by Mike Robinson, Associated Press Writer
Saturday, November 21, 1998P
olice digging for more bodies as Gacy horror flares anewPolice were looking for just one missing boy on the winter day in 1978 when they went to John Wayne Gacy's house. But there were bodies under the garage floor, bodies under the concrete, bodies under the basement, recalls prosecutor Colin Simpson. Investigators have long suspected that they didn't find all of the unrepentant serial killer's victims. Prompted by new evidence, police plan to begin digging Monday outside a brick apartment building where Gacy's mother once lived on Chicago's Northwest Side. Ground-penetrating radar suggests there's something under a blacktopped parking lot -- possibly a rib cage, tennis shoes, a body, maybe several. There's no certainty, but experts say that what police find could add to the toll of 33 known victims of the amateur clown and building contractor. And that could be important to families who have never learned the fate of boys missing at the time. When the 33 bodies were unearthed, worried parents sent in hundreds of sets of dental records from across the nation to see if they matched any of the remains, said Dr. Edward Pavlik, a forensic dentist who is chief of forensic sciences for the Cook County sheriff's office. ``There were a couple of families who kept sending their records in hopes that they could put closure to their family affair,'' Pavlik says.
DNA, a tool that wasn't available 20 years ago, might also be used to identify new bodies if any usable samples can be recovered from the remains. Interest in the site outside the apartment house began when private investigator Bill Dorsch, a former city policeman, told officials of the Chicago-based Better Government Association that he recalled once seeing Gacy in a nearby alley at 3 a.m. carrying a dirty shovel. Dorsch said that after Gacy was arrested three years later, he called the Cook County sheriff's office but the information he gave went nowhere. The association, a privately financed civic group, rented the radar, used it to examine the small parking lot and took the resulting picture to police. ``I don't think that there is any alternative, now that this information has come up, but to unearth these things and find out what they are,'' says former Gacy prosecutor Terry Sullivan. For six years starting in 1972, Gacy lured young men and boys to his home for sex, then tortured and strangled them. The bodies of 27 were found in the dank, malodorous crawl space under his house. Two more were dug out of his back yard and four others were fished out of the nearby Des Plaines River.
Gacy spent much of his 14 years in prison painting pictures of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and of fellow serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. In 1994, after savoring a last cigar, the man described by police and prosecutors as wholly without a conscience died in the execution chamber at Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet. Even veteran homicide investigators were shaken by the bodies, mainly reduced to skeletons by decomposition and the lye Gacy used to kill the odor. ``It was horrible,'' says Joe Kozenczak, the former chief of detectives in suburban Des Plaines whose investigation of a missing boy first brought police to Gacy's door. ``It was a nightmare that has never gone away,'' Kozenczak says. ``Two of my closest friends, investigators who stood at the house with me, are dead from heart attacks ... from the horror and the overwhelming anxiety and stress of working this case.'' He says nothing else he's seen matches Gacy's sheer heartlessness. Asked what he thinks Gacy would have said had he spoken frankly about his victims, Kozenczak answers without hesitation: ``John would have said they deserved it.'' Whether the police digging will uncover more victims is anybody's guess. But if so, it won't surprise investigators. "It will confirm what I've believed for many years," says Kozenczak, "that there are more victims out there, maybe many more victims."
