Sam L. Amirante

When all was said and done, there were almost as many opinions on that issue as there were psychologists and psychiatrists who were studying it.

One fact unearthed during all of the interviews and interrogations by the various renowned shrinks that hit home for me and which always anchored my belief that my client was insane on a level sufficient to have him found not guilty by reason of insanity was this: When John Wayne Gacy was five or six years old, he developed a fetish for his mother’s silk undergarments. He said he liked the feel of them. He would fondle his mother’s lacy panties and rub them on his little body. When he was done doing what he did with these items—and this made the hair on the back of my neck stand up straight when I heard it—he would bury them under the house. When John’s mother began looking for several pairs of underwear that she thought she had lost, she found a small bag filled with panties partially buried under the porch of the Gacy home.

John was punished by his parents, and his mother’s panties stopped disappearing. However, by the time John was a teenager and reaching puberty, he had graduated to stealing these coveted items from neighborhood clotheslines. He now was old enough to use these items during masturbation, which he regularly did; and when he was finished, he would revert to his original behavior and bury those items, often under the house.

This simple revelation, especially when taken in conjunction with everything else I knew about this sad, sad excuse for a human being, which appeared in report after report from doctor after doctor who had interviewed him, basically cinched it for me: John Gacy, my client, was on a psychological choo-choo train that went off the tracks many years before. The destination of that train had been predetermined. The normal synapse that happens in your brain and my brain and the brains of everyone else we know just did not happen in the brain of Mr. Gacy. He had, in fact, been miswired at the factory. He had a broken brain, and that brain had been broken long ago.
That was my opinion then, and it still is, and I sleep very well at night while holding it.

The theory that allows me to comfortably hold this opinion is surprisingly simple and has been stated in many ways throughout time. Here is one.

If a person who has reached the age of majority becomes angry with another person and says, “I’m going to kill you,” then that person methodically walks into another room with plenty of time to think about his actions, grabs a loaded shotgun from the closet, walks back into the first room where the other person is standing, and proceeds to blow this person’s brains all over the wall behind him, we call that murder.

However, if the same set of circumstances occurs and the perpetrator is a minor—let’s say he or she is seven years old—it becomes a terrible, tragic accident, like lightning striking or a collision in traffic. Why? Because we don’t blame small children for their actions no matter how sad and terrible, no matter how horrific the results may be. We know that seven-year-old children are not responsible for their actions. This is not a hard concept to grasp. Their little brains have not matured enough. They cannot understand the consequences of their actions. Hell, the Catholic Church takes the position that they cannot even commit a sin.

Everybody understands this.

Where the waters become muddy, where understanding becomes fleeting is when the “child” is six feet tall, weighs two hundred pounds, and has a five o’clock shadow or has long blonde hair and big perky breasts and chain-smokes. That is when the problems arise.
However, the brain of an adult can be so broken, so dysfunctional, that it is of no more use to that adult than the brain of a seven-year-old child. It just does not work properly—it’s broken, and it causes the adult to act in ways that are unacceptable without the willing consent of its owner.

As Donita Gannon walked back down the aisle and out through those huge swinging oak doors, she seemed to have lost a bit of the swing in her step. Once again, every eye in the courtroom was glued on her, but I am not so sure it felt as good as it did during her grand entrance. If she was embarrassed, I’m sorry. But like I said before, this was hardball. That woman had stood there at the outset of her testimony with her hand on a Bible and sworn to God that she would tell the truth, when, in fact, she was living a lie. Although it was not her fault—it was probably just a cruel trick of nature, like hurricanes, tornados, pestilence, or the like—her life was one confusing, tragic, incomprehensible lie, just like my client.

However, somewhere toward the end of this heartrending parade of life and death witnesses, the State wheeled in a wheelchair-bound accident victim straight from the hospital. Her name was Mary Jo Paulus. I always thought that they had gone a little too far with her. She was in agonizing pain, both physically and mentally. She cried on cue during her testimony; but on cross, Motta got her to admit that the State had purposely withheld pain medication with some excuse about how she should not be under the influence of drugs on the stand. Bob also pried information out of her that some other person named Weedle was the last to see the deceased victim, William Kindred. So what was she doing there in the first place? Why did she have to be there at all, considering her condition? Where was Mr. Weedle? Wasn’t Mr. Weedle pathetic enough as a witness? I don’t think that played well with the jury.

Like I said, this was hardball. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different.