Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  Throughout the early morning hours, they searched all over. They returned to the pharmacy, checked the local mall, combed the streets, occasionally circling back with one another at various meeting points to see if Rob had turned up. They had no sign of him.

  As dawn filtered through the sky and school and work approached, none of them had gotten any sleep. They returned home and prepared for the day. Early that morning, Elizabeth and Harold went back to the station to ensure the police had started the investigation.

  A youth officer had indeed been assigned to the case. He met with the Piests that morning, taking additional details about Rob’s disappearance. Elizabeth even handed over a student directory that included names and numbers of Rob’s closest friends.

  Back in the 1970s, many jurisdictions did indeed require complainants to wait anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours before filing a missing person report—though it varied, especially for minors. But many, including Chicago and Des Plaines police, got to work instantaneously.

  Rob’s disappearance immediately troubled the officer, who noted Rob had no reasons to leave home, nor any history of doing so. While the Piests waited in another room, he called the Torf brothers, who confirmed Gacy had been at the pharmacy and that he owned a Christmas tree lot nearby. The officer then called Mr. Gacy himself.

  Gacy picked up.

  The officer asked if he’d been at Nisson’s Pharmacy the previous evening.

  Yes, Gacy replied.

  Had he spoken with Rob Piest?

  No, he hadn’t spoken with him or interacted with him at all.

  He thanked Gacy and then immediately called Kim Byers, who said the last time she had seen Rob Piest he was on his way out the door to talk to “that contractor guy.”

  With that, the officer returned to Rob’s parents, telling them he would continue looking into the matter, and to let the police do their job.

  Harold Piest thanked him but could not let things sit. After work that day, he and his daughter drove around town, starting first at the Christmas tree lot allegedly owned by Gacy outside St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Church. There was no sign of Gacy. They needed to find out where he lived. The Piests went to their own church nearby where they asked their priest to contact the priest at St. Joseph’s to see if he could help. They met up with the Ukrainian church’s priest, and he was able to retrieve Gacy’s address for them.

  Throughout the day, Harold and his daughter continued to leapfrog the police as they conducted a similar investigation, staking out the Christmas tree lot and even knocking on Gacy’s door themselves.

  Harold Piest, however, stopped short of approaching the Gacy home. He and his daughter sat in their car on Summerdale Avenue, eyeing the house numbered 8213 and trying to decide what to do. It was now December 12, and the hour was growing late once more.

  In the end, they decided they would let the police do their work. They drove off, unaware that the body of their son, their brother, was still inside the house of John Gacy, waiting to be found.

  The phone rang in Denise Landingin’s apartment, now ready for Christmas. She passed by the tree, where underneath she’d set aside a wrapped present for her brother Dale: a new leather wallet.

  She picked up the phone. It was her mother, Dorothy.

  Everything that happened after that—for the next few years even—felt something like sleepwalking. There are times today when she’s able to latch onto the reality of those awful moments, but oftentimes, looking back, she feels as if she were watching herself play out a movie.

  “Your brother was found in the river,” Dorothy said curtly. “He had his underwear in his throat.”

  Denise paused.

  Maybe her mother repeated herself. Maybe she didn’t need to. Whatever was said, the conversation was brief.

  Dale had died.

  She tried to make sense of it. She thought about the last time she saw her brother, standing in the very same apartment. Sometime after that he’d gone into the river. Had he gone there on his own? Had someone done something to him? How long had he been missing?

  In actuality, Francisco had been the last to see his son alive. Father and son had met at a tavern at Foster and Broadway Avenues, not far from their apartments around the northern border of Uptown. They’d had a heated conversation about Dale’s future. Earlier in the day, Dale had been bonded out of jail. Police had arrested him for battery after an argument between him and Stephanie escalated. Francisco had even pleaded with the judge to put Dale in a mental institution, as his behavior had gotten worse recently.

  Once again, the things he had learned from Francisco Sr. had flared up in his own life. The choices he made now were of course his own, but they were also an echo of his father’s.

  When he and Francisco parted ways—around 3 AM on the morning of November 4—Francisco had watched his son head west in search of Stephanie, who’d gone to stay at her mother’s to get away from him. Dale had simply disappeared somewhere in between the streetlights.

  No one had filed a missing person report for Dale. It wasn’t unusual for Francisco not to see his son for extended periods, except when he needed money. Neither his sisters nor his mother saw him consistently enough to think anything was amiss. When no one heard from him for a week, they didn’t worry.

  On November 12, 1978, a father and son returning from a duck hunt steered their boat along the Des Plaines River and into the marina below the I-55 bridge in Channahon, Illinois. Near an inlet at the end of the marina, they noticed something floating beneath the river’s surface. They inched the boat closer to see for sure.

  The local sheriff’s office and the fire department descended upon the marina, warning ahead of their arrival that the body not be disturbed from its place in the water. Evidence technicians began scouring the area, while police and firefighters extracted the body from the oily water.

  They set him in the grass on the island. The young man was completely naked, though the officers at the scene took note that something seemed lodged in his mouth. As traffic rushed over the I-55 bridge next to them, they took several photographs of the body.

  The coroner arrived not long after, and they began readying the body for transport to a nearby funeral home where they would try their best to identify him and piece together how he’d died.

  They drove him thirty minutes away to the Kurtz Memorial Chapel, where the body lay in the morgue until the next day, when an autopsy began at 11 AM. At this point, the chief pathologist pulled the blockage in the body’s mouth, revealing a set of navy-blue underpants. The blockage had no doubt been placed there deliberately, but most likely not by the victim. As a result of the blockage, the victim had asphyxiated on his own vomit.

  Skin and hair samples were all taken for possible identification, in addition to fingerprints. Within twenty-four hours, the Illinois crime lab had hit upon a positive identification through the prints. Frank Landingin. Dale, as he was known to those who knew him best.

  By the day’s end, Francisco Landingin had been informed of his son’s death through a communication from dispatch as he drove his cab around town. Police sent word to Dorothy as well, and not long after, Dale’s sisters heard too.

  Dale Landingin had flouted danger for so many years, fearlessly skipping away from it with delight. Now it had finally caught up with him.

  Much like Phil Couillard had once watched his friend emerge from the swimming pool on a day in Lake Villa in 1971, so too had Denise watched her late grandmother draw her brother up from the water in South Carolina back when they were little kids. Now strangers would do the same for Dale at the end of his life.

  “I feel as though … it was some kind of sign,” Denise said. “That I was being told something like this was going to happen later. That I was preparing my life for what would happen. I believe my grandmother came to receive my brother from the Des Plaines River.”

  Police had begun taking a closer look at the man whose name was now part of Rob Piest’s offi
cial missing person report: John Gacy. They started piecing together Gacy’s life in detail. One of the earliest details they fixated upon was Gacy’s record. His seemingly ideal life had unraveled over his involvement with several teenage boys during his time in Iowa.

  Eventually one of the boys, fifteen-year-old Donald Voorhees, had told his father about the nature of his relationship with Mr. Gacy. Not long after, Gacy had even hired another boy to assault Voorhees to prevent him from testifying. But Voorhees knew his attacker and did not hesitate in identifying him.

  Gacy had eventually pled guilty to sodomy but denied the other charges. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to ten years. His wife filed for divorce the same day. Gacy, father to a son and daughter, never saw his family again.

  The episode with Voorhees alone was worth a second look, but as police delved further, they saw more encounters with police. In 1972 Gacy had faced charges of aggravated battery and reckless conduct. This incident, just a week before Gacy’s second marriage, started in the middle of the night outside a YMCA, when Gacy had offered a ride to a twenty-four-year-old man.

  In the car, the man quickly realized the driver was not headed toward his requested destination. When he protested, John Gacy pulled out a badge, telling the man he could avoid trouble if he performed oral sex. The man agreed. Later, they arrived at Barnaby’s, a Northbrook restaurant where Gacy worked. Gacy even wore a jacket with the restaurant name on it that evening. Inside, the two quickly fell into a scuffle as the man tried to get away from Gacy, who beat him after he’d fallen to the ground. When the man finally got free and ran outside, Gacy chased him in his car, at one point even hitting him. The man eventually ran inside a nearby gas station to safety, and Gacy sped off.

  But police dropped the possibility of charges as soon as they looked into the victim’s past: charges for prostitution and disorderly conduct. He’d also been making threatening calls to Gacy saying he would drop the charges in exchange for money. The police had even partnered with Gacy, using marked bills to prove extortion.

  In March 1978 Gacy had picked up another young man, Jeffrey Rignall, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. They hadn’t gone far in the car when Gacy thrust a chloroformed rag into Jeffrey’s face. Jeffrey passed out, waking here and there along the route, and again inside a home, finding himself inside a pillory-like contraption, where Gacy repeatedly raped and beat him throughout the evening. Rignall continued to drift in and out of consciousness, opening his eyes to find not only Gacy’s before him but another young man, watching as he was tortured.

  Bleeding, burned, and bruised, Rignall was thrown into Gacy’s car and driven back to the city, where Gacy laid him near the Alexander Hamilton statue in Lincoln Park. Somehow, Rignall was able to stagger to his apartment, where his roommate helped him to the hospital.

  After he recovered, Rignall did his own surveillance work, staking out an area he remembered during a moment of consciousness. Three days later, he spotted Gacy’s car and took down the license.

  The case was still pending in December 1978.

  Four officers drove down Summerdale Avenue to the house at 8213. It was now approaching 9 PM on December 12, 1978—twenty-four hours since anyone had seen Rob Piest. As they’d driven over, they discussed the possibility—the hope—of finding him alive inside Gacy’s home.

  Gacy’s Oldsmobile sat in the driveway when they pulled in. One of the officers went around to the back of the house to have a look, while Lieutenant Kozenczak and the others stepped up to the front door. They knocked.

  As they waited, a van rolled up to the house. Another young man, Mike Rossi, stepped out and greeted them, explaining that Gacy might not have heard them, since he often watched television in the back room. The officer who’d gone around back reappeared and confirmed he’d seen Gacy sitting inside his home in the glow of the television.

  Rossi explained that he was one of Gacy’s employees at PDM. He’d worked closely with Gacy on multiple jobs. He led them to the back of the house.

  Gacy answered the door to greet them, taking note of their badges as they presented them. He asked them to come inside.

  They confronted him with the facts of the matter: a fifteen-year-old boy was missing, and Gacy was the last person reported to have seen him.

  Gacy denied it. He’d seen two teenage boys in Nisson’s Pharmacy but had had no interaction with them. He’d been preoccupied with family matters: his uncle had died in the hospital the evening of the eleventh. When they asked him to come down to the station and make a statement, he told them he needed to help with the funeral arrangements.

  “Don’t you have any respect for the dead?” Gacy asked.

  Kozenczak pressed him to commit to coming to the station. Gacy insisted he’d try to get there that evening but gave no specific time. With that, the officers left the house and walked back to their cars. As they split up again, Kozenczak ordered two of the officers to stay behind and follow Gacy if he went anywhere.

  Minutes passed before Michael Rossi, the teenage employee, came out from the house and got back into the van. But instead of pulling out, he drove the van farther up the driveway toward the back of the house. The two officers kept still as they saw movement around the cars. They were taken aback though, when suddenly Gacy’s Oldsmobile veered down the driveway and out into the street, followed closely by Rossi in the van.

  The officers struggled to give chase. When they got through the subdivision and out to Cumberland Avenue, they saw no sign of Gacy or Rossi.

  Gacy was gone.

  Lisa Heath was shocked and upset to hear that her friend Dale Landingin’s body had been found in the river. She remembered the final meal they’d shared. As part of their investigation into Dale’s death, Chicago police had started piecing together the days leading up to his death. With their time frame, they had so far settled on Lisa as one of the last people to see Dale alive. She did not recall the specific date, just that it was morning. Had it been the morning of his last day?

  The pathologists had also noted the presence of bean sprouts in Dale’s system, indicating he’d possibly eaten food from an Asian restaurant. Specifically, the area around Dale’s place on Winthrop and his father’s on Carmen had been a growing corridor for Vietnamese Americans. Lisa later insisted she and Dale ate at a diner where bean sprouts would have been unlikely.

  Quite possibly, Dale was alive after he saw his father early in the morning on November 4, wandering around in search of Stephanie, until perhaps coming upon Lisa after daybreak. Later in the day, he most likely had a “large meal” that included bean sprouts before meeting with his killer.

  “I remember the police giving me details that weren’t really appropriate for a kid my age,” said Lisa, still only around thirteen at the time. Police never did follow up with her on the possibility that she was the last to see him, and for years, she has lived with this hanging in her life. It gave a new meaning to those feelings of finality she’d had as they’d both turned their backs and gone separate ways.

  After their visit to Lisa, word went out through the neighborhood that police had come by to talk to her about Dale. Stephanie called Lisa on the telephone. She wanted to talk. Sometime later, Stephanie arrived in a car driven by a friend. They asked Lisa to get in.

  As they drove, Lisa immediately picked up on the tension inside the car as Stephanie started asking her questions. That previous summer the two girls had interacted minimally with one another among a sea of other people going in and out of the coach house in New Town.

  They drove down Lawrence Avenue where Dale had grown up. Perhaps unknowingly, they passed where he’d lived, and then they arrived at the gas station where once he’d played a dark prank on his family with some friends.

  At the gas station, Stephanie and Lisa got out and went inside the restroom. Stephanie immediately turned upon Lisa. Out of nowhere, she pulled out an empty Budweiser bottle and broke it against a sink. She wanted to know what Lisa knew. What had she told the police? Why had s
he been with Dale?

  Lisa did her best to calm Stephanie down, trying to assuage her rage by insisting that she knew no more than anyone else and that nothing had happened between her and Dale. Stephanie had just lost her boyfriend, whose death no doubt grieved her, but whose abuse had also left physical and emotional scars upon her. All that anger, all that grief, was now fixated on Lisa.

  The driver of the car heard the commotion from outside and came in to break things up. The confrontation spilled outside the bathroom. Lisa turned her back on Stephanie and walked away. There was nothing more to be said. Stephanie and her friend drove off.

  In her thirteen years, Lisa had always held her own in a fight or confrontation, and there were many to be found in Uptown. As the investigation into Dale’s murder began to intensify, though, life in Uptown caught up with her.

  Not long after his body was found, Lisa was hanging out with some members of the TJOs, or the Thorndale Jarvis Organization, a gang operating in the Edgewater and Uptown neighborhoods. Later on, a police officer would refer to them as the Thorndale Jag Offs, something the TJOs found so amusing that they adopted the nickname.

  Much of this evening is also a blur, though she remembers they were all drunk on Richards Wild Irish Rose whiskey. She heard after the event that she’d gotten into an argument with one of the TJOs who’d been in a wheelchair after getting shot in the spine. When Lisa spit in his face, one of his brothers smashed a full can of beer against the side of her head. After she went to the ground, several of them fell in and continued to kick and beat her, only stopping when they feared she was dead. They tried putting her in a bathtub to revive her. When that didn’t work, they called an ambulance, telling paramedics they had found her like that on the street.

  Lisa’s recovery was difficult. For a long time, she remained at Riveredge Hospital, where doctors told her and her mother that every bone in the left side of her face had been broken. Reconstructive surgery patched her face back together, but for a while, Lisa was unrecognizable as her former self.