My question would be to you right off the bat is why,
after so many years of silence,
never having a media interview and people have said
that you have given them interviews in years past
Well, that’s hogwash. That’s strictly hogwash.
I’m constantly told that I, I’m misquoted
constantly saying that I said this
and I said that that’s not happened.
So that’s pretty well established on this.
This is the first time you’re speaking publicly
about your case.
Right. I’ve always felt
that my attorneys were handling it
and they said to keep a low profile and stay away from it.
And, uh, in light of all that has been used
against me in the media,
they’ve created this fantasy monster image
and it’s been going on for the last 12 years
and I’ve ever had no comment.
And I had no need to talk to the media
for the simple reason that they were looking for sensationalism
and they were looking for the monster.
When you say fantasy monster image,
what are you referring to by that?
Well, the idea that I’m a homosexual thrill killer
and all that, that garbage and they painted this image of me
that, like I stroll down the streets
and stalked young boys and slaughtered them.
Hell, if you could see my schedule, my work schedule,
you know damn well that I was never out there.
Well you, you were
now, you were indicted, convicted and sentenced
on thirty-three counts of homicide. Is that correct?
That’s correct.
Police digging under a house in Des Plaines, Illinois,
found four more bodies today.
The owner of the house, a man named John Wayne Gacy,
is suspected of having killed
as many as thirty two teenage boys
and burying most of them under and around his house and garage.
But the story, of course, is far from over.
Investigators know there are bodies or parts of bodies
still to be dug out of this muddy crawl space.
Police have been answering hundreds of telephone calls
from the families of missing teenage boys
all over the country.
Before the murders, Gacy was well-respected in his community.
He was active in local politics
and even dressed up as a clown to entertain children.
He’s a very good neighbor and we socialize with him.
In December 1978,
the disappearance of a 15 year old boy led police
to Gacy’s suburban Chicago home.
In the weeks that followed.
Police found 29 bodies buried in shallow graves
under his home and near it.
Police also found four bodies in nearby streams.
You see bodies in your sleep, you see him in your sleep.
It’s just too much.
It was December of 1978,
I was getting ready to do my laundry
and I was watching TV.
Today, police found four more bodies
in John Gacy’s suburban Chicago home.
And saw the news flash
about bodies being found under a house in Chicago.
One of John Gacy’s neighbors said all of this
is like a nightmare.
And I was dumbfounded.
It’s like, could one person do this?
I probably first wrote to him in 83, 84, 1988,
John finally responded to one of my letters,
and from there we started corresponding
and talking on the phone.
I thought I was gonna do either a book
or, you know, a short film.
But my interest was more on a personal level.
I wanted to ask him
why?
I started recording my phone calls with Gacy
simply because I couldn’t take notes very fast.
This call is subject to being monitored and recorded.
Hang up to decline or dial five five to accept.
By the end of 88? You know,
we were talking sometimes four and five times a week.
In January of 1989, I flew into St. Louis
and went to Menard Correctional Facility,
which is in the very southern tip of Illinois.
And I started visiting him, which I did every three months
for three days at a time. For six years.
Gacy’s the one who wanted an interview. And,
Of course, the Department of Corrections
didn’t want that at all. They didn’t want to give Gacy
any more attention than they had to and they didn’t
You know, who am I am nobody.
And then, oddly enough, Gacy said oh well you have
to talk to my good friend who works at the FBI.
And I said, who’s that? And he goes, Robert Ressler.
Bob Ressler helped establish the FBI’s behavioral unit
that investigates serial killers.
I think Mr. Gacy enjoys control.
He enjoys power and dominance over other people.
These are some of the base criterias for a serial killer.
Robert Ressler was a special agent at the FBI.
He basically coined the phrase serial killer.
Bob grew up in Chicago
and he was in Chicago when Gacy was arrested.
So he was involved from the very beginning. The FBI academy,
reached out to many serial killers to do interviews,
kind of to educate students back at the academy.
And Bob did most of those interviews.
In 1989,
I contacted Bob.
I said, would you be interested
in doing an interview? Because that may be the way
the Department of Corrections will say yes.
So that’s how it started.
Ressler and Gacy taped their interview
in the morning of May 4th, 1992.
It must have been a big deal for them to bring John
from one secure area to another.
There are a couple shots where it’s like, you know,
a scene from a Christmas Carol
dragging the chains, walking through.
It was frightening.
We used the warden’s office,
he very generously gave us his office to do the interview in.
Yeah, I was going to ask you
in so far as sound goes, if I’m down with my head,
does that hurt your sound quality?
No, it’s OK. Just don’t, try to move around too much.
If you break into song give em a cue.
I aint gonna break into any song.
John’s sitting there at the table
with his little stack of information and I said,
so can can we take the handcuffs off?
And the warden looks at the guard.
The guard looks at the warden and they go, Yeah, why not?
First time I had ever seen John without handcuffs.
And so then I immediately said to the cameraman,
anything that starts to get slow or dull cut to his hands.
There’s going to be a tell there somewhere.
And we’ll go into the lead in as to
as you know, you were at 1978.
Yeah. You were present. Yeah.
OK, that’s that’s the way I’d like to start.
And I’d like to kind of go
Well what do you got there? Let’s see your list.
I’d just like to go through the generalities,
maybe talk about the background of the thing.
The the, uh, the original case.
John is a master manipulator.
He comes across as
so damn normal.
Uh, bleeping of the language.
I will watch the language. He’s going to try.
John does tend to slip into
Well I,
I call it as I see it,
and some people can’t understand that.
We’re learning so much now
that we would never have known at the time.
Are you going to talk first?
Yeah, I’ll kind of introduce
Parts that I missed
or didn’t know about. Or didn’t want to think about.
This should be the definitive story
and not just about Gacy,
but it’s about the families that were affected,
the victims.
Hopefully making some sense
about some of the loose ends.
It takes time for history to happen.
All right, so whenever the hell they’re ready.
In 1978, when the Gacy story broke,
I was a general assignment reporter
and a weekend anchor at ABC Seven in Chicago.
Chicago was a dream job for me. Reporters, news people,
the people that the folks of Chicago
invited into their homes
every night were treated very, very well.
And if you go back to the days of the front page
when journalism was king in Chicago
and there were eight newspapers,
Chicago was the epicenter of great news coverage.
I remember the moment very, very well.
I walked into my apartment on East Randolph Street in Chicago
and the phone was ringing. I picked up the phone
and it was the person who would become a major source
for this story for years to come.
The source said get to 82- 13 West Summerdale right away.
I guarantee it’ll be worth it. And that began one of
the most incredible stories I’ve ever covered.
82 13 West Summerdale
is in a neighborhood called Norwood Park Township,
just outside of the community of Norwich on Chicago’s West Side.
I’ve been given very, very sketchy information
about what I was about to walk into.
It was something about bodies buried.
So it’s now 11:30, 12 at night,
there’s no newscast until the next morning.
This was well before the days of the internet and Twitter
and getting something quickly on the internet
before anybody else got to it.
1978
was a time when there were murders in Chicago,
but there were more drug related murders, gang related murders.
That neighborhood wasn’t one you
usually associated with violence.
It was a working class neighborhood
which was basically quiet most of the time.
So to have something like that out
there was certainly unusual, if not unheard of.
December in Chicago is not fun for anybody.
And this was a cold December,
but you can endure almost anything
if the story is big enough.
This was something the likes of which I had never seen.
That from now until the day I die,
I will be able to remember
and be able to feel and touch and see and smell.
When I got to the scene,
I believe I was the only reporter there,
but as the night wore on,
word started to get out and others arrived.
By morning, the story had started to come out.
The first name to surface was Rob Piest.
He was the trigger to the whole investigation.
Rob Piest was working at a pharmacy in Des Plaines
when all of a sudden he disappeared.
Joe Kozenczak and his fellow detectives
on the Des Plaines police force
weren’t out to make history or write the book
on serial killers on December 12th, 1978.
They were just looking for a missing boy.
As I was looking through the police reports on December 12th,
I noticed the missing persons case report of a young boy.
People say policemen have a gut instinct. In this case,
that’s how I’d have to describe it.
I just felt there was something in this case
that we should look at closer.
I was with the Des Plaines Illinois Police Department.
I started there in 1972.
I got a call from Captain Kozenczak
on the 13th of December.
Rob Piest, 15 year old boy from Des Plaines
had gone missing under unusual circumstances.
Late in the day and the 11th of December,
his mother had come to his place of employment,
which was a pharmacy in Des Plaines,
picking him up at the end of his workday.
Rob Piest had come out and spoke with his mom
and said, hey, listen, I’ll be done in a few minutes.
I’ve got this contractor that I want to talk to.
I understand he’s hiring and I could probably
make substantially more than I’m making here.
So if you don’t mind, I’ll just be a few minutes.
I’m going to go talk to this guy and I’ll be right back.
He was pretty excited about it,
and I told him there’d be no problem
that I’d wait for him.
And that was the last I saw of him.
A little after 9:00,
mom was waiting for him to return.
He didn’t return.
After Rob didn’t show up,
Mr. and Mrs. Piest searched all around
Des Plaines frantically looking for him.
Rob Piest was very, very close to his family.
They were going to celebrate the mother’s birthday that night.
And at that point, the Piest family launched
a full court press
into the disappearance of a child
who to them was inconceivable to have disappeared.
We knew something was wrong. So from there,
we went to the police and filed a missing persons report.
Missing persons back in that era,
and even now are pretty much a dime a dozen.
We’ll get a call of a missing person
and they most likely have run away previously
or had problems in school
or with the family or something like that.
It was totally different with Rob Piest.
I mean, he was like a really good kid.
He enjoyed school. He enjoyed his family.
So it was really unusual for him to go missing.
When the police report was being taken,
the desk officer overheard the mother make a statement
to the father saying,
I wonder who the contractor guy was.
That, to me
and he just jumped out like, who is this?
And they did a little background work on this.
Find out that the contractor
that was there was a gentleman by the name of John Wayne Gacy
and his expertise is he remodels pharmacies.
Now, give me kind of
just an overview of the business that you eventually established.
The construction work. Is this self-taught?
The construction and maintenance work?
I started doing painting,
and then I started doing wallpapering and decorating.
And inside of three years PDM, which is painting,
decorating and maintenance,
was doing a million dollars a year.
And that was-
and I only had four employees.
And that was the business you were in
at the time of the arrests?
That’s correct.
PDM in nineteen seventy four became a corporation
and then I owned PDM Contractors Corporation.
I own PDM Plumbing, PDM Concrete and PDM Decorating.
And then I branched off with another partner
into Raphco Construction.
And from there we were doing strictly drugstores.
John was successful in his, you know,
remodeling business of drugstores.
He was very good at chatting up the proprietor,
suggesting how to lay, you know, lay out the store
so that people would see more products and buy something.
And, you know,
he hired teenagers to do the work.
I worked for John’s business PDM contractors
in the summer of 1975 and then sporadically into 76.
He was a decent boss. He’d like to joke around,
he was a little bit heavyset, so he kind of had, you know,
the aura of being jovial and joking around
and seemed to not take things too seriously.
When I was working there, I think there was about four
or five of us that were working for him
and the age was all sixteen, which was how old
I was up to about 19 or 20 for the older guys.
I think everyone was in about that four or five year age span.
I think he utilized young boys
or adolescent boys in his business
because, yes, they were cheaper than if he hired perhaps
a real carpenter, a union carpenter.
He was always looking for inexpensive labor.
And, you know, young boys provided
that. At least at that time that’s what we thought.
You know, thinking back, yes, I should have been
much more unnerved and afraid, but I wasn’t.
Part of his success in that was his demeanor,
you know, people can put on two different fronts.
Because obviously, he was a monster.
When the investigators started out,
they learned from the Piest family
that Rob was going to go talk to John Gacy about a job,
and that’s the last he had been seen.
Well we were just in shock.
We couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep.
We didn’t know what happened to him.
We knew it was not of his own choosing because he loved us.
He loved his home.
If there was any way for him to come home, he would.
So we knew something really had happened.
We had no idea at that time
it would turn into something like this.
When you’re on a story like this,
in addition to covering who,
where, when, why, what happened, you also start to say, OK.
Who else knew about this?
Did the guy do anything before?
Is there a police record?
Is there something we can find out?
We started to call this person
to find out what was going on,
and he gave his name as John Wayne Gacy,
and stated that he didn’t know anything about any missing kids
from the drug store. He was a little,
defensive and based on that,
we wanted to pursue him a little further.
We were trying to do some background record checks,
but in 1978, you know, it’s not like it is today.
instantaneously, you get a criminal history,
you can find out everything you want.
In 1978, the Chicago Police Department
had a file called the Alpha File,
and they would,
based on what you told them, search these files by hand.
We called Chicago Police Department.
And said we’re trying to find out more about this guy
we’re looking at, can you help us?
Do you have any criminal history
on him on record?
And this Police officer said
the guy’s on parole to Chicago
from the state of Iowa. He served prison time.
He was convicted of sodomy of a young boy.
And the hair stood up on the back of our necks.
When they found that he had been arrested in Iowa
for sexually molesting a young boy.
That obviously threw some flags up.
They put together a couple of detectives later that evening
and went looking for Gacy. And when they got to his home.
He was getting ready to leave.
Now they did not search the house at that time
or look through the house.
No, according - afterwards,
they’re claiming that they came to the front door of the house
and knocked on the door and that I hid from them.
Why didn’t you let them in at that time
when they’re knocking at the front door?
There was no way I could have heard them,
I was way in the back of the house, in the rec room,
on the telephone. When they walked,
finally walked around the side of the house,
I could look out the picture window, see them there,
because I was on the phone
and they could see me clearly, too,
sitting on the couch on the telephone
because I was talking to my sister
in regards to a death in our family.
So I told her that I would call her back,
got up, went to the door
and he introduced himself as Kozenczak and Pickell
and they wanted to come in and talk to me about Robert Piest.
And I told them that I had not had any conversation with him,
but I said, if you want to talk to me, then come back there.
We just pushed him a little.
We said, we need you to come in the police station,
give us a witness statement about what you did see
when you were at the drugstore and he said, I don’t have time.
I can’t I can’t do that now.
And they wanted me to come down to the police station.
OK, well, I didn’t have time because I was doing work
for the county and stuff like that.
As soon as we left Gacy’s house,
he attempted to flee from the area,
running to his car and driving away at a high rate of speed.
Now who does that right?
I had decided, based on Gacy’s actions- trying to run from us,
and his attitude in the house,
that I was going to try to get a search warrant.
Went into the police station finally on the next day
after- this was after Kozenczak and Pickell were at the house.
They had asked me to come in
and give me an account of my whereabouts.
When Gacy came into the station,
it was my job to entertain him for a couple hours
because he was only there for to be interviewed.
We couldn’t detain him, but we didn’t want him to leave
until we got the search warrant.
So for two hours I sat there with him
and I quickly analyze and figure out this guy was
a blowhard that had a big ego. So I just started feeding it.
He’d tell me about how successful at business he was
and how he took care of the neighborhood.
He was the go to guy in his neighborhood.
And I would ask him, you know, about people he knew.
And he started telling me that he knew this guy,
he knew that guy, uh, politician,
so I would just act like I was really impressed
and he was just going nuts telling me all about that.
So it was no problem keeping him there.
The thing of it is, is that,
on that same day, they held me there for nine hours
and while holding me there for nine hours,
they executed a search warrant.
The first search warrant was executed on December 13th.
That is the search warrant where they claimed
they went through the house looking for Robert Piest.
It was written up to be looking for Robert Piest
and Robert Piest wasn’t there.
Gacy lived in an unincorporated area
of Cook County called Norwood Park.
The location of his residence was significant
because he lived a stone’s throw away
from the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines,
where Rob Piest was working.
The first search warrant was an attempt
to find Rob Piest alive and we didn’t find that.
The first search did not give us any direct information
in relation to where Rob Piest was.
They didn’t find any bodies in the Gacy house,
but they did find things that really didn’t belong there,
such as a class ring with the initials of somebody
that was not John Wayne Gacy.
And they found a variety of pornography.
They found up in the attic some shackles,
and they also found up in the attic under some insulation,
two books, one of which was titled The Gay Love Letters,
and the other book was Pretty Boys Must Die.
These are very, very odd things to have.
In the trash can in the kitchen
they found a film receipt that originated
from Nisson Pharmacy where Rob Piest had worked.
It had no one’s name on it at
all it had was a number on it. So we really had no idea
what the film was about or who it belonged to.
We assumed it probably belonged to Gacy,
but they recovered that just in case.
We found driver’s licenses from two other individuals,
so that was what we found,
but nothing to lead us to Robert Piest,
so we had to leave the house and let Gacy back in.
My job at the time
was to start digging into his past and his company’s past.
Gacy had been married in Iowa.
He had two children out there
at the time that he went to prison
and as soon as he was paroled, he headed back to Chicago.
By checking missing persons reports from the area
and a specific age,
we started seeing that several other people
that had worked for him were missing.
These individuals were young men that were
being reported missing
and have not been seen for several months.
We find out that the driver’s licenses
that were found in his house
seemingly were related to missing persons.
After the first search warrant,
when the police officers brought back the class ring,
which had initials inside of it- J.S.,
we were able to find out
this ring belonged to a fellow by the name of John Szyc
and, and then checking with his family,
finding out that, in fact, Szyc is missing.
We would sit there in
the Des Plaines Police Department
and just say, what in God’s name are we sitting on top of?
We saw that Gacy had a long record,
there were red flags all along the way
that for some reason nobody paid attention to.
You know, they say where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
In this case, there was a blaze out of control.
It was in so many different districts
and some were more diligent than others in pursuing it.
I think they did look the other way many times.
But the fact that he got away with it for so long.
Is he entirely to blame?
Or is there something faulty with the system?
Our primary focus, our only focus was watching Gacy.
You’re hoping you’re going to find this kid alive someplace,
you know, whatever it may be that, you know, return him home.
But it was quite apparent, you know, just days into it
that Rob Piest might have been the victim of a homicide.
We felt it very urgent
that we keep an eye on Gacy no matter what,
let’s not lose him.
From the very get-go
We had a team of undercover police officers,
four of them working 12 hour shifts
that were supposed to be tailing him.
I start the surveillance
shortly after the first search warrant.
Right away, we’re thinking, hey, you know,
if he’s not being held against his will Rob Piest,
you know, the worst case scenario
is that he’s been killed
and there’s a possibility that there’s more than one victim.
So I’m thinking to myself now,
what am I doing out here by myself?
And I went back that day.
I said, listen, it’s probably a good idea if we grab
one more guy for the night shift to be my partner.
And that’s how my partner, Mike Albrecht became involved.
We weren’t necessarily given any instructions.
We’re just told watch Gacy. I mean, you had a suspect
in a could be a homicide case, so you got to watch him.
The police had focused in on you
as being the suspect in the missing boy.
and eventually, uh
well they were following me around
Following you?
yeah, constantly.
And on December 13th,
I had made a statement to the police department.
And from that date forward, they were had me
under surveillance. The only trouble is,
is that the Mickey Mouse way they were doing it,
they had two cars following me day and night
and they had trouble keeping up with me.
So I used to go out to the car in the morning
and tell them where I was going, so in case they got lost.
because at the time I was doing five construction jobs
in five parts of the city.
So in essence, I was all over the place.
But this was like Keystone Cops trying to follow me around.
Gacy did know he was being surveilled
right from the get-go.
On the very first day of my surveillance
when I was just being relieved,
Gacy came up to us and asked if we were the police,
and we responded,
well, with Des Plaines, you know,
and we’ve been told to keep an eye on you,
and that’s what we’re doing.
So one of us would be parked in front of Gacy’s house
and the other one right on the corner
because if Gacy wanted to go out the back
we’d be able to watch that.
That first night was kind of uneventful,
and we spent most of the night at Gacy’s house.
But then, you know, he started going places at night.
And a third day of the surveillance,
we released the surveillance team about midnight
over at a place called the Moose Lodge in Des Plaines,
and Gacy was in the Moose Lodge at that time.
So Mike and I being in unchartered waters
thought hey, you know
it’d be a lot easier if we would just go inside.
He already knows that we’re here.
So Mike and I both went in the Moose Lodge
and we saw Gacy right away and he saw us walk in.
We sat at a table, maybe three tables away from Gacy.
And a short time later,
the waitress approaches us with two beers and says,
these beers on the gentleman over there pointing to Gacy.
About halfway through our beer
we sent Gacy a beer, so we reciprocated.
And when it was time for him to leave, he got up.
The place was just starting to close up.
And he walks past us and he says,
hey, would you guys like to go to breakfast somewhere?
Right around the corner was a place called
the Pot and Pan Restaurant.
And so we went in there and Gacy went and he sat down
and we were kind of sitting off the corner
a little bit away from him
and started talking back and forth
he says why don’t you guys come on and sit down with me?
So from that point on,
when he went into a public place,
we would go in there with him.
And we get into all kinds of conversations
about what we’re doing, why we’re following him,
and he talks about his business and how successful he is,
and he told us why he hired young kids.
He says, you know, I got to tell you from experience,
I know if I’ve hired a guy that’s been around the block
a few times, it’s hard for me to train him
because he’s used to doing it a certain way.
I hire these young kids that don’t have any experience.
I can train them right from right from the start
how to do it the way I want it done.
He was, you know, a real braggart
and he would imply all his contacts that he had
in the city of Chicago.
He had a lot of friends out of Chicago Police Department.
He would just at times give you kind of tidbits of what he had,
about all his contacts.
He never really said, oh, well, they’ve done this for me.
It’s more like planting a seed that if he needs help,
he knows where to go to get it.
Well, because of his political connections,
John felt he had Teflon coating, he could get away with anything.
That’s what I’ve learned is like, oh my God,
there’s a whole tractor trailer load of details
about Chicago politics that I never even considered.
Everything in Chicago was based on politics
back in the 70s.
The mayor was in charge
and he was at the top, top rung on the ladder.
But as it filtered down,
you had all these workers, precinct workers.
Gacy was one of those
foot soldiers out in Norwood Park Township.
Gacy was a politician. He told local Democratic officials
that he wanted to run for office someday.
He was very friendly,
forthcoming hail fellow well met type of guy.
John Wayne Gacy was also Pogo the clown
who loved to make kids laugh.
He was married twice, divorced twice,
and had two children. A Democratic Party
precinct worker with political connections.
His neighbors knew him as Johnny.
He had big parties every year at his house.
There were several groups
of people that went to these parties,
from the neighbors to young men and boys,
employees who thought that maybe he was the key
to a job or money or whatever.
Gacy’s parties were also for the political operatives
of the area of Norwood Park Township.
Gacy would do anything he could to ingratiate himself
with the power structure
because he wanted to rise within the democratic institution
in the city of Chicago.
So he had his picture taken with all these dignitaries.
Rosalynn Carter was in Chicago last May
for a Polish observance.
There was a parade and one of the parade coordinators
was John Wayne Gacy.
Gacy also attended the private reception
where there’s a picture of them meeting
the first lady was taken. The emblem on Gacy’s jacket
indicates he had Secret Service clearance
even though he was convicted of a sex offense in 1968.
There’s that one photograph of you Rosalynn Carter.
Um, yeah Mrs.Rosalynn Carter.
Well, the Secret Service tries to cover it up
and said, well, we don’t know how he got into the picture.
Hell, I was in charge of the reception.
I had to stand at the door and let them know
which politicians were allowed in
and which ones weren’t, the thing it is.
But the uh, the Secret Service wanted to cover up
and make it sound like that
I had no business there. I was cleared
and I was with Secret Service at the time
and setting up the parade route and everything,
because I used to set up the parades
for the Polish alliance.
And then for three years in a row
I had to set up the parades to run.
And, you know, that’s a big feat,
getting 20,000 Polish people
to go in one direction at one time.
A lot of times you’ll go to a story
and say oh I was suspicious of him.
Not in this case.
Gacy used the aura of being politically connected
to deceive people into thinking, you know,
let’s leave this guy alone
because it may come back to haunt us later on.
He manipulated public officials to think he was just a guy
who was on the make politically
and he fooled everybody every step of the way.
When we were following Gacy,
we had to kind of remind each other once in a while
what we were involved in and not get taken in by this guy
because he was a B.S.er and he, very boastful
and try to get your confidence and all that kind of stuff.
He was very likable
and Mike and I are like better kind of, you know,
keep our guard up with this guy.
Even though you have a tendency to put your guard down
because of the way he talked and acted and befriended us.
He acted like such a normal guy.
He says, I don’t know if you guys are following me
because of this missing person that they were asking about.
But I have nothing to do with this kid.
I’ve never seen him.
He says I’ll I’ll help you on the search you know.
But I got to tell you,
I’m not involved with this at all.
Now, he was showing some odd behavior.
You know, personality changes, if you would.
You know, he’d seem real friendly
and then all of a sudden he’d be aggravated
and then he would he would have this
real unusual look on his face, you know,
like almost like a beaten man, you know,
and aggravated scary looking face.
But, you know, we’d get him out of the car
and shake him by the shoulders
and tell him hey if you don’t knock it off,
you know, we’re going to have to arrest you
for reckless driving or something like that.
And then all of a sudden he’d be fine
and he’d be like that for a couple hours
and then he’d go nuts again.
Police have been watching John Gacy’s suburban Chicago
home for the past 10 days.
They became suspicious when 15 year old Robert Piest
disappeared after he allegedly was last seen with Gacy.
We were just so engrossed with this.
I mean, we thought of nothing else.
Nothing in the entire I mean,
it was only a 10 day surveillance,
but I mean, it’s all we lived and breathed.
We didn’t have a thought about anything else.
During this time, the investigators
were interviewing Michael Rossi and David Cram,
who were basically very loyal, longtime employees,
young kids, you know, in their 20s.
Mike Rossi and David Cram
they did odd jobs for him, you know, and helping him
on a construction job and stuff like that.
So they were his workers. They worked for him.
And each time they’d interview them
and they interviewed them multiple times,
they would give just a little more information.
Telling the investigators that they had been in a crawlspace
and been ordered to dig some trenches.
They said Gacy had them
dig trenches down in the crawl space
and the reason for these trenches
ostensibly given to Rossi and Cram
were to make holes to put in drain pipe
Captain Kozenczak and the investigators,
now they’re starting to find out
that there is an odor down in the crawl space,
and Gacy has always put it off to a sewage issue down there.
And when a smell would erupt from the crawlspace,
Rossi and Cram, they were told
to throw lime down to cover the smell.
The subdivision where the Summerdale house is located
is built on a clay field.
And when it rained, the rain would come down from both ends
and would flood from from one house to the other.
The crawlspace would fill up with water.
In 1976, I asked a landscaper, I said, what do you do for
for that sour odor of clay? And he said spread white lime,
just regular masonry lime on the ground.
He said, it’ll sweeten up the clay
and you won’t have that odor.
Sort of like what charcoal does in filtering things.
That’s why the lime was spread in the crawlspace.
How much the lime was spread down there eventually?
Uh, I think seven or eight hundred pounds of it.
We actually went into the crawlspace the first time.
But if you’re looking for a freshly dug grave,
you’re going to look for a mound of dirt.
Well, there was no mounds of dirt there,
so we did didn’t look any further.
But now with Rossi and Cram digging these trenches in there
we’re putting two and two together
or as crazy as he’s starting to act and his background,
you know,
that’s starting to come to the thoughts of these investigators
that maybe he’s got a dead body down there.
The first search warrant was executed on December 13th.
However, what is strange is you had 20 trained officers
that came into that house,
supposedly went down in the crawl space, crawled around.
There was no mounds of dirt. There was no odor.
There was no nothing.
I never feared anybody going down that crawl space.
Now, the team is starting
to put a little bit of pressure on Gacy
and he seems very agitated, so we’re starting to get to him
and we can tell.
When we first started the surveillance,
Gacy seemed to be able to operate like on three
or four hours sleep. But as the investigation went on
and he was becoming more and more worried,
he was getting virtually no sleep.
And it was very visible,
you know, his body language and his posture, everything,
he looked horrible.
He was just transformed from this effervescent guy
to a beaten man.
The police wanted to get a second search warrant.
The main obstacle was there was already a search warrant
that had been executed.
So we needed fresh probable cause.
The probable cause for the second warrant
was an amalgamation of about two or three pieces of evidence.
One was a class ring that Gacy probably should not have had.
Another item of evidence found in the Gacy house
was a photo slip, the kind
when people used to take pictures with film,
not in Rob Piest’s name,
but in the name of a young lady named Kim Byers
who worked at the drug store.
Kim Byers worked at the cash register at the Nisson pharmacy,
and she was at the front of the store
right by the front door.
Kim Byers was going to step outside and have a break,
and she borrowed Rob Piest’s coat.
And just before she went outside,
she took her film and was having the film processed,
got a receipt, put the receipt in the pocket of Piest’s coat.
That’s the same receipt that we found in Gacy’s trash.
So that tied Piest to Gacy’s house.
The third thing, as I recall,
was a conversation I had with the police officers
and they were doing surveillance of Gacy.
It was very, very cold that winter.
And that’s an important fact because they would
sit right outside of his house in the unmarked police car.
Gacy, who was full of hubris and arrogance,
would sometimes invite them in to use the restroom
and warm up the second surveillance team,
which was Bob Schultz and Ron Robinson.
They pretty much did the same things that we did.
You know, they followed him,
they had conversations with Gacy.
They stayed with him wherever.
This particular day
Gacy says to Schultz and Robinson
he says hey you guys want to have dinner at my place?
And they looked at each other and said
sure.
So they follow Gacy over to his house,
go in there, Gacy is starting to prepare dinner for them.
And while they’re in there Schultz says hey,
I got to go to the bathroom.
So Bob went into the bathroom and what happened then,
while he was in there, the heat kicked on.
And when the heat kicks on, Shultz smells this horrific smell
that he said he could only equate to the county morgue.
He thought that the odor reminded him
of what he had smelled in his experience
as a patrolman, the odor of decaying flesh.
When I heard that, I said, I think we have probable cause.
After I prepared the search warrant
with the police officers from Des Plaines,
it was already getting into the late afternoon, early evening.
So I went home, I had dinner with my grandmother,
went back to my place, fell asleep and all was fine
until about 5:00 in the morning when I received a telephone call
from Assistant State’s Attorney Mike Corkell,
who told me, get your ass out of bed
and over to the police station.
We found bones.
I made several trips
to the house during the excavation.
The stench in there was overwhelming.
The police officers would wear kerchiefs
around their nose and mouth.
And I remember seeing what they put in body bags.
I had seen crime victims before, dead people,
but nothing like this.
In hindsight, everything is very, very clear,
but as you’re going through it,
you’re trying to figure out how could he take victim
after victim from the same streets and not get caught?
And the only answer you come to
is that someone was looking the other way.
This man could have been stopped.