Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  * Shortly before it closed down, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer met one of his victims at Carol’s Speakeasy.

  * Mike Bowling’s recollection here includes the phrase “Gacy’s Aggregate” printed on the side of the car. As far as records can tell, Gacy did not ever call his business by this name; by 1975, he was using the name PDM Contractors. While this detail does not match any available record, Mike Bowling’s account does match with similar accounts of survival from Gacy’s home.

  7

  THE RUNAWAYS

  MARYJANE DIDN’T GIVE UP on Billy Kindred. She still wore the ring he’d given her, and still believed that someday soon they’d be together again. First, she went to one of his sisters to find out if she had any ideas. None of them had seen him in Chicago.

  And no one had seen him in Florida, where, only two months after Billy’s disappearance, his father had passed away. As far as anyone knew, Billy had no idea his father was gone. And as far as they knew, he hadn’t made his way down there or to Ohio or Indiana where other relatives lived.

  But while she spoke with his family, they told her Billy had once run away to California.

  “I was gonna search California,” MaryJane said. “God, what a joke.” Through a friend, MaryJane learned of a man making the drive to California via Canada, for a more scenic route. The man’s wife was eager for MaryJane to join her husband and young son. MaryJane was eager to find Billy, even if she had no real clues.

  As she made preparations to travel to the other side of the country, she purposefully did not tell her mother of her plans. Although her eighteenth birthday was approaching in a few days, her mother would have balked at the idea of her daughter traveling all the way to California with a stranger.

  So she left. She had no choice. She had to find Billy.

  The road unfurled like a ribbon tied to Billy. She would follow it to its end. But the way was not easy. Soon into the twelve-hour trip to the Canadian border, she found herself at odds with the driver of the car. They would frequently take turns driving, while the man went into the back to sleep. But he never slept much, often waking to berate MaryJane for braking too much, even when there was traffic up ahead. When she accelerated, he’d tell her she wasn’t doing it properly.

  “I finally couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. Just short of the Minnesota border with Canada, they pulled over on the side of the highway where she got out and said good-bye to the man and his son.

  But there’d been another reason MaryJane had stopped her journey. “It didn’t feel right,” she recalled. “That wasn’t where I needed to go.” She knew her answers were back in Chicago.

  So she started making her way home, hitchhiking back down the length of rural highways she’d spent all day going north on. Near Milwaukee, in a downpour, she found herself as far as she could get. She was soaked, walking along the side of the road, looking for the next ride. Her feet became waterlogged and purple in her moccasins.

  Eventually, a car pulled up alongside her. The driver asked her where she was headed. Chicago, she told him. He couldn’t take her that far, but he could help her. MaryJane was desperate enough that she got in. Along the way, he made a stop, getting out at a payphone. He called his wife who told him to bring MaryJane home with him.

  At the man’s house, he and his wife fed her, washed and dried her wet clothes, and when she was ready, got her to the bus station and sent her back to Chicago. “Totally nice people,” she remarked. “They didn’t do anything weird.”

  As the day ended, MaryJane finally returned to Chicago. She’d been in three states and close to another country, all in one day. She was worn out and still without answers. But she couldn’t go home. “I didn’t want my mom to know I was back.”

  MaryJane called a friend, to come keep her company. Within a few hours, he picked her up at the Greyhound Station downtown and drove her north where they rambled around together for a while. Eventually, they ended up in a park near the lakefront where they camped out until dawn, waiting for the sun to rise on another year of her young life.

  She was now eighteen years old.

  After Randy Reffett went missing, worry and wonder became an ordinary part of his family’s daily lives. At first, Charles Reffett had been angry with his oldest son, but when the days began to run into one another and still no Randy, he joined in the worry.

  For a time, the family wondered if he’d run away over a particular girlfriend. “She was African American,” Chris Reffett explained. “My mom and dad didn’t want him going out with her.”

  But the friction hadn’t been enough to drive Randy away for this long. And as the police and family searched, rumors of Randy’s whereabouts trickled through over the years. A neighbor heard Randy had been living in the city with a mystery woman. Another heard it was in fact a man named Russell who Randy had taken up with.

  As with the other boys, police inevitably used these rumors (as well as the fact Randy was now seventeen) to close out the missing person report. In the spring of 1978, officers following up on Randy’s case reported his sister, Brenda, had been at Foster Beach one day when a friend told her Randy had found work as a roofer, now living in the Montrose and Ashland area.

  “Due to the fact that the youth is now 17yrs. old and has been seen [Responding Officer] requests case be closed,” read the final page of Randy’s report.

  No doubt, Charles and Myrtle and their children felt frustration alongside the guilt and blame now invading the family home.

  On the May evening his younger brother disappeared, Clyde Reffett had run into Randy and his friend, Samuel Stapleton, on the street between the two families’ homes. One of the boys had showed Clyde some pills they’d gotten their hands on. Whether they were going to take them themselves or sell them off, Clyde didn’t wait around to find out. “I didn’t take no pills,” Clyde said. “So I just went home.”

  Myrtle eventually learned the details of that evening.

  “You should’ve stayed with your brother,” she told Clyde. Often, these statements would be made to Clyde after she had taken codeine for the bullet in her leg—still radiating with pain years later—followed by alcohol.

  “How can you feel that way, Mom?” Clyde would reply, trying to explain she could have lost two sons, had he not left.

  Myrtle’s blame found Charlie too, who had moved the family to Chicago from Kentucky in the first place, setting in motion the awful chain of events. “He slept on the couch a lot,” Clyde said.

  Clyde spent time away from the home to get away from the disfunction following Randy’s disappearance, trying his best to go about regular teenage life in Uptown.

  One evening, Clyde stepped into a phonebooth at Winona and Clark to call a girlfriend. As they talked, a car pulled up in the street outside the phonebooth. Clyde could see the driver, a heavyset man with a mustache, leaning toward him to speak through the window. The man asked Clyde if he needed a ride. Clyde said no, but the man kept asking. Clyde knew what it meant when older men sidled up alongside younger men.

  Enraged, Clyde rushed out from the phonebooth and took off his belt—adorned with a big brass marijuana leaf buckle—and slammed it on the man’s trunk.

  The man drove off, but Clyde would see him again.

  “The first time I ventured out of Uptown was years later,” Randy Stapleton recalled. He and a neighborhood friend, Danny, were headed to a roller-skating rink, especially popular in those days. “I never did any of that stuff. So we took the bus, and the farther we got out of Uptown, the more kids started getting on the bus, obviously heading out to the roller rink, too. And I started looking at them and they’re looking at me …”

  Randy remembered how the stares grew more disparaging. “My clothes were dirty and stained.… I started realizing, these kids, this is their Friday, Saturday night, and they spent hours putting themselves together and look at me: I’m going to the roller rink looking like this. But you don’t know. That’s how you live in Uptown. You were nasty, d
irty, and everybody was, and you don’t know any better.”

  None of the Stapletons had spent much time outside of Uptown. Several years after Sam’s disappearance, they decided to try. They moved to Round Lake Park, Illinois, a smaller suburb about forty-five miles north of the city. “We thought the suburbs was going to be just the opposite of Uptown and Chicago,” James Stapleton said. Before they left, Sam’s mother Bessie gave their new address to neighbors in case her son showed up in Uptown looking for them. She had hope: reports of Sam had passed through the neighborhood over the years he’d been missing.

  The family found a different life north of the city, quiet and green, something more reminiscent of their lives back in Ohio. Just two blocks north, the family could swim and fish all day long at Round Lake.

  Bessie got a call one day from a friend back in Uptown. Her son, Danny, the boys’ friend who’d gone to the roller rink with Randy, had seen Sam in Uptown with a nice dark tan. Danny’s mother suggested to Bessie that her son come up to Round Lake Park to tell them about it.

  “He wanted to come out to Round Lake and hang out,” said Randy Stapleton, the youngest of the siblings. The town had its own problems, but to someone like their friend, Danny, Round Lake Park “was like a resort compared to Uptown.” Danny came up north to stay with them. Sure enough, he told them he had seen Sam.

  Each report added to their optimism. Although their minds occasionally went to darker places, they were still encouraged. “We just had fantasies of him coming back home, with his life straight and maybe a girlfriend or a wife or something,” Randy said.

  But sometime after Danny returned to the city, the Stapletons noticed Bill’s .38 automatic pistol was missing from the house.

  “Obviously, it was all lies—we found out later,” Randy said of Danny’s stories. He’d been making up stories in an effort to get away from Uptown himself, and steal from the Stapletons along the way.

  Soon they also found out Round Lake Park was not the place they’d expected it to be. James and Randy were walking to a store one day when they encountered three bigger kids blocking their way. The Stapleton brothers tried to pass, but the other boys pounced, grabbing them and holding their arms behind their backs. One of the boys tried to put a lit cigarette in James’s eye. “I moved my head, and he got me underneath the eye,” he recalled.

  Once there’d been a time when Sam came to their rescue, whether it was in the flesh or simply through the mention of his name. But in Round Lake Park, Sam’s name meant nothing. Again, they found themselves going to the police for help. The brothers even identified one of the boys that attacked them, but nothing ever came of it.

  After a year of trying in Round Lake Park, the family gave up. They returned to the city, moving around from Logan Square to the area around Wrigley Field.

  But still there was that stray thread of hope, quavering like a frequency just out of earshot.

  Michael Conner arrived in Chicago to get inside his son Craig’s apartment. Craig’s landlord had let him in. But nothing appeared out of the ordinary. Craig’s pet dove, Dové, was in his cage, unfed but still alive. Craig’s briefcase was there too.

  Michael went to the conservatory as well, where Craig’s diploma hadn’t yet been picked up.

  Michael was tenacious and meticulous. With a degree in metallurgical engineering, he’d secured a job at the Los Alamos Laboratory in the atomic division. His job even gave rise to rumors among Craig’s friends that the FBI had gotten involved—his disappearance part of some wider conspiracy.

  But Michael led his own investigation into Craig’s disappearance, even as he called upon the police to help him. A report was filed, a slot in the Daily Bulletin printed with Craig’s name misspelled, “Graig Conner.”

  While the police made their rounds of the city, Michael Conner combed the streets, hoping to run into Craig or learn something from his friends or teachers. After one of his forays into the city, Michael came back to Craig’s apartment to discover something had changed: Craig’s jacket had been thrown onto his couch.

  For a moment, Michael felt relief, but as he looked around, he realized the apartment was still empty. Michael waited, thinking Craig had stepped out and would come back soon. But he never showed.

  Reaching through the coat pockets, Michael found a sales receipt dated October 20—two days after Craig’s supposed disappearance. Sometime after the sudden appearance of Craig’s coat, Michael learned from Craig’s piano instructor, Tex Richardson, that he’d been the one who’d brought the coat to the apartment. Tex had still not seen him and had no idea where Craig could have gone.

  But Michael was growing suspicious of the professor. Over the phone with Craig’s friend Robin Pratt, they discussed the relationship between the instructor and his pupil. Robin knew that Craig had started taking lessons from Leo Podolsky, the famous Ukrainian pianist who’d been on the faculty of Sherwood Music School since 1924, after he’d been stranded outside Russia after the revolution. When Tex found out about Craig’s clandestine lessons, he went “ballistic,” as Robin relayed to Craig’s father. Past episodes in which he’d witnessed Tex’s violent side gave Robin the certainty to say Tex could indeed have been responsible for Craig’s disappearance.

  “I know Tex was questioned like crazy when this all happened,” said Valerie Loy, Craig’s sister. “Evidently, they didn’t come up with anything.”

  In Craig’s Chicago Bulletin placement, there was another telling clue that had filtered its way to the police: “Frequents the area of 915 N. LaSalle.” This location was right around the corner from Bughouse Square.

  Rumors had made their way among the friends and faculty of the conservatory about Craig’s financial problems. Music, after all, was not a lucrative industry. Other students or individuals affiliated with the conservatory had been in similar situations.

  Jonathan Ben Gordon remembered another pianist who often went out at night. “He had a reputation … for doing extravagant sexual things at night,” he said. “He used to go out and … come in beaten up.” Jonathan had even seen him hanging out on the street corner, “kind of baiting people as they went by.”

  Before his disappearance, Craig had lined up a job interview in Colorado that November. He’d planned to fly back aboard TWA Flight 387 to New Mexico, spend a few days at home and then drive up for the interview. Michael flew home, but he planned to return and sit in the terminal at O’Hare to see if his son showed up. He would ask him why he’d disappeared.

  Although it had been years since they’d dated as young kids, Cindy Carrera still ran into her old boyfriend Dale Landingin from time to time. They shared a lot of the same friends. One day, Cindy and some of those friends went to visit Dale in the hospital.

  Dale had always been reckless with the El train. His best friend, Phil Couillard, remembered him “surfing the back of the train” on several occasions. When kids didn’t catch the train in time, they often ran alongside it and jumped on the back, where you could sometimes get in through an unlocked door. Phil heard Dale had once grabbed onto the back of a moving train, but, as it sped up, he’d failed to get in fast enough. At the end of the station platform, Dale clipped a wooden railing and fell to the tracks below.

  “Dude, how can you keep doing this to yourself?” Phil had told him. “You gotta quit getting so fucked up and playing games.” But Dale didn’t listen. And now, after scaling the steel beams leading up to the tracks, he’d inadvertently made contact with the electrified third rail and burned himself.

  His sister, Denise, remembers Dale laughing about the incident, while she cried beside his bed in the burn unit at the hospital. “He didn’t know how to show emotion appropriately,” she explained. “So he would laugh. He would get nervous when someone showed a tear.”

  Cindy saw the severity of the injuries for herself when she came to visit. At first, she and her friends took a similar attitude, laughing and fooling around with Dale. They gave him cigarettes, beer, and possibly some drugs, as
Dale lay recounting the story. But as they sat with him, Dale started complaining about discomfort.

  “I remember he started talking about burning,” Cindy said. “He started burning.”

  As Dale’s pain returned, the nurses hurried in and ushered the teenagers out of the room.

  “When you’re a bunch of stoners, you think everybody wants to get high and get drunk,” Cindy said, as if admonishing her younger self.

  This was perhaps the closest Dale had ever gotten to truly being killed. He’d done it with a laugh. He could only smile at death for so long before it smiled back.

  Cindy saw him one last time during the summer before they lost touch. By then, they’d left all romantic feelings between them in the childhood days when they wandered hand in hand through the halls of Stockton or sat in the sunlight at Gooseberry Park. Now, near the lakefront in Uptown where they ran into each other one afternoon, they walked through another park together, as friends. “I remember it being really nice,” Cindy said of the encounter.

  They talked about school, although Dale had stopped going long ago. Dale was seeing someone new. He alluded to difficulties with his parents, indicating he was mad at his father. It wasn’t a long conversation, just a quick check-in between two friends with a little bit of history. In the sunlight, they said good-bye to one another and went about their days. They would never see each other again.

  MaryJane circled the city like a lovelorn ghost, and people were starting to trade stories about her.

  Her friends in the neighborhood had never actually met Billy, and now they questioned her about his very existence. “Some people called me a liar,” MaryJane said. “That I was just looking for attention.…”