by David Nelson
For a time, Denise struggled to establish herself in Chicago. Without any money, she faced the difficulty of finding a job, coupled with the difficulty of finding a lawyer to help her regain custody of her children. “All that comes from this,” referring to the case. “The little selfish thing this asshole did to please himself caused all this to the world.”
Denise had no choice but to step up. Her ex-husband, Raul, the boy she’d met long ago in Uptown, died suddenly at the age of thirty-nine. Although she’d been unable to face her brother’s funeral back in 1978, now, many years later, she summoned the strength to sit in the pew beside her children for Raul’s service.
During the service, her father, Francisco Sr., slipped into the church. He made his way to the front to sit beside Denise and her children.
“Take your sister’s place,” Denise told her son.
“Why?” he asked.
“Just take your sister’s place,” she insisted.
After her return to Chicago, she mostly ignored her father and continued to block his presence in her life, for her own sanity and for her children’s safety.
Later, she remembered hearing how Francisco had been living with a Vietnamese woman and her children in Uptown. Denise feared for those children.
Her mother, Dorothy, died in 2010. Francisco died in 1999, and, to Denise’s knowledge, he never paid for the abuse he inflicted on anyone. Today, there are some in Denise’s family that continue to revere him and deny any wrongdoing.
Her words and her story are her payback. Through Denise, people will learn the truth of Francisco Landingin. Through her, they’ll also learn the truth of her brother—the ugly parts and the good parts, for her brother, almost as a result of their father, had his flaws, too, much like Gacy learned through his own father.
On and on it goes, a tapestry of tragedy, a ripple across an ocean of suffering too deep to fathom.
“Everything got quiet,” James Stapleton remarked of the time following the case. “[Bessie and Bill] didn’t talk a lot, even at dinner. There was no arguing. Not even small talk. It was weird.”
Although the family continued to stay in Chicago, despite the exodus of other Appalachian families like their own, their lives continued to morph in ways both large and small.
Bessie Stapleton had once enjoyed crime novels and TV shows, but after Sam’s involvement in what had become one of the worst cases in American history, she stopped.
Bill turned quiet and introspective. “[Bill] started looking at his own faults for being a stepdad and maybe what he did wrong with Sam,” the youngest, Randy Stapleton, said. “He didn’t do everything wrong, he wasn’t horrible like that, but he did a lot of wrong. And he could have been better. And I think that what hit my dad was … maybe if I could have been better or something, Sam wouldn’t have been killed.” But still, Randy admits, “I don’t know if the world’s greatest dad could have stopped Sam from doing what he was doing in Uptown.”
Things before Sam’s murder had never been easy between Bill and Bessie, as their marriage struggled amid poverty and frequent fighting in the household. To Juanita, however, it seemed they grew closer after Sam’s death and recovery, as Bessie sought to keep her family together.
Christmas a year after Sam’s identification was a particularly difficult milestone. The thought of Sam and the empty space he’d left behind pervaded the holiday season. They’d buried him just weeks before Christmas the year before. But this year Bessie decided it would be different. She had Juanita pick up her father, their grandfather, and bring him for Christmas dinner so they could celebrate.
Juanita credits the presence of grandchildren—her three kids—with helping the family make it through that first Christmas, and all the others after it. “If it wasn’t for the kids, we weren’t going to celebrate,” Juanita acknowledged. “Mom wanted to be close with everyone that Christmas.”
Nevertheless, through it all and to the end, Bessie and Bill remained together as they aged, with their children all stepping up to help their parents in the decades after the case. For as long as they could, Bessie and Bill drove down to Southern Illinois where Juanita lived, before later moving to Iowa. “It was a five-hour drive and they’d come down to us on the weekend,” Juanita recalled. “Just to get out of Chicago.…”
But the visits soon slowed, and eventually came to a stop.
In Juanita’s words, “They survived as long as they could.”
In 1998, Bill died of pancreatic cancer. Always close to her daughter, Bessie relocated to Iowa to live with Juanita until her own death in 2006. “I tried to do the best I could for my parents because I know that was a nightmare they went through. Gacy not only killed my brother; I think he killed my parents.”
Patti Szyc had similar feelings about her parents. “My mom had a heart attack,” she said. “My dad’s diabetes went off the wall.” Rosemarie Szyc died far too young, at the age of sixty-three. Richard Szyc followed not long after in 2002.
Patti Szyc never considered herself a victim, but she saw the effects of the Gacy case in indirect ways as well. Living in Colorado years later, she decided to pursue a job with the Denver Sheriff Department. After several rounds of interviews, Patti was asked if a background check would reveal anything she hadn’t disclosed. Patti told them her brother’s body had been found in the house of John Wayne Gacy.
“Their next question was, am I seeking this job for revenge?” Patti recalled. “I said, ‘He’s in Illinois. He’s got no chance of coming here.’”
Nevertheless, the interview ended quickly.
“Goddamn that sonafabitch,” Patti said of Gacy.
Still, Patti has not allowed the case—or even Gacy—to bother her in recent years. “My kids have always known they had an uncle who was killed by Gacy,” she said. “I’ve got no problem talking to people. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Ever since she heard the cheers for guilty back in the courtroom in 1980, she’s felt compassion for John Wayne Gacy’s family, especially his sister, Karen Kuzma, whom she once saw interviewed on The Oprah Winfrey Show. During the interview, Karen stated how, after John Gacy’s death, nobody expressed sympathy for her loss. “And that hit me really hard,” Patti said. “She’s worse off than me. She’s got shame. They had to hide who they were.”
After the show aired, Patti tried to contact the website to get the production to pass her contact information along, but nothing came of it. In more recent years, she thought about reaching out through social media.
In 2013 the Lifetime network contacted her to interview her for a show called Killer in My Family. During the taping, Patti would get an opportunity to meet Karen.
Of course, the show’s publicity played up the episode as a dramatic confrontation between Patti and Karen. In reality, Patti went into the taping with only empathy in her heart, even when she met Karen by chance during breakfast at the hotel before taping. “If you really didn’t want us to talk, you don’t put us in a hotel that has continental breakfast,” she said with a laugh.
For both Karen and Patti, the show provided a catharsis of sorts. For Karen, she was able to ask for forgiveness. For Patti, she was able to let Karen know there was nothing to forgive.
Forgiveness has often been in the minds of the families, though its answer is different for all of them.
“I don’t think I could ever really forgive Gacy,” Linda McCoy said. “I know you’re supposed to forgive, but that just doesn’t happen. I’m not forgiving a serial killer.” Instead, she and her siblings chose, in the years after the case, to honor and remember their brother Tim, who was the first of the victims. Linda and her brother Terry try to share a beer together on Tim’s birthday each year.
“I forgave that man before he got that lethal injection,” Clyde said, though he clarified that he doesn’t forget. “I often ask myself, did I really truly forgive? I truly believe I did in my heart.”
While he was living in Louisiana sometime after the case, his father came t
o visit him. Charles Reffett had remarried and been “saved” in his renewed Christian faith. For the visit, Clyde planned a fishing excursion and packed a cooler full of beer.
But Charles insisted he no longer drank. Instead, the father and son talked about everything that had passed between them, most notably the affair Charles had had with their mother’s sister, resulting in the birth of Clyde’s half-sister. They talked about Randy too, and the loss they shared. “We never baited a hook,” Clyde said. “We just talked about things.…”
The future would offer its own shares of troubles. Clyde has fought his own demons over the years, often faced with incarceration over petty crimes. His losses have been numerous, even after Randy and both his parents (Charlie in 1992, and Myrtle a month before the execution in ’94). In 2013 their sister, Brenda, drowned in the Chicago River in circumstances Clyde still has suspicions over.
Chris Reffett has held his own as well. Long ago, an accident rendered him partially paralyzed, a disability that still presents challenges.
Recently, he received pictures of his brother, Randy, whose face he hadn’t truly seen in many years. Not long before that, Clyde returned to Chicago, too, after many years away down South. They talk about old times—about old friends, the neighborhood. About Randy, their brother, who still inhabits their thoughts.
After their disappearances, after their murders, they walked, like living people, through the landscape of others’ dreams.
“I had this dream that he came to visit,” Clyde said of his brother, Randy. “He was in the backseat of my vehicle with his wife and some children.” Clyde saw this moment as emanating from the positivity he’s always tried to keep, even after the day in 1976 when his brother did not return home.
Judy Patterson, too, has had dreams of Greg Godzik over the years. But whenever he appears, he’s older, in his thirties, not seventeen, like when she’d last seen him. “What the hell? I thought you were dead,” Judy remembers asking him in some of the dreams.
But no, he’s been there the whole time, he tells her. Alive, growing older every day.
MaryJane remembered how her mother came bursting into her room in the middle of the night when she was still living at home. She’d had a dream about Billy, about the restlessness of his soul in the afterlife. “We have to pray for Billy,” her mother kept saying. “We have to pray for Billy to be at rest.”
MaryJane did as she was told, kneeling beside her mother for a few silent moments. When she was satisfied, MaryJane’s mother stood up, said goodnight to her again, and drifted off to bed.
Over the years, Denise Landingin has dreamed of loved ones coming back to tell her they’re all right, including her brother, Dale. “It was in full color, like it was in real life,” she said. “I was standing in this apartment. I don’t know what apartment it was, but I was comfortable in it.… There was a kitchen table and chairs there and a big window, and it looked like you could see trees blowing outside. And somebody knocked at the door, and I opened the door, and my brother was standing there, just like the last time I saw him, just like before he died. He’s nineteen, he’s young, and he’s got the same kind of hairstyle. He’s in his jeans and the tight little T-shirts and he’s like, ‘Why are you so sad?’ … I’m like, ‘What are you doing? We thought you were dead.’ And he says, ‘I’ve been in California with my friends, I’ve been having a great time.’ And that was the first and last dream I’ve had of him.”
* There have been many erroneous reports that Gacy’s final words were “Kiss my ass.” According to Bill Kunkle, these words were uttered during an exchange with a prison official, and not as part of any final statement before his death.
Coda
DISCO INFERNO
SOMETIME IN BETWEEN LEARNING of her boyfriend’s fate and facing his killer, MaryJane Piper found herself at Comiskey Park on the South Side of Chicago on a day in July 1979.
She’d joined up with some friends who’d driven her down that evening. She doesn’t remember having a ticket, but somehow, high on acid, she found herself among the many people who’d come for the double header between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers.
That evening, in between the games, attendees had been asked to bring in spare disco records for a special event hosted by Chicago shock jock Steve Dahl, who’d recently been fired by WDAI after it switched from rock to disco.
As if on a personal vendetta against the genre itself, Dahl and the listeners of his new home, WLUP, rallied around a simple mantra: “Disco Sucks.” In the weeks leading up to the event, Dahl celebrated the sudden death of Van McCoy by destroying copies of “The Hustle” on-air.
Later on, Dahl would release a shameful parody song, “Another Kid in the Crawl” set to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.”
Atrocious, brash, and arrogant, Dahl entered the stadium wearing army fatigues and riding a jeep that circled the baseball diamond. From the pitching mound, he spoke into a microphone and disparaged popular disco artists like the Village People and Donna Summer. Along with his cohort, Dahl led the crowd in virulent chants of “Disco Sucks!” Records frisbeed down from the stands and rolled through the dirt in between bases.
In recent years, many have interpreted the event as an act of veiled homophobia and racism, considering that so many disco artists of the time were people of color and that the genre had a large following in the gay communities.
MaryJane didn’t have a lot of personal feelings toward disco. She enjoyed any kind of music that let her dance, and when disco sometimes played at the bar, she often danced to it with enthusiasm.
Now, that evening, she’d come with her friends to get out, to forget everything she’d gone through in the previous few months. She delighted as the suspense built to a climax.
In the outfield, a green crate of records sat waiting as Dahl continued to bloviate on the microphone. Homemade banners proclaiming, yet again, Disco SUCKS! festooned the rafters around the stadium.
“This is now the largest anti-disco rally!” he told the crowd, moments before he set off the explosions that began first in a series of piddly fireworks, before culminating in a final blast.
Shards of disco records toppled down from the sky, to the cheers of thousands. Underneath a tower of smoke, mingling now with clouds of marijuana, a significant hole had appeared in the outfield grass.
For a few moments after, Dahl continued ranting about disco, but with the event mostly wrapped, White Sox pitcher Ken Kravec began warming up at the mound.
But after nine innings of drinking, the crowd had become restless and riled up.
Without any real security, several fans began climbing over the railings and onto the field. After a few, then came a stampede, their banners unfurling, beer bottles spinning through the air. Kravec fled into the clubhouse.
As chaos unfolded, some of the crowd tried to leave, while others continued the revelry. Teenagers danced around little fires in the field, trading physically stolen bases or bats from the dugout.
MaryJane found herself among thousands of other drunk and gleeful attendees. For a moment, she was upset when she couldn’t find her friend, but for the most part, MaryJane rode the riot unfolding around them.
“It was fucking chaos,” she said.
Harry Caray took to the microphone, pleading with attendees to return to their seats for the next game. But not long after, the White Sox forfeited to the Tigers.
MaryJane watched as all around her the youthful, drug-addled crowd continued to swirl like a carnival.
Eventually, she and her friends found their way out of the stadium. Somehow, they made it to one of their cars, escaping just as the police moved in with riot gear and quickly dispersed the crowd.
For the rest of the evening, MaryJane and her friends bounced between Rush Street and the lakefront. Their fun lasted until dawn, when MaryJane returned home to get a few hours of rest. This was one of the few moments she would feel carefree, happy even, in those days after the case br
oke.
To them, the evening wasn’t about baseball, it wasn’t even about disco.
It was about one last moment of freedom and revelry for a generation about to grow up. The youthful air in the stadium, of the 1970s itself, had been born in a postwar baby boom. They’d grown out their hair, worn their jeans tight, and listened to rock music. There were no seat belts in the ’70s, there was no stranger danger. You might have come home when the streetlights came on, but sometimes you also hitchhiked halfway across the country on a whim. You feared nuclear apocalypse from the Soviets, but that didn’t mean you had any reason to fear the handsome man driving the Volkswagen Beetle or the neighborhood man installing security systems for a living or the guy down the street who sometimes dressed as a clown for little children.
Fearless, youthful, loud, and crass, the ’70s had unfolded all around us in breathless events, at times so surreal not even writers “jumping the shark” on a nightly basis could have scripted them.
An American president had stepped down amid scandal. The next president had survived two assassination attempts. A news reporter had died by suicide live on TV. Terrorist bombings, skyjackings, and plane crashes occurred almost weekly. A religious fanatic had persuaded nine hundred followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid down in the jungles of South America.
A man had erased thirty-three lives from a corner of the world, and the country had watched as he took the stage dressed as a clown, and they, the boys he’d killed, retreated into the shadows.
Disco Demolition Night was the last celebration of a decade at times hell-bent on destroying us. In the morning, in the 1980s and beyond, we’d have to make sense of this time that seemed so carefree.
“Nothing like that ever happened,” MaryJane remarked, “and nothing ever will.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
