Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  The bodies had been there for varying durations, but it was clear most had decomposed to the point of skeletonization.

  “We’d be digging and as I removed mud, I would run it through my hands and make sure there was no bones or nothing in it,” Rafael Tovar explained. “And I’d put it in a bucket, I’d give it to a guy above me, he’d put it in a wheelbarrow, and he’d dump it and search it there. And then they’d move it outside to the backyard, it was dumped again, and we’d search it again just to make sure.”

  Bone by bone, they brought up each young man and placed him into a white body bag laid out in one room. Other officers sifted through buckets of mud to find stray fragments or belongings. Some of the boys wore jewelry, like a body that still had a bracelet welded around his wrist. Shoes marked the feet of others.

  Daniel Genty would occasionally hand up remains to Dr. Stein, who was looking specifically for sets of teeth. “We didn’t have DNA back then,” Genty said. “There’s no fingerprints, there’s nothing else. It’s the teeth that are going to be our answer.”

  Many of the bones were washed free of dirt and debris in Gacy’s bathtub before being put into body bags.

  Often gases and odors accumulated inside the home and the dig would come to a stop. The heat from the furnace, too, made each day difficult, especially as some of the bodies were not easy to get out from the muck.

  One of the bodies appeared to be more recently buried, with flesh that continued to slip from their gloves. “We couldn’t really get under him to dig, so we had to try to kind of work him loose,” Genty said of the backbreaking work. Eventually, their frustration growing, Genty slid the boy free. “We were all struggling.”

  In the midst of this were the holidays, and many of them had family in town, including Genty. He remembered walking into his own home to find it full of his wife’s relatives, all sounding off with holiday greetings.

  “Hi, folks,” he’d say, covered in mud. “I’d love to visit with you, but I have to go down to the basement and get my clothes washed.” This routine continued through the holidays. Genty would come home to a house full of in-laws, head downstairs to wash up, then come back up for the festivities, a morbid juxtaposition to experience each day.

  Somehow, they were all supposed to forget everything they’d heard and seen inside the house of John Gacy and put on a smile for their families, their children opening presents, eating ham and turkey, while still more bodies waited to be discovered when the job resumed.

  “In your mind, you’re going, ‘What the hell, this is insane,’” Genty said.

  Denise Landingin gave birth to her second child—a daughter—in early December of that year. Not long after, she made the decision to leave her husband and move in with her mother and two sisters. She and her husband, Raul, had gotten married at a young age, but even so, with the grief and responsibilities Denise now carried, she needed to get away.

  Some of Dale’s friends came to visit them one day at her mother’s house. Denise didn’t know them well, but she remembers all of them were blond-haired kids that had romped around the neighborhood with Dale. One of them was Donnie Belle, and the others might have been Phil Couillard and his brother.

  Phil himself remembered visiting the house to pay his respects to the family. He’d missed the funeral the previous month, since no one had known how to get ahold of him. Actually, he hadn’t even known Dale had died until several weeks after, when the media started talking incessantly about John Wayne Gacy.

  Phil’s mom had come into the room one day holding the newspaper. She pointed out an article to him, where he read Dale’s name alongside Gacy’s. “I just couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It’s gotta be somebody else.” He and his brother were the same age as some of the victims, with a similar background too. “It could have been us.”

  Now, a month later, he stood in Dale’s mom’s home. As was her way, Dorothy Landingin moved about the house without a hint of emotion, just as she’d delivered the news to Denise, who herself seemed to be on autopilot, drifting through a depression that Phil noticed during his short visit.

  One of the boys, possibly Donnie, handed over two silver rings that Dale had left behind. Along the band, Denise could see fragments of black onyx embedded. “He gave me those and then I never saw him again,” Denise said.

  As she crossed into 1979, Denise could no longer take what was happening around her. The name Gacy needled her constantly, though she tried turning away from it all. She had enough to bear with her brother’s death, but now she started to feel the effects of postpartum depression. “Layer and layering and layering,” she said of the various traumas affecting her. “And then finally, I did leave.”

  Just like her mother had so many years back when they all lived in Brooklyn, Denise pulled herself out of bed in the middle of the night. But unlike her mother, she went alone. “My heart was racing,” she recalled. “I was in a trance.… I got up and walked away from everybody.”

  She left her kids with her husband. The damage would be nearly irreparable.

  “I don’t remember Christmas that year at all,” Patti Szyc said. “I do remember that there was a tree up. But the tree was put up before the phone call even came.” She also remembered that the family went to their grandmother’s house for New Year’s Eve. Then the next day, they got ready to go to their aunt’s house. While they were going through the motions of the holidays, in some ways they were just marking time until they knew for sure what had become of Johnny.

  As they started getting into the car, another vehicle rolled up to the house. Although the car was unmarked, Patti knew who it was. “You kind of get the heart drop because you know why they’re there,” Patti said. The officers stepped up the driveway to meet Rosemarie and her husband, Richard. Solemnly, they confirmed what they already knew: Johnny, the redheaded young man of only nineteen, had indeed crossed the path of John Wayne Gacy.

  Detective Tovar, too, had gone looking for the television during the second search. He confirmed: the TV had belonged to John Szyc.

  “I had a series of nightmares,” said Lynn Meadows, the girl who’d gone to prom with John. “I kept dreaming that the phone would ring, and it was him. And he’d want to know how I was, and I’d say, ‘Forget about how I am. How are you?’ And he says, ‘I’m dead.’ And then he showed me his body and it changed, and it melted.” Not long after these dreams, Lynn heard her friend Johnny had been found.

  Mark Johnson had a different reaction. Not only was he shocked at the death of his friend; he also recognized the face of John’s alleged killer. He too had passed through the house on Summerdale Avenue, only to live to tell about it. If he hadn’t run out of the house, “I probably would have been one of them,” Mark said.

  As the police left the Szyc home, they struggled to get their car through the thick snow piled up from the first blizzard of the season. Some of the Szyc kids—having just heard of their brother’s death—trudged down the driveway dutifully to help push the car free.

  That same day, police continued their tour through the homes of Chicago’s worried families. They stopped at the Godzik home where Eugenia Godzik had known what was coming. She’d been following the news each day since hearing Gacy’s name in connection with Rob Piest. Years before, she’d spoken on the phone with Gacy, who claimed Greg had told him about leaving town.

  Greg’s girlfriend, Judy, had even stood inside the Gacy house long before investigators had trampled through it. She first heard about the case over the radio while out Christmas shopping with her brother. She knew as soon as she heard the name Gacy. When she got home, she hurried to call Greg’s mom. “I knew he wouldn’t have left,” Eugenia told her over the phone that December of 1978. The police had not yet confirmed Greg’s identity as one of the boys in Gacy’s home, but they didn’t have to. Both Eugenia and Judy knew. On December 23 the medical examiner officially confirmed the identity of Body 4 as Gregory Godzik.

  Although they had his name establishe
d, the police still had questions surrounding his death and disappearance. Only an hour into 1979, the police called Judy to speak with her. They wanted to ask her questions about Greg. Looking back, the late-night call enrages her for several reasons. “I’m a young girl,” she said, as if addressing the callers. “You shoulda asked me why was I going to [Gacy’s] house and not you guys.”

  In the bright lights of news crews and photographers, investigators stepped out underneath the dusky sky of another Chicago winter evening. Dr. Robert Stein announced, “The latest horrible news is … six bodies exhumed.”

  This became the daily ritual. As the sun set, or sometimes even after it had vanished, Stein and other investigators gave the statistics for the day. First, they would give the daily total, then the overall total as it stood.

  On December 26 the total stood at nine in the house, and one—Dale Landingin—from the river. The next day, eight more brought the total to eighteen. On Thursday, four more, bringing it to twenty-two. Six the next day, twenty-eight total, tying Gacy with the record of Dean Corll. The next day, with the discovery of the body of James Mazzara in the Des Plaines River, Gacy officially became the worst mass murderer in US history.

  “I think I dug about seventeen of them out,” Genty said.

  “I dug up five bodies,” Tovar recounted.

  Neighbors, reporters, and random bystanders came out to wait in the cold for the grim news each day. Kids from next door stood by as white body bags passed underneath their noses. An elderly woman, bundled against the frost, even spoke with a news crew to tell them she had a grandson who’d been missing.

  Along with the official press conference, the gathering crowd could also watch as each stretcher came through Gacy’s threshold, where the door had been removed from its hinges for easier access. “It was like instant lights, instant cameras, yelling back and forth,” said Rafael Tovar, a frequent informal pallbearer that winter.

  Boys had entered the house one by one, year after year, and there they’d remained for so long, waiting to return home. And now, one by one, bone by bone, they were coming out in between bursts of camera flashes, each of them flanked by their own escort of men covered in the same dirt they’d lain in for so long.

  Officers would push the crowd back after all the day’s bodies had been loaded into the coroner’s vans. Once there was a wide enough berth, the truck would back out and drive off with the boys.

  By New Year’s Eve, with a snowstorm barreling down upon the Chicago area, investigators stopped once more, though there was still ground to cover. Only two weeks later, a major blizzard flung down eighteen to twenty inches of snow, bringing the city to a halt, and swaying the outcome of a mayoral primary due to the city’s poor response. Subzero temperatures froze the ground around the house, preventing any further searches until spring.

  By then, though, the crawl space had been cleared. “We basically understood that there were no more graves there,” Genty said.

  In spring, when the weather began to lift, they did a final check of the property. On a March morning, Genty stood watching a Gradall excavator pull apart fragments of the property near the driveway. The driver stopped and shouted over to Genty, “Do you smell something?”

  Genty stepped over to the opening in the ground and began turning over some of the green-hued rocks. He sniffed them.

  With further digging, they uncovered another body, the skull wrapped in several layers of plastic covering from a dry-cleaner and garbage bags. Around a finger, this young man wore a silver ring.

  About a week later, Genty and his team located the final body, buried outside the crawl space in an enclosed area underneath the dining room. Gacy had no doubt eaten and entertained above this boy for years.

  The investigation shifted to identification. Without fingerprints, they turned to dental charts. In some cases, medical examiners had other clues from inside Gacy’s house pointing them to particular identities.

  During one search, police found Dale Landingin’s bond slip, dated one day before he disappeared. Michael Bonnin, a seventeen-year-old who’d gone missing in early June 1976, left behind a fishing license inside the house.

  Distinct clothing like jackets, belt buckles, and jewelry also played a critical and indirect role. The first victim had worn a decorative Model A belt buckle. Another individual had left behind a coat with the name “Duke” on it. The items they left behind were little clues, breadcrumbs to the doorsteps of their loved ones.

  By the second week of 1979 medical examiners had positively identified two of the men found in the river—Dale Landingin and James Mazzara—as well as eight more found inside Gacy’s crawl space. Surprisingly, not all of them had been from Chicago.

  Jon Prestidge had grown up in the Kalamazoo, Michigan, area for most of his life. His mother and stepfather owned a beehive farm in nearby Gobles, though sometimes he lived with his father in his trailer in Kalamazoo. After graduating from high school, he’d attended Kalamazoo Valley Community College, where he took health care courses part time. To help pay for tuition, he worked at a motel, where, according to his coworkers, he’d often clashed with management.

  In March 1977 Prestidge was staying with an older friend, Roger Sahs, in Chicago, just one stop along a journey out to Colorado where he wanted to go skiing. He’d already been down in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. During the evening of March 15 Sahs drove Prestidge to get a haircut, followed by coffee at the Oak Tree restaurant. Prestidge expressed the need for money, and so, after they finished, Sahs dropped him off at Bughouse Square.

  When Jon did not return, Sahs phoned Prestidge’s family back in Michigan. He also placed an ad with a photo of Jon in Chicago’s Gay Life magazine.

  Several months later, another face adorned the pages of Gay Life. Russell Nelson, twenty-one, had also come to Chicago on holiday, though from a bit farther away in Cloquet, Minnesota. His intended journey took him first to Chicago, where he hoped to view some of the city’s architecture, his major at the University of Minnesota. From there, he intended to go to New England via Toronto and finally down to Florida.

  He’d been traveling in the van of a friend, Robert Young from Belle Fourche, South Dakota. Young had even told Nelson about a contractor in Chicago who could give them work.

  In October 1977 Young and Nelson went out to New Town to visit some of the bars and dance to disco music. Nelson had won dancing competitions back in Minnesota. According to Young, while the men were outside Crystal’s Blinkers on Broadway Avenue, they were distracted by a group of people passing by. When Young turned back, Nelson had disappeared.

  Russell’s family in Cloquet last heard from him on October 14, when he called to wish his mother a happy birthday. Not long after, Robert Young informed the Nelsons that their son had gone missing. They immediately filed a missing person report with the sheriff in Cloquet.

  In Chicago, a short article ran in Gay Life asking for assistance in Russell Nelson’s disappearance. The article wrote his name as “Parker,” a nickname some have theorized Russell had taken on as part of a gay persona despite a steady girlfriend back in Minnesota.

  Chicago police did indeed look for both Jon Prestidge and Russell Nelson, though neither investigations got as far as Summerdale Avenue. For the most part, of the thousands of missing persons cases each year, Chicago police were able to close a majority of them, whether through their own investigations or the missing individuals’ voluntary return. In 1972, they closed 21,065 of their 21,634 total cases; in 1977, 18,483 of the 19,456 were closed. This leftover fraction was where these boys’ names might be found.

  Robert Gilroy was the eighteen-year-old son of a Chicago police sergeant due at a horse-riding lesson in Northbrook, and later at a camp in Gaithersburg, Maryland in late September 1977. When he didn’t show to either the lesson or the camp, his father conducted his own investigation. When this yielded no results, he reported his son officially missing to the Area 5 Youth Division of the Chicago Police.

  Of al
l the young men who ended up in the house of John Wayne Gacy, Robert Gilroy has the most comprehensive missing person report. Across nearly forty pages of information, police interviewed many friends of Robert Gilroy as well as employees of the camp he’d intended to travel to. The report took officers to the area around Sergeant Gilroy’s apartment, just a few blocks north of Summerdale Avenue, the area of Clark and Diversey, and out to the suburbs where Gilroy frequented various stables.

  After a steady clip of supplementary reports into October, information became scarce and repetitive, and Sergeant Gilroy agreed to weekly reports instead of daily.

  Sergeant Gilroy went on his own odyssey around the city, at one point stopping at a luxury apartment building near the lakefront where the doorman claimed to have seen the younger Gilroy walking in one day. He declined Sergeant Gilroy’s request to speak with residents of the building, for fear of disturbing them.

  In July 1978 the reports stopped.

  While Gilroy lived on the edges of the city, many of the victims lived outside Chicago. Although Rick Johnston lived in the suburb of Bensenville, the last time his mother saw him, he was getting out of her car in front of the Aragon Ballroom in Uptown in August 1976. The band Spirit was one of many playing that evening, and when they’d finished, Rick agreed he’d call for a ride home.

  When Rick’s call never came, his mother panicked. She’d seen the neighborhood around the theater, noting its rough appearance. Her son had grown up in the suburbs, spending part of his life in Galena, where his father owned the Chestnut Mountain ski lodge.

  For two years the Johnston family searched and theorized about Rick’s disappearance. For a while, they believed the Unification Church, led by Reverend Moon, had recruited Rick, now lost among its congregation. Before vanishing, Rick had shown interest in religion and was reading the Bible in his spare time. The family went so far as to attend a rally in Washington DC to see if they could pick Rick out among the worshippers.