A number of ...
What, three or four psychiatrists
and psychologists interviewed you?
I had thirteen of them.
There was six for the defense and seven for the state.
Yeah. What was the ... The state’s doctor ...
... position of the defense psychiatrists?
What did they feel your problem was?
What did they come up with from the standpoint of ...
Border ... What the hell is it?
God, I can’t remember offhand.
Borderline personality, anti-social behavior.
I don’t see how anybody can be anti-social
when you were involved with the public as much as I was.
How about the multiple-personality issue?
Oh, the multiple personality
came out of Dr. Reifman and Hartman.
These two clowns from the the Cook County there,
they came to see me the first time.
I says, "You want to talk to John Wayne Gacy the politician,
the clown, the family man, or the businessman?"
The next day I see it in the newspaper:
"Gacy has four personalities."
Now it was a one-sided fight.
Man and machine against the wooden shell
of a 20-year-old bungalow.
As the roof and walls shattered, reporters and neighbors
became witness to what Sheriff’s Investigators had been probing
since a few days before Christmas.
The stark frame covering to a mass grave.
If you look closely,
you’ll see fluorescent orange markings on the cement walls
that surround the crawl space, now open to the rain.
Each marking indicates the spot where a body was disinterred.
Bulldozers have finished clearing what was once
the crawl space of the home. But ironically,
one boy whose body was not found on the Gacy property
led to the investigation: young Robert Piest.
We didn’t even have the body yet.
Robert Piest's body was still missing.
Even though we thought it was in the river, it was frozen over.
The undercurrent was so tough.
There was ice all over the place.
There was nothing to tell us where to look in the river,
whether it was near the bridge still
or whether it was all the way to the Mississippi.
There was nothing we could do
but wait until somebody found a body.
There were in total 29 bodies which came out of that house,
and three more were pulled from the river,
but 4 months after his disappearance,
Rob Piest was still unaccounted for.
Then another body was found downriver from the I-55 bridge.
The body of the 33rd suspected victim
of John Wayne Gacy was taken to the Cook County
morgue.
From what I heard, it was challenging to identify the body
because of the lapse of time
and the condition of him being in the water.
A team of dental experts from Cook and Will County
have identified the male white body
recovered from the Illinois River
this afternoon as that of missing Des Plaines
youth 15-year-old Robert Piest.
We had the last link, the 33rd body,
but it was also terrible sorrow because I had become
so close with the family that it was just heart-wrenching
even to tell them that the body had been found.
Rob Piest’s family was a very wonderful family,
and I think everybody who worked on the stories heart
goes out to them because of what they went through,
but I think it was his brother who said,
"Rob wanted to do something big, and if his disappearance
and the investigation of his disappearance
led to stopping this mad man from killing anyone else,
Rob would have accomplished what he wanted to."
We really feel that what happened was worthwhile
from the point that it hopefully put an end to something,
and now we’re gonna
try to continue what he couldn’t finish,
and hopefully, nothing will happen like this again.
I think I took it back to the courthouse
and was just more determined
that this guy was not about to get off scot-free.
This family was on my list for whom I had to work for.
In his confession,
Gacy admitted killing the young men
after having sex with them, then burying
most of the bodies under his house.
Gacy told authorities where these bodies were buried.
Gacy told authorities exactly who, why, where he found them,
a wealth of information, in fact most of the information,
since the victims couldn’t speak for themselves
and their families really didn’t know
for the most part anything about John Wayne Gacy.
We had to find out from Gacy himself.
And it was Gacy’s conversations,
confessions to law-enforcement authorities
that enabled us to find out exactly what happened.
Though it was also very difficult to know
when to believe anything John Gacy said.
I think one of headlines said
that I was a homosexual mass murderer,
confessed mass murderer.
There is no confession, and we offered ...
I offered as much as $10,000 if you can produce a confession
where I confessed to a crime.
The time that I was interrogated by the police officers,
there was no stenographer.
There was no tape recording. There was no videotaping.
Nothing was ever taken down. Yet everywhere you will see,
"There’s five confessions by John Wayne Gacy."
If I confessed to something, then why wasn’t it videotaped?
Why wasn’t it recorded?
Why wasn’t a stenographer brought in,
had it written up and had me sign it?
There is no confessions in this case.
First of all, it doesn’t have to be recorded.
It’s nice if they allow it. He wouldn’t allow it.
It’s even nicer if they allow it to be printed and then sign it,
and he wouldn’t do that either.
So what you have is a pure oral statement
witnessed by a number of police officers,
having written numerous and lengthy police reports
with word-for-word documentation of what he said.
Gacy confessed at least three times,
but so every time, it was something different.
He just kept trying to muddy the water.
Gacy’s confessions were a result of various meetings.
And Gacy’s story about what happened would change.
He was like a chameleon.
He would say one thing, and then the color would change.
He would say something else at another meeting.
You have to know my brother as my brother
and not the criminal to understand
that he was like two different people.
What sane person goes out and does something like this
and then talks about it and confesses to it,
then says he didn’t confess to it?
There are no clear answers to anything about this case.
It’s totally mind-boggling.
It’d be kind of like a Rubik’s Cube,
and you’re trying to get all the numbers together,
and one just doesn’t want to go. And that’s how this is.
Some of it just doesn’t make any sense at all.
I don’t think it was something he was born with.
I think something happened to him to have done this.
But I just can’t figure out how he could be
so smart and intelligent and then so evil.
The judge did rule today that Gacy confessed voluntarily
and that Des Plaines police had sufficient reason
to arrest him when they picked him up.
Both sides agree that there could be mountains of paperwork
before the trial begins.
Well, it was a huge case
for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.
We had the largest mass murderer
in the history of the United States,
and there was no doubt that the orders to be
were going to be that the death penalty should be sought.
Sam Amirante, Gacy’s attorney,
who took Gacy on right after entering private practice,
he was a political animal.
And the publicity wasn’t going to hurt his beginning practice.
It’s a tragic day
in the American criminal justice system,
in the American system of justice, period,
when a man cannot be brought into court to face his charges
because of publicity or security reasons
or any reason whatsoever.
He was going to find any,
anything that could try and interfere with the case
or anything that was beneficial to his client.
Some people would say, "You got 33 bodies.
There’s no way you can lose it, is there?"
And there were others that made me think, not twice,
but 100,000 times about how we could lose it.
The state’s attorney asked me to handle the case.
Very early on,
we have to start thinking about an insanity defense.
The evening that Gacy was under arrest
and made his oral statements, his lawyers show up.
Now, he had already made one statement
without the lawyers being present.
They, of course, haul him off and talk to him.
So now he makes
a series of statements with his attorneys present.
We got into the Piest discussion.
At this time, then he told us that he took the body,
slept with the body overnight, and we asked if ...
"Did you have sex with" ...
He says, "I didn’t, but Jack might have."
While Gacy was drawing his diagram,
I kept asking questions,
and I was writing down everything he was saying.
And when he was finished, he kind of looked at it
and said, "Jack drew this."
And I said, "Who’s Jack?" He said, "Jack Hanley."
He starts talking about the killer being Jack Hanley.
And he would talk about Jack Hanley killing these kids.
He’s trying to inject a multiple-personality disorder
into his insanity defense.
Manipulating, conning, what he always does.
During one of the search warrants that I wrote,
a book was found in Gacy’s attic.
It was a book on criminal law and procedure.
And I was told that the chapter on insanity defenses
was bookmarked.
So it dawned on me later, I was probably being exploited
so he could get it into evidence,
he was perhaps schizophrenic
or had some mental disease or defect.
And what better way to put an insanity defense out there
than by making a statement
and having some kid like me write every word
that he was saying down. And then I’m going to testify.
And I put his defense in for him.
Gacy's lawyers claim he is a hopelessly sick madman
who collected bodies and should be hospitalized for life.
Prosecutors claim Gacy is a rational man
who methodically planned the murders
and should be sentenced to death.
What I did not know about the insanity defense
is that in the state of Illinois,
when you plead not guilty by reason of insanity,
you’re saying that you committed the crime
but that you were insane at the time.
So it’s not a question of innocence or guilt anymore.
What they’re trying to do is, your whole trial now
becomes an insanity trial
where you’re to decide whether a person is sane or insane.
If somebody killed 33 people and buried 29 of them
under his house, you have to be crazy.
So that was a given going in.
And our job was going to be to show them the difference
between crazy and legally responsible.
When you’re preparing for a case like this,
you’re there early in the morning,
and it’s pretty dark by the time you leave,
no matter what season it is.
But you can look outside, and the seasons are passing.
But you’ve lost all track of what season it is
or whether you could be going to a baseball game
or whether you should be skiing or anything like that.
It’s a time warp.
John Wayne Gacy went on trial today in Chicago,
charged with the sex murders of 33 young men and boys.
Some relatives of the 22 identified victims
were in court for the opening statement.
My mom and my dad and I, all three of us went,
and my mother would go on the news
as often as she could to prove that these kids
were innocent young kids that didn’t deserve to die.
If he can kill all those children,
he should be dead too.
If the childrens’ life didn’t mean anything to him,
his life shouldn’t mean anything to this society,
and that’s just how I feel for everybody.
She believed that she had to be there
to stand up for my brother
because there were a lot of parents that didn’t come,
but there were a small group. We came every day.
At the time of the trial, I was working at a bank.
And back in those days,
the banks were closed on Wednesdays.
And so every Wednesday, I was at the trial.
It was very emotional, people sobbing,
Most of them were parents, and here they’re sitting there
listening to testimony on how their child got killed.
It’s nothing anybody wants to hear.
One witness fainted on the stand when the prosecution team
showed her a bracelet belonging to her son.
You have 2 years to prepare for this,
but I had no clue
that we had to go on the stand and identify Gacy.
That was very eerie to me, and my dad,
the day that he had to get up on the stand,
my father kept crying.
And my mother kept saying, "Buck up. You can do this."
And that was the first or the second day.
My dad never went again after that.
Early on, we were using this big exhibit
with three-sided frames
to put all the life and death photos
in while the victim’s parents or whatever were testifying.
And after we did five or six of them, the defense objected.
And the judge said, "All right. Here’s the rule.
State, if you’re talking about a particular victim,
and you want to use that board,
you can have that victim’s photo in the board but none others.
When you get to closing arguments,
you can do whatever you want." Fine, Judge.
So when we finished, we now have a board with 22 empty frames.
It looked to me like 22 open graves.
There were were some victims who were still not identified.
We went to trial on all 33 murders,
22 being identified at the time that we went to trial.
But some were nameless.
We also had the crawl-space opening sawed out
so we could use it as an exhibit in court.
It became one my biggest tools,
having that crawl-space opening available as an exhibit.
John Gacy sat erect in his chair today,
showing no apparent emotion as the prosecution team
continued to call parents of the alleged victims.
They were naming all the victims.
Their pictures were there, and they were going through
and putting a name to a face for the jury.
And when they got to my brother,
Gacy just kind of smirked and chuckled.
It’s like, he was silent the whole time,
but with my brother, he laughed.
It was very difficult to look at him,
but I remember seeing him sitting over there,
and I kept thinking,
"Boy, you really fooled so many people."
I think he thought he would never be caught.
Police told the court Gacy became friendly
with a police-surveillance team
that trailed him as part of the investigation
into the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Piest.
Gacy and I had this relationship
from the surveillance.
When you’re there and you’re testifying,
you’re impacted by what you’re saying,
and you’re seeing the reaction of this jury,
which affects you too
because you’re answering your questions honestly,
and when you're describing in detail what John Gacy did,
you can see their reaction.
One by one, the witnesses described how they found
the remains of the victims, some buried on top of others,
many with a piece of cloth in the mouth
and some with ropes tied around the necks.
We did learn that at the trial,
Gacy would do different things to the boys,
and one of the things they said
that he would do this trick with cuffs.
And I know it came out that he did something
with my brother’s arms, put cuffs on him or something,
and then he would put something on them, so they would pass out.
Gacy could’ve had two personalities, but I don’t care.
Let’s put it this way.
I believe somebody has to be insane to do what he did,
but that’s too bad. You still killed 33 victims.
And I don’t care if you were insane or not, he was wrong.
He was wrong to destroy 33 families.
What’s going on?
[ Chatter ]
It was becoming a media frenzy
for finding anything relating to it.
The "Chicago Tribune" was the first to track me down.
And they interviewed me at the time.
I believe the police read the the story in the "Tribune"
and brought me in for questioning.
And at some point, they told me that they would like me
to testify as a prosecution witness.
The victims who survived their encounters with Gacy
became a crucial piece of the case against him.
And they described indescribable events.
I came out, sat in, got sworn in, did what I did.
My testimony was that one time in 1976,
John came over in the evening.
I was closer to 17 at that point.
He knew my parents weren’t home.
And it was about 10:30 at night. He said he had some stag films.
That’s what they called them then.
And it was on a ...
He had a little projector with him.
He brought that in, and he set that up.
And then something he did ...
He knew I was a high school wrestler, so he said,
"Hey, come on, big wrestler guy."
He started wrestling around with me.
And at one point he gets a handcuff on one of my wrists.
I fought valiantly,
but he did get my other wrist in a handcuff.
And he knocked me down to the floor.
He unbuttoned my pants and pulled them down a little bit,
but not my underwear, and then he left the room.
And because I was fighting
when he was trying to get that second cuff on me,
I noticed that it wasn’t very tight.
So I was able to pull my hand, quite painfully, to get it.
I actually got out of the cuff,
and he came back into the room a couple minutes later.
And I hit him with a double-leg takedown, a wrestling move,
and just dropped him right to the floor.
I kept my weight on his back to keep him down.
And I reached in his pocket,
and I got the key to the handcuffs,
and I got his arms behind him, handcuffed him.
And he’s laying facedown on the floor,
handcuffed behind his back.
I let him stay there for a little while
and made sure he calmed down. And then I unhandcuffed him,
and to be perfectly honest with you,
I think I freaked him out a little bit.
And then he said a very unique thing.
He said, and I’ll quote. He goes,
"You’re the only one that not only got out of the handcuffs.
You got them on me."
Maybe part of my calm response to it was that at that point,
I had a very optimistic view of humanity.
He could’ve done something to overpower me
and continue on, but he didn’t.
And I thank God for that, certainly.
He gets this in his mind to do this,
and he’s going to rape you and kill you
and all these kind of things.
And then something happens that snaps him back
to the more normal personality.
I suppose in retrospect, getting out of the handcuffs,
the first thing I should’ve done is just run like hell.
A lot of the early witnesses had already testified
by the time I got there on 25th of February,
and I was about to testify against a guy
who, once upon a time, was one of my closest friends.
The young man who was scheduled to testify before me
was a kid from Waterloo that Gacy had molested.
Donald was in the same hotel I was.
He was literally right across the hall from me,
and I saw him sitting out there, waiting to testify,
and I knew immediately that he was just blind drunk,
just blind drunk and on the edge of hysteria.
I knew he had been drunk the night before
because I found him knocking on my door at 3:30 in the morning.
He was sitting out there in the hallway at the hotel,
crying like a baby. He didn't want to be there.
He didn't want to talk about this.
The witness appeared unable to answer
even the simplest questions.
Judge Garippo finally dismissed the witness
and ordered the jury to disregard what he had said.
The judge did the right thing by excusing him
because he was a survivor but not a complete survivor.
I have a feeling his life was just ...
It was an ongoing Gacy nightmare.
After we got out of prison in the summer of ’70,
I never physically laid eyes on John again
until I testified against him in 1980.
They brought me in to testify for two reasons.
Number one, I knew John Gacy, and I knew him well.
But, number two, I was already a recognized expert
in criminal justice by then.
I’d been working for the state for 8 years,
dealing with prison inmates every day.
By then, I knew about those 33 bodies.
For several years, I had a recurring nightmare
that a knock would come on my door
in the middle of the night,
and I’d open the door, and it would be John Gacy,
who’d whip a cord around my neck and start to strangle me.
I got on the witness stand, and John is sitting there,
looking at me the whole time.
John’s sitting there, staring at me.
And I’m looking right back at him
because that’s how you deal with that kind of thing.
If you have to face fear, the best way to deal with fear
is to grab it and hold it until it’s not scary anymore.
After I got off the witness stand,
I did what I think every grown man would like
to be able to do now and then. I went home to see my mother.
And I vividly remember saying to her that he looked so ordinary.
And my mother looked me in the eye and she said,
"Who ever told you the devil was ugly?"
John, how about Tim McCoy, the last one of the five
you say you had personal knowledge of?
Tim McCoy, even though he’s the last one,
he’s the first one.
He’s the first one actually? Right.
The first of the 33?
Tim McCoy was the first one,
and Tim McCoy’s name wasn’t put on him until 1988.
Prior to that, he was known as unknown number nine.
Uh-huh.
And he was buried by me in the crawl space.
Uh-huh.
That’s the only knowledge that I have of it.
What was the circumstances of that?
He was killed in the house in self-defense.
And who killed him then? I stabbed him.
Yeah, and it was ... Initially, it was self-defense?
Why? Was he in the process of assaulting you or what?
He was coming at me with a knife.
Mm-hmm.
I just took the knife away and twisted it in his hand,
and that is what killed him. So ...
At that point,
you yourself did bury him then in the crawl space?
Right, and if you notice, he’s under concrete.
Did you bury any of the others in the crawl space?
No. I had nothing ... I had no knowledge of them.
Well, why is it that your first one is there
and then twentysome others are buried down there as well?
Did somebody know that you had done this with the first one,
giving them the idea?
More than likely when drinking
and getting high with the others, yeah.
Admitting it to them.
So you feel others then followed your suit
in using this as a burial ground?
Without a doubt. Yeah.
Since the beginning, there has been speculation
that Gacy had an accomplice, and today for the first time,
it was revealed that Gacy told a psychiatrist
that someone besides himself knew the dead bodies
were buried under the house.
At the beginning, authorities were very,
very interested in others who might have been accomplices,
procurers or enablers or assistants.
Michael Rossi and David Cram would dig trenches down
in the crawl space. And Gacy did say that these boys
should’ve have known what they were doing.
He told them not to dig in a certain area.
That certain area was where Gacy had buried a body,
and Gacy said he became very, very angry with them
for getting too close to that area.
John Gacy was a liar, so anything he said,
you had to take with a grain of salt.
The investigators' gut feeling was that
they might’ve been knowing a lot more than they were letting on,
but they grilled them constantly.
They corroborated things, and the bottom line was,
no, they wound up as state witnesses.
They were the ones who could put the description
of the crawl space.
They’re the ones who could say, "Yes, this is what we did,
and we did it because he paid us to do it.
This is why we dug the trenches.
This is why we put the lime on there,"
and those are important things to get before a jury.
And we just thought it outweighed any doubt
that they may give the jury
that they weren’t telling the truth about that.
When those two young men, Michael Rossi and David Cram,
wound up testifying against Gacy,
Vivian Rosenberg was our reporter at the trial.
She covered it.
David Cram, 22, today’s star witness was a favorite
and steady employee of John Gacy who lived with him for a month.
It was when Cram demonstrated how he kneeled to dig
two trenches in Gacy’s crawl space
that some jurors stood up for a better look.
In the center of the courtroom floor,
the crawl-space entrance, taken from Gacy’s home.
Cram spoke of the dirt mounds
sitting nearby as he dug for 4 or 5 hours.
He thought it was a plumbing project.
Cram was able to talk about conversations with Gacy
and that he knew where he wanted things dug.
All of that goes toward showing that
somebody was doing something sane at that time.
In later testimony, Cram took the Fifth Amendment
several times as both defense and prosecution asked him
if he ever had sex with John Gacy.
The defendant kept his eyes on the youth all the time, smiling.
Witness number two, Michael Rossi,
was called late Tuesday afternoon.
He said he moved in with John Gacy
when David Cram moved out.
He said Gacy ordered him to pour hundreds of pounds of lime
in the crawl space to get rid of what Gacy called the foul odor.
Rossi and Gacy seemed to have
kind of a father-son relationship,
and later I found out police documented
Rossi admitting to a sexual relationship with Gacy,
but Rossi then denied it on the stand.
Rossi denied that he had any involvement
with the murders.
I didn’t necessarily believe Rossi from the get-go.
But he lawyered up right away.
He was not cooperative with us at any time,
to be honest with you. And it took quite a while
to convince his side that he should testify.
Rossi's legal representation alone
was a newsworthy part of his courtroom appearance.
Rossi was accompanied into court
by former Cook County State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan.
Ed Hanrahan was a former Cook County State’s Attorney
who was a prominent name in the Democratic party.
I thought that it was odd.
It would seem like a kid from the northwest side
to get one of the most prominent names
in the legal circles in Chicago as his attorney was unusual.
There wasn’t a whole lot in the press about Michael Rossi,
other than he was the owner of my brother’s car.
Then he shows up to court with the best lawyer money can buy.
Rossi was involved in a slip-up Gacy made,
taking victim John Szyc’s car
and transferring the title over to Rossi.
I never heard the name Mike Rossi.
It wasn’t like he was a friend of my brother’s or anything,
so it’s like, "Well, why does this guy have my brother’s car?"
It just didn’t make sense. If he bought the car from him,
he should have at least known him a little bit.
The car was supposedly sold to Gacy.
Gacy then sold the car to Mike Rossi,
so that would’ve, quote,
explained how Mike Rossi had no clue who my brother was.
Michael Rossi was driving
the car of one of Gacy’s victims,
and Gacy said that he told the young man,
"The last owner of this car is dead."
I just want to highlight on John Szyc.
They want to make such an issue over John Szyc
and his disappearance.
I think he was killed for his car, personally.
And your personal knowledge of the Szyc case, then, is ...
My personal knowledge of the Szyc case
is that I had come home,
and Szyc and Rossi were at the house.
I had a few drinks. I went to bed.
Went I woke up the next morning, Rossi was sleeping on the couch,
and Szyc was dead on the floor.
I went about my own business, and he was gone later on.
And where did he go? Where did he end up?
I assume he ended up in the crawl space.
Did you see him being transported down there?
No, wasn’t present, didn’t do the transporting.
But when he was dead, he was dead on the floor?
He was dead on the floor, yes, in the hallway.
Did you have a conversation with anybody about that?
No. In other words, I just kept my mouth shut
because I didn’t want to get involved.
Mm-hmm.
My idea was to just stay out of it.
Mm-hmm.
John Wayne Gacy was a pathological liar.
If Rossi and Cram were involved in the murders,
then Gacy would’ve told us that up front
if he thought it would help him. Both of them denied
being part of the scheme to kill or bury bodies.
But I would have to think that they had reason to suspect
they were in the presence of evil
and doing something that they shouldn’t be doing.
I suspect that they knew more than they were letting on.
I think Gacy killed them. There’s no doubt there.
I’m not questioning that.
But I think he had assistance in burying them.
He could barely fit down there himself.
If he had to have somebody else dig the hole for him,
how is he burying the body by himself?
He would have just dug the hole himself,
and nobody would’ve known.
So the stories don’t all connect.
The stories don’t all connect.
The state has rested its case in the trial
of alleged mass murderer John Wayne Gacy.
John Gacy’s attorneys began their defense
and their first witness
was an alleged Gacy victim, Jeff Rignall.
Rignall told the court that he met John Gacy
March 21st, 1978.
He said that Gacy offered him marijuana
and then drugged him by placing a rag over his face.
So Rignall comes in,
and he’s going to be a witness for the prosecution,
one of our living victims.
I don’t know if he’d mentioned it
or someone had told me
that there was a book in the offing.
I said Jeff,
I’m not going to have the defense cross-examining you
out of something that you said in your book that’s different
from what you say on the stand,
and regardless of which is correct,
there’s just no reason for that.
That’s your decision, but I’m just telling you up front.
If you put a book out,
you’re not going to be my witness, end of story.
"Oh, yeah. I understand. I understand."
Of course, he puts the book out.
So I said, "We’re not putting you on."
Jeff wanted to testify for the prosecution,
but when he found out that they weren’t going to call him,
he was very upset.
And when he found out that the defense would call him,
he decided he would definitely testify
so he could get the story out.
It was so unbelievable that I blotted it out
and found it hard to believe myself that it happened to me,
and that's why I persisted on my own
in finding the man who had done this to me,
even though the police refused to acknowledge
or believe anything that I told them.
Rignall said that he woke up in Gacy’s house
with the suburban contractor
standing behind a bar mixing a drink.
Rignall said that he was in a semiconscious state,
but he heard John Gacy say,
"I’d just as soon kill you as look at you."
The defense thought Jeff was a perfect witness
because all along, he said, "That man had to be crazy
in order to do these horrific deeds to people."
Rignall described how Gacy stretched his arms
across a two-by-four as he performed
various deviant acts before chloroforming him
once again and dumping him in a city park.
When Jeff was testifying, he could get through part of it,
and he would just nervously almost collapse.
He started to describe that, "He handcuffed me,
chloroformed me, poked me, beat me."
He got so upset describing things that he threw up
all over the courthouse. And they had to close
the courthouse down in order to clean it up.
Rignall collapsed on the witness stand,
and deputies hurried him out of the courtroom.
And he was able to proceed with his testimony after that.
On the stand today, after Judge Garippo called a recess,
Rignall revealed something that he did not say in our interview.
He told the court a third person was in the Gacy house
the night he says he was raped, and he said it appeared
to be a man with light hair parted in the middle.
Where Jeff was being tortured,
there was a doorway behind him.
And it had a glass-type partition window in it.
He could tell that there was a light that switched on
because it was darker
and then all of a sudden a little bit lighter.
Jeff thought, "Maybe there’s somebody else in here."
And then he got beat up and chloroformed,
and the light was gone.
Jeff testified that he thought he came to
while he was being molested
and that there was another person giving him oral sex,
with kind of a light hair parted in the center.
By my medical records and by my doctors.
we feel that I was abused by more than one person.
I kind of find it hard
to see that Gacy did all that by himself.
The defense established today
that the man accused of 33 murders had a stormy childhood.
His mother, Mrs. Marion Gacy, testified on her son’s behalf.
My mom testified first.
She wasn’t a well person, always had to use a cane or a walker.
She said that John was a sleepwalker
when he was only 3 years old,
and a grammar school teacher recommended
that he be transferred to a special school
for what she called disabled kids.
She said that he was hospitalized
3 weeks with a head injury.
He worked at a grocery store.
He fell down three flights of stairs,
and he had hit his head,
and then he started having episodes with passing out.
John, let’s step back to your childhood.
What was your state of health as a child?
At the age of 10, I was told
I had an enlarged bottle-neck heart, okay?
And so I had a tendency to pass out a lot.
How about childhood illnesses,
did you have any ... I mean accidents, rather,
any sort of injuries or accidents?
I was hit with a ...
When I went to the other vocational school,
when I first went to the vocational school,
I got hit with a park swing
in the side of the head, caused a mastoid.
At what age was that, approximately?
Fourteen, I believe.
Got hit with a swing, were you out, unconscious?
Yeah. I was taken to a medical clinic.
Mm-hmm.
That was at the time ...
That’s when they started saying that I had epilepsy.
Did you have any episodes ... Seizures?
Seizures, things of that nature?
Yes. Seizures were, according to the doctor,
they claimed that when I have an epileptic seizure,
I had 800 times my own strength, or 800 pounds of strength.
Gacy’s mother said that Gacy passed out all of the time
and had to be put in a straitjacket one day
when he became violent. Spectators in the courtroom
showed what appeared to be sympathy for the woman
when told the court that her husband was a mean, abusive man.
I kind of look back because we always called
my dad Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
When he’d go downstairs and drink,
he always came up as another person.
He would be angry and upset about something.
And no matter what we said or did, he would blow up.
Have you ever been sexually abused by anybody?
At the age of 9, there was a contractor who was ...
Building contractor? ...
building a house next door, and he used to pick me up
and take me for rides
and always wanted to show me wrestling holds,
was always pinning my head in between his legs.
But at the time, I did not look at it as sexual.
He was showing me wrestling holds where my head
was always constantly pinned
between his legs or under his legs.
The guy was in our neighborhood
probably for over a year.
And my dad and him became friends.
And sooner or later the guy asked
if he could take John to go to the movies,
and it surprises me that my dad would have said,
"Yeah, that’s okay."
But I remember my dad being extremely mad
and talking about his gun.
He had a little pistol, and that he was going to shoot this guy.
And then as I got older, I had asked my mom about it.
My mom said, "Well, when John was younger,
this guy did something to him.
And it made Dad want to kill the guy."
I began to wonder, "Was that the start
of something that had happened to him?
Did he then think he had to be this person?"
What the defense was trying to do was to show
that he had been abused
and that that was the cause of his insanity.
I felt very sorry for the mother.
Later she broke down and cried,
saying "I still don’t believe any of it.
I’d just like to erase everything."
When she was finished, I testified.
You walk out there, and you get in the witness thing,
and after they swear you in, you sit down,
and some of the questions and stuff
were really about his childhood,
about, how did I see his childhood and him growing up?
Asking about if I had noticed changes.
I still lean toward something happened,
and somehow, he had two personalities.
There’s got to be two sides. But why?
Why all of a sudden such a big difference in character?
Did the knocks in his head, falling down the stairs,
was it more than just a little blood clot?
If you wanted a character witness,
I guess I was a character witness.
But you have all these eyes on you, all these parents,
siblings, looking at you. All we wanted to do was,
we wanted to apologize to the families.
We wanted them to know that their hurt was our hurt too.
The defense has rested its case in the trial
of accused mass murderer John Wayne Gacy,
this coming after another day of psychiatric testimony.
In the end, the trial was basically
was competing psychiatrist evaluations of Gacy.
On the one hand, you had those who said he was absolutely sane
and responsible for his actions.
On the other, they said that there was no way
someone who was sane could do what he did.
If you have one, two or three psychiatrists
that are willing to say that,
"I find that someone had a disease that made him insane
at a certain time,
but he could in fact act normal during the other times,"
it’s hard to contradict that expert.
I was very worried that we would not meet our burden
of beyond a reasonable doubt,
and he may be found not guilty or you may get a hung jury.
Let’s not forget serial killers are pretty smart people.
He was the kind of guy that would be totally honest with you
if he knew you already knew or were going to find out.
After he was charged with murder,
I drove him from the Des Plaines Police Station
to the Cook County Jail.
On the way there, "John," I says,
"How many people did you really kill?"
He says, "Well, I told my attorneys 30-some-odd."
He says, "You guys know about, what, 33?"
I says, "Yeah. Are there more?" He says, "Well, you know what?"
He says, "Forty-five sounds like a good number."
I said, "Well, where are they?"
He said, "No. That’s your job. You got to find out."
We had 33, so that would mean obviously there’s 12 more
somewhere.