The Last Victim_ A True-Life Journey Into the Mind of the Serial Killer - Jason Moss [68]
He cites, for instance, that the victims were killed in different ways, signaling different culprits; the police couldn’t identify some of the bodies, nor could they say positively when the crimes were committed; there was a lot of drug and alcohol use going on in Gacy’s house—engaged in by others, not him; the prosecution couldn’t prove where he was at the time some of the crimes were committed. His main argument seemed to be that nobody actually saw him commit the crimes, so he was within his rights to insist he didn’t do them.
When I read his long, convoluted arguments, all I could do was shake my head. Did he have any idea how crazy all this sounded? At his arrest he said unequivocally: “I did it.” Under interrogation, he revised his statement to say: “I didn’t do it; Jack did” (his alter ego). During psychiatric evaluation, he admitted: “I may have done it but I don’t remember.” At his trial he said: “Someone else did it and framed me.” Later he admitted to me: “They [the victims] deserved what they got.” Did he really think that other people were so stupid that they’d forget all the things he’d said earlier and ignore the mountain of evidence? In a word: yes. He concluded his first mid-February letter with this point:
. . . if I were as guilty as the State would like you to believe, then how come there is so much to my appeal and I am not dead yet? Clearly cases of crimes with death penalty conviction after mine are already dead within 6 to 8 years. Next month we go into the 15 year. As there is a lot of doubt in my conviction. The May 10th date is not written in stone and I wouldn’t bet that I will die then.
Although I enjoyed drawing him out in this way, asking him direct questions just to see what kind of answers he’d give, he’d only let me get away with it on a few occasions. In his very next letter, he indulged me further by responding to each of the fifty-three questions I’d compiled from various magazines and books.
In directing questions to him, I’d tried to focus in on areas he’d previously been evasive about. For instance, there was a long-standing story about his being caught when he was five years old smelling his mother’s panties. Experts point to that as the earliest sign of his sexual deviance. I asked him to tell me about his panty fetish, whether he preferred clean or dirty ones, and what he did with them. He answered by saying that he used to take only the panties of his mother and keep them in a brown paper bag. He couldn’t recall ever wearing or smelling them, and he said he eventually grew out of the habit.
I asked him about his voluntary confession to the police in which he not only admitted that he’d killed the boys but actually drew a map showing where the bodies were buried in their exact positions. He insisted that there’d been an illegally obtained confession and that the map must have been drawn by the police to frame him.
I was feeling more and more frustrated by these programmed answers until I came to a question concerning his being sexually molested as a child. For a change, his answer was direct and to the point:
Yes [I was molested] by a contractor who would come take me for rides. I was 8 years old and we always ended up with him holding my head between his legs. Until one day I was hiding when he came by and Mom asked me why I didn’t go. After explaining, she told my Dad. Next time this guy came by, my dad yelled at him and he never came back again.
Gacy seemed to be in incredible denial about other issues, though. When I asked what it felt like to be beaten and abused by his dad, he vehemently denied that he felt anything but love for his father. He was equally insistent that all the other stories