By John O'Brien
Tribune Staff Writer
John Wayne Gacy was executed in 1994, but Chicago police are preparing to find out whether he went to his death with a secret. They are making plans to dig up a small pie-shaped area behind a Northwest Side home, based on a ground radar survey indicating that human remains may be buried there. A former Chicago police detective once ran into Gacy in an alley there, holding a shovel, a recollection that along with the computer data from the radar is responsible for opening the new investigation. Still, even as police seek a search warrant for the dig, they are more than a little skeptical about what they may find. Recollecting Geraldo Rivera's plunge into Al Capone's vault, they fear being held up to ridicule if the tip does not pan out and they don't want to create a circus atmosphere.
The computerized data from the radar indicates, but does not prove, the presence of as many as four bodies buried at about 40 inches, according to sources. If successful, the search and identification of remains through dental records could bring closure to the families of some long-missing young men. Any recovery of human remains also would validate the suspicions of a former Chicago police detective who is at the center of the new Gacy development. His recollections prompted the Better Government Association to examine the site with the ground-penetrating radar, according to sources familiar with the probe. This week the state's attorney's office took a statement from former Detective Bill Dorsch, now a private investigator. Dorsch described for prosecutors the night in 1975 when the headlights of his car fell upon Gacy, holding a dirty shovel, next to the Northwest Side alley where the new search is proposed. The time was 3 a.m., according to the statement, and Dorsch, driving home from his police shift, was startled to see anyone in the alley, much less Gacy, whom he knew as a local building contractor who occasionally dressed up as a clown to entertain children.
Recalling the encounter in an interview, Dorsch related Gacy's quick, almost upbeat reaction. "I stopped and said, `John, what are you doing out here at this time of night with a shovel?' " He said Gacy approached his car, smiled and replied: "Well, with all the kind of work I do, there just isn't enough time in the day. So here I am." Dorsch drove on, thinking nothing more of the encounter. That is, until the arrest of Gacy and disclosure of his crawl-space cemetery three years later. Suddenly, the alley encounter took on new significance. "I thought back to the time I'd found him in the middle of the night, holding the shovel, and asked myself, `Was he burying a body back then?' " Dorsch said. At the time, Gacy's mother was renting a nearby apartment also frequented by her son, according to sources familiar with Gacy. Dorsch said he immediately contacted the Cook County sheriff's office, which had assumed jurisdiction because Gacy's house was in an unincorporated area just outside Chicago. But his telephone call to a sheriff's hot line, while answered, apparently went no further.
No one from the county police, he said, ever got back to him. "I'm sure they were swamped with work about Gacy and got lots of calls like mine," Dorsch said. Gacy, whom police have linked to 33 killings of young men and boys, went to his death by lethal injection without any mention of the suspected site. He was executed on May 10, 1994, at Stateville Correctional Center, near Joliet. Gacy's murder spree is believed to have begun six years before his arrest in December 1978. A search of his home in unincorporated Norwood Park Township at the time uncovered 27 murder victims in a dank crawl space. But the macabre retrieval of dead men didn't stop at what soon became known as Gacy's house of horrors. The bodies of two more victims were unearthed in his back yard; four others were fished out of the Des Plaines River. Gacy never confessed to the murders or gave a complete accounting of the crimes, and investigators have speculated that there could have been more than 33 victims.
In recent months, ground-penetrating radar provided by a New Jersey firm was slowly rolled over the site, shooting bursts of energy into the ground. Printouts of the radar imagery, examined by experts, indicate skeletal outlines, possibly as many as four sets. One set of images appears to show a skull, a ribcage and a shoe, according to sources familiar with the investigation. Officials with the Better Government Association could not be reached Tuesday. How the test, arranged by the BGA, came about in the first place is a story in itself that hinges, ironically, on another crime--the so-called Palatine Massacre. In that unsolved case, seven people died, shot to death in a fast-food restaurant in January 1993. Earlier this year, the BGA, which had conducted an exhaustive study of the massacre investigation, released a report highly critical of the police response to the crime.
Dorsch had been consulted in that case by the BGA because of his reputation for solving homicide cases while a police detective. In the course of his Palatine work he broached the subject of the Gacy alley encounter, which he said he had been unable to put out of his mind. Advances in technology have aided the inquiry. The radar, which has been used in other criminal investigations in recent years, has often been used to probe for hidden pipes as well.
This story is a composite of versions published in the various zones.
