front of buildings. Oftentimes they hung out with the Ghetto Boys and, later, the Kenmore Boys, some of the many gangs operating in Uptown.
Although the group never grew to the size of other neighborhood gangs like the Latin Kings or the Gaylords, they were well known in the immediate area of the Buena Park. “It wasn’t hard-core,” Billy’s sister, Syble Kindred explained. “They just hung out and drank a few beers sometimes. Listened to some music.”
Billy knew the dangers of the neighborhood, and as the oldest child in the Uptown home, he sought to protect his siblings, both younger and older. Although four other siblings had been born and remained in Kentucky, where their mother Lola had been born, six more lived in the family apartment on Gordon Terrace. “He’d always watch us like hawks,” said Syble, who in those days had long hair that went down to her waist. Billy often admonished her for hanging out in places where other boys might get ideas. “He said, ‘Mom, if I catch her over there again, I’m going to snatch her by her hair and drag her all the way home.’”
