Boys Enter the House: The Victims of John Wayne Gacy and the Lives They Left Behind

By David Nelson

"Here is a work that emphasizes the full view of the lives of those young people that Gacy took. . . . It is essentially the Gacy story in reverse. Victims first."
—Jeff Coen, author of Murder in Canaryville

As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown.

But in the winter of 1978–79, he became known as one of many so-called "sex murderers" who had begun gaining notoriety in the random brutality of the 1970s. As public interest grew rapidly, victims became footnotes and statistics, lives lost not just to violence, but to history.

Through the testimony of siblings, parents, friends, lovers, and other witnesses close to the case, Boys Enter the House retraces the footsteps of these victims as they make their way to the doorstep of the Gacy house itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781641604888

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

YOU KNOW THE STORY of John Wayne Gacy. You’ve seen the pictures of the smiling clown standing proudly outside the suburban home. You’ve heard of the young men and boys buried in the dark crawl space below Gacy’s ranch house.

Maybe you’ve watched the news footage of the investigators bringing them out from the house in white body bags and loading them into a coroner’s van, the flash of camera lights illuminating it all for the eyes of America.

But you don’t know the story of those boys. You might think you know; you might have heard them called—dismissed as—runaways or hustlers. But you don’t know their names; you don’t know their families, where they come from, how they lived their lives in short bursts of light and love.

Primarily, their lives took shape in the 1960s, alongside the ongoing upheaval and social change that followed them into the 1970s, when their lives blossomed. That same change and upheaval also gave rise to the type of crime that ultimately took their lives. While at the time someone still had a higher chance of being struck by lightning than meeting a mass murderer (the term serial killer was coined in the 1980s), these crimes commanded national attention in ways that inflated their magnitude and frequency in society.

In the twentieth century, Chicago, where most of these boys came of age, had already earned a reputation with its many gangsters and headline murders, including the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 or the case of Leopold and Loeb in 1924. But by the middle of the century, it had also seen a spasm of violence unlike any other, with motives unfathomable and unknown to people at the time.

James Degnan and his wife, Helen, woke on the morning of January 7, 1946. They went to check on their six-year-old daughter, Suzanne, who had not emerged from her bedroom inside the family’s large home on Kenmore Avenue in the neighborhood of Edgewater, immediately north of Uptown on the city’s North Side.

In her room the parents found an empty bed and a note demanding $20,000 in ransom, an amount that could easily be paid by James Degnan, a senior executive in Chicago’s Office of Price Administration.

Some say police acted on an anonymous tip; others say they were working merely on hunches. Whatever it was, it led them to a nearby sewer drain, where they found Suzanne’s head. Throughout the day, other parts of her body were located around the neighborhood. Even after her funeral four days later, police were still finding remains.

In June of the previous year, Josephine Ross, a forty-three-year-old resident of the Uptown neighborhood, had been found stabbed in her apartment. Several months later, Frances Brown, beaten, stabbed, and shot, was discovered in her apartment on Uptown’s border. Over her bed, written in smeared and uneven lettering, was a macabre plea in red lipstick:

For heavens

sake catch me

before I kill more

I cannot control myself

Hundreds of suspects were questioned in connection to the murders. But it wasn’t until the arrest of a young neighborhood burglar that police believed they had a good suspect.

William Heirens, a seventeen-year-old University of Chicago student, was arrested after an attempted robbery in Rogers Park in June 1946. After almost six days of nonstop questioning, during which Heirens was beaten, administered truth serums, and blocked from meeting with family or legal counsel, he confessed to the murders.

Investigators were skeptical of the confession at first, but reporters caught wind of Heirens’s admission, and soon the media circus was in full force. The Chicago Tribune relished the bloodshed, even congratulating itself on new scoops each day. At times, reporters even made up gory and salacious details to increase readership.

In September 1946, after pleading guilty, Heirens was given three life sentences. Heirens died in 2012, at the age of eighty-three. With hindsight, modern investigators have pointed to a host of problems with both the police investigation and Heirens’s defense counsel. Relatives of the victims have even expressed doubt as to Heirens’s guilt and called for investigations of stronger suspects.

The story reverberated among the people of Chicago for years, though its notoriety faded in the shadow of other more infamous crimes and cases until it became just another horrific anecdote in the city’s long, sordid history.

Twenty years later, Chicago again wondered at how a single man could inflict so much violence. In 1966 Richard Speck broke into a South Side townhouse that served as a dormitory for eight student nurses. A ninth woman, who had previously lived at the house, decided to come back and stay the night. Speck spent most of the night torturing and killing them, before raping and killing his eighth and final victim. With the presence of a ninth woman, Speck lost count of his victims and inadvertently allowed one to survive by hiding under a bed.

During these decades, however, the worst occurred in Houston, Texas. Over the course of three years, Dean Corll, a vice president at his family’s candy factory, had plucked dozens of young men and boys from surrounding areas.

With two teenage accomplices, he’d scattered their young bodies across a series of beaches or underneath a boat shed owned by his family. Police dismissed most of the boys as runaways and barely bothered to look into their disappearances. The murders crescendoed, sometimes taking the lives of two boys in one evening, including a set of brothers. Corll also killed one boy, and a year later killed his younger brother. All the boys had been strangled or shot.

In the end, Dean Corll was betrayed by his accomplice, Wayne Henley, who had been friends with many of the boys while willingly luring them to their deaths. The savagery eventually caught up with Henley, and during one evening’s murderous debauchery, he shot Corll several times as he ran out of the bedroom naked.

Henley and another accomplice, David Brooks, spent the next few days leading police to the burial sites of the boys. Twenty-eight bodies were pulled out from the sand, a macabre record that would sadly be surpassed only a few years later.

In many ways, Corll’s case prefigured its successor. The unsuspected villain in good standing with his community. The teenage accomplices groomed as custodians of his secret. And the parade of victims—young men and boys—who became footnotes, statistics, callously dismissed as runaways, throwaways, hustlers, homosexuals.

You know the story of John Wayne Gacy. But you do not know the story of these boys, the brothers, boyfriends, sons, friends, students, who inhabit these pages, who came of age in the 1960s and flourished in the ’70s in a wild world full of music and change, darkness and love, light and dark.

1

THE GREYHOUND BUS BOY

HE WAS JUST A KID.

But sixteen-year-old Timothy McCoy had traveled a good portion of the country on his own. He’d already lived in Iowa, Nebraska, Florida, and even California, where his father had briefly brought the family as part of his effort to secure a record deal as a country-western singer.

Aside from that, Tim had spent a good amount of his teenage years roving the country simply by walking out the door, standing on the side of the road, sticking his thumb in the air, and waiting for whoever came along to pick him up.

For kids without a license or money for their own car, hitchhiking was a popular means of transportation in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, when oil crises made getting around even more difficult. It was cheap and fast, and you never knew who you’d meet along the way as you crisscrossed the many highways and turnpikes of America.

Sometimes the trips were short for Tim and his siblings—to the beach from their home in Florida, or just across the border from their original hometown of Bartlett, Iowa, into downtown Omaha, Nebraska. Other times, the journeys became odysseys through the heartland.

One rumor places Tim, then fourteen, at Woodstock in 1969. Few have been able to confirm, but many say it’s likely he was there in the muddy fields listening to 1960s mainstays like Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, who recorded Tim’s favorite album, Cosmo’s Factory.

On his mother’s side, Tim had numerous cousins in different parts of the country. The family made up most of the small population of Bartlett, Iowa, Tim’s hometown.

Jeffrey Billings, only about eleven at the time, relished time spent with his older cousins. He remembered riding around in his cousin Butch’s 1962 Buick Electra one day, looking for something to do and picking up cousins along the way. They spotted their cousin Tim McCoy walking on the side of the road and pulled over. Tim jumped in, and together they decided to drive down into Missouri to go fishing.

That weekend, along a river near Kansas City, the cousins caught fish, made bonfires, and talked about family and friends. I was just a kid, Jeff said. It was summer vacation, no school. I’m down here lying by the river, million miles from anywhere […] fishing, all my cousins, you know, I’m safe. I feel good about that.

Of his cousin, Jeff remembered, Tim was one of them guys that, when you were around him, he was happy, he’d make you laugh. He always had something to say.

Later, when Jeff and his family moved to Michigan, they made frequent trips back to Iowa to visit. It was nothing for us to take a red-eye when Dad got out of work and take off for Iowa, recalled Beverly Billings Howe, Jeff’s sister.

Christmas 1971 was no different. The Billingses packed up the car and headed across the frosty Midwest plains to southwestern Iowa, and for a few happy days, the family reunited and celebrated together. Beverly and Jeff’s mother, affectionately known as Aunt Honey in the family, was Tim’s mother’s sister. Aunt Honey had met her husband in Virginia, where she and her sister had attended college. Despite the distance, they’d all remained close, visiting each other for summer holidays or Christmastime.

This particular Christmas, the sisters went grocery shopping and cooked together, while the cousins rode horses or ran wild in the fields. Mostly, they all spent time in nearby Glenwood, where one of the sisters, Hazel (also bestowed with an affectionate nickname, Aunt Tiny) lived in a house large enough to accommodate the ever-growing family. If they needed more room, they could always move into any of the many other houses around town owned by different family members.

They might have five, six kids in three bedrooms, but we were bunking up like cowboys, Jeff Billings recalled. Nobody was on the street.

Tim was there, too. Just a few years earlier, while living in Florida, his parents had decided to divorce. His mother had remarried and remained in Florida, but Tim and his siblings refused to join her, unable to put up with their strict new stepfather, who abhorred the kids’ long hair. Although Terry, Tim’s younger brother, stayed with their mother in Florida for a while, Tim moved back to nearby Omaha with their father.

But he continued moving around the country.

It was not uncommon for my parents to bring a cousin back, Beverly recalled of holiday visits. So Tim, along with one of Aunt Tiny’s sons, decided to take a few days in Michigan with Beverly and her siblings.

There, with his cousins and his aunt and uncle, Tim rang in the New Year 1972. There were snowball fights, matches on the basement pool table, late-night movies, and maybe a little bit of weed.

The kids made a movie of the fireplace on the 8mm camera, putting fake feet in the fire to stand in for Santa Claus. Tim proved his knack for mechanics when he helped repair his uncle’s snowmobile, giving the kids a chance to tool around through the thick drifts of mid-Michigan snow.

Beverly’s girlfriends passed in and out of the house, casting curious glances at the handsome sixteen-year-old. Even though he didn’t hit it off with any of them, he joked that maybe he should move up to Michigan.

On Christmas morning Beverly presented Tim with a new belt buckle engraved with the outline of a Model A car. He wore the belt buckle for the rest of his visit.

The last photographs of Timothy McCoy show a teenage boy standing beside the Christmas tree in his aunt and uncle’s home in Michigan. He wears a green army coat, and his dark blond hair runs long, curling around his ears and glancing the tops of his shoulders.

In one photograph, Tim, caught in mid-laugh, looks off to the side, maybe at a cousin who has no doubt just said something funny. In another, he stares directly into the camera, hands in his coat pockets, his smile tentative. In Tim’s eyes you can see some hesitation, the smile upon his face just about to break or fade. Someone who looks at Tim’s photo without knowing his age might say he’s still a boy. Others might look at it and say he’s a grown man. He sits smack dab between the two. Sixteen years old.

Some days later, Beverly, her parents, and a few siblings took Tim to the Greyhound bus station in Lansing. He was headed back to Omaha via Chicago, where he’d have a few hours to kill in the middle of the night.

Before he got onboard, each of the family members hugged Tim and told him they loved him. Just what we do in our family, Beverly said. Every one of us.

He promised to call them when he got back to Aunt Tiny’s home in Glenwood, Iowa. With that, he got on the bus, waved through the windows, and rode off as the family looked on.

They waited fourteen years for his call.

Chicago probably did not scare Tim. Although he’d grown up in small towns, he’d also lived in busier places like Burbank, California, and Hollywood, Florida. He’d been to all edges of the country. The city along Lake Michigan was just a new corner for him to explore during his overnight layover that January of 1972.

Tim had been mischievous and adventurous ever since he was a child. Siblings and cousins alike remembered a daring boy who threw himself into quarry lakes or mud puddles.

A railroad ran through the town of Bartlett, Iowa, and sometimes the kids were tasked with sweeping the box cars free of grain along the tracks near the house. Tim and Terry happened to be inside one of these boxcars one day when the train began to move. Petrified, Terry began to cry as the train gradually picked up speed. But Tim, full of glee, shouted enthusiastically, We’re going to Kansas City! We’re going to Kansas City!

The boys’ mother, Susie, happened to come out of the house at the same time to call them in for supper. When she instead found her two sons slipping away from Bartlett aboard a rapidly moving train, she yelled for help.

The noise attracted neighbors (mostly other relatives in the small town), and soon the boys’ older sister’s husband was running through the fields, clambering aboard the train, and jumping from roof to roof of the cars in order to rescue the boys.

Still thrilled with the situation, Tim eventually encouraged his panicked brother to jump from the train, and together they leaped over a passing barbed-wire fence. As Tim untangled his foot from the barbs, the train engineer finally looked back and caught sight of the boys’ brother-in-law, who was now trying to get off the train himself. Eventually, the train came to a stop, and their would-be rescuer stepped off to safety.

Jobs like sweeping grain were usually commissioned by Granddad—Bain Study, the self-made patriarch who adored his many grandchildren and encouraged both their mischief and their sense of responsibility. Granddad had started out working on the railroads to build himself up. For a time, he lived in a rundown cabin in an area known as Green Hollow, where nearby caves often gave warmth or served as cellars during winter and summer. Eventually, Granddad was able to save up for his own house, which he and Grandma filled with children.

At the height of his prosperity, Bain oversaw the Bartlett general store and post office, a one-pump gas station, a grain elevator, and a local bar aptly named the Honker Inn, in honor of the local goose population. With some time for leisure since he’d quit the railroad, Granddad often hosted poker games in the office at the grain bin, banished there by Grandma, who preferred he do his drinking and gambling outside. When enough beer bottles had piled up, he had his grandkids gather and exchange them for money to buy candy. Granddad was also generous with his winnings, but much of what he gave his grandkids came back to him eventually—after all, they purchased the candy at Granddad’s store.

While Granddad cleaned up at his poker game, his grandkids ran amok around him, whipping each other with long ropes of red licorice or succumbing to stomachaches after they eventually ate it all.

In Iowa the McCoy kids—Tim, Terry, Linda, and Cindy—had an idyllic family life on the plains. There was Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, guitars and BB guns, rodeos and baseball games, chores and Sunday dinner. Along with their cousins, they climbed train trestles, swam in rivers, threw frogs at one another, and dug up treasure, once even uncovering Granddad’s lost poker winnings in Prince Albert tobacco tins scattered in the yard.

Dirt-clod wars waged through the summer, until one dead-on projectile knocked an eyeball clear out of one cousin’s head. Later on, Tim’s cousins remembered a family visit to Florida spent wading through hurricane floodwaters and jumping off interstate bridges into waterways populated with alligators, as they learned when the coast guard pulled up to warn them.

At night when the McCoy kids went to bed, they lay listening to the sounds of their father’s band, the Country Rebels, practicing in the house downstairs. Their father, Jack, had come from Tennessee, of slightly unknown origins. He’d been given away twice as a baby, choosing later to join the navy around the age of seventeen.

Jack found family through a girl named Norma Study (known as Susie to her family), whom he’d impressed as a young cowboy with Elvis Presley hair riding motorcycles or bulls at the rodeo, where they first met. The wider Study family was not as impressed with this seeming bad boy, especially after watching him spin out on his Harley Davidson in their yard, running over Granddad’s cherry tree in the process.

Eventually, Susie’s nine siblings, as well as her parents, came to love Jack. I hated that boy then, Granddad said later. Then, after I got to know him, he was the best son-in-law I got.

Jack put music in their lives, too. By day, he worked in the fields or in surrounding factories, but in the evenings, Jack went to the bars or the local VFW and played music on his guitar. In his time, he recorded three 45-rpm records.

Everybody in every town we lived in loved him and went to see him, Linda McCoy recalled.

When Jack eventually took the family to California, he went to get noticed. He’d always been content just to play in local venues and entertain those he cared about. But now he wanted to see if he had what it took to go professional. The time spent there was short-lived.

Linda, it turned out, had developed a lung disease from the Hollywood smog, and doctors recommended they remove her from it soon. Slightly defeated, Jack took the family back home to Iowa, where the Midwest climate quickly restored her health. When my horse comes in, Jack used to say about his fortunes. And though he never got fame, Linda said, he always chased that neon rainbow.

While the orbit of the family revolved mainly around Susie’s parents, Granddad and Grandma, Jack and Susie were beloved by the rest of the family. They remembered Jack as a jokester and musician, while Susie was caring and generous, opening her doors to an endless stream of cousins who came to learn how to bake or cook.

Kindhearted and giving, Susie found a way to care for outsiders as well, helping mentally challenged persons through local organizations. She was from folk that finished their chores and enjoyed the simple things: a broken-in pony, a tended field, and a Dilly Bar purchased at the local Dairy Queen.

From his mother, Tim McCoy took a softer side. This side was good-natured and tender, a side that never told dirty jokes, exuding politeness and care, winning over people like the girlfriends of his female cousins, and earning him extra bowls of strawberries in milk from his grandmother, who did little to conceal that Tim was one of her favorites out of thirty-three grandchildren. This favoritism never wavered, not even after Tim unwittingly locked Grandma in the post office late one afternoon, which required someone to come rescue her.

This was the side of Tim that made sure to hit enough grounders so every cousin got a chance to catch one. This was the side of Tim that came from the heart of America, a salt-of-the-earth family that grew up in the hills and hollers and could trace its history back for centuries.

The family was loyal, sometimes to a fault. Tim’s mother, Susie, who attended school under her Christian name, Norma, once passed her homework to the front of the class through her twin brother, Norman, who mischievously put an n at the end of her name and turned it in as his own. She never told on him, because she didn’t want to get him in trouble.

Tim, too, did whatever he could to help cover for his siblings. Late one evening, he was making peanut butter sandwiches as Cindy attempted to sneak out of the house. Before she left, Tim made her two sandwiches as well. But the noise attracted their mother, who quickly appeared in the kitchen, asking why.

Well, Linda wants one, and Cindy wanted one too, Tim had said.

When their mother went to ask the girls why they needed so many peanut butter sandwiches, she found Cindy vanished. Of course, when Cindy eventually returned several hours later, she earned a torrent of trouble.

From his father, Tim gained his sense of humor, a side of mischief, and a spirited restlessness that drove him all over town, and eventually the country. Likewise, he inherited his father’s love for music, happily blaring Steppenwolf and Creedence Clearwater Revival on his stereo.

In retrospect, Terry, the youngest of the McCoy kids, often considered his brother outwardly as a long hair with redneck ways. He recalled Tim teaching him to play chicken with a penknife in the yard in Florida, throwing the knife into the dirt just inches from Terry’s foot. Once, it actually stabbed him. When Terry protested, Tim apologized and insisted it wouldn’t happen again. Sure enough, on the next throw, Tim’s knife pierced Terry’s foot once more.

But the closeness of the family also concealed edges that were beginning to fray. By the time the McCoys moved to Florida—again, on one of Jack’s whims—the children were older and fighting more frequently, burgeoning adults vying for independence.

Cindy and Linda clashed, mostly out of jealousy, as Cindy, tied down with a child she had had early on, watched her carefree sister come and go in the Florida sun. After one particularly bad fight resulted in broken lamps, their parents issued an ultimatum to the girls, and Linda moved out to live with a friend in a nearby town.

Their parents, Jack and Susie, had begun to grow apart as well. They were no longer able to ignore the differences in their personalities. Jack dipped tobacco and drank at the bars where he played music. Susie was straitlaced, indifferent to music, and preferred to stay at home and bake or spend time with her many sisters. At the start of the new decade, the 1970s, they split for good.

While the girls dealt with their own lives, Tim and Terry stayed behind in Florida with their father. Both parents moved on quickly, finding new partners—and in Jack’s case, stepchildren.

Terry, the youngest, remembers feeling confused by the divorce. Tim quit school and eventually moved to Nebraska with his father. He procured a fake ID and, at only fifteen, got a job as a forklift operator at Blue Star Foods in nearby Council Bluffs.

Around this time, another event occurred that was destined to become family legend. While traveling back and forth to the Midwest, so the stories go, Tim started dating a girl in Florida. She eventually became pregnant with his child, and he sent her a bus ticket to come up to Omaha and move in with him. There, she allegedly gave birth to a daughter. Some family members are skeptical that Tim could have possibly fathered a child, but others believe it. No one knows for sure.

Nevertheless, this time in Tim’s life reveals a young boy looking anxiously for the next phase of his life with a little bit of longing, a little bit of doubt. Terry saw him less frequently, his sisters even less so. Tim’s life in these last few months becomes a mystery.

But the last witness is perhaps the least truthful.

Tim arrived in Chicago sometime after midnight that January night in 1972, just after the holidays. His connecting bus home to Iowa was not scheduled to leave until early morning, giving him a couple of hours to spend in Chicago.

So when a car pulled up and its driver—a plump young man with a baby face and confident demeanor—offered to give him a ride around the city, Tim didn’t hesitate. The driver called himself John.

All their lives, they’d been getting closer to each other without knowing it. Tim had moved around a lot, but he’d come back to what he always considered home: Iowa. Just a few hundred miles away in Waterloo, John had been making a name for himself. But it wasn’t until they were in Chicago, perhaps both at a crossroads in their own lives, that they finally crossed each other’s paths.

That evening, John had gathered for the holidays with members of his mother’s family at his aunt’s home. John had been feeling lonely and depressed, though, as an aunt on his father’s side had died just days before. At the end of the party, John’s mother had refused to drive home, due to John’s inebriated state. He’d driven alone downtown, where he met Tim, who had time to waste and seemed friendly.

Perhaps the two had bonded first over talk of Iowa, where John had spent several years of married life. Now, back in Chicago where he’d grown up, he was a divorced twenty-nine-year-old working as a short-order cook and living near the airport in a new home he’d purchased with his mother, who also lived there.

Despite this, John presented himself as an ambitious entrepreneur, boasting about his prospects or his involvement in the local Democratic Party and his pending second marriage with a woman who had two daughters from another marriage.

He might have bragged about cooking for players of the Blackhawks hockey team, who frequented the restaurant Bruno’s, where John worked, often alongside a team of teenage boys who had also helped him out with some renovation work he’d done.

John knew Chicago well. He’d come of age on its streets. Mayor Richard J. Daley, a personal hero of his, had been mayor most of John’s life, having recently won a fifth term. Only a handful of years prior, the city had seen its way through the 1968 Democratic Convention, an event that had devolved into violent clashes outside the convention between antiwar protesters and police, as well as inside among delegates, journalists, and politicians. For Americans watching on television, the violence capped not only a chaotic year that had seen the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and a peak in American troops in Vietnam but a chaotic decade that seemed unending in its upheaval.

Aside from the convention, Chicago had been an epicenter for much of the bedlam of the 1960s. The city had become a battleground for radical political and activist groups. After the convention riots, the federal government brought charges against seven antiwar activists in what became known as the trial of the Chicago Seven. In 1969, as the trial unfolded, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and fellow activist Mark Clark were gunned down in an assassination coordinated by the FBI, the Chicago police, and the state’s attorney’s office.

Standing in solidarity with the Panthers, the Weather Underground sought to end US-led wars and imperialistic ambitions, often through its own brand of violence. Dozens of bombs went off in major cities in the 1960s and ’70s, most notably in October 1969 at the Haymarket Square memorial, commemorating a police officer who died in an 1886 anarchist bombing during a labor demonstration.

Only two days after, during events later called the Days of Rage, the Weathermen looked to incite more chaos by hosting rallies intended to spill into the Gold Coast, a tony neighborhood north of downtown. While the protests grew over the next few days, causing extensive damage to shops, cars, and homes, they were outmatched by Chicago police. Illinois state representative Richard Elrod was paralyzed from the waist down during a scuffle with a protester. Elrod would later become Cook County sheriff and would someday tour the home of John the driver, a fellow Democrat.

Outside politics and activism, Chicago’s crime rate had steadily risen since 1957, peaking in 1974 with 970 homicides. The Chicago Tribune put out a report in 1975 discussing the reasons for the rise, from increasing rates of idle youths to the depiction of violence in films and TV. One expert argued the depiction was not realistic enough to deter humans from killing other humans.

Chicago by then had a reputation, as did many major cities in America in the 1970s. But if he had been daunted by the city on the lake, Tim McCoy must have felt he was in good hands. John knew his way around the city.

They would have seen the in-progress Sears Tower, its bulky base rising up and giving way to a thin scaffolding of skeletal floors. They could have seen the river, famously dyed green each year for St. Patrick’s Day, which was also John’s birthday. Along the riverbanks sat the squat Art Deco–style Merchandise Mart near the twin corncob hives of Marina City, standing like two alien structures among the city’s other skyscrapers. Ice sculptures in the civic center plaza held fast in the deep freeze of another Chicago winter.

Maybe John took him past Washington Square, known to locals as Bughouse Square. And maybe here, John told him a few crude tales about the type of boys who stood out on the corners, waiting to catch a ride. One can imagine John casting sidelong glances, wondering how the handsome young man might react to these lewd details.

Up on Lake Shore Drive, Tim could look out at the black water of Lake Michigan, choked with ice and foam, and beyond, where the city’s pumping stations blinked faithfully out in the dark.

Through New Town, John might have showed him other places he knew. Bars where men went looking for other men. It was a curious neighborhood, full of taverns and restaurants with cheeky names and imagery cutting a bawdy balance between masculine and effeminate.

Farther still, maybe Wrigley Field, where John sometimes caught a Cubs game, and where the homes began to change. Maybe this was something new for Tim, something stark. Here, the tenement buildings seemed to be falling down, with their missing windows or their burned-out edges. It seemed like so many families were stacked on top of each other. Their faces told stories of poverty, something he knew only from television. In this neighborhood walked the ghosts of Al Capone and other gangsters, who used to own the many taverns and nightclubs now wedged against pool halls and unemployment offices, pizza places and liquor stores. Those former ballrooms had traded the velveteen hum of jazz for the noisy pulse of rock and disco.

At some point along the way, they decided they’d driven enough. Tim had grown hungry, and John was done waiting. It was time to get what he wanted.

They turned west toward the edges of the city, where planes swooped low and neat yards closed off little bungalow houses in a postwar sprawl that seemed endless and orderly.

They arrived at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park Township,* an unincorporated area of Cook County. The ranch home was nothing remarkable, and most likely untidy and unfinished at that point in time, as John had only moved in the previous August. Tonight, it was empty; not only had his mother decided to stay at his aunt’s, but his fiancée and her kids were with her mother.

John, no doubt, was his normal boastful self, talking about his connections and how he intended to turn the house into a proper home that could host parties and guests. John, a drinker, offered Tim 190-proof clear grain alcohol, and they drank together for a while.

As the conversation loosened and the night wore on, John might have finally broached the topic. By all accounts, Tim was straight. Girls liked him, and he liked them back. But according to Gacy, the two had a sexual encounter that evening and, sometime after, went to bed together. Whether this was truly a consensual encounter is unknown.

John had started making a practice of this kind of encounter. Back in February 1971 he had picked up another teenager from the Greyhound station and taken him home. The boy had not been a willing partner, and when he escaped, he promptly went to the police. John was charged with sexual assault.

But the boy never showed up to court, and charges were dismissed.

John’s problems went beyond Chicago. They had haunted his days in Iowa, where even the anchor of a successful career and a wife and two kids could not save him from himself. He’d been the manager of three Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, and active in a local chapter of the Jaycees, an entrepreneurial and civic organization for young men. The group had brought John a lavish social life, one that allowed him to dabble with prostitutes and wife-swapping. But for John, it wasn’t enough.

Donald Voorhees was the fifteen-year-old son of a fellow Jaycee who had caught John’s attention. John often socialized with young teenagers—particularly boys—who worked in his restaurants. They’d regularly come to his home in Waterloo, where he’d set up a social club (with dues) in his basement for them to freely smoke weed, drink beer, and play pool. Sometimes John showed them pornography, or stag films, on a projector. Other times John found creative ways to manipulate his young friends into sexual favors. He would claim he had been hired by the governor of Illinois to perform heterosexual and homosexual experiments in the name of science; other times, he would challenge boys to games of pool, asking them to perform oral sex on him if they lost. After Donald came over one evening, John got him drunk and coerced him into oral sex.

Frightened and traumatized, Donald went to the police, and with pressure from his father, a state representative, John was arrested on charges of sodomy. Immediately after John’s arrest, another youth came forward to tell a similar story.

John insisted on his innocence and requested a polygraph, which proved inconclusive. He might have even beaten the charges, had he not attempted to deal with matters himself.

John had mentioned his legal troubles to a teenage employee, Russell Schroe der, who was eager to pay off a debt on his car and vent off