Buried Dreams Read Online Free PDF

under the front porch, hidden from the street and not such an eyesore. The Old Man allowed that one to stand. The neighbors said the Gacys had a house under a house. It was a secret place where a quiet, polite boy could be alone, a boy who had been sick, frail as long as he could remember. In the damp darkness under the porch—garden snakes and salamanders there—John could think about flowers, about landscaping and building: the things he liked. The other boys were playing baseball or football or basketball, but John never had any interest in sports. A loner, sickly and weak, uncoordinated, flabby even as a child.
    All the memories swirling in a golden mist: sudden bright images, incomplete stories, everything coming together at a point where memory becomes linear and a certain kind of innocence dies: a point when the child realized he was not like other little boys. He was a “loner,” an “ugly duckling” he was “not good enough,” he was “different.”
    All the docs wanted a piece of his youth. John up there under heavy guard in 3 North, the isolation wing, the criminal psychiatric section of Cermak Hospital in Chicago. A literal madhouse, with all these screaming nuts, all the guys trying to hang themselves, “swingers” around every corner, and the gospel music blasting him awake at six in the morning when he never could get to sleep until four. John wassupposed to talk with Dr. Rogers and Dr. Rappaport, with Dr. Freedman and Dr. Morrison, with Dr. Brocher and Dr. Cavanaugh, all of them trying to crack the shell and pick away at his guts with their shining, sharp-pointed questions.
    Rogers was almost funny. John could see the guy was “scared,” didn’t like to be alone with him. Rogers was supposed to take “a sexual history” from John, and then—John supposed—the doc would bend all the information around, fit some pieces in here, some in there, and come up with a theory about all those bodies in the crawl space. Something to do with jagging off in the eighth grade.
    John figured Rogers purposely acted dumb, always asking him to define terms, explain things, like a doc who’s been studying this shit all his life didn’t know. Rogers, the way John saw it, got a kick out of asking questions. Not because he didn’t know the answers. The guy liked hearing other people talk about their sex hang-ups. He got his rocks off that way, and that was Dr. Rogers’ sex hang-up. Pervert questions, John thought.
    Still, John talked and talked and talked, elaborating on every detail, answering the questions as fully and honestly as he could, because, in a way, Rogers and all the other doctors were helping. The cross God gave John Wayne Gacy to bear was a heavy one: bad enough to be accused, but John told the docs he truly and honestly did not know if he committed the crimes. He could recall some parts leading up to just five of them, and it was as if he were a witness to what was happening, like he was another person in another body, watching. And then it all faded out and there was nothing until morning, and he found another body with a rope wrapped around its neck, some little present Jack had left for John to bury.
    If he did the crime—if the docs could prove to him that he did—then John would save Illinois the expense of a trial. There were twenty ways to commit suicide, even under heavy guard in 3 North. No one has the almighty right to take another life—the Bible says, “Thou shalt not kill"—and if the docs could show him, in his own mind, that he was a killer . . . well, a man like that, thirty-three bodies, he “didn’t deserve to live.”
    So he gave Rogers the sexual history, casting back into the golden time. The first memory, the first thing he could recall and be sure was his and not pieces of a story told to him, was a sexual event.

    1946. John was four and she took him out to the prairie where the grasses were high and they were hidden from the houses on Opal Street. A fifteen-year-old