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  “Boys Enter the House is an incredibly researched yet page-turning narrative and an essential read: anyone fascinated with this case knows of the many murdered boys, but Nelson expands their lives to a familiarity I’ve never before felt.… Nelson’s level of attention, detail, and respect toward the victims of criminals is the gold standard for every true crime writer.”

  —MARY KAY MCBRAYER, author of America’s First Female Serial Killer

  As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978–79, he became known as one of many so-called sex murderers who had begun gaining notoriety in the random brutality of the 1970s.

  As public interest grew rapidly, victims became footnotes and statistics, lives lost not just to violence but to history as well. Through the testimony of siblings, parents, friends, lovers, and other witnesses close to the case, Boys Enter the House retraces the footsteps of these victims as they make their way to the doorstep of the Gacy house.

  Copyright © 2022 by David Nelson

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-64160-486-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941440

  Typesetting: Nord Compo

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  For Mildred Hofelich, who gave me books when I needed them most.

  And for Lily and Charlie, my little beams of light.

  “I am disappearing inch by inch into this house …”

  —The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1 The Greyhound Bus Boy

  2 The Poor Side of Town

  3 Class of 1973

  4 All Happy Families

  5 Silly Love Songs

  6 In the Company of Homosexuals

  7 The Runaways

  8 Summerdale Avenue

  9 Light and Concrete

  10 The Gallery of Grief

  11 Boys Coming Home

  12 Remember Me Always

  Coda: Disco Inferno

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  NEARLY THIRTY-THREE YEARS after police arrested John Wayne Gacy, I found myself living in the same neighborhood as some of his victims.

  Uptown, on the North Side of Chicago, has become a different place since the 1970s. The Appalachian families—at one point the largest segment of Uptown’s population—have long scattered, either to the suburbs or back to Appalachia. While many of Uptown’s original buildings remain, many of them have been renovated or removed to make way for gyms or coffee shops or glassy apartment buildings devoid of any coziness or comfort.

  Today, you can find traces of the past on the North Side. In Uptown specifically, you can still take in a jazz set until 5 AM at the Green Mill or live honky-tonk music at Carol’s Pub, the last vestige of the Appalachians. You can still walk Sunnyside Mall, where Samuel Stapleton and Randy Reffett hung out together, or pass by their school, Stockton, where Dale Landingin, Billy Kindred, and Billy Carroll also attended in the 1970s.

  In the area formerly known as New Town, very little remains of the vibrant gay community of the 1970s where several of the boys roamed or disappeared from, though nearby Boystown carries on its echo. In North Center, you can still go to the Gale Street Inn, where Gacy himself used to schmooze and where, in 2015, I listened to the story of Judy Patterson, who confronted Gacy himself to ask about her missing boyfriend, Greg Godzik.

  For the stories that follow, these sacred memories are the primary source. Relatives, friends, and significant others have all stepped forward to retell their memories, not just of the case but of the times before their brother, their boyfriend, or their friend became a face in the newspaper. These memories form not just the narrative structure but the very heart and blood of this book.

  Of course, memories are always a bit elusive; like mirages, they shift and vanish as years go by. Sometimes they can conflict with the memories of another person, which I encountered in some situations when interviewing multiple siblings of victims. Other times, official records or statements from the time may slightly contradict: one witness’s memory conflicted in small ways with their testimony at the trial in 1980.

  Boys Enter the House attempts to balance these modern-day memories against the many records, news reports, and witness statements recorded back in the 1970s and ’80s. The reader should note that these stories are not necessarily told chronologically. For instance, events happening in one chapter for one boy may not be occurring at the same exact time or year for another boy; rather, they are told together for thematical purposes. Wherever dialogue or other direct quotes from past events are included, they have been recorded by witness statements or police reports or are taken from the quotations of those who remembered hearing them spoken.

  Obviously, within this book are many depictions of violence, including murder and rape. But readers should note that in addition to these acts, Boys Enter the House also depicts instances of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, often perpetrated among family members against child victims.

  Many of these stories overlap with depictions of sex work, specifically between male sex workers and older male clients. Boys Enters the House favors the term sex worker over prostitute, which brings connotations of criminality and stigmatization. In some instances, I have chosen to use the words hustler or chicken to reflect the colloquialisms of the time. Sex work is work, and sex workers come from unique backgrounds, ultimately deciding to pursue this work for a variety of reasons and circumstances, many of them a result of systemic factors.

  Those who hire sex workers, though I acknowledge that they can often take advantage of or exploit sex workers, are treated here with similar sensitivity. This book favors the use of the term client, though it does use the colloquialisms john, chicken hawk, or hawk in keeping with the slang of the day. In many situations in this book, this sex work is consensual; in others, it occurs immorally between adults and underage children.

  Terminology and societal perception of many of these topics continues to change, and I strive to be part of any new understanding that both holds the necessary people accountable and empowers others in the way they deserve.

  Throughout this book, I have striven to keep focus on victims as much as possible, not just the immediate victims of John Wayne Gacy (or other abusers and villains depicted within) but also the collateral victims who continue to hurt. Ultimately, Boys Enter the House is a coming-of-age story, much like the short story “Boys” by Rick Moody, from which this book draws its title, another story of boyhood and the various milestones and challenges it entails.

  When I first began reaching out to the loved ones of Gacy’s victims, I often hesitated, wondering if they would see the merit in retelling the case through the eyes of those who suffered the most. For many of them, the remembrance has been cathartic. And for a few others, they did not live to see the completion of this book. For all of them, though, I hope that I’ve told their stories honestly, with respect, and that they find their peace, even as the tragedies of this case continue to ripple, now nearly forty-three years after Gacy’s arrest—in some ways, not so long ago.

  INTRODUCTION

  YOU KNOW THE STORY of John Wayne Gacy. You’ve seen
the pictures of the smiling clown standing proudly outside the suburban home. You’ve heard of the young men and boys buried in the dark crawl space below Gacy’s ranch house.

  Maybe you’ve watched the news footage of the investigators bringing them out from the house in white body bags and loading them into a coroner’s van, the flash of camera lights illuminating it all for the eyes of America.

  But you don’t know the story of those boys. You might think you know; you might have heard them called—dismissed as—runaways or hustlers. But you don’t know their names; you don’t know their families, where they come from, how they lived their lives in short bursts of light and love.

  Primarily, their lives took shape in the 1960s, alongside the ongoing upheaval and social change that followed them into the 1970s, when their lives blossomed. That same change and upheaval also gave rise to the type of crime that ultimately took their lives. While at the time someone still had a higher chance of being struck by lightning than meeting a mass murderer (the term serial killer was coined in the 1980s), these crimes commanded national attention in ways that inflated their magnitude and frequency in society.

  In the twentieth century, Chicago, where most of these boys came of age, had already earned a reputation with its many gangsters and headline murders, including the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 or the case of Leopold and Loeb in 1924. But by the middle of the century, it had also seen a spasm of violence unlike any other, with motives unfathomable and unknown to people at the time.

  James Degnan and his wife, Helen, woke on the morning of January 7, 1946. They went to check on their six-year-old daughter, Suzanne, who had not emerged from her bedroom inside the family’s large home on Kenmore Avenue in the neighborhood of Edgewater, immediately north of Uptown on the city’s North Side.

  In her room the parents found an empty bed and a note demanding $20,000 in ransom, an amount that could easily be paid by James Degnan, a senior executive in Chicago’s Office of Price Administration.

  Some say police acted on an anonymous tip; others say they were working merely on “hunches.” Whatever it was, it led them to a nearby sewer drain, where they found Suzanne’s head. Throughout the day, other parts of her body were located around the neighborhood. Even after her funeral four days later, police were still finding remains.

  In June of the previous year, Josephine Ross, a forty-three-year-old resident of the Uptown neighborhood, had been found stabbed in her apartment. Several months later, Frances Brown, beaten, stabbed, and shot, was discovered in her apartment on Uptown’s border. Over her bed, written in smeared and uneven lettering, was a macabre plea in red lipstick:

  For heavens

  sake catch me

  before I kill more

  I cannot control myself

  Hundreds of suspects were questioned in connection to the murders. But it wasn’t until the arrest of a young neighborhood burglar that police believed they had a good suspect.

  William Heirens, a seventeen-year-old University of Chicago student, was arrested after an attempted robbery in Rogers Park in June 1946. After almost six days of nonstop questioning, during which Heirens was beaten, administered “truth serums,” and blocked from meeting with family or legal counsel, he confessed to the murders.

  Investigators were skeptical of the confession at first, but reporters caught wind of Heirens’s admission, and soon the media circus was in full force. The Chicago Tribune relished the bloodshed, even congratulating itself on new scoops each day. At times, reporters even made up gory and salacious details to increase readership.

  In September 1946, after pleading guilty, Heirens was given three life sentences. Heirens died in 2012, at the age of eighty-three. With hindsight, modern investigators have pointed to a host of problems with both the police investigation and Heirens’s defense counsel. Relatives of the victims have even expressed doubt as to Heirens’s guilt and called for investigations of stronger suspects.

  The story reverberated among the people of Chicago for years, though its notoriety faded in the shadow of other more infamous crimes and cases until it became just another horrific anecdote in the city’s long, sordid history.

  Twenty years later, Chicago again wondered at how a single man could inflict so much violence. In 1966 Richard Speck broke into a South Side townhouse that served as a dormitory for eight student nurses. A ninth woman, who had previously lived at the house, decided to come back and stay the night. Speck spent most of the night torturing and killing them, before raping and killing his eighth and final victim. With the presence of a ninth woman, Speck lost count of his victims and inadvertently allowed one to survive by hiding under a bed.

  During these decades, however, the worst occurred in Houston, Texas. Over the course of three years, Dean Corll, a vice president at his family’s candy factory, had plucked dozens of young men and boys from surrounding areas.

  With two teenage accomplices, he’d scattered their young bodies across a series of beaches or underneath a boat shed owned by his family. Police dismissed most of the boys as runaways and barely bothered to look into their disappearances. The murders crescendoed, sometimes taking the lives of two boys in one evening, including a set of brothers. Corll also killed one boy, and a year later killed his younger brother. All the boys had been strangled or shot.

  In the end, Dean Corll was betrayed by his accomplice, Wayne Henley, who had been friends with many of the boys while willingly luring them to their deaths. The savagery eventually caught up with Henley, and during one evening’s murderous debauchery, he shot Corll several times as he ran out of the bedroom naked.

  Henley and another accomplice, David Brooks, spent the next few days leading police to the burial sites of the boys. Twenty-eight bodies were pulled out from the sand, a macabre record that would sadly be surpassed only a few years later.

  In many ways, Corll’s case prefigured its successor. The unsuspected villain in good standing with his community. The teenage accomplices groomed as custodians of his secret. And the parade of victims—young men and boys—who became footnotes, statistics, callously dismissed as runaways, throwaways, hustlers, homosexuals.

  You know the story of John Wayne Gacy. But you do not know the story of these boys, the brothers, boyfriends, sons, friends, students, who inhabit these pages, who came of age in the 1960s and flourished in the ’70s in a wild world full of music and change, darkness and love, light and dark.

  1

  THE GREYHOUND BUS BOY

  HE WAS JUST A KID.

  But sixteen-year-old Timothy McCoy had traveled a good portion of the country on his own. He’d already lived in Iowa, Nebraska, Florida, and even California, where his father had briefly brought the family as part of his effort to secure a record deal as a country-western singer.

  Aside from that, Tim had spent a good amount of his teenage years roving the country simply by walking out the door, standing on the side of the road, sticking his thumb in the air, and waiting for whoever came along to pick him up.

  For kids without a license or money for their own car, hitchhiking was a popular means of transportation in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, when oil crises made getting around even more difficult. It was cheap and fast, and you never knew who you’d meet along the way as you crisscrossed the many highways and turnpikes of America.

  Sometimes the trips were short for Tim and his siblings—to the beach from their home in Florida, or just across the border from their original hometown of Bartlett, Iowa, into downtown Omaha, Nebraska. Other times, the journeys became odysseys through the heartland.

  One rumor places Tim, then fourteen, at Woodstock in 1969. Few have been able to confirm, but many say it’s likely he was there in the muddy fields listening to 1960s mainstays like Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, who recorded Tim’s favorite album, Cosmo’s Factory.

  On his mother’s side, Tim had numerous cousins in different parts of the country. Th
e family made up most of the small population of Bartlett, Iowa, Tim’s hometown.

  Jeffrey Billings, only about eleven at the time, relished time spent with his older cousins. He remembered riding around in his cousin Butch’s 1962 Buick Electra one day, looking for something to do and picking up cousins along the way. They spotted their cousin Tim McCoy walking on the side of the road and pulled over. Tim jumped in, and together they decided to drive down into Missouri to go fishing.

  That weekend, along a river near Kansas City, the cousins caught fish, made bonfires, and talked about family and friends. “I was just a kid,” Jeff said. “It was summer vacation, no school. I’m down here lying by the river, million miles from anywhere […] fishing, all my cousins, you know, I’m safe. I feel good about that.”

  Of his cousin, Jeff remembered, “Tim was one of them guys that, when you were around him, he was happy, he’d make you laugh. He always had something to say.”

  Later, when Jeff and his family moved to Michigan, they made frequent trips back to Iowa to visit. “It was nothing for us to take a red-eye when Dad got out of work and take off for Iowa,” recalled Beverly Billings Howe, Jeff’s sister.

  Christmas 1971 was no different. The Billingses packed up the car and headed across the frosty Midwest plains to southwestern Iowa, and for a few happy days, the family reunited and celebrated together. Beverly and Jeff’s mother, affectionately known as Aunt Honey in the family, was Tim’s mother’s sister. Aunt Honey had met her husband in Virginia, where she and her sister had attended college. Despite the distance, they’d all remained close, visiting each other for summer holidays or Christmastime.

  This particular Christmas, the sisters went grocery shopping and cooked together, while the cousins rode horses or ran wild in the fields. Mostly, they all spent time in nearby Glenwood, where one of the sisters, Hazel (also bestowed with an affectionate nickname, Aunt Tiny) lived in a house large enough to accommodate the ever-growing family. If they needed more room, they could always move into any of the many other houses around town owned by different family members.