by David Nelson
One of the last evenings she remembers at the coach house was also the night of Donnie’s birthday. “The house was packed with people,” Lisa said, remembering how she went all over the house to try and find her boyfriend. As she came upon the stairwell landing, she came to the realization that the boy kissing another girl in front of her was in fact Donnie.
Summer was fading, and so too would her relationship with Donnie. Not long after, she stopped going to the coach house. The parties died down as school started up for a lot of the kids who frequented the house, high on dope, drunk on beer. Lisa remembers hearing about the coach house getting closed down after neighbors complained.
For a while, Lisa was brokenhearted, though she moved on quickly. She never saw Donnie again, but with Dale, it was a different story.
Greg Godzik had been in a good mood as the afternoon of Saturday, December 11, 1976, turned into another early winter evening in Chicago.
Christmas was coming fast, and soon Greg would have a break from school, during which he’d open the gifts that his mother had already wrapped and stashed away in a closet somewhere in the house. Things were still going well with his girlfriend Judy, and later that evening, they were scheduled to meet up for a date.
He’d recently gotten a job working with a contractor who ran his own company out of a house in Norwood Park Township near the airport. The man, John Gacy, paid Greg so generously that he’d quit his other job at a lumber company. Sometimes Mr. Gacy even had Greg help him dig trenches for drain tiles in the crawl space of his house. He was going on his third week of work with Mr. Gacy.
With her son in such a good mood, Greg’s mother, Eugenia, decided to bake cookies so that he could take some to Judy that evening, before she and her husband went to evening mass. But even before he arrived to pick Judy up at her house, only five minutes away, he’d eaten all the cookies himself.
Judy doesn’t remember where they went that night, but they never went places specifically. More often than not, they found themselves just driving around the neighborhoods and letting the evening take them wherever. They were content just spending time together without a destination in mind. The radio played songs they liked, and they were together, with Christmas all around them.
As it got late, they went to pick up Judy’s mom, who was on a date that evening as well. With Judy’s mom in the car, they drove back.
Sometime close to eleven o’clock, Greg pulled in front of the Patterson’s house. Judy’s mom thanked him for the ride, said goodnight, and left the two kids alone to sit in the driveway.
Normally Judy and Greg would sit together making out and listening to music on the 8-track player for a while. But that evening, something was different about Greg. “He was in a hurry to get rid of me,” Judy recalled. But when she asked him where he needed to get to so late at night, he was cryptic and vague.
“I gotta go,” he told her simply.
Judy said good-bye and slipped out of the car and into the cold. The parting was not normal; it was rushed and tense. She was angry as she got inside her house.
Then Greg drove off.
It was now going on Sunday, December 12, 1976. And it was the last time Judy Patterson would see her boyfriend, Greg, the blond-haired boy she’d loved and whom she thought she knew everything about.
The break Billy Kindred had been waiting for came finally in February, just two months after him and MaryJane’s night at Diversey Arms when they told each other things about themselves that would lock them together intimately and, in some ways, permanently.
MaryJane was at home that winter evening with plans to meet up with Billy later on when he called to give her some good news. He and his friend Gerald had met a man, a contractor, who was interested in hiring them both to work for a company he ran out of his own house. Billy never said his name, but they were going to go talk with him.
“I’m hearing how excited he was,” MaryJane remembered of the call.
Before they said good-bye, Billy promised he’d be over to see her soon. They hung up.
As the night grew later, Billy had still not arrived, and he hadn’t called to update her either. Other friends had even stopped by and agreed that it was odd he hadn’t gotten in touch. She called his apartment. But there was no answer. “Honest to God, I feel like I knew something that night,” she said, noting that she was more worried than angry that Billy hadn’t shown. “I knew something was up that night.”
She struggled to fall asleep, knowing that her boyfriend was somewhere out in that cold February night.
MaryJane was not to be underestimated. Even in her teenage years, she’d become a tenacious and feisty young woman, unafraid to seek out what she wanted, what she needed. At one point in her life, she tracked down her own biological father, simply so she could sit across from him in a diner and try to know who he was.
And so, as she struggled to get some sleep that night, it was clear that that same drive inside her would lead her all over Chicago—all over the country if she must—to find out what had become of her boyfriend, Billy Kindred, the kindhearted boy whom she had been so sure she would spend the rest of her life with.
Lynn Meadows arrived at the Szyc household in Des Plaines wearing the blue satin dress her grandmother had sewn for her.
“[John] swore to God he was gonna get roses to match it,” Lynn said. “He did it.” That evening, her prom date, John Szyc, presented Lynn with a collar of blue roses that she kept for years until a house fire destroyed most of her belongings.
Inside, John’s family took photos of the evening. Against a drawn set of golden curtains, Lynn stood beside John, who wore a tuxedo with a white bow tie and gloves to match.
She teased him when she noticed his family calling him Johnny. “I looked at him and I said, ‘Johnny, no.’”
To Lynn, he’d always been, and always would be, John. In some ways, the line was divided between the two. There was Johnny, whom his family knew and loved. And then there was John, the person his friends knew and loved and who, in some ways, was the real John Szyc.
At the prom, John and Lynn danced together and with other friends too. “We had a lovely time,” Lynn said. “He was a perfect gentleman.”
After the dance, Lynn and John found themselves at a beach on Lake Michigan, dancing and singing with their friends, as Chicago glinted to the south and the wide dark of the lake met with the black embankment of the night in front of them.
In his tuxedo, John joked that he wanted to see if he could dance like Fred Astaire.
“He couldn’t,” Lynn observed with a laugh. “And then me, I’m like, ‘But that makes me Ginger [Rogers]. I don’t want to be Ginger. Let me be Fred.’”
Lynn Meadows was used to pushing the envelope when it came to sex and gender norms. She’d started an LGBT rap group at Maine West. When she was young, she’d had a “passionate crush on Marlene Dietrich.” And even though Steve Reeves didn’t look bad to Lynn when he played the muscly Hercules in 1958, it was still clear she was not interested in John or Johnny.
But he wasn’t interested in her either.
John had known for some time that he preferred men, and as he looked to the future, past high school to life ahead, he was more certain than ever. “I asked him if his parents knew this, and he said they didn’t,” Lynn said. “That’s why he had to have a girl [to go to prom].”
Lynn would help keep his secret for as long as Johnny decided to be Johnny, and John decided to be John. “I loved him,” Lynn said. “He was a good friend.”
* At the time, MaryJane actually went by the name MaryJo Paulus, which appears in court documentation and police records from the time; today, she prefers MaryJane Piper. For consistency, she is called MaryJane Piper here.
6
IN THE COMPANY OF HOMOSEXUALS
AFTER HER SON DISAPPEARED, Violet Carroll spoke with police on several occasions. In their home on Eastwood Avenue near the lakefront, Huey Carroll drank in excess, often exacerbating the abuse
he inflicted on the family. In one of the first reports filed by responding officers, Huey conceded that Billy “had told both parents he was leaving home because the parents drank too much, and he could not stand their drinking anymore.”
Violet drank too, and in the months after her youngest son, Billy, walked out of the apartment on the June evening of his older brother’s birthday, officers investigating his disappearance often took note of it as well. In a March 1977 supplementary progress report, officers of the Area 6 Youth Division stated that they cut short their interview “due to the intoxicated condition of the complainant,” Violet Carroll. Similarly, in the next report, dated November 4, 1977, the reporting officer was “overwhelmed by the intoxicated condition of the complainant.”
But it was during this same visit that Violet also made the claim that Billy had visited her back in May, some eleven months after his initial disappearance. When she asked where he had been living, according to Violet, he had refused to say, except “out of state.”
Given Violet’s condition, it’s possible the reporting officer misunderstood her, or Violet herself truly believed the visit had taken place. Moreover, it was possible that Violet knew exactly what she was saying and made this statement in order to revive police interest in her son’s case.
The statement had the reverse effect. By November 1977 Billy was eighteen years old. Since he had recently made contact with his parents, he was therefore considered alive and well and able to take care of himself. The case was closed.
But Violet had actually given them one key clue to her son’s disappearance, had they made any true effort to follow up on it. On August 20, 1976, Violet, apparently sober, met with Officer Shields and pointed investigators in a new direction. Officer Shields wrote, “Further interviewes [sic] with mother disclosed that within the last year, the boy went with homosexuals but [she] did not know any of their names.”
Across Uptown, police followed up more regularly with Bessie Stapleton about her son, Sam, who had not returned from his sister’s apartment one evening that May, exactly a month before Billy.
Perhaps owing to her tenacity or her past run-ins with police over treatment of her son, Sam’s report was considerably thicker than the other boys, clocking in at thirty-seven pages. For most of summer 1976, police filed a new supplementary report every week.
Bessie had informed police that she suspected a local man known only by the nickname “Mr. Clean” as having potential involvement in Sam’s absence.* She didn’t know Mr. Clean’s real name, nor did she know his address, only that he was a known “homosexual” living in the area and that Sam and his friends had previously roughed him up and taken money from him.
The Mr. Clean thread did not pan out, though the theme continued throughout the report. That summer Bessie reiterated her suspicions that Sam was “in company of homosexuals.”
One friend had seen Sam along one of his favorite haunts, Sunnyside Mall. On two separate occasions, two friends had stated Sam was living with an older man somewhere in Uptown. Bessie Stapleton herself had even heard Sam was living in Rogers Park “with an Adult named Gene, who rides a motor-cycle.”
His stepfather, Bill—who’d driven all through the neighborhood on his own search—told reporting officers that he suspected his son was “playing with homosexuals.”
Later in the summer, Bessie told police officers Sam might have been staying at the Abbott Hotel, a location so notorious for sex work that the school across the street had turned students’ desks away from the windows to protect them from seeing anything nefarious. Later the hotel’s owner insisted the establishment ran as a “rest haven for homosexuals,” discouraging female guests.
Not long after, she also heard Sam’s girlfriend had seen him at the Yankee Doodle Dandy Restaurant, a well-known meet-up place for older men and younger boys. But when Sam saw that police were actually arresting his girlfriend for reasons unstated in his missing person report, he fled.
Throughout that summer, Bessie and Violet continued steering police toward the area of Clark and Diversey, an intersection in a neighborhood today known partly as Boystown, but back then known as New Town. Other mothers and witnesses would speak up about this as well. In these reports, the use of the term homosexuals is a catchall for any adult men who sought the company of other males of any age. In Mr. Clean’s case, he was most likely a local pedophile, considering Sam was fourteen at the time.
In the 1970s, for many of these parents, the implication of homosexuality was an uncomfortable thread to pursue. As a society, the country had not yet started embracing gay rights in a meaningful way. Up until fairly recently, homosexuality had been criminalized in a variety of ways. In Chicago harsh laws and city ordinances had prohibited everything from cross-dressing (until 1973) to sodomy (until 1961.)
Anita Bryant, a popular singer of the 1950s, led a “Save Our Children” campaign against gay rights under the guise of Christian activism in the mid-1970s down in Dade County, Florida. Bryant believed “homosexuals” were looking to “recruit” children both for molestation and to advance their lifestyle.*
In 1977 her attempts to repeal laws prohibiting discrimination against gay people succeeded, and other cities followed suit. The campaign gave way to extensive backlash, including a boycott of orange juice—Bryant was a brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission. Gay men wore buttons proclaiming, “Anita Bryant sucks oranges,” while bars refused to serve cocktails with orange juice. Even the Aragon Ballroom in Uptown hosted anti-Bryant events called Orange Balls.
The campaign culminated with a television appearance in 1978, during which a gay activist threw a pie in her face.
Not long after, the boycott—gaining momentum from many celebrities—inflicted enough financial damage that Bryant’s career opportunities began to wane. In 1980 she divorced her husband and fled public life.
While Bryant’s campaign inflicted lasting damage, the gay community had begun to step out from the shadows. It had started to untangle itself from societal perceptions, and it was finding a voice—one that was grower louder and louder each day. The world was changing.
Robin Pratt had stepped out of the closet by the time he got to Lincoln College, named for the small town that was home to it in Illinois. He hadn’t been sure about Lincoln, but he’d been sure about two things: his pursuit of music and his attraction to other men.
“One day I was late for class,” Robin said, adding, “What’s new?”
Approaching one of the buildings on campus, he passed a young, good-looking man coming down the steps as he was going up. The two men made eye contact, said good morning, and Robin went in for class.
Coming out of the building after class, Robin saw that the young man was still hanging around. “This is very interesting,” Robin remembered thinking to himself.
The two men struck up a conversation. Robin learned that Garth, the young man, was originally from Canada but working now as a book salesman out of Chicago. They made easy conversation, during which Garth invited him back to his hotel in nearby Champaign-Urbana. “So I went and spent the weekend in the hotel,” Robin said.
Although their time was brief, Robin and Garth stayed in touch, sometimes meeting up in Chicago when Robin could travel. After a summer abroad in England, Garth moved into a townhouse on Belden Avenue in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Robin would occasionally visit, sometimes driven there by Garth, other times driving up to the city in his 1965 Electra convertible at high speeds. Things were different and open in the city, increasingly so in the late 1960s and early ’70s. For a young man living in a time when gay was still taboo, Chicago was a haven.
At the townhouse, he found a cast of gay characters living with Garth, including Tex Richardson, a piano instructor at the Chicago Conservatory College downtown.
During one of Robin’s visits that fall, Tex asked if he’d like to see the school. Robin was curious, so he agreed. Together they drove downtown and Tex took him to Steinway
Hall on Van Buren, where the school occupied a floor of an office building that had formerly been home to a theater for impresario Florenz Ziegfield as well as offices for architect Frank Lloyd Wright but was, most recently, a theater for adult films.
Tex gave him a tour of the facilities and classrooms, stopping inside one of the recital halls where two Steinway concert grand pianos sat solemnly on stage.
“Why don’t you play something?” Tex asked him.
Robin scoffed.
“Just play anything,” Tex insisted.
The empty hall now filled with Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 14” while Tex Richardson took notes nearby. Robin played a few other pieces to show his skills.
Once he’d stopped and the final notes reverberated off into the hall, Tex asked simply, “How’d you like to go to school here?”
“No one had ever asked me in my life, how would you like to do such-and-such,” Robin stated. “It was always, ‘You will do this.’”
Robin knew his time at Lincoln College—now starting his sophomore year—was over. He called his father to tell him the situation. While his father preferred Robin complete his education, Robin was insistent on moving to Chicago. He told his father that even if he said no, he was going to do it.
“That the first time I ever really stood up,” Robin said.
For a time, he was enrolled at both schools, until he finally untangled himself from Lincoln. It took a while for Robin to find footing in Chicago, bouncing among the YMCA and a string of bad situations and apartments.
Not long into his time in Chicago, Robin remembered, he watched as an argument between Tex and Garth one evening grew to the point where Tex took Garth by the feet and dragged him off. Robin recalled Tex swinging Garth around the room in a chair with wheels until Tex threw him out of the townhouse completely. “That was the first time I really saw Tex’s temper,” Robin said.
