Nancy Rommelman - Destination Gacy: A Cross-Country Journey to Shake the Devils Hand

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Copyright 2014 by Nancy Rommelmann

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Previously published in the LA Weekly, September 16, 1994

A cross-country journey to shake the devils hand

When I wrote Going to Gacy, in 1994, John Wayne Gacy was the most notorious serial killer in America. He still is. We are revolted by his crimes yet remain transfixed by how a human being can commit such acts. We brand him a monster, lock him away, execute him, and yet the question remains. Whether my meeting Gacy helped bring the man and his motivations into focus, you may decide for yourself.

Another thing that has not changed in the past 20 years is Americans stance on capital punishment. Some believe execution is the only just penalty for taking a life; others insist, The death penalty is dead wrong. As a journalist who chronicles murder, I have seen peoples blood burn for revenge in the wake of a killing. I have felt it myself. But then the blood cools.

One fact is irrefutable: keeping a prisoner on death row is expensive. The state of California, for instance, spends $90,000 a year more on a death row prisoner than on a regular inmate, and the cost of court dates and appeals can run into the millions and stretch over decades. When looking for consensus, we might let fiscal responsibility rule the day if our hearts remain conflicted.

Nancy Rommelmann

Portland, Oregon

February 2014

I once read that serial killer John Wayne Gacys brain was missing. Someone had stolen it. Following Gacys execution, the brain had supposedly been extracted in hopes that probing the gray matter might shed some light on why killers kill. A later newspaper story reported that a forensic psychiatrist dissected his brain and still has it. Regardless of what actually happened to Gacys gray matter, the public had an insatiable appetite for him while he lived; postmortem, we were still trying to get a piece of him.

Ive got mine: a pack of prison cigarettes and several photographs from when I visited Gacy in May 1994. The following week, the number one serial killer of that time was executed for 33 murders he committed throughout the 1970s, most of which included handcuffing young men and boyssome of whom were lured to Gacys home for paid sex, others with the promise of employment in Gacys contracting companyto a specially made board, then choking them to death with a knotted rope over a matter of hours or sometimes days. He stuffed 27 of the bodies into the crawl space beneath his Chicago-area home; two were found buried in his yard, four in a nearby river. Once a pillar of his Des Plaines, Illinois, community, Gacy denied the murders; in 1980, a jury found otherwise and sentenced Gacy to death. His fight to postpone the inevitable ended when the state of Illinois rejected his final appeal. The May 10 execution took place as scheduled.

Before his death, family, friends, and people he had never met besieged Gacy with requests. One came from a 26-year-old musician and artist from Los Angeles, with whom Gacy had been corresponding for two years. On Gacys urging, Rick Gaez made the 1,500-mile journey to visit his pen pal before it was too late. Rick asked me, a casual friend who also was a writer, to accompany him and document the encounter.

I took a lot of flak for it. Wasnt I scared, wasnt I sickened? How could I explain I was looking forward to it? A crime-TV junkie, I could at the time have told you every schedule change Americas Most Wanted had made in the previous two years. The re-enactments, especially the ones involving murder, drove me off the couch screaming at the perps mug shot. No matter how heinous the crime, I looked. Meeting Gacy meant facing the horror Id insofar only encountered on the nightly news, my front door double-locked.

The anticipation made me feel as though I were filling with helium. Certainly, I had never knowingly courted a murderer. Going to Gacy meant walking into the den of the beast. Shackled, defanged, yes, but even under neutralized circumstances, the idea was electrifying.

We took to the road to meet a killer.

Driving out of Los Angeles in a rented Tempo, I try to remember Gacys 1978 arrest. I vaguely recall some big white man in handcuffs, sheet-draped bodies bobbing past prying cameras. But it was a world away from New York City, where wed recently been held hostage by local serial killer Son of Sam. Daring to stay out past midnight became a nervy drama; the killer could be anywhere. With our nightly lives hanging in the balance, the city crackled.

Cruising through Death Valley, Rick agrees part of Gacys allure was the proximity to danger. But he insists his initial contact with Gacy was predicated on something more tangible: the killers art.

In 1992, I saw one of Gacys paintings. It was odd, really bright and flat, Rick says. I knew I wanted one, so I wrote him, and enclosed a picture of myself when I was 17, really clean-shaven and pretty and boyish, figuring thats about what he goes for.

Rick knew he fit the profile of Gacys victimsyoung, good-lookingand used this to entice Gacy into painting his portrait, which Gacy did, at a discount. But why would Rick, the product of a close-knit Catholic Latino family, a popular guy very much on the L.A. scene, keep communicating with a middle-aged sex offender and serial killer?

Ive always been attracted to extremes, to deviants. Like my father said, You never know how cold the devils hand is until you shake it. When I got the opportunity to shake Gacys hand, I took it. People think its wrong, but thats a judgment call on their part. Why shouldnt I communicate with this guy? Hes part of 20th-century history, and Im getting to meet him.

But why Gacy? Why not the pope?

The pope is boring, and anyway, meeting Gacy puts a little black in my life. Growing up in Orange County, life was comfortable, boring, suburban. Writing Gacy was like becoming a punker when we were kids, shouting Fuck you! just to break the monotony.

I ask how the letter-writing started.

He sent me a questionnaire, stuff like Favorite Movie, and sent me his responses. I started to get a letter every month or so, and my girlfriend and I would just laugh, it was so weird. And all my friends thought it was wild; they couldnt believe I was writing this guy. They all wanted to, but nobody actually did. The people I know are talkers, no ones a walker. No one follows through with the things they say theyre going to do. But I was really glad no one else wrote him. I think the novelty wouldve worn off if seven of my friends had said, Dude, I got a letter from him, too.

Gacy letter to Rick, April 30, 1993 : I think what I enjoy about your letters is youre open and honest...you live in a town that is based on fantasy, so youre right, you have a lot of phony people, but some honest ones, too. Hell, I seem to have found one...

Once in Vegas, we bypass the glitzy Golden Nugget for the dustier El Cortez, where geriatric gamblers play the slots, dropping in nickels with the slow determination of cows at a salt lick. Rick and I head to Glitter Gulch, where the girls dance topless to trash-rock. For $1 tips, they grind with various degrees of enthusiasm, each failing to get a lap dance out of the young farmer to my right, who sits stock-still each time a silicone-engorged breast hits his nose. I chat up two Aussies who say theyre part of a band called the Hoo Doo Gurus. When I tell them were headed to see Gacy, they shout Fair dinkum! and I think: