The clowning was relaxation for me.
I enjoyed entertaining kids. Like some people are ...
You know they...
They unwind in different ways,
either going out drinking or that.
I could put on clown makeup, and I was relaxed,
and I enjoyed doing it. It was twice.
It was only twice a month that I did it.
This was not used then for a lure to draw kids to you.
No. would visit different hospitals
and entertain the children there,
and we didn’t entertain them with handcuffs
or anything like that. All we used was balloon animals
and small toys and stuff like that.
But we also did parades, and in the summertime,
like on Fourth of July,
I used to be in four parades in one day.
I always told people, when I got into clown makeup,
I regressed into childhood.
It was fun being a clown because you could be yourself
or just let yourself go and act a fool.
You could be slapstick and funny and have a good time.
That’s why I always enjoyed clowning.
Clowning has taken a bad name, right,
because of what they’ve used in my case.
Gacy was superconfident when we first started
our investigation up until the last maybe 2 1/2 days.
It seemed like months,
but it was only a 10-day surveillance,
and it was a cat-and-mouse game
between the surveillance team and Gacy.
At one point, we were in a restaurant,
and he was telling me he volunteered as a clown,
and he said to me, "Dave, if you’re in a parade
and you’re dressed like a clown,
if you see a nice looking gal,"
he says, "You can put your arm around her
and get a little feel." And he says, "You know, Dave,
clowns can get away with murder."
And the hair on the back of my head just stood up
because he was so confident
that he would get out of this crisis he was in.
Gacy appeared to be an average Joe.
He didn’t look sinister. Just an average-looking guy,
and I remember thinking, "Could this guy really be a monster?
Could he have killed Robert Piest?"
The evidence was that Piest left work to meet with Gacy
to talk about a job,
so Gacy was thought to be one of the last people
to have seen Rob Piest.
When Gacy realized that we were seeking
a second search warrant,
he went so fast from being superconfident
to really having nothing to live for,
and we knew he was about ready to break.
Now, the first search warrant,
a police officer had opened the crawl space.
It was a big crawl space.
He looked down there, didn’t see anything.
But then it became evident
that there might be more people missing,
and one of the officers when he was in the house,
he said,
he’d smelled this real putrid smell coming through the vents.
So once we went and did the second search warrant,
we’d searched everywhere else,
so we decided, "Well, let’s dig."
All right. Is there a flashlight up there?
I was standing, holding a flashlight over the crawl space
for one of the evidence technicians,
and he said, "I think we have something,"
and so we started digging some more,
and then we found a left femur with no flesh on it.
So we kept digging, found another left femur.
Nobody has two left femurs,
and he kept digging and found a third one,
so we knew we had a lot more there than we thought.
Everybody stopped.
At that point, when we discovered the initial bones,
everybody stopped. We regrouped.
"All right. Let’s see. What’s the next step?"
When I got to the scene on Summerdale,
the medical examiner, Robert Stein, was there,
and I realized that if Stein was on the scene
in the middle of the night, this had to be big.
In Des Plaines, Illinois, near Chicago,
a man who served time in prison for sex crimes was let out.
Today, they found the bodies of at least three young boys
buried under his house.
It’s suspected because of the looks of the area
down in the crawl space,
there are some other mounds and appears to be more there.
This should not have happened.
These young men and boys should still be alive today
had somebody paid any attention to the warning signs.
Gacy is a 36-year-old building contractor
who reportedly dressed like a clown to entertain
at children’s parties.
He once went to prison for a sex offense in Iowa.
It wasn’t very long before we realized
that the house on Summerdale
was not the only place we should look for leads as to Gacy.
I reported on Gacy’s time in Iowa
where he was arrested for sodomy.
The picture that was painted was very, very similar
to what was happening here.
They should have been able to see what happened in Iowa.
On a historical note,
your Iowa conviction goes back to ...
What year was that?
1968. ’68. And what was ...
Just in a nutshell, without getting in too deeply,
what was the basis of the Iowa conviction?
The basis ... It was a sodomy conviction.
It’s the only thing
I ever was sentenced to was the sodomy conviction.
They’re claiming that the state representative’s son,
who was on the other party,
he claims that he was sexually abused by me,
and in essence, he was blackmailing me for it.
Now, what it boils down to is oral copulation,
and it was consensual.
I’m Karen Kuzma. My brother was John Wayne Gacy.
The John I knew was good. He was kind.
He was hardworking. He did love family.
I keep trying to put a point in time
when I saw a big change in him,
and in Iowa was where the big change took place.
When he moved to Iowa, it’s like there was a different John.
John moved because he met and married his first wife, Marlynn.
Her father had Kentucky Fried Chicken businesses in Iowa.
He wanted John to come on to help him to manage them.
His father-in-law was trying to build something up for his kids,
and that’s why he wanted John to be in there with him
to learn the business so he could carry it on.
When John got there in Iowa,
then he started with this Jaycee chapter.
Gacy was a very prominent member
of the Waterloo Junior Chamber of Commerce,
known as the Jaycees.
These were young business people priming themselves
to take leadership in the business community,
which translated into the leadership in Waterloo.
Those business people
have always had the ear of the authorities and the mayor
and in a very limited sense, ruled the town.
John was a recruiter, probably their best recruiter
from what the Jaycees said.
He got into anything that would bring him more contacts,
especially if he could get a foot up.
Gacy pretty much became the man in the community,
so he was one of their prime movers,
one of their big leaders.
I moved to Waterloo, Iowa. I was honored as man of the year
because besides working full-time I also ...
I was the chaplain for the Jaycees,
and I also ran the membership campaign,
and of course we used pornography.
We had stag shows, and that’s how we increased the membership
from 150 to 400 members in that Jaycee chapter.
We were dealing with porno films,
and we had the girls set up in a room and that.
So it was the thing to do.
We were boosting membership from it,
so nobody said a word about it.
Gacy was attempting to get a cadre of people to engage
in the same kind of activity that he was engaged in.
What Gacy was doing is saying, "We’re sexual beings.
We enjoy it, so let’s revel in it,"
and on certain nights,
after you’ve had a certain number of beers,
and you’ve watched some stag films,
maybe that why not sort of an attitude.
He wanted this to be the norm.
Everybody is involved in sexual activity outside the marriage,
so why are you looking at me?
We went to visit John in Iowa.
When we got there, he said, "I’ve got some plans for us.
I’m a member of the Jaycees, and I’ve got to go this party."
So we went, and at the end of the evening, he said,
"I’m not going to be going home with y’all."
When we were going to get into the car,
it wasn’t Marlynn and John.
It was her and another guy. She brought him home instead,
and I guess John went with his wife.
The next morning, John came home,
and this guy left right about the same time,
so I stepped outside with John, and I told him,
"I cannot believe
that you put us in that type of awkward situation.
Ron and I are packing up, and we’re leaving."
I was really, really upset. I’m not a prude.
I mean, if you’re going to do something like that,
do it on your own time.
Don’t invite me and throw it in my face.
When I look back at some of that switching partners
and all this craziness, I wonder
if that wasn’t a precursor to all this other stuff.
John Gacy was a very dominant personality,
so people did what he wanted them to do.
He used them as objects and toys for his sexual gratification.
John was married, had two children,
and we received a call that he had been arrested for sodomy.
It was devastating to my father at that point
because he thought John had his act together,
and then he gets arrested.
We had a report that he had coerced a young man,
a minor, Don Voorhees, to commit a sex act with him.
He was the son of a state representative in Iowa,
and I thought he was quite brave as a young man to come forward
and tell his story to the police.
We had it investigated,
and we brought a charge of sodomy against John Gacy.
This was a law that had direct application to mostly men
who required young people to commit acts of sex on them
or be the recipient of those sex acts themselves.
At the time he was arrested for sodomy
of the 16-year-old youth in Iowa,
Gacy was running for president of the Jaycees,
the Chamber of Commerce.
He did lots of inspirational writing for them
about how to manipulate people,
how to inject your ideas into other people’s minds.
He believed he could talk his way out of pretty much anything,
and he was successful at it on many occasions.
It wasn’t just Donald Voorhees
that had made complaints against Gacy in Iowa.
When he was able to get these young boys back into the house,
all he had to do was to get them into a position
where they’re immobilized,
and then he took advantage of them.
Gacy thought that he was above the law.
He obviously thought that nobody would ever believe
somebody else’s claim against him.
At the time
this young individual made the charge at me,
he was blackmailing me. He wanted more and more money.
He said, "Look. I gave you a blowjob.
Now you got to pay for this." I said, "Go see your father."
He wasn’t getting along with his father,
but they came down heavy on me.
John didn’t feel remorse about anything.
When he was first arrested in Iowa,
"It’s not my fault. It’s the kid’s fault."
He just did not have the emotional core to feel anything.
He was just kind of a flat line.
As far as my mom and dad felt,
they believe that John was getting railroaded
because him and this other guy were running for office.
The whole thing was over Jaycees and a political position.
I can’t get into it because I really don’t understand
whether John was telling the truth
or not telling the truth,
but my mom and dad, they were believing it.
They understood the sodomy part, but they said
he shouldn’t have been charged because it was consensual.
Gacy dragged out this period of time between the indictment
and the trial, and for the next several months,
we kept hearing horror stories about his attempts to intimidate
and even eliminate the complaining witness.
We recognized that he had a certain amount of evil in him
that would come up again if we didn’t send him to prison.
So we charged him with a series of additional crimes
which eventually led to his guilty plea
on the sodomy charge.
On the night of the sentencing,
we went to see Marlynn,
who was still his wife, but she had filed for divorce,
and her dad told us a lot of things
that he had found out since the arrest.
He felt that John had brought this pretty much on himself.
He had had complaints at the restaurants
that he owned about John
being just a little overly friendly
sometimes with the employees in wrong ways.
He wasn’t sympathetic about any of it.
He just wanted John out of his daughter’s life
and out of the kids’ life.
John Wayne Gacy was sentenced to serve 10 years
in the men’s reformatory at Anamosa.
Anamosa is typically for younger people
who have committed crimes,
and perhaps through rehabilitation,
we can return them to society better than when they came in.
This is the men’s reformatory at Anamosa.
Inside are 629 inmates.
I was 21 years old, and I was only inside the walls
about a year and a half. I had one count of forgery
and one count of breaking and entering, burglary.
The prison itself, it looks like Ivanhoe’s castle.
To me, that’s the best way to describe it.
I wouldn’t want to live there again,
but at least it doesn’t look like a waiting room for hell.
John Wayne Gacy,
inside the walls, he was known as Gacy.
I never heard anybody ever call him John.
"Here comes Gacy recruiting for the reformatory Jaycees."
He literally went around talking to people,
basically saying this is something
that’ll help you pass the time, and so I joined.
That’s how I met him, and then we started hanging out together.
We played cards almost every evening,
always talking about something,
but Gacy lied about why he was there.
His version of that story was that he got popped
for showing pornographic movies to teenagers,
and he certainly never talked about
any sexual assaults on anybody.
He had this big fat secret that he had to hold on to
unless he wanted to leave prison in a box
because that’s what happened to sexual deviants back then,
and so he’d managed to already inveigle himself into a position
of pretty significant influence for an inmate.
I’m John Gacy. I’m from Waterloo, Iowa.
You’re a man of some authority here.
What is your title?
Well, I’m first cook in the kitchen,
and there’s nine cooks under my direction,
under the supervision of several supervisors
that are assigned to the food area.
Of course the kitchen had some of the most
prestigious jobs in the system, and Gacy got a lot of privileges
because he gave a lot of privileges.
When he was cooking as a chef,
he would curry favor from the guards
by providing them with the best steaks and other cuts of meat,
and outside the kitchen,
only the guards and other administrative people
were white shirts in the penitentiary,
but he got to wear a white shirt.
That’s not prison garb, okay?
I mean, it was blue denim then, and it’s orange now,
which meant that he had an in in not only the laundry
but the dry cleaning shop.
He received an award from the national Jaycees
for the best performance in a prison Jaycee chapter.
That’s John.
It literally was one of the bigger chapters
in the entire state.
I’m not in any way diminishing the nature of what John did,
but John had some good attributes,
one of which was he understood how to lead people.
Back then, John had read an article about this couple
who had run this miniature golf course,
couldn’t afford to keep it up.
John immediately looked at that and he talks to the warden,
"Oh, this is a great recreational deal for the guys."
Okay. The warden says, "Fine. Get on the phone and call him."
He does, and of course John tells them,
"This is a nonprofit."
He didn’t both to tell them he was an inmate,
but if you donated to the reformatory,
it’s a nonprofit, and you’ll get a tax break.
So the next thing we know,
we’re sending a truck from prison industries
to pick up the remains of this golf course.
I do have a smile on my face because I like clever,
and that’s clever. His name is anathema now,
but if he’d gone a different route,
that golf course would have his name on it.
His time in prison, I think he talked more
about the meals he made, the miniature golf course.
You would have thought that he was down there
remodeling the prison from the way he talked,
like he was the head guy down there.
In that closed little environment,
people like John have a lot of power.
Human beings don’t change their nature
when you lock the door behind them.
They’re still human beings with all their virtues
and all their faults.
If John Gacy had wanted somebody snuffed,
he could have gotten it done. The power was there.
[Lyrics]
Joyful and triumphant O come ye,
o come ye to Bethlehem
Come and behold him
Christmas at Anamosa, how do these 629 men observe it?
Well, differently than we do of course,
but it’s still Christmas. How about Christmastime?
Do you do anything special for the guys?
The food service department on Christmas Eve,
we would serve cookies and hot chocolate
to the men in the cell house.
[Lyrics]
Glory to God
About a year after John was in prison,
my dad was sickly, and on Christmas Day, my dad died.
[Lyrics]
O come, let us adore him
Christ the Lord
John felt he killed dad.
He felt that what he had done caused dad dying.
We had to try to convince him dad died
because of his drinking. That’s what killed dad.
[Lyrics] Word of the Father
I think it was the shame that he’d went to prison
that was weighing on his mind
because John had always tried to win his approval.
[Lyrics]
O come, let us adore him Christ the Lord
One of the strongest memories I have of John Gacy
was walking the yard every night and just talking,
and he was just devastated by the death of his father
and the fact that he couldn’t be there.
He felt very strongly that he’d somehow let his father down.
That’s the only time I ever saw him cry
was talking about his dad.
How about your dad, John?
You had mentioned that you could never really please him,
that he had talked of you in a derogatory terms.
And I did not hate ... I didn’t hate my dad either.
But you did have a hard upbringing with him,
did you not?
My dad came from the old country, limited education,
but he was a good provider
and with strong will and strong views.
He was also an alcoholic, sorry to say.
Was he abusive? Did he strike out at you from time to time?
When he drank, he was almost like a different person.
My dad struck all of his children all the time.
Yeah.
John was usually his target.
Dad thought my mother kind of mollycoddled him,
that she babied him,
and when he drank too much, John got the brunt of it.
After dad passed away, my mom called me, and she said,
"We’re going to try to get John home
because I’m just by myself," and she was invalid.
A lot of things she couldn’t do for herself.
So she got in touch with a friend
who knew different people here in Illinois,
and he helped her writing letters,
and they finally got through to Iowa.
I’ve been here now about a year and 2 weeks.
How long do you plan to take up residence here?
Well, I hope to be getting out sometime in May.
Because of John’s record of being a model prisoner,
they felt that he was rehabilitated,
and so at 18 months, he came home.
The judge gave him the 10-year sentence,
which was the most he could give him,
but it did go unheeded by the Iowa Parole Authority,
whoever they are, because they allowed him parole after a year
and a half with his white shirt and cooking for the warden
and building a junior golf
course in front of the penitentiary,
and Illinois accepted his parole.
I think possibly some money changed hands,
but all the actors are dead,
and so really it is a closed issue.
We both ended up
being essentially released the same day,
and he said, "Well, if you’re ever in Chicago, look me up.
I’ll take you out to dinner."
The last time I talked to him was literally at the front door.
From a law enforcement standpoint, I am sorry
that there was no transfer of information about this man.
That’s the part that really bothers me.
Our system was developed to the point
that we tracked people who were on parole.
We just didn’t do it,
but we sure had a mountain of information on the man
that would have been extremely helpful to the communities
in which he eventually landed.
After fooling authorities that,
"Oh, he’s fine. He’s cured,"
Gacy was free again to come back to Chicago,
but Gacy was not fine at all.
The Iowa State Psychopathic Hospital it
was called at the time
did a complete work-up of Gacy as a sex offender
before the sentencing in that case which essentially says,
"This guy is a sexual psychopath.
There is absolutely no treatment of any kind
that is going to cure this guy. For the rest of his life,
he’s going to remain a dangerous sexual predator."
Gacy’s psychiatric evaluation clearly said,
"This man will continue to commit crimes."
Somebody somewhere really screwed the pooch on this one
because they had every warning sign.
When you paroled out, where did you set up
establishing your residency? I was ...
Under the interstate compact, I was paroled back to Illinois.
Mm-hmm.
And you went to Springfield first, did you not?
No. No?
Directly to Chicago ... Directly to Chicago.
... because I had a job working at Bruno’s Restaurant.
That was a requirement of interstate compact transfer.
You had to have a job and a place to stay.
I moved in with my mother in the condominium.
My dad had just passed away.
So I lived with my mother and worked at Bruno’s as a chef.
Bruno’s was a pizza place but also an Italian restaurant,
and John did like his job.
I think that he liked the hobnob of being with other people.
He had a whole new life of meeting people
that probably would have never been in his life
had he not been working at the restaurant.
When I first got out on parole, for the next 2 years,
I stayed with Bruno’s Restaurant,
and I worked for them,
but on the side, I used to work for ...
I used to go in at 4 in the morning
and get off at 2 o’clock in the afternoon,
and to me, that was too short of a day, not enough work,
so I started doing odd jobs painting,
and I found that on the weekends,
the afternoons and the weekends,
I was making more money than I was as a chef
even though I was getting 12 something an hour.
I borrowed $600 from my mother,
and through odd jobs, I left the chef business.
He started kicking out this little remodeling type business.
He went to construction and repairs
and rebuilding and remodeling. He just wanted to be successful.
He wanted to be known for something.
I owned PDM Contractors.
PDM was able to work 52 weeks out of the year.
While most construction companies shut down
for the winter, I never had time to shut down
because I had them on a waiting list.
Our business was growing at that rapid rate.
After prison, mom and John got along at first.
His wife went on her way with the kids.
He never tried to contact her or anything,
and then John started talking to mom about getting a bigger place
because he needed to have a garage.
He needed more space to run a business.
He couldn’t do it from a condo.
Well, lo and behold, mom went ahead without us
and sold it,
bought a house that he picked out on Summerdale.
Norwood Park is where they moved to.
Norwood Park Township was bungalows of people,
small single-family houses,
the good working class people of Chicago.
This is where they lived.
That’s what Norwood Park Township was like.
That Summerdale house was rented to PDM Contractors,
and the living room was the front office.
The dining room of that house was like a board room
because it was an 8-by-10-foot table
with big captain’s chairs
because we used it as a board room for meetings.
John was happy because it was going to be
where he could start a business, and mom was happy.
I think she was happy to be back in a house again,
but all of it seemed kind of short-lived
because my girlfriend Carole got to dating him.
Carole was my best friend through high school
and always kind of had a little thing for John,
and the next thing I know it, they’re getting married.
I was really happy because Carole really needed somebody,
and John needed somebody.
I always told him I always felt him as a brother.
The day we got married, that was our big ...
that was a big joke.
He did all the food and everything and setup.
We had the party at the house.
I was introduced to John in 1972
and asked to photograph his wedding.
It was a nice affair, very small, very low-key.
I photographed it all in black and white.
He was a good groom that day.
During the wedding, he was dignified,
and Carole was beautiful.
Her two little girls, John’s stepdaughters,
stood up in the wedding, little flower girls.
He was always good to the girls.
I can’t say enough about that.
I mean, the girls still refer to him as their dad.
John was settling again.
He moved Carole and her children in,
and then he moved the mother in, Carole’s mother,
and then of course he had mom living there,
but she didn’t want to interfere because of their marriage
and everything, a new marriage,
and she just felt it’d be better if she was back on her own,
and so he got her an apartment in a building
where he was doing maintenance on Miami
not too far from the house. When mom moved out,
she just said things weren’t getting along,
but that’s all she said. She didn’t say anything else.
Mom protected John all the time, all the time.
One time she said that she’d come home one night,
and it was totally dark in her apartment,
and when she turned on the light,
found him there with another man in her living room.
It scared the daylights out of her.
She didn’t know what was going on.
It just scared her, and I asked her
if she ever found out what that was all about.
She said, "Oh, it was just nothing."
She did try to protect him. There was no doubt in my mind
that she probably carried secrets
that she went to the grave with.
The media says ...
has called you a homosexual killer.
What is your position on homosexuality?
I have nothing against it. I’m an outspoken liberal.
I don’t care for the labeling.
I don’t care for any labeling for that fact. I’ve been ...
Do you claim to be a ... No.
Do you claim homosexuality?
No, I would definitely not be homosexual.
I have nothing against what they do,
and I don’t deny that I’ve engaged in sex with males,
but I’m bisexual.
You’re bisexual? Right. I ...
my preference is women.
Mm-hmm.
And I’ve been married enough times
and have children, and I see nothing wrong with it.
He always told me he was bisexual.
I didn’t know anything about the sodomy from when he was Iowa.
I didn’t know the full story. That’s why it didn’t hit me
like, "Oh, my god. He was in prison."
He just said he was dealing with pornography. That was his story.
After having the wedding pictures, John always called me
for doing various little photographic jobs
as well as some of the construction work.
Anything he needed pictures of, I was there to do it,
or if there was a wall to be knocked down,
I was there to do it.
So I photographed him as Pogo the Clown.
I photographed his stepchildren.
I photographed his family for their Christmas cards.
John was a master at saying something
without coming right out and saying it.
But if you took offense to it, he would always have an out.
He once said to me,
"There’s money to be made in photographing homosexuals,"
and I assumed, knowing John,
that there was going to be something sideways about this,
either sleazy or maybe just downright illegal.
He said to me, "What? How dare you say
that I should photograph homosexuals
engaging in illicit behavior. I didn’t say that at all.
I just meant taking dignified portraits of homosexuals.
What’s wrong with that?
There’s no illegality or immorality in that."
Well, of course there isn’t,
but he always left himself an out.
He was very careful the way he used his words.
John didn’t like if anybody called him a homosexual,
but I guess he preferred men more than he did women.
I didn’t realize how much of that was going on.
My dad had conservative values.
If you were out after midnight, you were up to no good.
My dad did not believe it. If you were out after dark
and you didn’t leave a phone number,
you were up to no good.
So I think that’s why I tended to go that way more,
just to be the opposite of him.
I used to make comments when he would go out at night,
and when I would make these comments and say,
"You know, anybody that’s going out at midnight
is up to no good,"
so this is when I was getting aggravated with him though.
This was ...
we were married already maybe about 2 years,
and he said, "You sound like my father."
I said, "Good. I hope it haunts you."
I don’t think I ever slept a lot really.
Our bedroom was right by the drive as you come in,
and there were times I’d hear the car
and thinking he’s coming in, never heard the door open.
So I’d get up, and I would nosy around.
His car would be parked,
and he’d be maybe standing and talking to somebody,
and it was always a young kid.
I thought really he was dealing with drugs.
It’s like a Grand Central Station all night long.
I had gone to the garage one day when he was gone,
and I knew he’d be gone for a long period of time,
and there was a red light up on the wall.
He had heavy chains laying on the side
and a blanket on the floor,
and then the one time I was in his car,
I reached under the seat and found a big crowbar
and a couple of other ... and I’m like, "What in the heck
are you carrying a crowbar in your car for?"
He says, "What the hell are you doing in my car?"
I said, "I was cleaning it."
I felt like I was living in this ...
that it was some kind of a movie,
and of course there was Mother’s Day,
which last time we had any ... anything to do with one another.
He said, "Happy Mother’s Day,
and this is the last time that we’re having sex."
I said, "Oh, really?"
Well, with all the stuff that was going on,
and I felt that he was lying to me,
I had made an appointment to go and see a lawyer
because I didn’t want to live like that anymore.
I was married twice,
and just because I didn’t get along in the marriages ...
My marriages went down the drain
only because I was a workaholic working 7 days a week and that.
Years later, Carole finally opened up to me,
and she said she really felt that he was making things bad
so she’d leave,
and I guess I could understand that knowing what I know today.
He was definitely leading two lives.
Even though he wanted the happiness,
something kept driving him toward the other side.
The day that I walked out of that house,
he said, "One day, you’re going to read about me
on the front pages of the newspapers."
Even being married to him, there was a lot that I didn’t know.
Gacy employed mostly young men,
and they would party at the house.
Not only his friends liked to party there,
so did his employees.
That was their home away from home and source
of all kinds of marijuana, drugs, uppers, pills, booze.
And people often asked him why he would employ
all these inexperienced young men.
He’d developed relationships with lots of them.
There were the lost souls,
the kids that had no aim in life.
They had nowhere else to go. If they needed a flop somewhere,
well, they knew they could count on John.
There was 12 keys out to the house.
Twelve sets of keys?
Twelve sets of keys.
Anybody working for PDM Contractors
had a set of keys for the house
so you could come and go when you wanted,
and of course my neighbors would keep me informed.
They would inform me,
"God, while you were out of town,
they must have been partying all night there."
At that point, John is alone.
Sometime later, Michael Rossi came to live with John.
Who is Rossi?
Michael Rossi was an employee of PDM.
Mm-hmm. And how old was he at the time? Who was he?
He was 20 years old.
Michael Rossi was a handsome kid, polite.
He just struck me as just a nice kid
who wouldn’t be involved in anything unseemly.
If John and Michael got something from another,
the obvious thing right on the surface of it:
Michael got work.
John got his walls knocked down for cheap.
Michael got room and board.
John got some form of companionship.
John told me that Michael Rossi is really good
with helping keep his crews working.
He could count on him to do things.
When he ordered it, it would get done,
but I know Carole didn’t care for him.
We just couldn’t put our finger on why.
I learned later their connection was not only business.
It was also personal and sexual.
There was more than one person that was in that
some kind of relationship.
David Cram was one of those people who worked for John
sometimes as a construction person.
He worked in the bedroom. They had a sexual relationship.
He collected checks from John’s company.
He got to borrow John’s car.
It’s the same setup where you give me something,
I’ll give you something.
Insofar as being bisexual, if I wanted to engage in sex,
Rossi and Cram were willing to go down on me anytime I wanted,
providing they were given stuff.
Those two guys were around and in the house a lot.
The very first time I met Rossi and Cram,
I just said to John, "Those two are bad news."
John Wayne Gacy, a popular Democratic precinct captain,
emerged as a person of interest in a missing persons case.
Robert Piest was only 15 years old.
He disappeared after applying for a job with Gacy.
Throughout the entire investigation,
Gacy was always talking about suing
the Des Plaines Police Department for harassment
and interfering with his freedom.
So he calls in Sam Amirante, who was just leaving
the public defender’s office at this time,
and they sue for harassing him with the surveillance.
Sam Amirante and John Wayne Gacy
had known each other from Norwood Park
Township political circles.
Gacy was a member of the electric board,
and Amirante did some legal work for them.
He had just hung out his shingle as a criminal defense attorney,
and so when Gacy needed a favor,
is the way he put it, he called Amirante.
John Gacy was Sam Amirante’s first private client.
Yeah, that’s one hell of a way to start your career
in private practice.
Most of our work, obviously,
as surveillance team was outside.
So Gacy is in the attorney’s office,
and the next thing we know,
it’s 3 o’clock in the morning or something like that.
One of the attorneys comes out the front door
and waves Mike over and says,
"Hey. I know it’s super cold out there.
Why don’t you guys come on in?
It’s too brutal for you guys to be out there all night."
Seeing what led up to this point,
we talked to each other and said,
"You think maybe he confessed to his attorneys,
and they’re a little concerned that they’re in there
with him all by himself?"
And that’s a darn good possibility.
So we decided, "Okay. We’ll come in there under one condition.
We have to be able to see Gacy."
So they get us a couple chairs, and they’re,
"Whatever you guys want, we’ll get for you."
They bring a bottle of booze out here.
"Have a drink on us," and just couldn’t do enough for us.
And we still hadn’t seen Gacy.
The attorneys gingerly bring Gacy out,
and he looked like he was the walking dead.
His eyes were closed. He was slouched over,
and it looked like he was actually sleeping.
So he laid him on the front couch.
We could see him through the glass,
and we were talking to the attorneys
about what we have seen over this 10 days of following him,
and this guy is dangerous.
We both had this kind of look on our face
and stepped back and said,
"Well, just be careful because when he wakes up,
you never know what he’s going to do.
We’ve been told that he gets very violent.
He can hurt people and is very erratic when he wakes up."
And they get this very shocked look on their face.
Their eyes were like the size of saucers.
Believe this or not, the attorney said,
"Guys, if he tries to leave, shoot his tires out.
We can’t tell you anything. Stop it. Don’t let him leave."
So there was something very urgent on their minds.
Well, about, I don’t know, 7:30 or 8 in the morning,
Gacy gets up.
He jumps up off this couch, stares straight ahead.
He had this wild man look in his eyes,
flung the door open, jumped in his car and took off.
We were in hot pursuit on foot to get to our cars
so we could follow him and not lose him.
His first stop was a gas station, a Shell station.
Goes into the gas station, and he’s double handshaking
and showing some emotion with the owner.
Gacy didn’t do that kind of thing,
so that was kind of strange.
It really looks almost like he’s saying his last goodbyes,
and at one point, he pulls out a ...
we could see from a distance,
it looked like a bag of marijuana,
and put it in the pocket of this young man,
the attendant. And again, he took off like a madman.
We decided Mike would follow Gacy,
and I would go in the gas station.
As soon as I walked in the gas station,
this kid took the marijuana out of his pocket
and just about threw it at me and said,
"Hey, I didn’t buy this. I didn’t ask for it.
He just gave it to me. He says he’s given his stuff away."
We went from the gas station.
We didn’t know where we were going.
We ended up at David Cram’s house.
So he pulls up. He goes into Cram’s house.
They both come out. David Cram comes over to me
and asks if it’s all right if he drives Gacy’s car.
I said, "I don’t care if you’ve got a driver’s license.
Don’t drive like an idiot,
and you won’t have any problem from us."
So they drive from Cram’s house over to Di Leo’s restaurant
in the Chicago area, and Gacy goes in,
and then all of a sudden Cram jumps out of his car
and comes over to us and says,
"Gacy just told me he killed 33 kids."
I realized the magnitude of this case at that point,
and Cram is saying that Gacy is going to try to kill himself.
He was going to go to his father’s grave at a cemetery,
and he was going to commit suicide.
But Dave obviously had a bag of marijuana,
so okay, let’s just take him on a marijuana
and see what happens from there.
I grab Gacy. I pull him out of the car
and throw him up against the trunk,
and pretty much yell at him that he’s under arrest,
and that was just for the marijuana,
and we knew that the investigators were seeking
a second search warrant.
And we put handcuffs on him and put him
in the back of our car and drove to the station,
and shortly after being at the station,
Gacy complained of chest pains,
so they took him to the emergency room
at the Holy Family hospital. They told him at the hospital,
just give him the whole screening.
Do whatever you got to do.
They wanted him there as long as they could
until they got executed on the second search warrant.
Mike stays back at the station,
and I go up, sit with Gacy,
and not long after we were there, I said,
"Hey, there’s a call for you, Dave," so I got on the phone.
It was Captain Kozenczak over at Gacy’s house, and he said,
"Hey, we just executed the second search warrant.
We went in the crawl space,
and the very first shovel of dirt that we dug into,
we found bones down there, human remains."
So at that point is when I arrested Gacy for murder.
Gacy had been a successful building contractor
at the time of the discovery.
... volunteer at the local Jaycees
who entertained children as Pogo the Clown.
He is charged with murder.
... killed as many as 32 teenage boys.
This grim investigation is expected to last ...
It’s almost a sense of being in shock and disappointment.
We were so hopeful that somehow Rob Piest
would be found alive somewhere,
but at this point, we realized that wasn’t going to happen.
Certainly there was a cost of Gacy’s early release
from prison at Anamosa
because had he done his full sentence,
he would have been in prison until ’78.
The crimes never would have happened,
and there would have been a lot less people
that would have been affected by John Wayne Gacy.
Gacy’s dark secrets, the fact that this was a house of death,
a house of horror, was not known.
They have found the decomposed remains
in the dirt crawl space underneath Gacy’s house.
They expect to find many more.
The minute authorities realized
that there were bodies buried
and they started prying up the floorboards,
that’s when the secrets of John Wayne Gacy
started to pour out of that house.