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Speaker 7: You are now listening to True Murder The most Shocking
Speaker 7: Killers in True crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 7: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 7: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 7: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 7: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 8: Good evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for the
Speaker 8: program True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime
Speaker 8: history and the authors that have written about them, Sam,
Speaker 8: could you do me a favor? Thus begins a story
Speaker 8: that has now become part of America's true crime Hall
Speaker 8: of Fame. Is a very grotesque tale befitting a Stephen
Speaker 8: King novel. It is also a David and Goliath saga,
Speaker 8: the story of a young lawyer, fresh from the public
Speaker 8: Defender's office, whose first client in private practice turns out
Speaker 8: to be the worst serial killer in America's history. Sam
Speaker 8: Amaranti has just opened his first law practice when he
Speaker 8: got a phone call from his friend John Wayne Gacy,
Speaker 8: a well known and well liked community figure. Gasey was
Speaker 8: upset about what he called police harassment and asked Amarante
Speaker 8: for help, with the police following his every move in
Speaker 8: connection with the disappearance of a local teenager. Gasey eventually
Speaker 8: gives a drunken, dramatic early morning confession to his new lawyer.
Speaker 8: Gasey is eventually charged with murder and Amorandi subtly becomes
Speaker 8: the defense attorney for one of America's most disturbing serial killers.
Speaker 8: It is his first case. This is a gripping narrative
Speaker 8: that re enacts the gruesome killings and the famous trial
Speaker 8: that shocked the nation. The book this evening we were
Speaker 8: featuring is John Wayne Gacy Defending a Monster with my
Speaker 8: special guest Judge Sam Amaranti and Danny Broderick. Thank you,
Speaker 8: gentlemen for agreeing to be on this program and welcome
Speaker 8: to True Murder.
Speaker 6: Thank you, Dan, Thanks Dan, Hi, Thank you very much.
Speaker 8: This is going to be a great program for our
Speaker 8: audience and a big thrill for me. This is as
Speaker 8: always intrigued me, John Wayne Gacy. He is definitely one
Speaker 8: of the most amazing characters in history. I would say,
Speaker 8: never mind true crime history. Now let's get down to
Speaker 8: the setup. Here we're talking about Chicago, and a little
Speaker 8: place in Chicago's called the Plaines. Let's go back to
Speaker 8: the Nissan Pharmacy, Larry and Phil Thorpe's business and a
Speaker 8: young boy named Rob Peaste and what is John Wayne Gacy?
Speaker 8: Just go back to that moment? What is first? Tell
Speaker 8: us who John Wayne Gacy is? Just roughly who he
Speaker 8: is basically in that community. What type of person is he?
Speaker 8: And take us back to that faithful night on December eleventh,
Speaker 8: nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 6: Okay, I let Danny start with that. I'll start with that.
Speaker 6: And John Wayne Gacy was a painting well a contractor
Speaker 6: of some with some success. He was he was always working.
Speaker 6: He began his business PDM contracting, which was stood for
Speaker 6: painting maintenance and what was the other painting decorating and yeah,
Speaker 6: page to painting district, decorating and maintenance. And he started
Speaker 6: to specialize somewhat in doing pharmacies and drug stores. Nissan
Speaker 6: Pharmacy was a drug store and he had he went
Speaker 6: there to bid a job to the Tork brothers who
Speaker 6: were the owners of drug store. Gaycy was also a
Speaker 6: precinct captain in his precinct. He was also on UH
Speaker 6: commission for the Lighting district. He was a local politician
Speaker 6: of some note. He was a very good precinct captain.
Speaker 6: He brought in the votes, et cetera. So he was
Speaker 6: he was a clone. He was also a clown, that's correct.
Speaker 6: And he was very very well known. He used to
Speaker 6: have parties at his house that four hundred people Black
Speaker 6: parties and very well white and very end of that,
Speaker 6: believe it or not. Yeah, And he would have parties
Speaker 6: at his house that were theme parties. Year after year
Speaker 6: he would have, you know, four hundred people or thereabouts
Speaker 6: in attendance. So this is the guy that we're talking about,
Speaker 6: someone that everybody knew and if the mayor knew him
Speaker 6: or knew who he was, he was he was. He
Speaker 6: actually ran the Polish Day parade. And not a scary guy.
Speaker 6: And it was the scariest thing about him. He was
Speaker 6: not a scary guy. Yeah, he wasn't intimidating, nerve wracking.
Speaker 6: He wouldn't scare you. As a matter of fact. He
Speaker 6: was the kind of guy that would volunteer for just
Speaker 6: about anything and everything. If somebody said I need somebody
Speaker 6: to pick up around here, he'd be the first one
Speaker 6: with his hand up. So this is the guy. And
Speaker 6: on that night, December eleventh, nineteen seventy eight, he was
Speaker 6: in the pharmacy to bid a job for, you know,
Speaker 6: some remodeling in that pharmacy. Now they were friends with.
Speaker 8: Now he's friends with the owners, Larry and Phil thorpe
Speaker 8: Now who was Rob Peacete, he was working at the store.
Speaker 8: Tell us how he may have came or how he
Speaker 8: did come to come in contact with John Wayne Gacy.
Speaker 8: John Wayne Gacy had come there, had visited, and had left,
Speaker 8: but apparently had left his address book behind. So tell
Speaker 8: us about that interaction and also about Kim Barnes because
Speaker 8: it would be important later.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Robbie Peaste was a really good kid. He was
Speaker 6: a hard working kid. He was a good student, an athlete,
Speaker 6: and he had a part time job there in the pharmacy,
Speaker 6: trying to raise money for various things, especially to get
Speaker 6: a new car that he wanted. And Nat Knight was
Speaker 6: his mother's birthday, and his mom came to pick him
Speaker 6: up at the pharmacy and he ran across you know,
Speaker 6: Gaysey ran across him in the pharmacy, which initially Gaysey
Speaker 6: denied that he ever saw the kid in the pharmacy.
Speaker 6: But then he finally admitted that and he ran across
Speaker 6: him and he told the kid he saw him working
Speaker 6: hard and that he might be able to fit in
Speaker 6: with his contracting with Gaysey's contracting company, and asked him
Speaker 6: to come and go with him and apply for a job.
Speaker 6: And at first the boy was hesitant because his mom
Speaker 6: was waiting for him, he was getting out of work,
Speaker 6: but he really wanted this new job. Gaysey promised him
Speaker 6: he could make more money than he was making at
Speaker 6: the pharmacy, and then he basically lured him into his
Speaker 6: his car. Gasey went home first, actually he went home.
Speaker 6: He left, and he went home and he forgot his
Speaker 6: fate would have it, he forgot his his calendar book,
Speaker 6: his diary at the pharmacy, and he went back there.
Speaker 6: And when he went back, he struck up this conversation
Speaker 6: with Robbie Peace too. He saw the throwing garbage out
Speaker 6: in the back of the pharmacy, and then he ultimately,
Speaker 6: you know, Gasey was the consummate con man, the world's
Speaker 6: chief manipulator, and he was able to manipulate and cond
Speaker 6: Peace and getting into his car truck, into his truck
Speaker 6: come back with it tright, we would normally he wouldn't
Speaker 6: do that. And then he did his typical braggedo's type things,
Speaker 6: telling Peace how he could do this and do that,
Speaker 6: and what a great guy he was, and how much
Speaker 6: Peace would like to work for him, and eventually took
Speaker 6: him back while Robbie's mother was waiting for him in
Speaker 6: front of the store. Gasey took Piece back to his house,
Speaker 6: which was probably about fifteen twenty minutes away from the pharmacy,
Speaker 6: and ultimately, as he read in the book, he he
Speaker 6: killed Robert Peast after showing him this rope trick and
Speaker 6: just different things like Casey did. Yeah, and the depiction
Speaker 6: in the book, we've gotten some questions about how we
Speaker 6: could put in such a vivid depiction. That depiction was
Speaker 6: given to us by John Wayne Gacy, given to Sam
Speaker 6: during some of the confessions. We also had access to
Speaker 6: all the statements that he made to the police. We
Speaker 6: had access to all the books that have been written,
Speaker 6: and so there's some but very little artistic license. We
Speaker 6: know for a fact that that's what happened when he
Speaker 6: when they got back to John Wayne Gacy's house. Yeah,
Speaker 6: when Gessey talked to me. He was very very specific
Speaker 6: about what happened. He was specific about the conversations he
Speaker 6: had about his murder victims, how he killed him, why
Speaker 6: he killed them. And Robbie basically kind of broke the
Speaker 6: mold because a lot of Casey's victims either were from
Speaker 6: already or he picked him up in a place called
Speaker 6: buck House Square, which was a hangout for one of
Speaker 6: homosexual hustlers. Rather try to hustle to make some money now,
Speaker 6: and Robbie broke the robery, broke them. He wasn't the same.
Speaker 6: It was something that Gaysey did a little differently than
Speaker 6: he did with his other murder victims.
Speaker 8: Right now, he couldn't hit them now. While the mother
Speaker 8: is waiting for the son, you know, he disappears. Basically
Speaker 8: he disappears, you say, John Wayne Gacy, the con man
Speaker 8: talks this kid into going back to his home on
Speaker 8: the promise of jeez, won't your mother be surprised and
Speaker 8: won't this to be a nice present. He did show
Speaker 8: the con because he used something. The kid really knew
Speaker 8: and was very responsible and wanted to get back and
Speaker 8: knew how important this birthday was. Yet he still talked
Speaker 8: this kid into with the lure of a five dollars
Speaker 8: wage rather than two eighty five that the kid was making,
Speaker 8: and he played upon that, manipulated the kid with that. Now,
Speaker 8: what happens back at the pharmacy with the mother and
Speaker 8: with rob Peaste's father and family, tell us about what
Speaker 8: happens back at the pharmacy. Meanwhile with the mother, Well.
Speaker 6: She waited and waited a while, and she went and
Speaker 6: looking for him, and he was gone. And everybody assumed
Speaker 6: he had just left and maybe forgot she was there
Speaker 6: or something, and went home by himself. And she went
Speaker 6: on to get him, and he obviously wasn't there.
Speaker 8: She was.
Speaker 6: It was her birthday. People were awaiting, her family was
Speaker 6: waiting for them, and Robbie never showed up. And because
Speaker 6: this was so unusual, I mean, the kid never did
Speaker 6: anything like that, they immediately immediately contacted the Displains police
Speaker 6: where they lived in Illinois. Here we call it displains.
Speaker 6: It should be the plan, yeah, but we call it displays.
Speaker 6: And she contacted them, and you know, as usually is
Speaker 6: the case with missing teenagers, police said first, you know,
Speaker 6: said okay, well he'll be home, things like that. But
Speaker 6: they hounded the parents hounded the police I mean, they
Speaker 6: wouldn't take no for an answer. They wouldn't take he's
Speaker 6: not coming home because he's a runaway teenager. And they
Speaker 6: were so hounding them so much and so serious about
Speaker 6: the kids lack of doing this in the past that
Speaker 6: the police really got on the case right away and
Speaker 6: they went to see Gaysey. But again, Gaysey was the
Speaker 6: it was a manipulator, and he was able to con
Speaker 6: the police that night too.
Speaker 8: Did What did John Wayne Gacy say the police when
Speaker 8: he was questioned about whether he had spoken to Rob
Speaker 8: Peace or whether he'd seen him, And what did the
Speaker 8: police do shortly afterwards after they had questioned John Wayne Gacy.
Speaker 6: Well, it was it was actually twenty four hours before
Speaker 6: they actually went. It was almost to the to the
Speaker 6: hour one day later that they went to his house.
Speaker 6: They had questioned him over the tele phone the next morning.
Speaker 6: They had worked with the parents all that night and
Speaker 6: you know, looked for him and the parents went out
Speaker 6: and looked for him as well. But then when morning came,
Speaker 6: an officer I believe his name was Rogers, called Gaysey
Speaker 6: in the morning.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 6: Gaysey was actually in the middle of a meeting. Uh,
Speaker 6: he did not ever see the kid yeah, the night
Speaker 6: had having ever seen the kid. And this is after
Speaker 6: the night that he you know, killed him. Uh, Rob
Speaker 6: Peace was still in the house. Okay, So that was
Speaker 6: in the morning. And then later that night, about nine o'clock,
Speaker 6: four ranking officers from the Displays Police Department went to
Speaker 6: Gaycy's house. Two stayed outside because one of Gasey's employees
Speaker 6: were what happened to be outside happened to arrive at
Speaker 6: the same time that the police did. So they stayed
Speaker 6: outside with the kid, kept him occupied, and two went
Speaker 6: to the door and Gacy invited them in and to
Speaker 6: talk to them as if nothing had happened. And the
Speaker 6: eerie and grotesque thing that is true is that all
Speaker 6: the while there was Rob Peaste was in the attic
Speaker 6: and just a few under seven bodies were underfoot, and
Speaker 6: he talked to them as if nothing had happened. Now
Speaker 6: they got a little insistent, and at that point he
Speaker 6: got a little belligerent. He said the kind of famous words,
Speaker 6: don't you have any respect for the dead? Because he
Speaker 6: had gotten word that his uncle, his mother's brother, had
Speaker 6: passed away and he had to go and see to that,
Speaker 6: you know, make a funeral arrangements and everything. So he
Speaker 6: said these words to these officers at a time, and
Speaker 6: after some prolong questioning, they didn't have any other evidence,
Speaker 6: they didn't have anything else to go on. They left.
Speaker 6: Although they suspected him greatly, they all left and after
Speaker 6: that he disposed of the body. Yeah, there was really
Speaker 6: nothing they could do. He was a businessman in the area,
Speaker 6: and they at the time they didn't know about his background,
Speaker 6: that he had a conviction for sodomy ten years before that,
Speaker 6: and they were just beginning the investigation. They did know
Speaker 6: anything about him other and he was upstanding members of
Speaker 6: the community, and these people were complaining about him. So
Speaker 6: what they when he told them? Although they suspected he
Speaker 6: might have been lying, they tended to believe him a
Speaker 6: little bit too.
Speaker 8: When did it come at what point he said they
Speaker 8: went and questioned him before they had checked out his
Speaker 8: previous record forsodomy in his ten year sentence and the
Speaker 8: pending court case that he had as well, and then
Speaker 8: the other case where either was an acquittal or there
Speaker 8: was something wrong with that trial. Refreshed my memory on
Speaker 8: that one. But when did they look into his background
Speaker 8: and his criminal record and then further suspect him.
Speaker 6: I imagine when you know, when the state's attorneys got involved,
Speaker 6: when the investigation became more more heated and they got
Speaker 6: the state's attorney's office, the prosecutors involved, then I think
Speaker 6: they started looking into his into his criminal background. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and as soon as they found out that he had
Speaker 6: a prior conviction for sodomy, they locked in on him,
Speaker 6: justifiably so. And they were convinced that he had something
Speaker 6: to do with the disappearance of rob Peace. But they
Speaker 6: didn't know if he was hiding him, right, They didn't
Speaker 6: know if he was dead or if he was just
Speaker 6: being hidden or you know what to think at the time, nobody,
Speaker 6: but nobody at that time suspected John Wayne Gacy of
Speaker 6: anything other than his his potential involvement with Robbie Peat.
Speaker 8: Now, how did police proceed, you say, now, they once
Speaker 8: they looked into his record, that's once Terry Sullivan got involved,
Speaker 8: the state attorney prosecuting attorney. Now, tell us what the
Speaker 8: police did in terms of they say, didn't have enough
Speaker 8: evidence for a warrant. I'm suspecting, So how did they
Speaker 8: proceed with this investigation? How did they gather information? And
Speaker 8: tell us how they proceed with this case?
Speaker 6: Well, I started tailing them. They put a unit on
Speaker 6: Gaysey twenty four hours a day. They had two police
Speaker 6: officers following him everywhere he went, watching every movie made,
Speaker 6: and that's when he went That's when he called me
Speaker 6: to see me. They were asking him to come in
Speaker 6: to give statements. He had a lawyer who was a
Speaker 6: civil lawyer who really knew nothing about criminal defense work,
Speaker 6: and he really wasn't helping him too much. So Gaysey
Speaker 6: decided to call me, who he knew as I was
Speaker 6: a chief public defender in the Northwest suburban area. And
Speaker 6: he called me because they were tailing him so much.
Speaker 6: They just put a constant tail on him to see
Speaker 6: what he would do where he was going, and he
Speaker 6: was actually playing games with them. He would, you know,
Speaker 6: he would tell them things like, oh, clowns could get
Speaker 6: away with murder, and playing little cat and mouse games
Speaker 6: like a lot of these serial killers do. But they
Speaker 6: were looking for evidence. But even though they were tailing them,
Speaker 6: they simply couldn't find anything. He actually invited them into
Speaker 6: his house and he had a some pump they used
Speaker 6: to work in the crawl space where most of the
Speaker 6: bodies were, and he turned off to some pump to
Speaker 6: create a smell, he turned up the forced air heat.
Speaker 6: And at the time he did that, one of the
Speaker 6: police officers said he smelled when he was in the
Speaker 6: in the house, he smelled a smell that in his
Speaker 6: experience he knew was similar to that of putrefying bodies.
Speaker 6: And that was one of the bases of the first
Speaker 6: search war, that the officer smelled that smell and Gasey
Speaker 6: fighted them into the house. And actually, to me, it
Speaker 6: seemed like he was trying to get caught. Why don't
Speaker 6: get companies just couldn't come out and say he did something. Actually,
Speaker 6: there was another search warrant. There was another search warrant
Speaker 6: that they did that they did execute while Gasey was
Speaker 6: with them, I'm pretty sure. And then that was when
Speaker 6: the officer smelled that smell. And then they got the
Speaker 6: second search war when he was in custody.
Speaker 8: And what did they find in that the first search warrant?
Speaker 8: They found something in the garbage and it turned out
Speaker 8: to be very important at the trial, something.
Speaker 6: With There was a receipt, There was a receipt from
Speaker 6: photos that the receipt was in Robbie Peaste's jacket that
Speaker 6: his girlfriend Kim, he mentioned earlier, he had given her
Speaker 6: the receipt and when the police were doing the search
Speaker 6: warrant they found they looked in the garbage can and
Speaker 6: found this receipt in the garbage can. Yeah, Kim Barnes
Speaker 6: was an employee at the Actually I don't think they
Speaker 6: knew he did. Buyers and yeah, buyers and she she
Speaker 6: liked Rob. She had gotten her own pictures. She took
Speaker 6: her own pictures in to be developed. She was wearing
Speaker 6: Rob's jacket because it was cold up front at the checker.
Speaker 6: You know where the cash register was, because the doors
Speaker 6: and if you go back there today, that building is
Speaker 6: still there, that parking lot is still there, and it's eerie.
Speaker 6: But it happens to be a nurse.
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Speaker 6: Retails seems a nurse like a nursery or nurse a
Speaker 6: nursery school. And the doors have there were there were
Speaker 6: no revolving doors, so when you'd open the door, there'd
Speaker 6: be a blast of air coming in. So she was
Speaker 6: wearing Robbie's jacket and she had inverted she well, actually
Speaker 6: wasn't inadvert and she put she remembers specifically that she
Speaker 6: put that receipt for the photos into the pocket. Then
Speaker 6: she forgot about it. She gave the coat back to
Speaker 6: Rob because it was the end of their shift, and
Speaker 6: Rob wore that coat into Gaycy's house.
Speaker 8: That ends up we'll talk about that later, but that
Speaker 8: ends up being one of the more important bits of
Speaker 8: evidence at trial, at least using the prosecution. Yes, now
Speaker 8: let's get back to so Now, first the investigation with
Speaker 8: Terry Sullivan being involved, they have got a couple of
Speaker 8: police on him, tailing him. John Wayne Gacy knows that
Speaker 8: he has a tail on him, and he basically drives
Speaker 8: around like a madman through the city, playing games and
Speaker 8: then inviting police in for uh into his home like
Speaker 8: maybe an innocent person would Certainly you wouldn't think a
Speaker 8: guilty person would be inviting police into the home. To
Speaker 8: continue with what John Wayne Gacy does and what the
Speaker 8: prosecution does.
Speaker 6: After this, well, I'm trying to think at what stage
Speaker 6: you're talking about here. They had been telling him for
Speaker 6: a while, and all the while the police are trying
Speaker 6: to build evidence for a final search warrant they wanted.
Speaker 6: They were more and more sure that they were correct
Speaker 6: the strength and then they started missing other missing kids
Speaker 6: hit associated with Gasey. They were coming up with some
Speaker 6: evidence and statements from people, and they found out about
Speaker 6: asidemy background, and then then another key bit of evidence
Speaker 6: is that one of Gacy's employees was driving a car
Speaker 6: that once was owned by a person who was missing,
Speaker 6: and so they put together hello, hello, Hello, you're going
Speaker 6: we just heard something on the line. They put together
Speaker 6: that the car was owned by a kid who had
Speaker 6: been reported missing, and they literally went to the Department
Speaker 6: of Motor Vehicles and found that the car looked exactly
Speaker 6: like the car that this kid owned. They found that
Speaker 6: the two bin numbers were identical except for one or
Speaker 6: two letters or numbers, and therefore they were sure that
Speaker 6: this kid was driving the car that was owned by
Speaker 6: this missing kid. So now they are starting to realize
Speaker 6: that there may be other kids who are missing who
Speaker 6: are linked to Gaycy. At that point, they start getting
Speaker 6: together the evidence sufficient to get a second warrant and
Speaker 6: they are going to go in that house for sure now.
Speaker 6: All the while, while Gaycy is being tailed, not only
Speaker 6: does he invite these officers into his house, he goes
Speaker 6: out drinking with them. He introduces them as his bodyguards.
Speaker 6: It was one of the most bizarre situations known to man.
Speaker 6: He'd come out to their car in the morning and
Speaker 6: tell them where he's going, just in case they'd lose
Speaker 6: him in track, and then if they did lose him,
Speaker 6: he'd get out a we didn't have cell phones, bit
Speaker 6: then he'd get a fight a pay phone. He'd call
Speaker 6: the police station and let the police station know where
Speaker 6: he was, and he'd laugh at himself, dou'b' stupid they
Speaker 6: were because they lost them. Yeah, very strange. So now
Speaker 6: with armed with the evidence that they had about other
Speaker 6: missing kids, the smell, you know, one of the officers
Speaker 6: felt it felt he was sure enough to sign an
Speaker 6: affidavit that said that he smell. The smell was challenged
Speaker 6: extensively in court by Sam and Bob Mada. But because
Speaker 6: the smell, the smell of rotting bodies is no different
Speaker 6: than the smell of rotting carcasses of any other animal.
Speaker 6: That's the one thing that makes that little piece of
Speaker 6: evidence not that important. It was similar to it could
Speaker 6: have been. But they did have a key, that key
Speaker 6: piece of evidence, which was the receipt for the photographs,
Speaker 6: and that put rob piece in that house, that that
Speaker 6: evidence for the judge. They were saying, basically, judge, how
Speaker 6: did this piece of evidence get into his garbage? And
Speaker 6: with that they got the warrant that allowed them to
Speaker 6: go in and search extensively, and at that point they
Speaker 6: went down into the cross space and covered the first
Speaker 6: bone and there.
Speaker 8: Now before this all happens, you get involved, Sam, and
Speaker 8: this is the this is your first client in your
Speaker 8: private practice, as you're venturing out here from a stint
Speaker 8: of five years or more in the public defender's office.
Speaker 8: Tell us about the meeting with John Wayne Gacy initially,
Speaker 8: and what he told you and what you believed about
Speaker 8: the case and why you decided to get involved.
Speaker 6: Well, initially, he came in and just said that he
Speaker 6: was being tailed and he was being harassed and and
Speaker 6: the police were ruining his business and he had no
Speaker 6: idea why, and he wanted me to find out why
Speaker 6: as uch as anything I could do about it. And
Speaker 6: I believed him. I believe, you know, because to me,
Speaker 6: he was just this upstanding guy in the community who
Speaker 6: was a contractor and a clown, a political you know,
Speaker 6: kind of a political, low lying political figure. And so
Speaker 6: I was going to find out. And he came to me,
Speaker 6: really not because I was a lawyer, because he wanted
Speaker 6: me to present him. Casey was a Chicago clout kind
Speaker 6: of guy. You know, he was looking for influence, and
Speaker 6: he figured I was involved with the Displayings Police Department
Speaker 6: because my office, when I was a chief Public Defender,
Speaker 6: was in the same building with them, and I knew
Speaker 6: a lot of those guys, and I had tried a
Speaker 6: lot of cases with them, and I knew Terry Sullivan's.
Speaker 6: He figured I had the inside scoop on what was
Speaker 6: going on, and I would try to find out, and
Speaker 6: I simply couldn't find out. I mean I went everywhere
Speaker 6: trying to find out. I went to Sullivan, I went
Speaker 6: to the mayor of the town, I went to the
Speaker 6: chief of police, and nobody would really tell me anything.
Speaker 6: I'd get a little bit, you know, bitch and pieces
Speaker 6: of things here and there, but it really seemed like
Speaker 6: he was a victim of circumstances. You know, even when
Speaker 6: I found out about the sodomy conviction, I thought, this
Speaker 6: guy's just the wrong place at the wrong time, and
Speaker 6: they're they're targeting him for something they didn't do. And
Speaker 6: that was my feeling when he came in. And we
Speaker 6: actually prepared a lawsuit, a federal lawsuit against the police
Speaker 6: department to restrain them from harassing them. But before I
Speaker 6: had the opportunity to file that suit. He and I
Speaker 6: also set up a polygraph for him. He came into
Speaker 6: my office late one night after telling me the same
Speaker 6: garbage story over and over again, and I started to
Speaker 6: just think that he just wasn't being frank with me.
Speaker 6: And he called me one night, and you have to understand,
Speaker 6: at the same time I had my older son was
Speaker 6: in the hospital himself. He had a real high fever
Speaker 6: and he had been hospitalized for about a week, and
Speaker 6: I was spending my nights at the hospital like days
Speaker 6: working on the gaycy case, and I never slept for
Speaker 6: a few days. After he called me, and the eye
Speaker 6: was just really aggravating me. He got to the point
Speaker 6: where he was just just really irritating me to the hospital.
Speaker 6: To the hospital, He'd called me constantly and he would
Speaker 6: tell me the same old stuff, and I start suspecting
Speaker 6: that he was laughing to me. And I set up
Speaker 6: this polygraph and he was supposed to take it. The
Speaker 6: next day. He calls me about eleven o'clock at night.
Speaker 6: He said he want to talk to me, meet with me.
Speaker 6: He had some new things to tell me, and I
Speaker 6: yelled at him and said, look, Johnifer's something I knew
Speaker 6: he wanted to tell me. Fine, Otherwise I don't hear
Speaker 6: about it. I don't hear of the same old cramp
Speaker 6: all the time. I don't want you to come in
Speaker 6: and just tell me the same thing as Christmas time.
Speaker 6: My kids in the hospital. I'm tired, I've been working
Speaker 6: for days. If it's something that he yes, it's something new,
Speaker 6: I want to tell you. I agreed to meet him
Speaker 6: at my office late at night, but the other lawyer
Speaker 6: was involved at the time, Leroy Stevens and Gasey was
Speaker 6: late as usual and which made us more aggravated with him.
Speaker 6: And then he comes in and talks to us and
Speaker 6: tells me the same old story. He was in the pharmacy.
Speaker 6: He may have seen the kid, he didn't have anything.
Speaker 3: To do with it.
Speaker 6: Blah blah, blah, blah blah. I couldn't take it anymore.
Speaker 6: I had a newspaper sitting on my conference room table,
Speaker 6: and on the front page of the newspaper was the
Speaker 6: picture of Robbie Peaste. I looked at him, and I
Speaker 6: started screaming at him, and I started pounding my fist
Speaker 6: on the table, and I said, John, look at this picture.
Speaker 6: This is a good kid. This kid is missing. They
Speaker 6: think the police think you have something to do with it.
Speaker 6: Now be striving me. Tell me the truth. And he
Speaker 6: looks at me. And Gasey was not an intimidating guy.
Speaker 6: He was just a con man, like a milk toast
Speaker 6: sort of Santa Claus kind of guy. And he looked
Speaker 6: at me like a puppy dog. And he said, he
Speaker 6: looked at Rob's picture. He said, this boy is dead.
Speaker 6: He's not the boy that was in the drug store,
Speaker 6: but he's dead. And I said, what are you talking about.
Speaker 6: He goes, he's in This boy's into the Splains River.
Speaker 6: He said. Now my heart started pounding. I said, what
Speaker 6: are you talking about? And then he asked me if
Speaker 6: it had anything to drink. And I happened to have
Speaker 6: some bourbon in my car that I'd given got as
Speaker 6: a Christmas present from somebody. I ran out to the
Speaker 6: cart the got the booze, and I poured him a
Speaker 6: little drink, myself a drink. Steven's a drinker. We're gonna
Speaker 6: have a toast and uh, he said, poor, poor the
Speaker 6: whole glass. I poured the coffee cup full of booze
Speaker 6: at that when he went out to the car. This
Speaker 6: is an interesting sideline. When he went out to the car,
Speaker 6: he saw the poor the coppers who were tailing him
Speaker 6: freezing to death because it was Chicago winter. I know,
Speaker 6: you guys have real winter up there where you are,
Speaker 6: but we have pretty good ones here too, uh. And
Speaker 6: so he invited them into the reception area all you know.
Speaker 6: But they were inside the office, divided by a glass partition. Yeah,
Speaker 6: not in my office. They were in the hallway in
Speaker 6: the office. So I poured him a drink. He down
Speaker 6: the whole coffee cup full of full of whiskey, and
Speaker 6: he asked for another one, down to another, chugged another
Speaker 6: full cup of whiskey. Then he looked at me eyeball,
Speaker 6: the eyeball, I'll never forget this, like it was just yesterday.
Speaker 6: And he said, Sam, I've been the judge, jury and
Speaker 6: executioner of many, many people. Now I want to be
Speaker 6: my own judge, jury and executioner. I'm going to tell
Speaker 6: you the story from the beginning. I'm want to do
Speaker 6: things my own way. I don't want you to interrupt me.
Speaker 6: I'm going to tell you everything that happened. And I said,
Speaker 6: what are you talking about? My heart was like in
Speaker 6: my throat at this time, and I said, what are
Speaker 6: you talking about? He said, it started in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 6: I was driving past the Greyhound bus station in downtown Chicago.
Speaker 6: And for that statement it went on for the next
Speaker 6: five or six hours. He never stopped. He told me
Speaker 6: that he had killed thirty four young men boys, gave
Speaker 6: me names, why he killed him, how he killed them,
Speaker 6: told me about this thing called the rope trick where
Speaker 6: he would trick them into putting handcuffs on them and
Speaker 6: put a rope around their neck. Told me that they
Speaker 6: were greedy, they were dumb and stupid, had a reason
Speaker 6: for every one of them. And he knew exactly where
Speaker 6: everybody was, where there were multiple bodies in a grave,
Speaker 6: he knew approximately when he killed them. And then he
Speaker 6: wanted to show me the crawl space and I didn't
Speaker 6: want to see it. I mean, I was just You
Speaker 6: have to understand, I was beside myself. I didn't know
Speaker 6: which way to turn at the time, and Lee Roy
Speaker 6: Stevens didn't know which way to turn. And he went
Speaker 6: into this thing for five or six hours and then
Speaker 6: he fell asleep. In all week Ado, we were scurring
Speaker 6: around trying to find a phone number for a psychiatrists
Speaker 6: to try to have him committed and try to keep
Speaker 6: off the law enforcement authorities, keep them from arresting them,
Speaker 6: get him committed, try to put him in a secure environment.
Speaker 6: And we actually set up an appointment with a psychiatrist
Speaker 6: for early in the morning after he fell asleep, and
Speaker 6: then Leroy took off and Leroy told the police to
Speaker 6: shoot his tires out when he if he tried to leave,
Speaker 6: which they kind of looked at him, like, what are
Speaker 6: you talking about? And then I just sat up there
Speaker 6: and watched him. He was sleeping in my conference room
Speaker 6: across the table from me, and a couple hours later,
Speaker 6: maybe an hour later, he woke up and he started
Speaker 6: he had this guttural sound to him, almost like a growling,
Speaker 6: and he stood up like in the movie Frankenstein when
Speaker 6: Boris Karlov stood up and just kind of put his
Speaker 6: arms out straight, and his eyes were his eye lids
Speaker 6: were fluttering, his eyes were set back in his sockets,
Speaker 6: like could just see the whites of his eyes. And
Speaker 6: he started walking towards me, and I'm calling his him
Speaker 6: going John. We looked like Igor and Frankenstein walking. I
Speaker 6: picked up a baseball bat that I had my conference
Speaker 6: room and I'm holding it in my hand and he's
Speaker 6: walking toward me. I'm backing up. I went out the
Speaker 6: door of the conference room into the foyer foyer area
Speaker 6: of my office, which was separated by a glass partition,
Speaker 6: where the police run all the way and they see
Speaker 6: this happening. And I'm walking with this bat in my hand,
Speaker 6: backing up, and Gasey gets in the front part of
Speaker 6: the office there and he stops walking. I push him
Speaker 6: with the bat, with the end of the bat, and
Speaker 6: I pushed him down on a couch and he sat
Speaker 6: down and fell asleep again, and I put his feet up,
Speaker 6: and for the next half hour hour or so, I
Speaker 6: was sitting there watching him again, reading a book and
Speaker 6: waiting for Leroy to come back because we were going
Speaker 6: to try to get Gaysey to a psychiatrist. And then
Speaker 6: he wakes up like nothing happened. He said, I have
Speaker 6: to get out of here. I got to go ahead,
Speaker 6: things to do, place to go. And I'm like, John,
Speaker 6: where are you going? We got appointment a psychiatrist. Is no,
Speaker 6: I'm not going to any psychiatrist. And what are you
Speaker 6: talking about? He said, John, you told us everything that happened.
Speaker 6: He told us about the cross space. He wanted to
Speaker 6: show us. You told us this they had about the murders,
Speaker 6: he said, so I did. But you know what interesting
Speaker 6: thing he said at that time, he said, I told
Speaker 6: you I wanted to do it my way, which made
Speaker 6: me think he started his manipulation and his cunning and
Speaker 6: he was going to just do something crazy. And he
Speaker 6: took off, ran out of my office, took off, jumped
Speaker 6: in his car and drove about seventy miles an hour
Speaker 6: down down the street and followed by followed by the police.
Speaker 6: And then he stopped and delivered a bag of marijuana
Speaker 6: to some kid in the gas station and smiled at
Speaker 6: the police and took off again. And he ultimately they
Speaker 6: stopped him. I couldn't do anything at that point, couldn't
Speaker 6: take m a psychiatrists. They didn't stop him immediately. They
Speaker 6: waited a while. He made some stops along the way.
Speaker 6: He stopped and saw this kid named David Kram, who
Speaker 6: was one of his employees, kind of a a sidekick
Speaker 6: of his, and he told Crab and then Cram subsequently
Speaker 6: told the police that John Gasey told me. He told
Speaker 6: his lawyers he killed all these people, and the police
Speaker 6: just thought he was, you know, talking like it was
Speaker 6: a hit man or belonging to mafia or something, and
Speaker 6: they didn't even think anything of it. And then he
Speaker 6: took off again and they eventually stopped him and arrested
Speaker 6: him for the possession or delivery of the marijuana. Right,
Speaker 6: And that's sorry I got called into the police station.
Speaker 8: Now, the reason why, the reason why Terry Sullivan finally
Speaker 8: decided to bust him for he said he was still
Speaker 8: a felony for the marijuana, was that your efforts to
Speaker 8: get a t RO temporary restraining order, we're going to
Speaker 8: complicate the case.
Speaker 6: Telling me that was coming up. Now, this was on
Speaker 6: a Thursday hearing. The next day. The next day, and
Speaker 6: you have to remember, uh, they he was driving down
Speaker 6: a street called Milwaukee Avenue, and there was some chatter
Speaker 6: and there was some concern that he was heading for
Speaker 6: a cemetery where his father, where his father was buried,
Speaker 6: and they started to believe that possibly he was going
Speaker 6: to go and try to kill himself, and they weren't.
Speaker 6: They did not want him to do that, and so
Speaker 6: they were trying to figure out a reason. They still
Speaker 6: didn't have the evidence sufficient to arrest him for murder,
Speaker 6: so they were trying to figure out a reason, and
Speaker 6: then somebody remembered, hey, wait, we just watched him give
Speaker 6: this kid a bag of pot, so we'll arrest him
Speaker 6: on the pot. Which was another subject of our emotions
Speaker 6: to exclude evidence, to suppress evidence, because the police really
Speaker 6: had no authority to arrest him for they had defense
Speaker 6: where they arrested him, they weren't in their own jurisdiction
Speaker 6: at that time, and they were not in hot pursuit,
Speaker 6: and it was one of the things that we argue
Speaker 6: which eventually changed the law and they had peace officers
Speaker 6: jurisdiction in Illinois. But Terry, you know, Terry had to
Speaker 6: act because you know, Terry and I are good friends.
Speaker 6: Now we're great friends. And I saw him this morning
Speaker 6: and we were on Extraly, the TV show together. But
Speaker 6: at that time Terry and I and we had a
Speaker 6: lot of respect for each other. But he was a
Speaker 6: chief prosecutor out there, I was the chief public defender,
Speaker 6: and we used to constantly lock horns. You know, we
Speaker 6: never agree on anything. We constantly lockhorns, and we're both
Speaker 6: vicious advocates, proponents our own side. So he knew I
Speaker 6: wasn't gonna stop, and I was gonna go ahead and
Speaker 6: get that tro and I was going to screw up
Speaker 6: his entire investigation. So he had to do something. Terry
Speaker 6: had to do something. He's a he's a bright guy,
Speaker 6: sharp layer, and he just had to do something.
Speaker 8: Now, before we get any further into this case and
Speaker 8: into this wonderful book that you that you were talking
Speaker 8: about right now as well, is that a big theme
Speaker 8: in this book is your duty, your obligation, and your
Speaker 8: willing obligation to defend even this evil dirt bag, this
Speaker 8: reviled human being, regardless. And so let's spend a little
Speaker 8: bit of time in that. A lot of people that
Speaker 8: read true crime probably are on more on the prosecutor's side,
Speaker 8: and many true crime books, maybe as a vast majority
Speaker 8: of true crime books are written from that perspective of
Speaker 8: the prosecution's perspective that people are evil and that they
Speaker 8: deserve to spend the rest of their life in prison.
Speaker 8: And there is a fair amount of people that probably
Speaker 8: believe in the death penalty as well. And you mentioned
Speaker 8: that you're not opposed to the death penalty by principle.
Speaker 8: Tell Us, one of the big theme in this book
Speaker 8: is and tell us, what your position is in terms
Speaker 8: of the defense of everyone, and why do you think
Speaker 8: it's important that you would have and do everything you
Speaker 8: can for your client despite being John Wayne Gacy for example.
Speaker 6: Well, you know, as our constitution in the States, we
Speaker 6: have an amendment, the sixth Amendment, which was basically written
Speaker 6: by John Adams, our second President, who defended the British
Speaker 6: soldiers in the uh from the thing we call the
Speaker 6: Boston Massacre. He stepped forward and said that no man
Speaker 6: in a free country should be with a.
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Speaker 6: Oh, accused man should be without counsel. And he was
Speaker 6: just one person that stepped forward. His his cousin Sam
Speaker 6: Adams was the leader of the Patriots, and John Adams
Speaker 6: took on the cause to represent the British soldiers who
Speaker 6: fired upon the uh the colonists at the time. And
Speaker 6: and that's basically the the the oath that every every
Speaker 6: lawyer takes, every president we have takes every to defend
Speaker 6: and protect our constitution. It's a sacred right that a
Speaker 6: lot of people have died for. And people always ask,
Speaker 6: you know, why do you defend somebody with that? How
Speaker 6: do you defend somebody like that? It's it's principal. We
Speaker 6: need defend a person that using such a heinous crime. Everybody,
Speaker 6: as Judge Grippol said, and as we said in the book,
Speaker 6: everybody is safe. Everybody could get a fair trial. Anybody
Speaker 6: could get a fair trial, doesn't matter who they are.
Speaker 6: In Our constitution doesn't only say citizens, says all persons
Speaker 6: are protected under the constitution. Yeah, it's the hard cases
Speaker 6: the test that concept. It's not the easy cases. It's
Speaker 6: very easy to say, you know when when asked, how
Speaker 6: can you defend a person like that? Well, first of all,
Speaker 6: it's a four there's a four hundred page answer to
Speaker 6: that question. It's called John Wayne Gacy Defending a Monster.
Speaker 6: That book is the answer to that question. But people
Speaker 6: say that, Sam, they say it. They said it often
Speaker 6: to me when I was practicing, and people hate us
Speaker 6: for doing it too. Yeah, that's the strange thing that
Speaker 6: people don't. You know, Sometimes the people that weigh the
Speaker 6: flag the highest are the ones that criticize you the most,
Speaker 6: and they don't understand that the constitution requires that, it
Speaker 6: requires that, it requires that otherwise, so you know, we
Speaker 6: would ask, you know, I would ask, do you know
Speaker 6: anybody that's ever gotten a dui? You know, were they
Speaker 6: drunk at the time? And the standard answer to that is, well,
Speaker 6: that's different because that's not this heinous, ugly, terrible, satanistic person.
Speaker 6: The fact is is that if you don't defend the
Speaker 6: satanistic person, eventually the people with the DUIs and the
Speaker 6: traffic tickets and the smaller charges don't get defended either,
Speaker 6: because the concept gets eradicated. It gets eroded and eradicated.
Speaker 6: You know, in the civilized society, you know that that's
Speaker 6: what we do. And you know, if t had to
Speaker 6: handle it, myself is a dad, and I have you know,
Speaker 6: I have two boys, and I have a little girl now,
Speaker 6: and I have a stepdaughter, and Danny has two sons,
Speaker 6: and you know, if anybody laid a hand and any
Speaker 6: of my kids, I'd be the first in line to
Speaker 6: grant this guy myself to make sure he didn't go
Speaker 6: to trial. I'd want to grab him, I'd handle them.
Speaker 6: I'd want to torture and everything else. And Danny would
Speaker 6: do the same thing. But we don't want our government
Speaker 6: to feel the same way. We don't want our government
Speaker 6: to act like the victim. I'd go there, and I
Speaker 6: feel when you see people stand on line, and you know,
Speaker 6: I'm the same way when it comes to that, And
Speaker 6: you know, I stand on the bench a long time too,
Speaker 6: and I had to enforce the laws trust for both sides,
Speaker 6: for the state and for the defense. But the thing is,
Speaker 6: when you're representing somebody, it's not that person. It is
Speaker 6: that individual you're representing, but it's the premise of our
Speaker 6: whole country. It's the basis of our constitutional cornerstone. And
Speaker 6: that's why we wrote that prologue in the book, the
Speaker 6: prologue about the Boston Massacre, about Johnny Adams stepping forward
Speaker 6: and representing the British soldiers because that was the right
Speaker 6: thing to do, and he did it at his own expense.
Speaker 6: He did in his own cost. He did it because
Speaker 6: he believed in those principles and all it was flight
Speaker 6: for that and that our soldiers and our marines and
Speaker 6: our sailors and everybody near and forcers have fought for
Speaker 6: in our free society depends on for centuries. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 6: it depends on that, and that's what we fight for.
Speaker 6: Of course, Sam was a marine, I was in the army.
Speaker 6: We both know what it's like to be uh to
Speaker 6: be in a position to have to defend those rights.
Speaker 6: And you only judgment about you know, you might not
Speaker 6: like your client. I certainly didn't like John Gacy. But
Speaker 6: just like a doctor, if you know who takes the
Speaker 6: hypocratic oath to preserve and protect life, a lawyer takes
Speaker 6: a similar oath to preserve and protects somebody's individual rights.
Speaker 6: And we would never expect or even think that a
Speaker 6: doctor would treat somebody like Acy who might be dying
Speaker 6: and purposely let him die because he doesn't like the guy,
Speaker 6: or because he did something heinous. A doctor would. You
Speaker 6: would never expect an ethical physician to do something like that.
Speaker 6: So the same thing with an ethical lawyer. You would
Speaker 6: expect a lawyer to just lay down and die on
Speaker 6: his client because he doesn't like the client, or because
Speaker 6: a client did something so horrible that everybody hates the
Speaker 6: client for because a lawyer, just like a doctor, is
Speaker 6: a professional in his duty bound to follow his oath.
Speaker 6: And that's what we do, and we believe in that,
Speaker 6: truly believe in that. We truly believe in what we do,
Speaker 6: and that really protects us as a free society and
Speaker 6: free people. Yeah, we don't agree on a lot of things,
Speaker 6: Sam and I, but we agree on that. We disagree
Speaker 6: on many many things. Dan is the old hippie liberal
Speaker 6: against the death penalty. I'm the more that John McCain
Speaker 6: conservative gang.
Speaker 8: Now, the thing is, I think where some people have
Speaker 8: a problem, we won't spend too much time on this.
Speaker 8: We've got to get to this incredible trial, the sensational trial.
Speaker 8: And your experience throughout this is that the information that
Speaker 8: you got from say, well, just throw a scenario and
Speaker 8: so that I think people can understand your position. If
Speaker 8: John Wayne Gacy were to come to you and Leroy Stevens,
Speaker 8: but as his counsel, if he were to come to
Speaker 8: you and you only and give you that confession of
Speaker 8: the thirty three murders, would you then do everything in
Speaker 8: your power to go to court and say that my
Speaker 8: client is not guilty of the crimes that he's accused
Speaker 8: of and suppress in practicality all that information that he
Speaker 8: gave you.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, that's exactly what I did. I mean, he
Speaker 6: did tell me everything, and we certainly have to come
Speaker 6: up with a plan. We have to come up with
Speaker 6: a theory of defense in his particular case, because he
Speaker 6: did tell the police our only defense was insanity. But
Speaker 6: you always a lawyer always puts the state, the government
Speaker 6: to their burden of proof, which is beyond a reasonable doubt.
Speaker 6: And if the government or the prosecutors do not have
Speaker 6: that evidence that are sufficient to prove somebody guilty beyond
Speaker 6: a reasonable doubt, then they failed. And the defense lawyer
Speaker 6: doesn't go in there and say his clients innocent. But
Speaker 6: the fact that the government needs that evidence sufficient to
Speaker 6: connect those dots to prove somebody guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,
Speaker 6: front Stow does that. He says, like, we don't want
Speaker 6: to correplate our client innocent. We player client not guilty.
Speaker 6: There's a difference between somebody being innocent and somebody being
Speaker 6: not guilty. Not guilty simply means there is not enough
Speaker 6: evidence to prove the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Speaker 6: I think O. J. Simpson was a perfect example that
Speaker 6: in the States there where you know, there's no doubt
Speaker 6: in my mind as a retired judge, as a as
Speaker 6: a lawyer that he was guilty, and all the evidence
Speaker 6: there proved and guilty. But the system broke down in
Speaker 6: Ojy's case number one because we had, first of all,
Speaker 6: our criminal justice system came in disrepute because there was
Speaker 6: a judge who handled the case initially, who didn't they
Speaker 6: have the courage, in my opinion, to throw out evidence
Speaker 6: that the judge should have thrown out because there was
Speaker 6: a bad search of Ojay's house that have particular evidence
Speaker 6: became the bloody glove, which the defense layer made a
Speaker 6: mockery of and made a mockery of the police officer
Speaker 6: who discovered they had bloody glove because of his racism
Speaker 6: and everything else that think that he went in there,
Speaker 6: lied about why he went in and how he went in.
Speaker 6: If the judge initially called the prosecution the police officer
Speaker 6: and they have bad evidence, the o J trial never
Speaker 6: would have taken place. But because it took place, the
Speaker 6: judge didn't call him on it, and then it became
Speaker 6: a media spectacle. The jury called him on it. The
Speaker 6: jury called him on it, and they said, you know what, State,
Speaker 6: you don't have enough evidence approves this gut guilty beyond
Speaker 6: the reasonable doubt. These are twelve people who aren't lawyers,
Speaker 6: who come out of society from different backgrounds, different economic backgrounds,
Speaker 6: different racial backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds. They come together unanimously
Speaker 6: and say, state, you didn't have enough evidence, approved this
Speaker 6: guy guilty beyond a reasonableout state, you screwed up, and
Speaker 6: that's bad, and that brings our whole system into this refuge.
Speaker 6: And if the defense lawyer falls down. We have another
Speaker 6: example of that in the Wine Corona case out of California,
Speaker 6: was another serial killer. In that case, his lawyer did
Speaker 6: did not defend his client properly. He didn't do anything
Speaker 6: for his client. Corona killed twenty six migrant farm workers,
Speaker 6: buried him in the fields, and his lawyer was more
Speaker 6: interested in writing a book at the time of the
Speaker 6: trial and defending his client. Corona was convicted. But you
Speaker 6: know what, in our appeal system here in the States,
Speaker 6: dead conviction. Twenty six convictions were overturned because the lawyer
Speaker 6: was incompetent. And so that's why a lawyer. There's so
Speaker 6: many built in safeguards in our system. So we have
Speaker 6: to do the right thing, no matter what are guys
Speaker 6: accused of, no matter what he tells us he did.
Speaker 6: We had our plea, and if we think a guilty
Speaker 6: plea could mitigate the sentence, we do that. But if
Speaker 6: we think the state doesn't have sufficient evidence to prove
Speaker 6: our client guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, we have to
Speaker 6: assert the rights and assert the rights of the defendant
Speaker 6: that they have proof beyond the reason without going to
Speaker 6: gives him because in the States, he's presumed innocent. That's correct.
Speaker 6: And frankly, we don't execute crazy people. So even if,
Speaker 6: like in this case, where you admit that the crime
Speaker 6: occurred and that your client did the act, the defense
Speaker 6: of insanity is that he was incapable of knowing what
Speaker 6: he you know, did was wrong. He was in capable
Speaker 6: at the time of conforming his acts to the law.
Speaker 6: And that is another that that is a defense to
Speaker 6: any crime because you don't execute crazy people in this country.
Speaker 6: It's like executing a child. Sery of ver defense was
Speaker 6: to save his life in this particular case.
Speaker 8: Correct, Now, how did you how did you go about?
Speaker 8: You said, the only option left for you was the
Speaker 8: insanity defense. So obviously you believe you had some you
Speaker 8: had some form of case here to prove that, uh
Speaker 8: that that he was insane. So how did you go
Speaker 8: about and what kind of evidence did you use specifically
Speaker 8: to to try to explain to the jury and prove
Speaker 8: to the jury that he was insane.
Speaker 6: Well, under Illinois law at the time, the only thing
Speaker 6: we needed to do in our case in chief was
Speaker 6: to raise the issue of insanity. Once it's raised, then
Speaker 6: the state is the burden of proving the defendant is
Speaker 6: sane beyond a reasonable doubt. And the definition of insanity
Speaker 6: is that a person is suffering from a mental illness
Speaker 6: or mental defect, and because of that mental illness or
Speaker 6: mental defect, he cannot appreciate the criminality of his act
Speaker 6: or be able to conform his conduct to the requirements
Speaker 6: of law. That's the legal definition of insanity, and it
Speaker 6: was the legal definition of insanity in Illinois at the time.
Speaker 6: So we did is put on psychiatric evidence, and we
Speaker 6: put on some lay testimonies, some of Casey's victims who
Speaker 6: testified he was crazy, victims that weren't murdering victims who
Speaker 6: we have victims who obviously were alive and who got
Speaker 6: away will we found and they testified that Gaysey was
Speaker 6: totally crazy, and that testimony is allowed in our trial
Speaker 6: system here. So we raised the issue and we put
Speaker 6: on some psychiatrists. Then the state came back and they
Speaker 6: put on other psychiatrists to say that he was sane
Speaker 6: at the time of the effect. Yeah, thirteen thirteen doctors
Speaker 6: testified at different times on different issues. Most of them
Speaker 6: psychiatrists are psychologists, very dramatic to a very dramatic testimony.
Speaker 6: One doctor described him as having an onion skin personality
Speaker 6: where he could take away layer after layer after layer
Speaker 6: after layer, and he had a Swiss cheese alter ego.
Speaker 6: Casey had no conscience. He was a psychotic, neurotic psychopath
Speaker 6: with an IQ about one hundred and sixty on hundred
Speaker 6: and sixty five. He was a consummate manipulator, a con
Speaker 6: man because it was a psychopathic or sociopathic personality, and
Speaker 6: because he had no conscience. But yet he was psychotic,
Speaker 6: a borderline psychotic, because he suffered from delusions. He suffered
Speaker 6: from a narcissistic personality disorder. He suffered from hypochondriosis. He
Speaker 6: believed he had an upside down heart. He believed he
Speaker 6: had these hosts of medical physical illnesses that didn't really
Speaker 6: exist physiologically. He was a necrophiliac. He liked to sleep
Speaker 6: with the dead. I mean he was on leave sexually,
Speaker 6: but sleep next to yes. He was a pedophiliac, liked
Speaker 6: having sex with children. He was such a complex human
Speaker 6: being that he's probably one of the most complex human
Speaker 6: beings I could ever imagine meeting in my life or
Speaker 6: anybody could ever imagine meeting. And the scariest thing about
Speaker 6: this complex person who everybody perceives as a monster, and
Speaker 6: of course he was my client, But the scariest thing
Speaker 6: is the guy wasn't scary at all. All those horrible
Speaker 6: things that were wrong would have He was not scary
Speaker 6: at all. He could be anybody's brother or father, or uncle,
Speaker 6: or teacher or fellow juror or lawyer, doctor. I mean,
Speaker 6: he was just not a scary guy. You would never
Speaker 6: think he was capable of doing those sort of things.
Speaker 6: He was the classic. He was the classic Jacqueline Hide.
Speaker 6: He was a Jeculin height out of the book. When
Speaker 6: he was good, he was the best of good, and
Speaker 6: when he was bad, he was the worst of evil.
Speaker 6: And that evil was taken over the good more and
Speaker 6: more and more and more. And the man was just incredibly,
Speaker 6: incredibly complex.
Speaker 8: You used actually the Jacqueline Hyde story to illustrate the
Speaker 8: insanity or that John Wayne Gacy was not sane. In
Speaker 8: what I found interesting was your especially was your deliberation
Speaker 8: to the jury and then the rebuttal John by Bill Kunkle,
Speaker 8: and he had said that he countered a lot of
Speaker 8: what you had said. He explained that John Buckovich wanted
Speaker 8: to threaten to quit Gaysey's work, and he, instead of
Speaker 8: killing him in front of witnesses, he went out in
Speaker 8: the middle of the night and brought him back to
Speaker 8: the home. He said he conned him as he had
Speaker 8: done many others in the past. He used guile, and
Speaker 8: he used cutting, and he talked about premeditation instead of
Speaker 8: a psychotic break. And he said he countered what you
Speaker 8: had said, Well, how could he eat food with the
Speaker 8: cops upstairs and or a cop with the police, and
Speaker 8: with the body nearby? And he said, well, how does
Speaker 8: a And Councle said, well, how does a coroner eat
Speaker 8: lunch after he's done an autopsy? So it's an interesting
Speaker 8: Vali because you know both of you state your case
Speaker 8: is very eloquently, as does Terry Sullivan. But basically it
Speaker 8: was hard for the jury and they only deliberated for
Speaker 8: an hour and fifteen minutes.
Speaker 6: Right, I did a great persuasive job. Councle is a
Speaker 6: brilliant lawyer. He's an absolute brilliant He's a judge. Councle
Speaker 6: now he sits on the bench in cook Connie, Illinois,
Speaker 6: and he's a great judge, and he was a he's
Speaker 6: a tremendous in size lights so he's a big man,
Speaker 6: and it's tremendous prosecutor, a wonderful prosecutor, a great example
Speaker 6: of what a prosecutor should be. And because the state
Speaker 6: has the burden of proof, he gets the last word,
Speaker 6: and his last word was left with the jury, and
Speaker 6: his last word was throwing all of the photos of
Speaker 6: the boys who were killed in the same opening of
Speaker 6: the cross space, the original real opening in the crosspace
Speaker 6: that was put right in the middle of the courtroom,
Speaker 6: and he threw the pictures in the cross bace, and
Speaker 6: he asked the jury to do the same thing to
Speaker 6: Gaycy that he did to all these kids. And it
Speaker 6: left that jury spellbound. I mean, after that, you could
Speaker 6: hear a pin drop in the courtroom. People were just
Speaker 6: spellbound at their closing argument. And he did an excellent
Speaker 6: job conco and he did an excellent job in rebudding
Speaker 6: or in sanity insanity defense. And I'll tell you a
Speaker 6: thing about their argument. They said Gaysey was evil and
Speaker 6: he knew what he was doing. There's a big difference
Speaker 6: between guys like Gacy and I don't know if I'm
Speaker 6: sure you know about John Hinckley who tried to kill
Speaker 6: President Reagan. He shot President Reagan, and he did it
Speaker 6: because he was suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder, trying
Speaker 6: to impress Jody Foster I think at the time, or
Speaker 6: whoever there was, and he did it in front of
Speaker 6: the whole world. He shot at the President, tried to
Speaker 6: kill him, and nothing was going to stop him. And
Speaker 6: that's insanity because he could not conform his conduct to
Speaker 6: the requirements of law. And he was found not guilty
Speaker 6: of every reason in sanity, and he'll probably be locked
Speaker 6: up for the rest of his life. Who killed John Lennon. Yeah,
Speaker 6: people like that just don't get out of don't get
Speaker 6: out of that that environment. Although everybody's afraid they will,
Speaker 6: they never do. And that's a class against sanity. Gaysey,
Speaker 6: on the other hand, and there's something that's going on
Speaker 6: in our news right now. We're just saying that Gaycy
Speaker 6: killed people all over the country and they're looking for
Speaker 6: bodies all over the country, which I can tell you
Speaker 6: is untrue. And I would be very surprised if they
Speaker 6: will find another body associated with him, because he did
Speaker 6: everything right in that house and if he truly was
Speaker 6: crazy the way I argued, if he truly was crazy,
Speaker 6: he wouldn't have cared. He would have done it anywhere
Speaker 6: in front of anybody. And that was I think Cuncle's
Speaker 6: best argument. That he was able to control his conduct.
Speaker 6: He was able to conform his conduct and the requirements
Speaker 6: of the law. He was able to appreciate the criminality
Speaker 6: of his act because he buried his victims, because he
Speaker 6: hid the evidence. So all those things voted against the
Speaker 6: the very believable insanity argument that that we gave in
Speaker 6: the theory of our case. But Kuncle, in his brilliant way,
Speaker 6: was able to totally rebutt it. And uh, and I think, really,
Speaker 6: if the state is right, they won't find anybodies anywhere
Speaker 6: else because Gacy killed everybody in his in his own house.
Speaker 8: The other thing what I thought was interesting too was uh,
Speaker 8: and maybe he can tell us because this is part
Speaker 8: of the story that we have left out. And I
Speaker 8: to me this was more evidence of him not being
Speaker 8: insane in that tell us about the not the ruse,
Speaker 8: but tell us what happened once a victim got back
Speaker 8: to John Wynn Gacy's home. What did he actually do?
Speaker 8: As far as what we talked about the trick and
Speaker 8: the handcuffs.
Speaker 6: How did Yeah, Well he would you know, I thought
Speaker 6: he was a clown. And he used to sometimes do
Speaker 6: with the clown outfit on, sometimes do without. They'd have
Speaker 6: a few beers or maybe smoke some wheat together, or
Speaker 6: you haven't watched some on the movies. Get him in
Speaker 6: a good mood, and then he say, here, I'm going
Speaker 6: to show you a trick and a trick. Oh yeah,
Speaker 6: show us, John, show us. And he'd take out these
Speaker 6: handcuffs and he would put handcuffs on himself and he'd
Speaker 6: go wallah. Also in the handcuffs would be off, he'd
Speaker 6: be out of him and they say, how do you
Speaker 6: do that? He said, well, here, you try it. He'd
Speaker 6: give them the handcuffs to put on, and they put
Speaker 6: the handcuffs on, or he'd put them on them, and
Speaker 6: he's stand there and look at him and smile, and
Speaker 6: they say, well, what's the trick, John, what's the trick?
Speaker 6: And then he would take the key out of his
Speaker 6: hand and they'd hold it up and say the trick
Speaker 6: is I have the key. And I was able to
Speaker 6: get out him because I have the key. You don't
Speaker 6: have the key. You're dumb and stupid not try to
Speaker 6: get out of this, and he would put this rope.
Speaker 6: He would have a rope and put the rope around
Speaker 6: their neck, what she called the rope trick, and while
Speaker 6: they were struggling to get out of the handcuffs, he
Speaker 6: would put the roper on their neck and twist the
Speaker 6: rope like a turner kid with a hammer handle that
Speaker 6: he had inside the rope. And then he would just
Speaker 6: sit there and watch the die and he would carry
Speaker 6: on with his business. He would make phone calls, he
Speaker 6: would do paperwork while they would be suffering and dying
Speaker 6: right in front of him, and he had no he
Speaker 6: had no feeling about it at all. It was a
Speaker 6: it's just an unbelievable thing. I could talk to him
Speaker 6: about children who were dying in a children's hospital of cancer,
Speaker 6: and John Gacy would cry like a baby, authentic tears,
Speaker 6: not crocodile tears, authentically feel compassionate sorrow for these children
Speaker 6: who didn't know who he never met. And then in
Speaker 6: the same breadth, I could ask him about a victim
Speaker 6: and he would talk about them as if they didn't exist,
Speaker 6: as if they were garbage that could put on the
Speaker 6: street that he just didn't have any feeling for it all.
Speaker 6: It never had any feeling of remorse. I was hoping
Speaker 6: that when he was executed, his final lawyers would be
Speaker 6: able to convince him to apologize and to show some
Speaker 6: remorse and to show some respect for the victims and
Speaker 6: the victims' families. I thought that would be a good
Speaker 6: way for him to go out. Instead, he was such
Speaker 6: a con man. He actually convinced the lawyers who were
Speaker 6: representing him at the end of the case before he
Speaker 6: got the death penalty, that he was innocent. This guy
Speaker 6: actually convinced, you know, he convinced them of that. He
Speaker 6: convinced himself by that time, at the time you get
Speaker 6: the death penalty in nineteen ninety four, that he really
Speaker 6: was completely innocent. A committee which lends itself to the
Speaker 6: fact that he might might just have been crazy. I mean,
Speaker 6: he was crazy. Let's put it this way. John Langacy
Speaker 6: was crazy. Whether or not he was insane, his insanity
Speaker 6: rose to the level of passing the small test for
Speaker 6: the law in the state of Illinois. It didn't okay,
Speaker 6: Jerry did not agree that he did. But he was
Speaker 6: a nutcase.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yes, when he's laughing at court when Terry Sullivan
Speaker 8: confronts him at trial and he laughs at in the
Speaker 8: face of Terry Sullivan. There was some evidence that that
Speaker 8: is a that's a pretty crazy last year.
Speaker 6: Actually, oh, there are a lot of crazy gestures. At
Speaker 6: the end of the trial, Dan, all of us, I mean,
Speaker 6: we were crying, tears of exhaustion, tears of whatever. I mean,
Speaker 6: just you know, like you feel like a balloon with
Speaker 6: the airlit out of you. All the jurors are crying. Judge
Speaker 6: lou Garrippo, brilliant jurist, he tears are coming out of
Speaker 6: his eyes. When he was talking about the justice system
Speaker 6: that we have and if the John Gasey is the
Speaker 6: world could get a fair trial, then everybody in our
Speaker 6: country is safe and could get a fair trial. And
Speaker 6: Gaysey was He had no effect, He had no emotion
Speaker 6: at all. As a matter of fact, he asked me
Speaker 6: to call the prosecutors back to the bullpen where he
Speaker 6: was being held. The jail sew where he was being held, right,
Speaker 6: and he wanted to congratulate them. He congratulated Bill Conkle,
Speaker 6: he congratulated Terry Sullivan, He congratulated Bobby Egan and Jim
Speaker 6: Varga for the great job they did in prosecuting the case.
Speaker 6: The guy who was just crazy, he was crazy, but
Speaker 6: like Danny said that he rised at a level of
Speaker 6: insanity as the friend. And all the jury said no,
Speaker 6: you all the appeals along the way said no. The
Speaker 6: jury was right. And the thing is is defensillawyers by
Speaker 6: modern and I did our job to defend all those rights.
Speaker 6: And you know, I could go to sleep every night
Speaker 6: know that I did everything I could for them man
Speaker 6: and protected his rights and justice was served. Yeah, and
Speaker 6: you know it's funny, and I know we don't have
Speaker 6: a lot of time left, but I have to say this.
Speaker 6: It was the defense council, it was the defense attorney.
Speaker 6: It was this guy sitting across the room for me
Speaker 6: that did something ultimately about the fact that you know
Speaker 6: that kids when they first went to look for John
Speaker 6: Wayne Gacy, they it was the parents that got them
Speaker 6: involved in the case immediately at the time. However, if
Speaker 6: you reported somebody missing, you would they would wait forty
Speaker 6: eight hours, sometimes seventy two hours because they would assume
Speaker 6: that the kids were runaways. So often they were. And
Speaker 6: so this was a policy which Sam wrote a law
Speaker 6: years later in nineteen eighty four. Nineteen eighty four called
Speaker 6: the Eye Starts Law, and that stopped that policy, and
Speaker 6: the I SARTs Law became the precursor to what we
Speaker 6: now know as the Amber Alert. It was called the
Speaker 6: Missing Child Act of nineteen eighty four. It ended the
Speaker 6: seventy to hour waiting period that police would routinely use
Speaker 6: before they start looking for runaway missing children. It started
Speaker 6: these local agencies that specialized in locating and finding lost,
Speaker 6: missing runaway children. And it started a statewide central computer
Speaker 6: system where all information regarding runaways and missing kids would
Speaker 6: go into the system and then profiles of people who
Speaker 6: would be suspects in perhaps causing the fact that they
Speaker 6: were missing now and that came as a result. That's
Speaker 6: kind of the silver lining behind the behind the gaycy cloud.
Speaker 6: As a result of that law, thousands and thousands of
Speaker 6: missing children have been relocated in the state of Illinois
Speaker 6: all over the states.
Speaker 8: Well, that's that's great, that's great news, great development. You
Speaker 8: were recommending at the trial and especially in the wrap up,
Speaker 8: that that that John Wayne Gacy should not be put
Speaker 8: to death, that people should study John Wayne Gacy extensively.
Speaker 8: Study now for those people that think that when somebody
Speaker 8: is recommending or advocating or fighting for somebody to not
Speaker 8: receive a death penalty or life without the possibility of parole,
Speaker 8: that people are suspicious that psychiatrists and their ultimate wisdom
Speaker 8: will let a guy like John Wayne Gacy out on
Speaker 8: the street again to recommit, or just let him out
Speaker 8: without and thinking that he didn't get his due punishment.
Speaker 8: What are you what were you recommending ideally with with
Speaker 8: John Wayne Gacy?
Speaker 6: I was recommending ideally that he'd be kept in a
Speaker 6: secure environment where he would because every doctor would agree
Speaker 6: that he was always a danger, if not to himself,
Speaker 6: to somebody else. I don't think he would ever have
Speaker 6: been let out if he was found not guilty by
Speaker 6: reason of insanity, he would have been kept in a
Speaker 6: secure environment. And maybe we were told by our own doctors,
Speaker 6: if he ever were let out of a secured environment,
Speaker 6: a structured environment, he would kill again. If Casey ever
Speaker 6: got out of jail, he was going to kill again.
Speaker 6: So we were looking for is to keep him in
Speaker 6: a structured environment where he could shed light on situations
Speaker 6: where maybe we could prevent a future serial killer from
Speaker 6: doing something like that. And I told the jurors, there
Speaker 6: was other people out there like that. If we study him,
Speaker 6: if we find out what makes him tick, maybe, just
Speaker 6: maybe we could stop it before it happens again. And
Speaker 6: sure enough, there have been other serial killers, other mass
Speaker 6: murders since that time. And I was just hoping him,
Speaker 6: praying that the jury would accept our argument and study him.
Speaker 6: If we could say one kid, we could say one
Speaker 6: kid by doing it, Why put this guy to death?
Speaker 6: I mean, I told him I would join hands with
Speaker 6: them if we could bring one child back to life.
Speaker 6: Again the gay Sy kill the woul joined hands them
Speaker 6: and I put Gaysey to death. But if we could
Speaker 6: save one child, one child by keeping them alife, isn't
Speaker 6: it worth it? And that's what I was hoping to do.
Speaker 6: But obviously it fell in deaf fears, because what do
Speaker 6: you do? As Bill Councle said, John Gaysey was the
Speaker 6: poster boy for the death penalty. If you don't put
Speaker 6: John Gaycy to death, who do you put to death?
Speaker 8: Isn't it interesting now that Illinois has abolished the death
Speaker 8: penalty or is going to abolish.
Speaker 5: The death penalty has abolish, he has abolished.
Speaker 6: Not only that the Gaycy case brought about another law
Speaker 6: in Illinois because there was such a fear that he
Speaker 6: would be if found not guilty by reasons insanity. Law
Speaker 6: was actually put through the legislature during the case that
Speaker 6: it's called the guilty but mentally ill law, which is
Speaker 6: the same kind of a lot of that Dahmer was
Speaker 6: prosecuted on there in Wisconsin. Right, it's not if a
Speaker 6: person pleads guilty in Illinois, they could still get the
Speaker 6: help in a mental institution, but then they have to
Speaker 6: be punished, serve their incarceration, whatever punishment's been imposed after
Speaker 6: they've served time in the minilism, which doesn't make any
Speaker 6: sense to me. The reason that the laws of the
Speaker 6: death penalty has been aboused in the state of Illinois
Speaker 6: is because they found thirteen people men on death row
Speaker 6: who had not committed a crime. Now, imagine yourself driving
Speaker 6: down the street one day and you get stopped for
Speaker 6: a traffic ticket and you happen to look like someone
Speaker 6: Suddenly you're in the system. You've done nothing wrong, But
Speaker 6: as the ball starts to roll and people start pointing
Speaker 6: their finger at you in lineups, et cetera, they find
Speaker 6: some kind of evidence that links you wrongfully to a
Speaker 6: crime or the problem with death that can't be reversed, right,
Speaker 6: and so and they you know, through DNA, they found
Speaker 6: thirteen people who did not commit the crimes that they
Speaker 6: were convicted of. Enough for governor who who bounced the
Speaker 6: death penalties in jail himself.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, yeah, a lot of courage to do that,
Speaker 8: but he didn't have it.
Speaker 6: He didn't have enough courage to say no to some
Speaker 6: of that. Can imagine there's a lot of friends in
Speaker 6: jail now worry about it.
Speaker 8: Interesting, Yeah, well that's why. The reason why I don't
Speaker 8: believe in the death penalty is because I don't want
Speaker 8: to have blood on my hands for the wrong exactly.
Speaker 5: Right, because they're killed in our name, the child absolutely,
Speaker 5: And I think basically life without the possibility of parole
Speaker 5: unless somebody can tell me, who has never been in
Speaker 5: prison that it's a cakewalk, I think that should suffice
Speaker 5: the rest of.
Speaker 6: Your life, thinks the worst sentence. When I was on
Speaker 6: the bench, I had the opportunity only once I had
Speaker 6: a death penalty case in front of me, and rather
Speaker 6: than put a jury on for the death hearing, the
Speaker 6: defense lawyer chose to have a death hearing in front
Speaker 6: of me as a judge. And so I had this
Speaker 6: young eighteen year old's life in my hands, and he
Speaker 6: committed a horribly vicious murder. He chopped off his victims,
Speaker 6: had his arms spread him round. It was it was
Speaker 6: an assassination type murder, and it was just a horrible
Speaker 6: thing I chose. Although I am not you know, as
Speaker 6: you know you and Danny are. You know, I'll equivocally
Speaker 6: opposed to the death pedalty. I think you better be
Speaker 6: damn sure before you send somebody to that because it
Speaker 6: is irreversible. But this particular kid, I felt it was
Speaker 6: a harsher punishment to send him natural life without prole.
Speaker 6: That's what I did. It was only eighteen years old,
Speaker 6: and I'll never forget it. You know. I saw tears
Speaker 6: streaming on his eye and asked if he anything just
Speaker 6: if I asked him if he had anything to say
Speaker 6: to me, and I he said, just give me some hope, Judge.
Speaker 6: And I told I'm going to give you the same
Speaker 6: hope that you gave your victim that night on the
Speaker 6: railroad tracks, and no hope at all.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 6: And so I locked them up forever. And you know,
Speaker 6: I think about this kid all the time, and it's
Speaker 6: it's a it's a horrible, horrible sentence to me. If
Speaker 6: I were locked up by hey, things about me, I'm
Speaker 6: sure he's got I'd rather be I think if I
Speaker 6: were locked up there along, I'd rather be put the debt.
Speaker 6: So I think the tougher sentence is life imprisonment without
Speaker 6: pro and less expensive. Yeah, it's less expensive to keep
Speaker 6: somebody alive in the jail theness to put him to debt. Yeah.
Speaker 6: All you got to do is put them in a
Speaker 6: room and feed them instead of pay for all the
Speaker 6: lawyers and all the armies of lawyers and all the
Speaker 6: repeated and continuous appeals that go on, which are safeguards
Speaker 6: and they belong there. So it's actually cheaper to sentence
Speaker 6: them to life.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Incredible.
Speaker 6: And then if you find out ten years later that
Speaker 6: the guy didn't do it, you can fix it. You
Speaker 6: can't fix it if he's already in the ground.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah. So this this experience for both of you,
Speaker 8: that John Wayne Gacy defending a monster. How has the
Speaker 8: press been so far? How is the how is the
Speaker 8: what seems to be the public's interest. Are they still
Speaker 8: fascinated with John Wayne Gaysey? And are they very interested
Speaker 8: in this book that you're you doing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we've been on We're really happy because you know,
Speaker 6: we're in Amazon dot com and we've actually been on
Speaker 6: three or four different number one bestseller list through Amazon
Speaker 6: for quite a while, under which we're happy about legal history.
Speaker 6: It's in a subcategory of legal history American history, which
Speaker 6: is what we wanted. We wanted a classy, you know,
Speaker 6: classy book. It's a difficult subject to write on. True
Speaker 6: crime is difficult to begin with, and and we wanted
Speaker 6: to make sure this was a book that would become
Speaker 6: a classic. And all the occasions are now that they are.
Speaker 6: The books have been flying off the shelves in the bookstores.
Speaker 6: Independent bookstores are Barnes and Nobles, Amazon dot Com, Kindle. Look,
Speaker 6: we've gotten great receptions. We've had book signings all around
Speaker 6: the immediate area. We've made all the local media. It's
Speaker 6: still going on the media. We were out in California
Speaker 6: and Hollywood, a book signing at book Soup on Sunset Boulevard,
Speaker 6: the Gunda Beach and Eras Zona, Vegas, and everywhere we've
Speaker 6: gone we've been accepted, interestingly enough. In Vegas, we actually
Speaker 6: stopped a protest one of the victims of family members
Speaker 6: was protesting a Gaysey art show over there, and we
Speaker 6: appeared as speakers, and we actually defused the protests after
Speaker 6: they hurt us and give our talk. We defuse the
Speaker 6: protest situation because they realized that, you know, we had
Speaker 6: a job to do, and we were presenting this book
Speaker 6: as the character of this book is a constitution, it's
Speaker 6: the criminal justice system. It's not only about gaycy. Certainly
Speaker 6: doesn't glorify gaycy. And it's been more apologized, were apologize.
Speaker 6: It's very well. It's been very well received. Not often
Speaker 6: you hear the sight of the defense lawyer, and everywhere
Speaker 6: we go, we've got offers for movie options by producers
Speaker 6: in Hollywood. Wanted to do a big screen movie in
Speaker 6: a classic movie trial drama, not like you know, the
Speaker 6: blood and gore, murder Mayhem type thing, but a trial
Speaker 6: drama like a John Risham type trio. Except in this
Speaker 6: case it's not fiction. It's it's real in the genre
Speaker 6: of in Cold Blood or or Helter Skelter. It's the
Speaker 6: true story, and it's a riveting story, and it's it's
Speaker 6: been we're still we're still flying high. We came out
Speaker 6: August first, and we haven't made the New York Times
Speaker 6: bestseller list, which we'd like to do. We've been selling
Speaker 6: some books up in Canada, which we were really happy about,
Speaker 6: and we'd like to keep selling them up there. We'd
Speaker 6: like to come up there and visit you guys. And
Speaker 6: things have been really great. We're appearing. I was on
Speaker 6: TV this morning, I was on radio this morning. I'm
Speaker 6: gonna we're gonna be on radio and TV again next week.
Speaker 6: So the media has been absolutely wonderful, wonderful to us. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and we really appreciate it.
Speaker 8: And you've got you've got the approval of Terry Sullivan,
Speaker 8: the author of Killer Clown, which you wrote the definitive
Speaker 8: book before this book came out, So now you have this.
Speaker 6: Is the definitive book. Yeah, this is the true story.
Speaker 6: Terry and Iron you've been talking about that this morning.
Speaker 6: We were kidding around and he's talking about my book,
Speaker 6: and he said, yeah, but I have the better book here,
Speaker 6: Killer Cloud. And so we start locking horns again as
Speaker 6: we once did as prosecutor a defense lawyer. But Killer
Speaker 6: Clutter is an excellent book too, and Terry is an
Speaker 6: excellent lawyer and in a very very good friend of mine. Yeah,
Speaker 6: Terry gave me an office for a period of time
Speaker 6: and complete access to his files. You have to realize that,
Speaker 6: you know, lawyers don't dislike each other just because they
Speaker 6: go up against each other's and it's sort of like
Speaker 6: playing football or you know, I mean, that's why as
Speaker 6: kids we play football and play sports so that there
Speaker 6: can be competition and you don't wind up hating each other.
Speaker 6: And so Terry, not only you know, agrees that this
Speaker 6: book is a good book. He participated in some small
Speaker 6: way in that he gave us access to his five
Speaker 6: And you know, in Danny's Becers, you respect another lawyer,
Speaker 6: just like you. Hockey team, you know, Vancouver and the Hawks, No,
Speaker 6: you don't want to see them players lay down and
Speaker 6: die against each other. We'll seem out there fighting and
Speaker 6: trying to win for their teams. And football players, you
Speaker 6: don't have respect for a quarterback who has a phony
Speaker 6: knee injury he gets out of the game as opposed
Speaker 6: to the guy who who really you know, plays through
Speaker 6: hurt and injuries. And talking about someone specific, I'm talking
Speaker 6: about Cutler here in Chicago, and uh, you know, you
Speaker 6: respect the guy who's tough. You respect the guy who
Speaker 6: goes in there and fights for his team, and that's
Speaker 6: what lawyers doing. I respect Terry Sullivan, and I respect
Speaker 6: Bill Cuncle, and I respect all the police officers who
Speaker 6: revolved in the Gaycy case because they did their job
Speaker 6: and they did it well. And in turn, I like
Speaker 6: to think that they respect me for doing my job
Speaker 6: because they did my job well. And and that's what's about.
Speaker 6: And uh so I respect Terry and I respect his book.
Speaker 6: I think Killer Crown Clown is a great book. And
Speaker 6: and we're, you know, for defending a monster. We're getting
Speaker 6: great great uh the books kind of compliment each other,
Speaker 6: and we're getting great reviews all over the country over here,
Speaker 6: great views out of Canada too, is I think we've
Speaker 6: been getting some.
Speaker 8: Great reviews out of well, you know, the thing is
Speaker 8: is that this book has got a completely different perspective.
Speaker 8: But because of your position as his defense lawyer, the
Speaker 8: access that you have, the incredible conversations that you have,
Speaker 8: the Gacy confession, and just what you were privy to
Speaker 8: and then not so memoir esque, but just basically who
Speaker 8: you are and what you were doing in your life
Speaker 8: at that time. Your very first real wow, how could
Speaker 8: you get a bigger case than this to start off,
Speaker 8: I mean, this is quite the baptism by fire, to
Speaker 8: say the leader.
Speaker 6: That's a story in and of itself. That's what makes
Speaker 6: this such a story. That's what made that you know,
Speaker 6: that grab me. It's this amazing story. And it's like
Speaker 6: a Grisham story, right down to the fact that he
Speaker 6: was a young lawyer who was confronted with this monumental case,
Speaker 6: then confronted with a confession that hit him like a
Speaker 6: mack truck, and then went on to be involved in
Speaker 6: case where he is suddenly thrown completely into the limelight
Speaker 6: and in front of cameras and all that kind of stuff,
Speaker 6: and so he handled it. So it reads like a
Speaker 6: Grisham novel, except it's all true and it sets a story.
Speaker 6: It sets the record straight for history too. It is
Speaker 6: the true story, and we wanted the truth to know one.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And I think that's what you're doing too. I
Speaker 8: really when you made the point about legal history, I
Speaker 8: think a lot of people who haven't read, who haven't
Speaker 8: had the pleasure of reading true crime. So well, I
Speaker 8: don't read true crime, and I say, well, it's history,
Speaker 8: and you really are missing history in important history because
Speaker 8: it's you do go back in time to the feelings
Speaker 8: and the emotions of that time and maybe even perceptions
Speaker 8: at that time. So it is really a historical document.
Speaker 8: And the book looks great. It's out in hardcover, it's
Speaker 8: got fantastic photos in it, and it's a fantastic thrill
Speaker 8: ride of a read. So I want to thank you,
Speaker 8: gentlemen for coming on. Judge sam Ammarati and Danny Broderick
Speaker 8: a great book, and thank you for a great interview.
Speaker 8: And I wish you guys the best of luck with
Speaker 8: this and I'm sure you won't have any problem. It
Speaker 8: has to be turned into a film and this story
Speaker 8: will continue. Fascinating case, fascinating story, and fascinating book. Thank
Speaker 8: you very much, gentlemen.
Speaker 6: Thank you Dan, thanks for having us, thanks for having
Speaker 6: us sound.
Speaker 8: Thank you very much, gentlemen. Have a good evening, Thank
Speaker 8: you too. Good night. You've been listening to the program
Speaker 8: True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history
Speaker 8: and the authors that have written about though you might
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