Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  12

  REMEMBER ME ALWAYS

  ON THE DAY OF the execution, Bessie Stapleton made a call to Russ Ewing, still a reporter for Chicago’s ABC affiliate, to see if she could attend. She didn’t necessarily want to witness it, but she wanted to be nearby. She wanted to know when he was dead.

  A few hours later, Ewing called back. “There’s nothing I can do,” he told her.

  While Juanita stayed at her home, glued to the television all day, James, Randy and their parents decided to drive the hour-long journey south to the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois. As they drove, they listened attentively to the radio for updates on last-minute appeals for clemency.

  When they arrived at Stateville, they found the roads outside the prison mobbed by onlookers and media. “It was a mad house,” James Stapleton recalled. “People in clown uniforms holding signs, chanting, ‘Gacy die, Gacy die!’”

  The Stapleton family attempted to drive through the chaos and find a way up to the prison, but eventually gave up. They turned around and headed back to Chicago.

  As John Wayne Gacy’s death approached, an air of jubilation fell over Chicago. Parades passed through downtown. A rally formed at the Daley Center, where thirty-three mock body bags represented his victims. Activists for and against the death penalty took their respective places in the commotion. Media coverage intensified, fixating on every detail of the choreographed “death ritual.”

  For his final day, May 9, 1994, Gacy was transported by helicopter from Menard Correctional Center to Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, where other famous inmates like Leopold and Loeb and Richard Speck had once been housed. That evening, Gacy ate his last meal of butterfly shrimp and fried chicken. Afterward, he shared a cigar with a prison staff member.

  In the weeks leading up to the execution, prison officials decided not to allow relatives to witness the event. Instead, the facility arranged for family members to sit and wait in a side room elsewhere on the prison grounds.

  With two kids and last-minute plane tickets to buy, Patti Szyc wasn’t sure how to get back to Chicago from Kansas City, where she was then living. But in the days before the execution, she received a call from someone with the Geraldo show asking if they could interview her for the execution. They would also pay for her to travel to Chicago.

  Earlier in the day, Geraldo Rivera interviewed Patti via satellite, along with Harold Piest, who chose not to attend the execution. Patti had provided a photograph of her brother to producers. She never got it back.

  At the prison, Patti joined her family in a room set up specifically for the relatives. They found the setup less than ideal. “The room was like in the basement of a building that they no longer used,” Patti Szyc said. “It was really dreary, dirty. Ceiling tiles, most of them were gone, and there was asbestos hanging.”

  As long hours dragged on, the families grew hungry. Eventually, prison staff put out three small trays of vegetables, fruit, and cheese, directly underneath some of the visible asbestos.

  More disturbing though, was the lack of news coming in. “I thought we were going to have a live-feed type of thing from the execution,” Patti said. “I knew I wasn’t going to watch it through the glass, but I didn’t think I was going to be watching a TV that anybody at home was going to be watching.”

  Patti had not come necessarily to witness Gacy’s last breath. She’d come to be there for her parents. As the evening progressed, some of the other family members grew agitated, panicking that the execution might not even happen.

  Of the wait, Patti remarked, “It still seemed like an eternity.”

  While the families would not be allowed to witness Gacy’s death, members of the media and law enforcement made up the fifty or so slots in the observation room of the execution chamber.

  Bill Kunkle had been eager to come. In a letter to an old friend, former governor James Thompson, Kunkle volunteered to push the button that would release the chemicals to kill Gacy. Along with Greg Bedoe and Bob Egan, Kunkle eventually secured a spot in the observation room, though he lamented the absence of any victims’ loved ones. “That really irritated me,” Kunkle said. “I can see why they couldn’t have them all there because it would be too many.” Kunkle viewed himself as something of a representative as he took a seat among the onlookers that evening.

  Sometime around midnight, the blinds closing off the window into the execution chamber opened and revealed the now fifty-two-year-old face of John Wayne Gacy.

  Strapped to a gurney, Gacy lay on his back looking up at the ceiling. Before the chemicals began to flow, he did not have any last words.* He merely waited silently for the first round of chemicals—sodium pentothal for sedation—to enter his system intravenously. Shortly after, a flow of pancuronium bromide would slow and stop his breathing, followed by potassium chloride to stop his heart.

  Those inside the witness room now waiting through a long hush, watched as—at 12:40 AM on May 10, 1994—the first injection of chemicals passed through the convicted killer’s veins. He slipped away into unconsciousness.

  But sometime after the second chemical, prison officials noticed a problem developing in one of the lines running to Gacy’s body. They quickly closed the blinds as they moved to fix the issue.

  Ten minutes later, the blinds reopened with Gacy where the witnesses had last seen him. This time, however, his skin had gone from pale to a purplish color. He made no movements, even as the final chemicals passed through his body.

  At 12:58 AM, John Wayne Gacy was pronounced dead.

  There ensued considerable debate about whether Gacy had suffered during those eighteen minutes. Prison officials were quick to state the delay had come from “gelling” in the line, a result of a liquid base (sodium pentothal, the first chemical) meeting a liquid acid (the pancuronium bromide). They insisted Gacy had felt no pain during the delay.

  “If he was still alive in some sense for that extra eighteen minutes,” Kunkle said, “all it means to me was he got eighteen minutes more than he was entitled to.”

  Immediately after Gacy’s death, prison officials continued to treat families of the victims with unceremonious indifference. Someone from the staff came into the room not long after the execution and announced his time of death. “And then they shut off the TV and said, ‘You can go home,’” Patti Szyc recalled.

  The crowd of families rippled in anger. They asked to speak with the press.

  The prison officials had assumed none of the families wanted to speak with the media, who were already packing up elsewhere on the grounds. This further enraged the families, and prison staff hurried to stop the news trucks from leaving.

  To get the families all the way across the property to the media tents, prison staff arranged for vans to transport them, one load at a time. By the time they were all assembled, it was the middle of the morning.

  They were told each family would get one minute to speak.

  Vito Mazzara and Tim Nieder spoke for their brothers, James Mazzara and John Mowery. Sherry Marino asked vehemently that her son, Michael Marino, and all the victims be mentioned.

  For the Szyc family, there was a strange irony in the timing of the execution. The case and Johnny’s identification had cast a pall over the holidays of 1978. His funeral had coincided with Easter 1979. Now, just days after Mother’s Day 1994, their own mother stood before the many reporters and their bright lights and cameras to speak about her son.

  Older now and speaking through emotion built up over seventeen years, she said haltingly, “I don’t think it solved a lot. Seeing someone—or hearing about someone’s death. But it was the sentence that came down. And I feel we need to be more consistent with our laws if we expect to ever have a peaceful society.”

  Angry, hungry, exhausted, and still grieving, the families scattered back to their homes around Chicago.

  Somewhere along their drive home, the Stapleton family heard the news. Sam’s killer had been executed. “I kno
w my mom was happy,” James Stapleton said. “We were all kind of happy that it was finally over. I think he was on death row longer than Sam was alive.”

  Juanita, too, finally found some relief upon hearing the news, though she lamented the amount of money spent to keep him alive on death row since the day of the verdict: “To me, it felt like he should have been hung the same day.”

  Chris Reffett, the brother of Randy, who’d died alongside his friend Sam Stapleton, saw the news on the television. “That lethal injection, it’s too easy,” he said. “Somebody takes the lives of thirty-three young men and they just put a needle in his arm and put him to sleep. That’s just too easy.”

  “It used to bug me that it took so long for them to kill him,” Linda McCoy said of her brother Tim’s murderer. “It bugged me that he made money off paintings … that he made money off books. And it bugged me that he made money off movies. I just found that insulting. And when they finally did put him to death … it was gratifying.”

  Judy Patterson didn’t feel much of anything after Gacy was gone. She hadn’t watched much of the coverage either, though after it was over, she decided to call Greg’s mom, Eugenia, with whom she hadn’t spoken in several years.

  But Greg’s sister answered instead. When Judy asked to speak with their mother, Greg’s sister gave her the news. Eugenia had died a few years prior.

  Of the many mothers, Eugenia had been one of the more vocal, agreeing to speak with media and appear on television programs over the years to talk about the case, to talk about her son, and to talk about the justice she so hoped for. She never lived to see it.

  After his death, John Wayne Gacy’s remains were cremated and turned over to his sister. His death certificate listed heart failure and “lethal levels of potassium chloride” as the immediate cause of death. In a subsequent box, as was standard for executed convicts, the Will County medical examiner typed “homicide.”

  Not long after boys in Uptown were taken by John Wayne Gacy, another predator moved through the neighborhood. Much like young men had whispered about a man named John back in the 1970s, in the 1980s young men began to talk about a man named “Larry.”

  By the time thirty-one-year-old housepainter Larry Eyler was arrested in Indiana, he was the suspect in dozens of murders, with bodies scattered across rural Indiana, Illinois, and possibly even Wisconsin and Kentucky. At least three of these young men—including one who is still unidentified as of 2020—came from the Uptown neighborhood.

  Just before his death in 1984, Danny Bridges, a sixteen-year-old sex worker and youngest in a family of thirteen, gave an interview to an NBC documentary crew, speaking adamantly about Eyler, whom he called “a real freak” well known to other sex workers on the North Side.

  Billy Carroll’s friend Gene Anderson was also friends with Danny Bridges. Clyde Reffett knew the family and often sparred with some of Danny’s brothers on the streets of Uptown. Mike Bowling also interacted with Danny.

  By then, the neighborhood they’d all lived in was changing.

  They left the mountains fast

  And lived in Is, Illinois, for a while

  But found it dull country and moved back.

  For many of the Uptown families, the words of Appalachian poet Jim Wayne Miller foretold their next chapter.

  Darrell Samson’s family returned to Appalachia, taking up residence in states like Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina. Tommy Boling’s family mostly returned to Tennessee, where they buried him.

  Many other families—no matter if they had ties to Appalachia—eventually left Uptown for different parts of Chicago, Illinois, or elsewhere in the United States like the Stapletons, the Reffetts, and the Landingins. “A lot of us didn’t get out of there,” said Billy Kindred’s best friend, Danny Jockell. “Some of us committed suicide, some of us were murdered, some of us were doing life in prison, some of us moved away. Some of us survived. I was one of the survivors.”

  By the time of Billy disappearance, his mother, Lola Woods, had already gone back to Ohio.

  During one of her last visits to Chicago, she looked out the window of a taxi one day and saw a young man who resembled her son. She asked the driver to stop, so she could get out and see for herself. “Billy, Billy,” she exclaimed as she followed the boy down the street.

  MaryJane dealt with a potent mixture of anger and grief that affected the personal relationships she started and developed during the 1980s. Throughout this time, she continued wearing the turquoise ring Billy had given her, creating friction in her eventual marriage. “You’re jealous of a dead guy?” MaryJane would ask her husband.

  Over the years, the case would come back into the news, but she paid little attention to it. A month after the execution, someone called her asking if she wanted to attend a bonfire. Two businessmen from the area had purchased almost $10,000 worth of amateur artwork Gacy had made in prison, mostly paint-by-numbers scenes of clowns or Disney characters. In June 1994 they invited victims’ relatives and members of the community to a bonfire in Naperville where the artwork was summarily and gleefully destroyed. She turned down the invitation. “I was busy having my own life and kids,” she recalled.

  The birth of MaryJane’s second child with severe disabilities brought back much of the psychological trauma she’d experienced from Billy’s death, which she’d kept just below the surface of her life. “I was dealing with being diagnosed with PTSD,” she said, “and then trying to care for a child who I had to learn how to care for.”

  All her children today know about Billy. They recognize that faraway look MaryJane often gets whenever a song by the Eagles or Johnny Rivers comes on. “Mom, where did you go?” they’ll ask. “Was it Billy?”

  Once, MaryJane had a new sink installed in her home. When the job was complete, she looked at the polished installation and saw the brand name: “Kindred.” She asked the workers to remove it.

  Recently, these memories and the heartbreak have become slightly easier to cope with. Songs have been easier to listen to. Talking about her memories of Billy has helped. Acknowledging the pain allows her the ability to feel it, process it, and with time, even set it aside, though there are few days where she doesn’t think about Billy or that time of her life. “I believe I have found another path to get myself to better places at times,” she said. “And I know I’m doing it and I know I’m capable of much more.…”

  Recently, she got back in touch with Syble, Billy’s sister, who has become something of the family matriarch after the death of her mother, Lola, in 2018. The two continue to speak on the phone regularly—not just to reminisce about Billy, but to talk about their grandchildren.

  Billy is never far away from Syble. She visits the graves of her two brothers, Billy and Michael, who drowned just years before Billy’s death and lies nearby. She maintains their graves and leaves flowers and mementos.

  MaryJane hasn’t been to Billy’s grave for some time, though years ago friends drove her down to Indiana, where they got lost on the way. An old man in a truck came up, asking if they needed help. MaryJane described the cemetery, a name she’d forgotten.

  “The name is Little Memory, honey,” he said in his Southern-sounding accent.

  “I’ll never forget him looking me in the face and saying that,” she remembered. “I carried that with me. I’ll never forget the name of that cemetery again.”

  Time and again, some turn in her life has led her back to Billy, to thoughts of Billy, to memories of Billy. She thinks often about the medallions that once belonged to her grandfather, the same ones she gave Billy as a gift before he died and which investigators found inside the house.

  In recent years, she’s made attempts to get them back. Because they are evidence, and because she is not next of kin, they won’t even entertain the idea of releasing them to her, though they are most certainly hers.

  She still hopes to see them one day. She doesn’t know how she’ll feel, or if she’ll even want to keep them. But at the very least, she
wants to hold them. She wants to feel whatever it is she’ll feel when she touches them again. She’s ready.

  In 1992 WGN aired a film based on the investigation and arrest of John Wayne Gacy called To Catch a Killer. For his portrayal of Gacy, Brian Dennehy earned an Emmy nomination.

  For Denise Landingin, there was only outrage. She called the station. “Whoever I got to talk to, I said to them, my brother was one of the victims,” she said. “I’m begging you, please don’t put this on.”

  The man she spoke to sounded as if he had no compassion in his voice. “Pray to God that you don’t have a son or a brother or a sister or a mother or a father that’s out there, and a Gacy gets hold of them,” she said. “Pray to God this doesn’t happen to you.…” And she hung up the phone.

  She has always regretted these words; she regrets also that she turned her brother down when he asked her for a place to stay, not long before he disappeared. She wonders what would have happened had she said yes.

  After those days, she followed an odyssey that took her out of Chicago, away from her family and her children, through multiple states and marriages, and through addiction. “I was running from all of it,” she said.

  This part of her life’s journey came to an end on a park bench in Southfield, Michigan, almost ten years after she’d first left Chicago. “It was like a light hit me. I knew that I was killing myself.… I was feeling guilty about my children.”

  Her return to Chicago was less a homecoming than a return to the responsibilities she’d neglected and the consequences waiting for her. “The people I had to face, all the relatives on both sides,” she said. “The names I was being called … I had a pee test with people standing right in front of me when I took it.”