The Last Victim_ A True-Life Journey Into the Mind of the Serial Killer - Jason Moss [97]
I felt somewhat depressed as well, because although I was glad to be rid of Gacy and my other pen pals, I’d enjoyed the excitement. Without their bizarre behavior to examine, my life now seemed fairly boring.
Still, there were compensations: the time away from Jenn seemed to make us both more giving and appreciative. And Jarrod was ecstatic that he had his brother back—that I wasn’t as distracted as I’d been the previous months.
There was, however, one last piece of unfinished business: Gacy was due to be put to death and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
I still feared him. I continued to have trouble sleeping. At times I hated him more than I’ve ever hated anyone. I prayed to God that this time he’d finally be executed. Seven times in the past it had been postponed, and there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t happen again. I knew for sure that Gacy thought he still had a few more tricks up his sleeve.
The media attention surrounding the scheduled execution was enormous. I couldn’t turn on the television or open a newspaper without seeing Gacy’s smiling face. And each time I glimpsed it, the memories would come flooding back—of his standing over me, wagging his penis in my face, and me sobbing helplessly. No matter what else I lived through, that image would forever be burned into my brain.
If there was an upside to all this, it was that I was now a celebrity among my friends. A feature article had appeared in the local newspaper about my visiting Gacy for a school project, and when I walked around campus, people I hardly knew would call out, “So they’re gonna smoke your friend, huh?”
Actually, there’d be no smoke involved, since lethal injection was the preferred method of execution in Illinois. I told myself that I couldn’t wait for the needle to be inserted, that once the deadly liquid ran into his veins he’d be out of my life forever.
The part I kept buried at the time is that I could never have administered the lethal dose myself. No matter how much I feared and hated him, I couldn’t wish what was going to happen to him on anyone. I imagined him in his cell with all his bravado, all his charm, pretending to the world that he was fearless. I knew how terrified he really was.
This might sound ridiculous, but I began wondering if Gacy had a soul. I wondered if someone who was that evil, who’d destroyed so many lives, who was so willing to be deceptive and manipulative, could possibly have anything resembling a spiritual side to him. If so, I wondered if he’d haunt me from the grave.
The day of the execution, Jenn joined my family as we sat around the television waiting for the latest report. The media had been calling me for comments because I was a local connection to a story that, by now, had spilled beyond America’s borders and gone international. While I answered reporters’ questions, bantered with Jenn and my brother, sparred with my mother, and talked with my dad, I kept thinking about Gacy. I felt really sad. I thought about how alone and scared he was probably feeling.
Except for my grandfather, who’d died when I was young, Gacy was the first person I’d known whose life was about to be snuffed out. As the spectacle unfolded on television, there were shots of protesters outside the prison . . . interviews with relatives of the victims . . . footage showing where the execution would take place, the gurney he’d lie down on, and the straps that would hold him in place. The camera lingered on the IV tubes that would deliver first a double dose of sodium pentothal to sedate him and then a combination of pancuronium bromide to stop his breathing and potassium chloride to stop his heart. The executioners seemed to have thought of everything.
Normally, this is supposed