"It's God's Will"

Verdict on a mass murderer

The flat voice of the court clerk filled the hushed courtroom of Chicago's venerable Criminal Court House. "We, the jury, find the defendant John Gacy guilty of the murder of . . ."--and then she would add a name. Twenty-two times she repeated that litany and then, because the other victims still had not been identified, she began adding numbers--eleven in all. Frowning slightly, the chunky, moon-faced defendant sat slumped in his chair. Moments earlier, walking into the courtroom, he had turned to his two gloomy attorneys. "Cheer up, boys," he joked, "and keep a straight face." On the way out, Gacy winked at a sheriffs deputy.

So ended last week the five-week trial of John Wayne Gacy, 38, who was accused of murdering more people than anyone else in U.S. history. A building contractor who lived outside Chicago in Norwood Park, Gacy appeared to be a friendly neighbor who delighted in entertaining kids by dressing up as Pogo the Clown. But in December 1978, when police questioned him about the disappearance of a local 15-year-old named Robert Piest, Gacy began jabbering about a seven-year career of murder, of picking up boys and young men, forcing them to perform sexual acts and then strangling them. Police discovered 26 bodies in a 40-ft. crawl space beneath his house, one body under his dining room and two buried in his backyard. Four more bodies, including Piest's, were dumped in the Des Plaines River.

Whether or not Gacy had committed the murders was never an issue at the 30-day trial, since he stuck by his confession. Rather, his two attorneys argued that Gacy was innocent by reason of insanity. Throughout the testimony of 101 witnesses, Gacy remained stonefaced, though relatives of the victims were often sobbing just a few feet away. Only when his second wife, Carole Lofgren, testified that he had been a "warm and gentle" lover did Gacy break down and cry; the couple, married for four years, were divorced in 1976.

During his closing argument, Defense Attorney Sam Amirante tried to create sympathy for his client by citing Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and quoting Jekyll's anguished lament: "If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also." But the most emotional moments came during the state's summation, when, one by one, Prosecutor Terry Sullivan placed photographs of the 22 identified victims on a wooden easel and described each one in detail. The next day, Chief Prosecutor William Kunkle snatched up the photos and stalked over to a wooden hatch that had been brought into the courtroom; it had once covered the crawl space under the Gacy house. "Show the same sympathy and pity this man showed when he took these lives," Kunkle told the jury. With that, he flung the photos through the opening of the hatch. Gasps filled the courtroom.

The jury took only 1 hr. 50 min. to find Gacy guilty. Next day, he received his sentence: death by electrocution. "It's God's will," Gacy told Prosecutor Kunkle. "The jury just did to me what I've been trying to do to myself for so many years." Judge Louis B. Garippo set the execution date for June 2, but there will be an automatic appeal under Illinois law. The case will drag on for months, if not years, and some cannot wait for it to end. "He killed my son and we're going to kill him," vowed Harold Piest, 46, the father of Gacy's last victim. "I'll go down and pull the switch myself if they want me to."

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