I was 19 when I ran away, and that was in ’80.
Not ’80, ’61.
I went to Las Vegas for 3 months.
Mm-hmm.
Took off, took my car and left.
Yeah.
I walked for Palm Mortuary being the night man
picking up bodies at the hospitals and stuff for them.
I worked as night man only.
I didn’t have nothing to do with the bodies,
all this talk that I slept with the dead ones
or had sex with dead bodies, there’s no truth to any of that.
You did in the mortuary, didn’t you?
I lived in the mortuary, yes, but not in the embalming room.
I mean, they make it sounds like I slept in the crypts with them,
and I never climbed into a coffin or anything like that.
That is so damn ridiculous. It’s the same thing.
The contention is that I slept all night with Robert Piest.
If you want to say I slept in the same house with a dead body,
okay, fine. I’ll buy that, but in the same room,
no, and besides, the dead won’t bother you.
It’s the living you’ve got to worry about.
The case, which some thought would never be tried
in the courts,
is now winding down to the last few days.
Gacy’s attorney, Sam Amirante,
told the jury what he had been trying to prove all along:
that John Gacy is insane and has been for a long time.
Amirante appealed to the jury,
saying that this is the only country
in which John Gacy could get a fair trial.
The defense says Gacy wasn’t responsible for his actions.
The prosecution wants the death penalty.
The prosecution gets the last say
because it was our burden of proof,
and Bill Kunkle, my partner, was dynamite on that.
I looked over to where Gacy was sitting at counsel table.
I said, "If you want to show this man, this killer mercy,"
and I just stopped, walked over to the victim board,
which was right behind the crawl-space opening
directly in front of the jury,
and without saying anything, began to rip each photo
out of the frame with a loud noise
and walked over in front of the crawl-space opening,
directly in front of the jury and eyeballed the jury,
and said, "If you want to show this killer mercy,
you show him the same mercy he showed
when he took these 22 lives off the face of the Earth
and put them here."
And I threw the victim photos into the crawl-space opening.
They hit the front of the jury box
and splashed all over the tile floor
and spread all over the well of the court.
Absolute pin-drop silence.
I didn’t move for about 3 minutes,
and Sullivan actually had to almost lead me to my chair.
I was done. I was spent.
It is indeed possible that if John Wayne Gacy
is not guilty by reason of insanity,
he could be out of a mental institution
within a matter of years.
After the jury went out, there was a little bar
about a block away from the courthouse
where we all went called Gene’s. It was such a lowlife place,
you entered through the back door,
but state’s attorneys went there, public defenders,
cops, everybody. And then when juries came back,
the courthouse would call down there,
somebody from the courtroom and say, "The jury is in."
It wasn’t but about 2 hours.
You could barely have finished a drink or two,
and the phone rings.
The jury has now reached a decision in the trial
of John Wayne Gacy,
accused of killing 33 young men and boys.
Now, we do not know what that verdict is
because they are calling
both sides back into the courtroom now.
We’d been at trial and jury selection for 7 weeks,
6 weeks of trial, so 2 hours was pretty quick.
When a jury comes back fast, the rule of thumb
is that it’s a not guilty,
so I was pretty terrified when we walked back to the courtroom.
And of course, when they actually read the verdict,
that’s just the best.
It took the jury of seven men and five women less than 2 hours
to find John Wayne Gacy guilty of murdering 33 young men.
Gacy was convicted of murdering more people
than anyone else in US history.
In the end, the prosecutors managed to prove
that Gacy did so many things to try and cover up what he did,
that he was so careful
and so calculating about it that he was absolutely sane.
It what an emotional time for relatives of the victims,
and many, like Ken Piest, whose brother was killed,
want revenge.
There’s only one solution now.
What is that?
I want to see him go to the chair.
And Eugenia Godzik,
mother of another victim, tearfully agreed.
I hope he does get the electric chair.
Then that’ll make everybody feel better.
I’m sure it’ll make the other mothers feel better, too.
I remember saying, "Thank God,"
and, "It’s not over yet."
There will now be another hearing,
and the same jury will begin deliberating once again.
This time, they will deliberate on whether John Wayne Gacy
should be put to death in the electric chair.
Throughout the trial,
there had been constant references
to a Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of syndrome
where because of pills or alcohol,
Gacy became this brutal killer,
much like the kindly Dr. Jekyll became the brutal Mr. Hyde.
So I actually got the Robert Louis Stevenson book,
and I read it again.
And so one of the things I did in the argument is I said,
"They keep talking about Jekyll and Hyde."
I said, "I don’t know if you read it,
but what you learned is,
that the goodly, kind Dr. Jekyll wanted to study evil,
and so he invented a potion that he could take
that would expose that evil, and he became the evil Mr. Hyde
and committed these horrible crimes.
He took the potion on purpose
because he wanted to know what he was doing when he did it,
and he remembered what he did after he did it.
And guess what, folks?
He enjoyed it, and he did it again,
and he did it again,
and all he cared about was the godlike decision
of who would live and who would die,
and John Gacy made that same decision.
Robert Louis Stevenson always had a moral
at the end of the story,
and the villain in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde paid
for his crimes with his life."
John Gacy will be put to death in the electric chair.
Judge Garippo sat back in his chair
as relatives and friends of the victims applauded and cheered.
The convicted murderer showed no emotion at all
as he walked up to the judge’s bench.
He simply nodded as Judge Garippo
set the date for execution.
I thought Gacy was the poster child for the death penalty,
and, frankly, if Gacy hadn’t received the death penalty,
my position would’ve been,
nobody should receive the death penalty.
I’m relieved, and the sooner they get rid of him,
the better for all what he’s done to every family
and caused everybody unhappiness and something
that can’t be repaid.
My mother assumed that, "Okay, it’s over.
Next week, he’s going to be put to death,"
not realizing it takes umpteen years.
They have appeals and all that.
His adaptable life in prison seems unreal.
It’s like he’s home, conducting business from him living room.
He was writing letters. He got a pen-pal club
going and getting his word out there of his innocence.
I’m sure there was a lot of people that believed
some of the stuff that he told them.
I felt things were going to work out
because I knew I didn’t do the killing,
and I thought it would come out in the trial, but Amirante,
with this insanity defense, what I ...
And again, you can call it my ignorance of the law,
it’s like I explained
in a letter to Chief Justice William Clark,
the evidence based in on the theory
that the more sensational the case it,
the more crazier it sounds, the insanity defense would work,
and I still think it was stupid.
How about ...
I think they did a disservice to me
and they did a disservice to the victims.
You know what people don’t understand is,
I feel I was wrongfully convicted for 33 murders,
and it was only because of sensationalism and ego.
The Des Plaines police did a sloppy investigation.
This is ... It may not be the correct way of wording it,
but the thing of it is is that, they had other suspects,
and they had tunnel vision into say,
"It’s Gacy’s house. It’s easier to put everything on Gacy."
How are you? I’m doing fine. How are you?
Good, good.
Liz gave me a call last night and said that you tried to call.
Oh, yeah.
I just didn’t get home in time.
By the time I met John,
he definitely was not happy with his defense attorneys.
It was really like, "Why I got railroaded.
They shouldn’t have joined all the murder charges together."
There’s only one pathology report,
and it’s on Robert Piest. You mean to tell me
there’s no other medical reports on this case?
There’s 33 victims and one medical report.
You see, there is enough grounds to get a new trial,
but it slowly is slipping away,
and people don’t understand that.
We’re 10 years down the line on this appeal shit.
My relationship with Gacy became much more familiar
over the years. There were allotted time slots
of how much phone time you could get,
and John seemed to always get whatever he wanted.
See, it’s a domino effect.
Once you overturn it, you know ...
but right now they’re giving credibility to Amirante.
And until I can take that credibility away from him,
I don’t stand a chance.
John never seemed to get cut off.
If he wanted to talk for an hour, he could.
That’s ineffective assistance of counsel.
And so that’s going to be part of that issue? Okay.
Okay. Yeah.
John obviously thought I was on his side in his appeals,
and I would talk with his various lawyers at the time.
Honestly, I think I was just somebody who could help him.
He had so many people that he used to do this or that.
I cared about him in many ways. I also hated him in many ways.
John, towards the end, basically just was lashing out.
All the appeals, they’re just feeding the machine,
more paper, more motions.
He was using anything he could to come up with an appeal,
but he was basically the poster child for the death penalty.
In fall of 1993, I remember being in the car
with my partner, Greg, and we heard a radio broadcast
saying that John Wayne Gacy had a date set for death,
and then at the same time, we both came up
with kind of this idea of, "Wow, wouldn’t
that be interesting to represent John Wayne Gacy?"
And then we laughed it off, thinking,
"Why would we ever be chosen to represent him?"
Then we got a call that John Gacy might want
to interview us, but interestingly,
it was not about representing him in the death-penalty matter.
He had a civil matter that was going on at the time.
When he was in prison, he started painting,
and he sold his paintings.
People wanted to buy his stuff because of his notoriety.
He was making money, and the state of Illinois
was suing him to try to take away his money
that he was earning on death row.
Right now, Gacy paintings are a big business, big commodity.
There’s a large call for them. In fact, I think Gacy right now
is one of the hottest convict painters,
I guess, or the death row artists.
Hey, your painting have improved over the years.
I think we’ve seen some ...
I think I’ve learned from each one of them.
Yeah.
I guess it’s the same reason why I relate to Michelangelo
because he was a workaholic and Leonardo da Vinci.
People always ask me who my favorite artists are and why,
and I did not know that Michelangelo was homosexual,
and it doesn’t make no difference to me.
He was a workaholic. He was a sculptor.
He was a painter and did a lot of other things.
da Vinci was an inventor and that.
And of course, in my life, I’ve done painting,
decorating, wallpapering.
I’ve done mural work, you name it.
The prison system did not like the fact
that John Gacy was making money. He also had 900 number
where people could call in and listen to his voice,
and he would tell them that he was actually innocent
and that they were going to execute an innocent man,
but he made money on that, as well,
and the law in Illinois says
that if an inmate can pay for his incarceration,
the inmate has to pay it, so they were suing Gacy
for basically his room and board.
So that’s how we got the call originally.
Gacy denies that he’s reaping big profits
from sales of his artwork.
Some of his old paintings are selling for thousands,
but Gacy told me that money is going to dealers and lawyers.
At first, my partner, Greg, said,
"Why would we do this?
We’re not going to represent him."
And I said, "Don’t you want to meet this guy?
Don’t you want to look evil in the eye?"
The prison is an old place. It’s kind of a gothic,
strange kind of eery-looking place
that sits on the Mississippi river,
and I remember going in there,
and it was kind of a freaky experience.
You were actually put into a little room with your prisoner,
who was handcuffed, but there was nothing between you,
and we kind of said to him, "John, is this civil case
really the most important thing going on right now
when you have a death date in about 7 months?"
Later, when we walked out of the prison, I said to Greg,
"Why don’t we represent him in the death-row case?"
If you’re a runner, you want to run the marathon.
If you’re a mountain climber, you want to climb Mt. Everest.
This was the ultimate challenge, right?
Our plan was, we would represent John Gacy in his civil case
but only if we were able to represent him
in the death-row appeals, as well.
All of his traditional appeals had been exhausted,
and that is why the death date was set,
so we had to come up with some creative arguments
to make to get him off the death penalty.
It might be further appeals. It might be actual innocence.
It might be ineffective assistance of counsel,
saying that lawyers were not doing
the right thing in the past, so you’re basically coming up
with anything you possibly can at this point
just to get that execution date off the calendar.
Gacy did not get the death penalty for all 33 boys,
so we thought that if we could prove actual innocence
for those boys where they had the death penalty,
the death penalty would be withdrawn,
and we’d just have him living out a life sentence,
so we went to the warehouse where John Gacy’s evidence was,
all of the things that were taken from the home
and the various business records that were in the Gacy home.
John Gacy’s records were meticulous.
They had his car and his gas and his motel bills
and those types of things, and we determined that John Gacy
was actually documented out of the state
at a time where several of these young men and boys
were deemed to be gone missing.
As you know, I’m a bug about record keeping.
Mm-hmm.
All of my business records confirmed where I was,
who I was with, what hotel I stayed at,
what meals I ate. Everything was in the files,
and all of those files on December 29th of 1978
were confiscated by the Des Plaines Police Department.
Mm-hmm. And those files there alone
could have proven that I wasn't in Illinois
when 16 of these murders ... when they finally set the dates
as to when these murders occurred.
Mm-hmm.
The fact that we found that Gacy
was probably out of town during at least a few
of the boys’ deaths led us to believe
that there were other boys and men involved in these crimes,
and that was consistent with a lot of the things
that we had heard over the years.
And listen, the dates that were set for the death of these boys
was somewhat arbitrary
because it was a date they may have been last seen
and then they were found, but I think it’s possible
that John Gacy didn’t kill all those victims.
I believe that there may have been other people
who helped him or were in on it.
His whole thing what that his appeal
was going to vindicate him
and he was going to be found innocent,
and how can you be innocent?
You can say you didn’t kill 33 people,
that maybe you’ve killed 10 of them.
It doesn’t matter. You killed somebody.
You’re not going to be vindicated,
and he would always try to change the subject.
"Let’s get off that subject.
I don’t want to talk about that anymore."
You did say that you never painted yourself
as an innocent babe in the woods, that you ...
We’re going over the same thing.
Yeah.
We’re not going to go into that.
Basically. No, but the point is,
if you feel that you’re not covering up
your part of the crimes but at the same time
you open the thought that others were involved,
would you be willing to cooperate
with law-enforcement people today to avail, say,
the materials that you have amassed to more or less pursue
if, in fact, there are others that are on the streets
that have been involved in these murders?
Would you be willing to cooperate
and to assist to pursue that
to the ends of bringing others to justice?
Would you be willing to do that?
I’ve got no qualms about that,
but what I don’t understand is,
why wasn’t it done to begin with, Bob?
We tried to get Gacy to tell us,
if they were other people involved, who were they?
So was he making it up? Was he protecting someone?
He speculated who it might be, but he never gave us anything
that we could go to the prosecution and say,
"We have this information that you don’t have,
and it’s going to die with Gacy, so don’t execute him."
We never had that ability.
In his opening session Monday,
the Supreme Court rejected
an appeal challenging the death penalty
for serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr.
The Illinois Supreme Court is expected to announce
an execution date within the next 2 weeks.
He didn’t start talking about the clock ticking until ...
in ’94 when they set the date for May 10th.
He knew then that the time was running out,
and he felt more and more pressure.
The last time I saw John, which was for his birthday,
March of ’94, and he said,
"This is the last time you’re going to see me.
I’m going to be executed in May."
And I said, "No, you’re not."
He goes, "Yes, I am," and I got emotional.
He couldn’t hug me because he had handcuffs on,
but I could hug him, and he said, "Hug me."
So as I’m leaving, it’s like ...
I’m just like, this is going through my head.
I can’t believe that Gacy was comforting me.
Gacy’s attorneys were on the phone with their client
putting together still more last-minute appeals
hoping to beat the clock and the executioner.
Between the time that Gacy was convicted
to the time he was executed,
Illinois changed the form of death
from the electric chair to lethal injection.
We brought an injunction saying
that the method of execution was cruel and unusual
because of the way it was going to be
implemented by this machine that was faulty.
We’re getting down to the very last appeals.
We’re on uncharted grounds here.
When I told him his last appeal was rejected,
I remember him kind of waving me away,
saying, "We’ll talk about it later,"
as if there was going to be a later.
He may have already come to grips with it
in his own mind, that the appeal was done.
On the night of the execution,
I was on the phone with him several times,
and at about 11:45, we’re talking,
and I hear mumbling, and he goes,
"Okay, my ride is here. Got to go."
And that was our last conversation.
Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!
I was there that night. The clown has got to go!
See you in hell!
It was an event. Gacy’s execution was an event.
It’s time die. Fourteen years has been much too long.
He deserves to die!
There were people from both sides,
pro death penalty, against death penalty.
There were lines of people, miles of people protesting
and, "Kill the clown."
The clown goes down!
[Lyrics]
Na, na, na, na
Hey, hey, hey Goodbye
And frankly, that was upsetting
because if a government is going to take the life of somebody
because they’ve committed a horrendous crime,
then it should be something of awe.
It should be a calm, solemn event.
It shouldn’t be a circus.
It shouldn’t be cheering and drums beating and ...
That’s not appropriate for the victims.
It’s not appropriate for anybody.
I was hoping that my mother would be alive because she said,
"Oh, I want to be there. I want to be there."
And she couldn’t that was sad.
Both of my parents had passed away.
My mom did not want him to go to jail and paint and all that,
and that’s why I felt I needed to be at the execution,
but the sad thing was that none of the family of the victims
could be in the auditorium when he was being put to death.
They put all the victims in a room in a ...
Dungeon.
... in a building that was far away from the press,
far away from the execution itself.
We were watching it on a TV like the rest of America.
In my opinion, they had us locked up
so we could only see what they wanted us to see.
It was like they didn’t want us there, period.
The first drug is sodium pentathol,
which puts you to sleep.
If you get enough of that, it can kill you by itself.
The second drug is a thing called pancurium bromide,
and that causes your breathing to stop.
The third drug is the one that stops your heart.
And it kept getting delayed, the execution itself.
They kept delaying, delaying, delaying.
We kept saying, "Well, what’s going to happen?"
They said, "Oh, they’ll call us when it’s over."
When Gacy was wheeled into the area
where he was to be executed, we left the premises,
and I remember, we were watching television
and watching what was going on, and we heard
something malfunctioned. They closed the curtains.
When the phone rang, they had some complications,
and then they rang again, and they said, "Okay.
He is now put to rest," and that was it,
and we all just looked at each other,
and you get up, and you go out.
It was bizarre. It was very strange.
John Wayne Gacy was pronounced dead at 12:58,
2 minutes before 1 o’clock this morning.
There will be a lot of questions to be asked yet
about how this system worked.
They began the injections at 12:40.
He wasn’t pronounced dead for 18 minutes.
It malfunctioned, like we said
it was going to malfunction,
and he was probably suffocated to death,
and I think most people probably would say
that that was a good result.
They said that he probably felt more pain
than they had planned on,
but I know if my mother was there,
she would have said, "That’s not enough."
One little bit of pain is not enough.
I attended the execution as an official state witness
and signed the certificate of execution.
He got a much easier death than any of his victims.
In my opinion,
he got an easier death than he deserved.
I spent a couple hours
with him before they stopped visiting hours.
I hugged him, and I told him.
I said, "May God open his arms to you if you’re truly sorry.
You need to ask him for forgiveness,"
and I don’t think I even said goodbye.
I don’t know why. It’s just, you hug each other.
You say, "I love you." "I love you back."
He was crying. I was crying. It was hard.
It was hard breaking and knowing I’d not see him again.
I don’t know if it was because of the love,
knowing him as a child and an adult
and in a different sense. But I hadn’t seen the evil,
so it’s like I could dismiss it because that wasn’t him,
but now I’m just settled with the fact that he was evil.
So many years have gone by,
and I at least don’t think about it like it was yesterday,
but it’s still part of my life,
a part that I’d love to be able to just erase if I could.
I only wish he would’ve apologized in some way
or said something kind in the end to those families
to have helped them to have closure
because I can’t imagine ever losing a child of mine
and not know that someone was actually sorry
for doing harm to them.
So many of those people and families are gone.
Maybe their sisters and brothers are still alive,
and I hope their lives are a lot better than all of this.
This case did not die.
The story did not die with the execution of John Gacy.
I suppose there’s a lot that’s still unknown.
I came to Chicago in 1994.
I was the news reporter for the morning show.
I never imagined the twists and turns of a story like this
that were unresolved after all these years.
It’s a story that has 50 stories within it
and has all these different branches,
and surprisingly, sometimes they end up crossing.
I was about 17 when he was arrested,
and I lived in a Chicago suburb.
Everybody in Chicago knew about it,
but years later, when I started looking into it,
the more I learned about the case,
the more convinced I became that the thing everybody thought
they knew wasn’t the whole story.
There was a lot of speculation at the time,
and there still is a lot of speculation
that there may have been others involved
in some of those murders.
Gacy always said he didn’t kill all the boys,
and he alluded to the idea
that there could’ve been a bigger picture,
that there may have been a snuff-film operation
and that some of these young men and boys
were being killed and videotaped
and the videos sold on the black market.
He didn’t give me name. He didn’t say he was involved.
He didn’t tell me who was involved,
but he alluded to that.
When he first said that to me, I was thinking,
"This sounds like a bunch of BS,"
and then I thought about it,
and I thought, "Well, Gacy liked to make money.
There were probably other people involved in these crimes.
There was probably a black market for snuff films back
then if you like that kind of stuff,
so maybe that did make sense."
The thing of it is, they want you to believe
that I and I alone committed these murders,
and I had nothing to do with the murders of anyone.
If anybody was involved, then how many people
are we talking about beside yourself?
We believe there was four people involved.
Mm-hmm.
And that would be Michael Rossi, David Cram,
Phillip Paske.
Both Rossi and Cram denied any knowledge of Gacy’s murders
or of any of their involvement in anything.
Phil Paske was from Chicago.
He was one of those people who got into trouble,
did a little drugs, did a little of this.
And somehow, John Norman came into his life.
So the story goes like this. There’s a guy named John Norman.
Norman does some jail time
for assaulting some kids in Homewood, Illinois.
While he’s in the Cook County jail
using the jail printing press,
he creates this newsletter, "The Delta Project,"
this sex-trafficking ring that’s going to men
who want to have sex with boys.
And while he was in Cook County jail,
he met Phil Paske,
and when he got out of jail, Cook County jail,
Paske took over the operation of ... Norman’s operation.
Here we’ve got a Phillip Paske,
who had a newsletter going out of the Cook County jail,
and here he is involved with a guy named John Norman.
And John Norman was running boys for hire.
They were making snuff films with young boys.
They were pimping them off. They were selling them.
So the connection is this.
John Norman running "The Delta Project" sex-trafficking ring
has an assistant named Phil Paske, and guess what?
Phil Paske works for John Wayne Gacy.
In 1977,
the judiciary committee of the United States Senate
put together a subcommittee to investigate the problem
of child sex trafficking.
Their first hearing was in Chicago.
They called in a hub, the center
of the country’s business in child sex trafficking.
And yet, nobody ever thought, "Hey, maybe we ought to look at
that sex-trafficking ring
that was investigated by Congress in 1977
when you’re investigating John Wayne Gacy in 1978."
I guess you got to kind of ask yourself,
what are the odds that Phil Paske,
who’s John David Norman’s right-hand man,
is working a day or 2 here and there for Gacy?
I can’t believe that there wasn’t some crossover.
Gacy loved pornography. There’s certainly evidence
that if John wasn’t making stag films, he was trying to.
After John had been arrested, the police had gone through.
There was a big dresser and something else
that we had picked up and taken that wasn’t ruined or destroyed,
and when we got it home, underneath the drawers
were some packets that were taped to the thing.
I would think, if anything, the police would’ve found those.
It was just kind of weird,
and they were some pornographic pictures.
It was John. It was a three-person thing.
I was shocked, and I put them back in the envelope.
I don’t know if I gave them to Sam Amirante
or if I gave them to a detective that came to the house.
I said, "I can’t believe that these were not found."
Not that John Wayne Gacy is a credible witness here,
but he says, "They ought to look into John Norman
and look at his videos to see if they can identify any victims,"
and sort of implying that John Norman is involved in this.
There was a crossover when we checked into
John Norman’s background,
that he goes all the way back to the early ’70s involved in ...
He ran the Norman Foundation.
He ran Epic International and the Odyssey Foundation
out of Dallas, Texas,
and these were organizations were wealthy men
could hire young boys for sexual weekends, male prostitution.
Have you ever met Norman?
You ever had any contact with Norman?
I have yet to see a current picture of him,
and therefore, I’d have to say no.
Phil Paske may have been with him at one time or another
because, see, again, I came home from out of town at times,
and Phil Paske would be at the house drinking beer
or something like that.
David Cram is the one that brought Phil Paske in
because Cram, he didn’t want to do nothing.
He got a hold of this guy.
He said, "Well, this guy can get you somebody for sex."
Gacy clearly knew who John Norman was,
and his deflection, his lie was,
"Oh, I don’t think I know him. Do you have a picture?"
John knows who his accomplices were,
and somehow he’s protected them, so the fact
that he kind of threw Paske out there is suspicious.
That was typical Gacy, sort like,
"Don’t look over here. Look over there,"
so you never knew if he was telling the truth
or he was really leading you somewhere
that you should be going. You didn’t know with him.
I think Phil Paske is the bridge here.
He works for John Wayne Gacy, and he works with John Norman
of "The Delta Project" sex-trafficking ring.
Is that a coincidence?
If nothing else, it’s worth looking into.
I don’t know that they ever looked into it at all.
I just don’t get that,
so that contributes to this cloud of suspicion.
You would think that as the generation passed
that someone would say,
"It’s time. It’s time to get to the bottom of this,"
and I just don’t see it happening.
I have thought all along that we are going
to find more bodies attributable to John Gacy.
I think the problem is tying them to him necessarily.
I interviewed Detective Tovar,
who was on the case and was riding with John Wayne Gacy,
and he said Gacy said,
"There may be as many of 45 victims."
He looks at me
with kind of almost like a twinkle in his eye.
He says, "But 45 sounds like a good number."
I talked to him enough times that I was pretty sure
he was being honest.
We’re putting on the dates of how he was killing people.
Serial killers kill kind of in some kind of order.
There was that period of time when he was traveling,
so maybe he killed them somewhere else.
Two or three of them were from out of state.
Very first kid was from Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan,
so could be from other states that just floated through town.
He killed them.
Maybe he buried them somewhere else
or maybe threw them somewhere else.
Just my own opinion,
but I firmly believe there’s more.
I don’t think John Wayne Gacy one day just woke up
and started killing people.
What was going on before that house?
If he was killing people, where did he put those bodies?
They’re not going to be in that house,
so where are they?
I had been contacted by Detective Bill Dorsch,
who had an interesting story.
He had known John Wayne Gacy before all this happened.
A lot of the branches of my investigative work
came from Detective Bill Dorsch.
I’m a retired Chicago homicide detective.
I started my career in 1970 as a patrolman.
Back in 1974, I did meet John Gacy,
invited to his house in Summerdale,
and at that time, I was with my wife and one son.
We had a meeting with his wife and her two children,
and we had about 4 or 5 hours of dinner and congenial meeting,
nothing more than that. From that conversation,
I learned that John took care of the building
where his mother was living
just right over my shoulder here.
He was the maintenance man, and I was living in an apartment
just 50 yards away from it.
Bill Dorsch lived just off the corner of Miami and Elston,
and on the corner of Miami and Elston across Miami
was this funny, triangular property
with a small apartment building on it.
Gacy’s mother lived there,
and Gacy took care of the property
and poured concrete and fixed plumbing or whatever.
So Dorsch was coming home from work
in the middle of the night one time in the mid-’70s,
and he sees somebody in the shadows across the street
in front of this building at Miami and Elston,
and it’s Gacy carrying a shovel in the middle of the night.
And I simply say to John,
"John, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning.
What the heck are you doing out here?"
And John sort of laughed, and maybe I laughed too,
when he threw me his answer, but he said, "Bill, you know me.
There’s not enough hours in the day.
I have to get it done when I can."
Dorsch thought that was odd, and they made a joke about it,
didn’t think anything of it until years later
when the story broke of what had happened,
and Dorsch said, "Boy, maybe there was more to that."
In 1978, Gacy’s arrested,
and Bill Dorsch has this horrible a-ha moment.
He called the team investigating the case and said,
"I just think you ought to know that I saw Gacy
at a shovel at this property.
You might want to take a look at it."
He didn’t really think about it again,
figured that the investigators had done their due diligence
and found nothing there.
More than 20 years later,
Bill is working on this murder investigation
as a PI in the Northwest Suburbs with the Suburban Police
and the Better Government Association,
which is a local watchdog group, and they’re trading war stories,
and he tells them this story
about Gacy that’s always haunted him.
And they contacted me about a couple days later
and said, "Bill, if you can ever find a way where you can further
that investigation, we’d like to know about it."
I went back to my office, talked to my old homicide boss.
He said to me, "Well, Bill, you’ve been talking about this
all these years, about your suspicion,
but we all know you just can’t dig without more proof."
He says, "See what you can find out."
So in 1998,
Bill Dorsch interviewed all these other neighbors.
John Wayne Gacy was the maintenance man
for the apartment building
located across from the house that I lived in as a youth.
By the time I was 12 years old, about,
I had become the lawn-mowing boy of the neighborhood.
There was one day
I was out mowing a lawn out on Elston Avenue,
and a gentleman came up to me, and he called me over and said,
"Son, are you interested in mowing more lawns?"
All I knew is his name was John. I knew nothing more about him.
Once I had that down, he had me starting to haul trash
from the buildings. The home that I lived in
was directly across from the corner of the building,
so my windows of where I lived actually look into the windows
where John’s mother was residing at the time.
One day, I was taking trash out from the units,
and I opened up the gate.
John was standing there, and he just simply looked at me
and said, "Mike," he says, "We’re doing some digging here.
You’re going to have to go around the building."
He was leaning against the fence watching another gentleman
down in a hole doing all the manual digging.
I would say it had to be 6 to 8 feet in depth.
It was actually pretty much the entire parking lot.
Suddenly, there were 3-foot, 4-foot-deep trenches
that were 2 feet wide running along the sidewalks.
I would see those ditches daily,
and I went to school one morning,
and the ditches were filled.
Now, those ditches were not filled that evening filled,
so they were filled sometime between
when I went to bed at night
and when I went to school at 7 o’clock in the morning.
Why they were filled overnight, I don’t know.
When they were filled,
they had bushes that were put in there
about every 4 feet from each other.
To this day, it questions me.
Why would you dig a trench 3 to 4 feet deep,
about 2 feet wide to put in a small bush
when you can just dig holes and put those bushes in there?
Bill Dorsch tried to contact other people who had lived
around the building who might remember Gacy there.
And from everything that the witnesses were saying,
there was some suspicious activity
going on at that location.
Another neighbor lived across Elston on the corner
and used to get up in the middle of the night
to take care of a sick child
and had many memories of sitting at his kitchen table
in the middle of the night
looking out the window into the darkness,
seeing John Gacy dragging large garbage bags across the yard,
large, heavy garbage bags across the yard
in the middle of the night.
Another neighbor, Bruno Muzinski,
lived in the basement apartment of the Miami
and Elston building itself. He was another police officer.
The first time I met him, it was good.
He looked like a regular guy, did his work,
and I had no problems with him.
He was in my apartment. We had coffee together.
We talked together, but as the months went by, he changed.
He got different.
He looked different. His manners were different.
He’d come around. His hair was all disheveled.
His eyes were all glassy, and he just wasn’t right.
I could see it in his eyes. He just wasn’t right.
He looked like he was in a horror movie.
Come around at night,
and he’d go into the laundry room across from my apartment,
and I’d hear banging and digging, the hammer,
with the sledgehammer pounding the concrete down there.
We couldn’t figure out what was going on down there,
and it was a big question mark
and waking us up during the middle of the night.
Years later, when Bruno Muzinski heard
that Gacy had been arrested,
he called his own police station and reported,
"I saw some weird stuff at this building at Miami and Elston.
You should tell the higher ups
they might want to check it out."
So I called the detective division up,
and I told him who I was, and I told him the things
that were going on around the building and everything,
and he says, "Bruno, we don’t want any more bodies."
I was sort of shocked. I thought they’d want to get everything.
They’d want to do everything in their power
to find out where everybody was and who was killed
and get closure for the other families.
But I guess not.
Bill found other neighbors who, when Gacy was arrested,
had the same reaction he did. They had seen Gacy
doing something strange at this property,
and Bruno Muzinski called the police to say,
"You ought to take a look."
That’s a very big issue for me.
I always thought that perhaps I was the only one
that ever called the police department.
The police knew about all this,
and you would expect that they would act on this information,
and, in fact, they didn’t,
so that’s when I began a search for technology
that could be used that we couldn’t use before,
and that’s when I came upon the ground-penetrating radar.
When we did the ground-penetrating radar,
we had a company from out east, and Ron LaBarca,
who was president of that company, came out,
and he assisted us with his expertise.
Ron LaBarca’s survey revealed
what he called anomalies underground.
He would not go so far himself
as to say whether or not they would be human remains,
but there were anomalies in the soil.
Finding an indication that a body may be buried
through the use of equipment is not proof enough.
You have to be able to dig before you know what’s there,
but in law enforcement,
we all know that’s the final answer to the question.
You have to dig.
As an investigator, you continue to seek the truth,
and that’s all I was trying to do.
Never did I suspect the Chicago Police Department
was not in the same mood as I was
or didn’t have the same intention as I did.
Bill Dorsch interviewed all these other neighbors,
and then the police interviewed them
before filing the search warrant.
Just before that investigation occurred in 1998,
William Dorsch is told by insiders nothing would be found.
Everything was going well up until the second meeting
with the state’s attorneys office,
and my fellow detectives from area five,
we had a meeting,
and I was ordered from people that I used to work with that
there was not really going to be a dig,
that they were not intent on finding any bodies.
So in 1998, Mike Nelson drew a diagram of the yard
indicating where the trenches had been
that he’d had to mow the grass around.
I recall specifically one spot of the property
where there was a large bush,
and it would’ve been on the Elston-Miami intersection
of the grass, and it was very thorny,
and I recall that it has a massive root structure
that you can’t really do anything with,
so when I drew my schematic,
I specifically put on that corner that that bush was there,
that that bush was there the whole time I grew up
and that absolutely nothing could’ve ever been dug there.
I did watch what was going on through news media
just to see what was happening,
and they squared off the areas and all the areas
that I basically had marked on the lawn.
They had put the tent over a spot in the yard
where there had been a giant bush in 1978.
They dug where I told them not to dig,
and that was specifically one spot.
I said, "Don’t even waste your time. There’s nothing there."
Police in Chicago said they have no evidence
that serial killer John Wayne Gacy
buried bodies of his victims
in the backyard of his mother’s apartment building.
Holes were dug in the ground Monday
after a former Chicago detective said
that he had seen Gacy near the building with a shovel.
I was told at the beginning that the Chicago
Police Department was going to do everything
they could to further this investigation.
I trusted them.
I learned quickly that that was not the right thing to do.
So Bill was very upset. He felt he couldn’t
trust his friends in the police department.
He didn’t trust the brass who had authorized the dig.
Dorsch felt really terrible.
I guess the biggest thing is,
I realize that Bill Dorsch alone,
even as an experienced investigator,
has very little power.
I now recognize that if I don’t tell the story now,
it may never get told.
Bill Dorsch told me about the 1998 dig,
and I obtained the documents from the radar company,
and then I was able to call the head of that radar company
to have a conversation with him to get his thoughts on that,
and he said, "Yeah, we gave them 17 targets to dig
where we found something that was worth looking at,
and the Chicago Police Department
would only dig in two spots."
They say all they found was a glass marble,
a saucepan and some wire.
As far as they were concerned, the case was closed.
The president of the US Radar Company writes,
"In a proper investigation, the authorities would’ve been
more willing to excavate any possibility."
So I thought that was pretty interesting
that even the head of the radar company
thought that the Chicago Police Department
didn’t do a thorough job in that 1998 investigation.
I found Detective Bill Dorsch credible.
He certainly had all the information.
He was passionate about what he was doing,
didn’t really have anything to gain by it.
You would think anybody would want to know
the answers to the questions about the Miami Avenue address.
Surely, a police department would only look good
if they were to find the bodies,
identify the bodies, contact the families and bring closure.
I can find no other reason for not doing,
except certain people in power don’t want it done.
You start to sense that maybe there’s a cover-up here,
that careers are made on this case,
and it certainly would not bode well for the police department
to reveal
that those investigations were not done very well.
I’m sure there were people in the police department
and the state’s attorney’s office that
wanted Bill Dorsch to go away. But he didn’t.