Now, when the search warrants were effected in your case,
they did find an awful lot in the crawl space of your home.
Did they not?
Well, yeah. I had offered to sell them the house
because I thought there was nothing down in the crawl space.
Yeah.
I had never had any qualms about them
going down in the crawl space. They were going to go ...
Well, how many bodies were actually located
on the property and where?
To my understanding, there was a total of 29 bodies
or 28 bodies were found on the property,
26, 27 of them under the house.
And the rest? One was under the driveway.
One was under the garage. So that makes a total of 29.
Okay. Now, from the standpoint of the arrest,
when you were arrested in this matter, this was ...
It snowballed. It snowballed, okay.
What was the date of that arrest, do you recall?
December 22nd, 1978 is when I was arrested.
I was driving home from college
for Christmas break,
and I just kept hearing about all this on the news.
I never ever thought of my brother.
They found two more bodies today in Des Plaines,
Illinois in the house of a 36-year-old
convicted sex offender,
and this miserable search will go on.
It never even came into my head
that my brother would be a part of that.
When I got home, and I walked in the door, my mom says,
"I have something to tell you," and then I knew.
That’s all she had to say. I knew that she was
going to tell me he is somehow connected to this.
We grew up in Chicago. We moved in 1973 to Des Plaines.
I was the fourth child out of five of us.
I had all brothers.
My brother John was 3 years older than me.
To me, he was adventurous.
He was older and driving, and I was a young kid.
He was 19 years old.
What I remember about his disappearance is,
he didn’t show up for work on Friday, and it was payday.
The people he worked with got concerned.
So they went over to his apartment
and had to call the police in order to let them in,
at which time they called my mom.
His place was not ransacked or anything.
And it was like, "Oh, well, he’s not here."
I remember them basically saying that he left town.
When my brother disappeared, his car disappeared.
The police convinced my mom that,
"Oh, he just went away for the weekend.
He’s 19 years old. You got to let your child go."
As time went on, you pray that he’s still alive
and he’s happy somewhere.
It was the September after he had first disappeared.
My brother’s 1971 Plymouth Satellite
was seen stealing gas. It had my brother’s plates.
It gave you hope again that, "Oh, well,
maybe he is out there," that he is alive.
My mom knew enough about the Chicago police
and how they worked.
She would call them all the time,
but it just was a kid that disappeared,
and that was the attitude of the police.
What made this whole case blow up
is Rob Piest disappeared from Des Plaines.
Friends and relatives of missing teenage boys
have been calling from all over the country
to learn more about this bizarre crime.
It was Robert Piest’s disappearance on December 11th
that led police to the home of the suburban contractor.
At that point, the only name we knew was Rob Piest.
We only had one name, but I also had information
that this was just the latest of many, many victims.
Officially, the word came out that night
that there was one body buried in the basement.
Days later, the number grew and grew and grew.
The key was, where’s the suspect?
Once we found the bones,
Gacy was charged with one homicide,
one count of homicide.
He’s actually smiling in his mugshot.
That was strange to me.
And so he was detained from then on.
We bring Gacy into the interview room.
Gacy says, "I’m going to give it all up.
I’m ready to give you a detailed confession."
I had read him his Miranda Rights,
and I started asking Gacy some questions then,
and I got into more of a monologue by Gacy.
It wasn’t a interrogation so much.
He just started telling us things and rambling on about it.
He told us that he had buried 27 young men in his crawl space.
He did bury a couple of the kids in his backyard,
and then he threw the remaining in the Des Plaines River.
It was just a tough thing to listen to,
the way he talked about how he killed everybody.
He started out with Rob Piest, what happened with Rob,
and he said he was just getting ready to leave the pharmacy
when Rob Piest came out to his car and said,
"Hey, I understand that you might be looking for some help,"
and Gacy says, "Yeah, actually, why don’t you hop in
and fill out a quick application?
And I’ll give you a call." So he jumps in the car with Gacy
while his mom is out front waiting for him,
and Gacy fumbles around with the paperwork, and he says,
"Jeez, doggone it, I must’ve left the stuff at home."
He says, "I just live down the block here.
If you want, come on with me,"
and Piest says, "Well, my ma is out front."
He says, "I’ll get you back right away.
Don’t worry about it."
So kind of reluctantly, Piest says,
"Okay, let’s go do a quick application."
So Gacy drives from Nisson Pharmacy with Rob Piest,
willingly, to his house and go in his house,
and Gacy starts talking to him about entertaining kids
as a clown and stuff like that.
He says, "Yeah, I got all these cool tricks."
He says, "I’ll show you,"
and he puts a pair of handcuffs on himself, Gacy does,
and struggles with the handcuffs a little bit,
and then he turns around,
and he’s got the handcuffs dangling,
and Piest says, "Wow. That’s cool. How’d you do that?"
And he says, "Easy. Put them on. I’ll show you how to do it."
So Piest actually handcuffed himself,
so Piest struggles and struggles and struggles,
and he says, "I don’t know how to get out of these things.
What’s the trick?"
And he says, "I reached in my pocket,
and I pulled out the key," and I said,
’The trick is, you got to have the key,’"
and he says, "Once I got Piest shackled,
he was pretty much mine at that point."
Gacy just talked so matter-of-factly
about what he did to Rob Piest,
got into great graphic detail of the handcuff trick
and a rope trick, disrobing him and performing oral sex on him.
He was pretty proud of that rope trick.
He thought it was kind of ingenious.
He’d put a rope around their neck,
tie a little knot right at the neck,
and then a little bit later, he would put another knot,
and he’d have a stick, maybe 8, 10 inches long,
and he would wedge the stick between the front shoulder
and the back of the head, and he would start twisting it,
and, of course, twisting, and it would just get tight
and eventually strangle them.
The rope trick is ...
The way I describe the rope trick is,
it’s nothing more than a tourniquet.
Mm-hmm.
And I had explained it to them.
I even demonstrated it to them. It would cut off the air.
So if you’re going to kill somebody,
you just put it on their neck and twist it three times
or four times or whatever until the person stopped moving.
So he was doing this to Rob Piest
and twisting and twisting it,
and he did it maybe three or four times,
and he got a phone call.
And he went to answer the phone, and when he came back,
Rob Piest was dead, fallen onto the ground.
The family was driving around the neighborhoods
and so forth that evening after
when his mother came and couldn’t find him,
and I think Rob was already done by that time.
He was already dead.
Throughout the confession,
Gacy pretty much showed no emotion at all.
At the conclusion of the interview,
we stepped out and his attorney,
Sam Amirante was waiting in the lobby.
So we briefed him on the confession
and both Gacy and his attorneys agreed to have Gacy
do a second confession with the state’s attorneys
there, the police officers and his attorneys.
Well, there had to be 15 people crammed
into a little interview room,
so I’m just watching everyone else with their jaws open.
He had all of us on the edge of our seats,
and John knew it, and this was going to be his last hurrah.
We’re his last audience. He’s lost everyone else,
so he’s going to try to impress us with his horrific acts.
It was a nightmare.
Sam Amirante, his criminal attorney,
called me, and he told me
that John had been arrested for suspicion of murder.
Of course, 2 o’clock in the morning,
you’re not even awake, and you’re hearing this,
and I said to Sam, I said, "Can I talk to him?"
He said, "For just a minute," and so he put him on the phone.
I said, "John, did you kill somebody?"
And he uttered, "Uh-huh." He didn’t say, "Yes,"
but that’s exactly how he uttered it.
And, of course, at this point, we thought it was a person.
We didn’t learn until everybody else
did about the numerous amounts of bodies
that were under the house.
When I watched the news, I just cried.
This afternoon, Gacy was charged
with murdering Robert Piest. At the hearing, police said
Gacy has confessed to the Piest murder.
Meanwhile, investigators have started
to dismantle Gacy’s house
and garage as they continue to search for other bodies
in this quiet suburban neighborhood.
By the next day, the 22nd of December,
it was a feeding frenzy.
Reporters every step of the way, cameras all over the street,
authorities going in and out of the house.
It was a mob scene.
It was one of the biggest stories Chicago had ever seen.
People were glued to their screens watching our coverage.
Here’s what it looked like last night when we were here
starting at about 11 o’clock as the search was beginning.
Why were you here? No comment.
We can’t say anything.
You can’t say anything about why you were here
for a couple hours tonight? No, we can’t.
State’s attorney’s office advised us not to say anything.
State attorney’s office advised you not to say anything.
You’ve been here for a couple hours,
and they say you can’t say anything?
I got to go now. We blocked off the street
around the sides of the house,
and there was people there every morning.
It was cold, and there was people just standing around,
three, four, five deep, couple hundred people
that were just watching the house.
I pretty much stayed at the house over there digging.
It was my job to do so.
You just go on, and you keep digging, keep going.
Those poor guys down there, are using, literally,
their 10 fingers, literally, using their 10 fingers,
and trying to exhume the body because there’s always
a possibility of loss of trace evidence.
So you can’t use a shovel or something like that.
And with that, the medical examiner disappeared
into what he called the incredible maze
that was a crawl space and, more recently,
has been a mass grave under John Gacy’s home.
Every day, we’d probably come up with a couple,
two or three bodies,
and then on a good day maybe four.
Once you got your body completely dug out,
we’d video-tape it.
Recording at the north wall at the front door, upper level,
the remains of body number five are found.
Say this was body such and such,
dug up by such and such,
and then he’d be put in a body bag and taken out,
and then you’d keep going for your next one.
We’d go in there do the same thing every day.
About 4:30 in the afternoon
when we started bringing the body bags out,
the cameras would roll at that point,
and that’s when the local news went on,
and they could lead the story with it.
Everybody got their shots? Everything got quiet,
and you could hear people say, "Okay, today, three more.
That’s" ... They were counting them.
People were out there in the snow,
chanting like at a football game,
the number of body bags being carried into a squad roller
to be driven to the morgue,
like they were counting points in the end zone.
It had turned into a circus,
an amazing spectacle to this reporter,
people bringing brown bag lunches,
mothers lifting up small children,
so they could see the sheriff’s officers
dumping loads of mud on the driveway,
mud that had been part of a grave,
and when the people got tired of looking at the house
they could take pictures of each other.
"See? I was there, where they found the bodies."
During the time that we’re recovering bodies,
we don’t find Rob Piest there.
So his parents, his sister and brother,
they still didn’t have his body.
Since Robert Piest’s only been gone for 10 days,
this can’t be him because these are bones already.
And so at that particular point, go back to Gacy.
I certainly never handled anybody else like John Gacy
or that magnitude of a case,
but I went back to the conversation of Rob Piest,
and we didn’t have a body, and it was around Christmas,
and we had been told Gacy was in an Iowa prison
when his father died. That upset him a lot.
So I brought that up to Gacy.
I said, "Remember when your father died?
Well, we’ve got a family now in Des Plaines
who would like to be able to spend
Christmas having closure on where their boy is
and where the body is."
And he kind of hemmed a little bit, and I said,
"Well, is he aboveground? Where’s he at?"
He said, "Well, it’s neither."
And you took him where? Out on the I-55 bridge.
And that’s where ... How was he then taken
from the car and placed into the river?
Just opened up the trunk and dumped him in
Uh-huh.
There was no big special deal out of it.
Okay. Yeah.
We asked John, "Why? Why the river?
You had a perfect thing going on here."
He said, "Well, there was no room left in the crawl space,"
so he drove to the river.
The bridge from which he threw the body
was pretty high, and the current got pretty fast.
It just kept moving and moving and moving.
And so I didn’t really have great confidence
that we would be able to find Rob Piest’s body.
Thirty-six-year-old John Gacy,
a convicted sex offender, has already been charged
with the murder of 15-year-old Robert Piest.
Police are searching a river for his body.
By that point, we now know that Gacy was talking,
and he’s laying out exactly where those bodies were buried.
Gacy, for some reason, took a liking to me.
I had blond hair at the time and certainly a lot younger,
but we had a good relationship. And they got a hold of us
and said that Gacy wanted to talk to Larry and I.
So Albrecht and I walked back into the cell block
and try and get more information.
Gacy called the crawl space, "the burial grounds,"
and I said, "I haven’t been in your crawl space.
Can you kind of tell me where things are?"
He said "Well, give me a piece of paper,"
and the only thing we had
was a pink copy of his prisoner property receipt,
and he drew a diagram a rectangular shape of the house,
which was the crawl space, and inside it,
he put another rectangle and with an X on it,
and he said, "That’s where the first one was buried."
Then he put an N on top.
And I said, "What’s that?" He said, "That’s north."
And then he started to make smaller rectangles.
Some would have numbers in them.
These numbers denoted how many people were buried
in a particular grave or trench.
He went all the way around the perimeter of the house
making these various notations where bodies were buried,
and as soon as he got done with it,
I reached in and grabbed it from him
because I wanted to have that as evidence, and it was amazing.
His recollection of where those bodies were
and where they actually
did find the bodies was right on the money.
Police investigators using sledgehammers, axes and chain
saws gutted John Gacy’s suburban Chicago home today.
They have found bodies every place Gacy told them to look.
The murder suspect has allegedly told police
they will find the remains of 20 more young men and boys here.
I think everybody was numb at that time.
It wasn’t that we didn’t expect to find bones.
It was just in the number of bones.
There were 29 bodies that were at the house,
27 in the crawl space and one under the barbecue pit
and one under the walkway to the garage.
I can’t tell you how I acted when I saw
that they were under that house. I stood there, like, frozen.
I was always on him about the smell in the house.
I couldn’t stand it. It smelled like dead rats.
And I used to tell him, I said,
"You really got to get somebody or do something.
There must be something dead under the house."
He said there, "There isn’t anything dead under the" ...
I said, “Yes, there is.
I can smell it, and I know the smell.
That’s something dead under there."
I’m like, "I was right, there were dead things
under that house." That just freaked me out.
And the youngest girl had her bedroom
right there where that crawl space was.
I couldn’t get down in the crawl space that easy,
and then I had a bum back to begin with.
You got to crawl on your belly to move around
in the crawl space. There is no way
that I could have done any of the digging down there.
I had enough trouble just getting down there.
Gacy asked us about whether two kids that worked for him,
Mike Rossi and David Cram, were at the station,
and we said, "No."
And he said, "Well, because they were involved,"
and we said, "Well, what do you mean they were involved?
They were involved with the killings?"
And he says,
"No, but they dug the trenches in the crawl space for me,"
and, "Well, did they know what the trenches were for?"
And his answer was, "They never said anything,
but if they didn’t know what was down there,
they were ... stupid."
Gacy told the boys to go down and dig some shallow trenches
so that he could take care of some of the plumbing problems
that were down there.
Later on, he would have them spread the lime
to get rid of any of the smell,
and that’s really why they claim that they were digging.
He was paying them enough money that, in fact,
he was, shall I say, attractive to them.
That’s kind of why they stuck with him.
His two loyal workers, Cram and Rossi,
they were tough guys, you know, street smart,
and they were getting property from young kids
who never-appeared again,
property that these young victims
had that Gacy was giving to them.
When we were on the scene,
we saw Officer Rafael Tovar taking Rossi
in and out of the house.
I asked my cameraman to get a shot of him
because I was curious. "Who is this kid?"
As the investigation wore on,
the name Rossi went from Gacy confidante,
friend, lover to informant by police.
We went to Mike Rossi’s house
because we wanted to interview him some more,
and we got there.
His wife told us he was still at work,
and she invited us to wait for him, and I asked her,
"What kind of car does he drive? I’ll look out the window",
and she told us it’s a white Plymouth.
I says, "Okay, fine." And a little bit later
while looking through some of the missing persons reports,
I noticed that John Szyc’s car was a white Plymouth Satellite.
It was one of the lights in the cartoons that go on,
I said, "Darn, that was the same color."
Then talking to Mike Rossi,
we found out that he’d gotten the car from John Gacy,
so we were able to tie John Szyc to Gacy in that manner.
John Szyc was not a runaway. He was a working kid
and somehow or other wound up on the bad side of Gacy.
I spoke to members of John Szyc’s family.
They’d been pleading with Chicago Police
to help them find their missing son.
Police had come back to the family and said,
"We have evidence that he’s alive
and just simply gone."
So for 2 years, that’s all the family had to go on.
They worked the John Szyc case,
but they took an easy way out in closing the case.
Mike Rossi apparently went up to get gas one day
and did the fill-and-run, took off without paying.
They had the license plate number,
so when the report was written,
it got channeled over to the investigator
that was doing the John Szyc missing persons report.
Authorities started to question that.
Gacy assured them, "Oh, no, no, no, no.
Szyc needed money. I had the car because he sold it to me,
so he could get money to leave town."
Gacy tells them, "John’s not around here.
I haven’t seen him in months. He ran away."
The police believed Gacy’s story.
In fact, John Gacy himself was the one who determined
that John Szyc was a runaway.
The Szyc family provided me with a letter
from the Chicago police department
which I quoted in one of my stories.
"Dear Mr. and Mrs. Szyc, I was unable to locate your son,
but I did learn that he sold his auto in February of 1977
and told the buyer that he needed the money to leave town."
The investigator told the Szyc family,
"Well, he must be alive.
Maybe he’s just mad at you or whatever."
So that was how he closed the case.
I used to have dreams that I would see him,
and either he would run the opposite way
or would just ignore me.
So in your head, you’re thinking that he disappeared because,
for whatever reason, he didn’t want to be a part of the family.
I didn’t see my brother’s car again until on the news
when they were at Gacy’s house.
At that point, we’re watching the news every day.
You see the car,
and then you notice they mentioned a ring.
With the initials that were in it,
I already knew that it was his.
So it all started to add up a little bit.
There were just things that definitely put him there.
It was just a matter of time.
When the police officer ... Sorry.
When the police officers come to tell you
that he was positively identified,
it sort of, you know, changes everything in your life
because then you know he’s not coming home.
You get closure by knowing it had nothing to do with us.
He got in with the wrong guy at the wrong time,
and this is what happened.
You never become numb to the scene of a stretcher carried
by four men with a white shrouded body
lying on top of it. I think the one common thread
that runs through all the interviews
with the families of the victims is,
"We tried to tell the police.
We tried to tell them, but they weren’t listening."
As I continue my research, I’m getting angrier and angrier
as to why somebody didn’t stop this man
before he started killing young men and boys in Chicago.
Gacy’s name came up
in some missing person reports in Chicago,
and Gacy had some kind of contact with the victims,
whether they were working for him,
or they went to talk to him about a job
or whatever it may be.
Gregory Godzik, let’s see, number four.
Gregory Godzik had come to work for me in,
according to this, 1976.
He came to us through Taft High School through a program.
He had worked for Republic Lumber Company,
and then he came to work for us.
My brother Gregory was 17 in 1976,
and he was a senior at Taft High School.
We had a very simple family.
We had dinner together every night.
Those times were very simple, very simple life.
Senior year, you had an option to have a part-time job
but still getting school credit,
and he decided to get a job at this Republic Lumber making,
I think, $2.25 an hour. I remember him coming home,
and he said there was a man that came in.
"His name was Gacy, and he wants to give me a job,"
making $5 an hour.
If somebody’s dangling $5 an hour cash versus $2.25,
a kid at 17 is going to say,
"Well, I’m going to go this route versus that route."
He thought Gacy offered him a future.
It was December 11th, a Saturday night.
He was supposed to go to Gacy’s house to pick up a paycheck.
The next morning, my mother woke up and said,
"Do you know where your brother is?"
When he’d come home, he’d give my mother a kiss.
And that night when he did not come home,
my mother knew there was something wrong.
My mother felt immediately, "This isn’t normal.
Your brother’s missing." She called the Chicago Police.
My mom talked to a couple of police officers,
and they all said,
"Well, there’s really nothing we can do.
He has to be gone at least 72 hours,
but we’ll take the information."
Sunday, they found the car in a parking lot.
That was his pride and joy, his car,
and to find it unlocked, it was so out of character.
My mom told them where he was working,
but nothing was ever followed,that we know of.
Gregory Godzik, who worked for Gacy,
disappeared in December of 1976,
2 years before bodies were discovered under Gacy’s home.
I talked to Greg Godzik’s mother, Eugenia,
and she told me she had gone and confronted Gacy directly.
I talked to him.
I called him up to find out if my Gregory called,
and he said he did and that he was going to come to work,
and I says, "Well, did he ever come?"
and he says, "No."
And I says, "How do you know it was Gregory?"
And he says because he had him on his tape,
and I asked him if he could play it back.
He said, no, he erased it.
My mother had my brother’s time card.
He says, "Can I have that time card?"
And my mother said, "No, I’m going to hold on to this."
I do remember her saying, "He’s kind of an odd man."
She felt that he probably could have gave more information
but was too elusive.
He kind of brushed her off. She felt odd.
Eugenia Godzik told me that she both confronted Gacy
and went to the police.
Did you ever tell the police
about your conversation with John Gacy?
Yes, I’m sure I did.
And that was the last she heard from Gacy,
and she got nowhere with police either.
Mrs. Godzick was very convincing
that her son was not a runaway.
But once again, Gacy was able to convince the police
that he didn’t really have any further involvement with Godzik.
My father, his mode was: stay at home, say the rosary,
and my mother kept saying, "Oh, the hell with that.
I’m going to go do the footwork."
In the meantime, I did have at least
two of my girlfriends’ dads looking into it.
The one that I called right away,
he was a homicide police officer.
I remember talking to my girlfriend, and she said,
"Oh, my dad is always saying it’s tops on his list."
When the Robert Piest story broke out 2 years
after my brother had disappeared,
my mother said, "Oh, my god.
Gacy, that’s the man that your brother worked for.
This could be it." Shortly after that,
we got a phone call from my girlfriend’s dad,
He said, "There’s a case breaking.
It’s bigger than you can ever imagine,
and there’s many, many bodies. Be prepared."
Gregory was 17 years old when he disappeared 2 years ago.
He had worked part-time for Gacy
and was allegedly last seen with Gacy the night he disappeared.
Nevertheless, Gregory’s mother still hopes he’s alive.
I really do want to believe that.
Gregory said that he was working around Gacy’s house
digging trenches around his home,
and eventually it ended up
that they were digging their own graves.
The 2 years that it took, there were so many opportunities
for this to end up better than what it was.
Yes, my brother would’ve been a victim,
but there would’ve been so many more young men saved.
I feel sorry for those other families
that had to go through the same thing.
Ever family I spoke to said they were reassured by police
that they were working on it,
but in none of the cases did the police come up with any answers,
explanations or evidence.
In Chicago, clout was everything,
and the victims were voiceless and faceless and cloutless,
young boys and men, hitchhiking, looking for work,
looking for fun, being approached
by this roly-poly man who would promise them money,
promise them jobs and give them something else.
Gacy never once showed any type of remorse or regret
in what he did. He always blamed the kids.
"They did this for money."
Whether it was for a job or for sex,
whatever, it was never his fault at all.
I am not the monster image that’s been portrayed of me,
and the only way you can make a monster image
is to make it look like I stalked the streets
and picked up altar boys off the street.
They want to make them look like innocent babes in the woods,
and I was swatting them like flies.
Gacy would tell us that he had other kids
that he had picked up
and had sexual relations with but didn’t kill them all.
He had this dark Oldsmobile with a spotlight on it,
and a lot of people thought it was a squad car.
A young kid 16, 17,
18 years old some guy pulls next to him with a squad car,
it looks like,
they’re going to do what this guy tells him to do.
Once he got in the car back to his house,
Gacy determined whether they’re going to live or die.
My encounters were always by happenchance.
If you pull up to a stoplight,
and there’s somebody standing there waiting for a bus,
if you give them a ride, and you ask them whether,
"You get into anything,
or you want drugs or something like that?"
that’s how it happened, always happenchance encounters.
I talked to a number of young men
who had been approached and propositioned by Gacy.
I talked to some young men who’d escaped, barely,
the fate of most of his other victims.
One violent attack took place just 9 months before bodies
were discovered in his crawl space.
At the time Robert Piest went missing,
Gacy was actually out on bond on a charge of battery.
The victim was Jeffrey Rignall. He came forth.
We got the information from Rignall himself.
Jeffrey Rignall was the love of my life.
Jeff and I were together for 27 years.
It’s very hard to find somebody special.
You’ll know when you find one.
And that’s exactly what Jeff was, a special person.
All the problems started when he got abducted by John Wayne Gacy.
In 1978, right around the 20th of March, I got a phone call.
Jeff told me that he was abducted and almost killed.
Jeff said, "The guy rolled down the window and said,
’You want to smoke a joint?’" So Jeff got in the car.
The guy lit the joint up and passed it to him.
He was a clean-cut looking man,
and I got in the car with him,
and shortly after I got in the car with him,
he placed a rag over my face,
of which turned out to be chloroform.
He was unconscious.
Jeff would wake up every now, and then he would see something,
but he would only be there for a split second,
and then the rag would come over his face.
The next thing he knew, he was strapped down in a torture wood.
There were chains he said that were suspended from the ceiling
that held him up in the air.
So he was there being beaten, being raped, being chloroformed,
drugged, beaten again constantly.
After the attack, the abductor drove him back down to the area
that he was picked up at and left him there half-clothed,
only his pants on and nothing else.
When I first saw Jeff, he was distraught.
He was beat up, and he had burns from chloroform,
had a rope burn.
He was still bleeding from the backside.
Everything that could go wrong with your body
seemed to go wrong with him at this moment.
The police come to the hospital to interview Rignall,
and his story is very vague,
and he did not know where the house was
or what it looked like or anything,
and so it was a very minimalist police report,
and nothing transpired.
The police assumed that Jeff’s encounter with Gacy
was a consensual arrangement.
They had no clue of how to treat a gay rape of any sort
and did not even think that would be possible,
because they would figure that all sexual arrangements
between gay people were consensual,
which is definitely not the case.
Jeffrey Rignall filed a report,
but much to the shame of the police at that time,
they pretty much figured,
"Oh, it was one gay guy on another one,"
they didn’t really care
because they didn’t do very much of an investigation,
so Jeffrey decided he’d do his own investigation.
Jeff thought that that man could kill somebody.
He figured whatever he did to him,
he was going to do it to other people.
That’s why he wanted to catch him.
As soon as Jeff got out of the hospital,
we started looking for the car that picked Jeff up.
He noticed the license plate because he had to walk around it
in order to get to the car, and he could hear planes.
So he knew he was out somewhere in the vicinity of the airport.
Since the police took the matter very, very lightly,
and I felt that you know it wasn’t a light matter,
I rented a car and sat where I thought I was approximately,
waiting for his car to come by.
We went out every day we could, and then ...
This had been probably 3, 4 weeks?
Jeff looked up and he said, "That’s it! That’s the car!"
We saw the car go by, pulled in right in behind him,
kept a couple car lengths away from him.
You could see the license plate.
We took the license plate number,
identified the name and went back to the police.
They got his picture and did a photo array,
and he identified Gacy as the one that done it to him.
They called Jeff and told him that he was arrested.
And he said, "Good, where is he? Is he in jail?"
Says, "He’s out on bond."
He was released right away after posting a minor bond.
Now he’s out probably doing the same thing that he did to Jeff.
So we tried to get the charges on Gacy bumped up.
And the State’s Attorney said, "You can’t bump them up."
After all, it’s just another butt-fuck."
This grim investigation at John Gacy’s house
is expected to last for weeks, and when they finish here,
police plan to search other sites and drag a river
where Gacy allegedly told them he disposed of other bodies.
When we all saw the bodies coming out there,
Jeff just totally freaked out. He was manic, crazy,
yelling, screaming, throwing things around.
"See, I told you. I told you. They never believed me.
I told you. Why didn’t they believe me?"
He was totally upset.
I thought he was going to just have a total nervous breakdown
and be done, and eventually, he did calm down,
and then the next news had more bodies coming out.
And it just continued that way.
There were all kinds of victims,
and there was a good percentage
that were absolutely straight, suburban kids,
and there was certainly a good percentage
that were either homosexuals or even homosexual prostitutes.
Gacy told us that most of his victims,
as long as they didn’t pose a threat to him,
the vast majority of these people left, and left unharmed.
The victims who he perceived to be a threat,
either because of remorse that they showed
or trying to extort more money
or the threat of telling neighbors,
he said he would deal with them usually with the rope trick.
The fact that it appeared that many of the victims
were gay young men I think created a stigma.
Gay men in Chicago back in the ’70s
were still kind of an underclass,
and I think this might have been part of the reason
why Gacy was able to get away with what he did.
I think it affected the way it was reported
and the way it was treated by law enforcement.
It was a very difficult thing to report because I didn’t know
what the parents and family members of these young men knew.
Investigators tonight believe that many
if not most of his alleged victims
were either male prostitutes or other homosexuals.
They came to him either paid or looking for a good time
and got more than they bargained for.
The characterization of the victims was horrible.
They’re young people who were entitled
to the rest of their lives
to have something that they could live for,
and Gacy snuffed that out completely.
They shouldn’t have been portrayed like that
because there was no proof.
Robert Piest was a healthy, athletic young man
who never left home.
His mom was waiting for him around the corner.
The police went by what they were being told by Gacy.
They didn’t know who these people even were.
They had no idea if it was the senator’s kid or a runaway kid.
The reporters are doing the same thing.
The police told the reporters, "Nobody cares about them."
Whether it’s runaways, whether it’s drug ...
Who cares? They are still people.
And the Chicago police, who on many occasions could have
prevented the futures from happening, did nothing.
I recall reporting at the time
all of Gacy’s contacts with the Chicago Police Department.
John Gacy came into contact with authorities
more than half a dozen times, allegedly involved in crimes
ranging from kidnapping to rape and assault.
His name came up in connection with missing persons.
He was even linked to a theft
committed with the car of one of his victims.
I remember talking to the police superintendent at the time,
James O’Grady, and asking him, "What was going on here?
Why didn’t you see these signs? Why?
Why did you just kind of dismiss it and release him every time?"
and he was angry.
He thought that the detectives did not do their work.
He wouldn’t appear on camera to talk about it,
but the police superintendent of the time
was furious with the work of the detectives
who released Gacy time after time after time.
That’s where he’s the scariest.
He’s a person who got involved with charities,
got involved with politics,
did things that made him believable.
What’s scary about that is, someone in your neighborhood,
who you think is a good person,
they might just be another John Wayne Gacy.
John Wayne Gacy was a master manipulator.
He manipulated his victims. He manipulated authorities.
He lived to deceive. And after his arrest,
a whole new chapter of Gacy’s deception began.
The day that we arrested him, Gacy was already thinking
what his defense was going to be.
He looked up at me, and he said, "It’s never going to happen."
I says, "Well, what do you mean?"
And he says, "I’m never gonna spend a day in jail for this."