Monday, December 31, 2018

ZOMBIE'S AND MAI TAI'S, OH MY!


If you're looking for something in the way of the exotic for your New Year's libations, consider going retro with some wild tiki cocktails.


Donn Beach is credited with combining the fruit flavors of the Hawaiian Islands and other tropical Pacific locales along with (mostly) rum, to make delicious cocktails which he served beginning in the 1930s at his Don's Beachcomber bar in Hollywood, then later at his string of Don the Beachcomber restaurants.

How could you not, I ask?
It was a drink called the Zombie that Beach created in 1934 that ignited the torch of the tiki bar craze. A concoction of three different kinds of rum, lime juice, falernum (a mixture, usually of the flavors of almond, ginger and lime}, Angostura bitters, Pernod, grenadine, and "Don's Mix", a combination of cinnamon syrup and grapefruit juice, it packed such a punch that customers were only allowed two per visit. Legend has it that Donn made up the drink for a hungover businessman who needed to make it through a meeting that day. The customer came back, saying that it had turned him into a zombie.





Other exotic cocktails to consider for your New Year's Monster Bash are the Mai Tai, The Hurricane, The Rum Runner, The Painkiller and The Scorpion. Check out Jeff "Beachbum" Berry's excellent book on tiki drinks, "Beachbum Berry Remixed" (or any of his others, too).

Mahalo!

The Zombie and The Witch Doctor that caused many a' mondo hangover.
A page from a Don The Beachcomber cocktail menu. Check out the "Limit Two"
notices for the Zombie and the Test Pilot -- and the prices!
A menu from Don The Beachcomber, Huntington Beach, CA before it closed.

Sunday, December 30, 2018

JOHN WAYNE GACY, KILLER CLOWN (PART 2)



The arrest and trial
The case against John Wayne Gacy unfolded in the days, weeks and months following the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Piest on Dec. 11, 1978. People in Chicago and across the country came to view the case -- and Gacy's house -- with a morbid fascination. Here is how it happened.

When Robert Piest’s mother arrives to pick up her son after his shift at a Des Plaines pharmacy around 9 p.m. Dec. 11, 1978, the 15-year-old Maine West student asks her to wait a few minutes while he sees a man about a summer construction job.

He is never seen alive again.

His mother files a missing person report at 11:30 that night.

The next day, Des Plaines police learn it was John Wayne Gacy whom Piest wanted to speak to about a job. Gacy is asked to come to the station for questioning. At 11 p.m., Gacy calls Des Plaines police Lt. Joe Kozenczak. "You still want to talk to me?" Gacy asks.

Gacy arrives at the station at 3:20 a.m. Dec. 13 but doesn't connect with the lieutenant.

Excavating Gacy's basement graveyard.
He returns to the station later that day and gives a brief statement. Kozenczak asks Gacy for the keys to his house, showing him a search warrant. Gacy protests but surrenders his keys.

Inside the house, authorities find a receipt the Piest family later says is connected with their son.

By Dec. 14, Gacy is placed under around-the-clock surveillance. On Dec. 19, Gacy invites two police officers into his house for breakfast. Both smell the odor of death.

Two days later, Gacy is seen handing a package containing marijuana to a gas station clerk. He is followed and arrested. Police are told Gacy has already admitted to his lawyer that he committed "maybe 30" murders.

Bodies of Gacy's victims at the morgue.
Police accuse Gacy of holding Piest against his will and threaten to tear up the floor of Gacy's house. Later, a search of the home reveals the first bodies.

In a rambling verbal statement lasting several hours, Gacy on Dec. 22 tells police he has killed 32 young men and boys after having sexual relations with them.

In his earliest confession, he says he buried the bodies of 27 victims on his property, most of them in the crawl space. Five other bodies, including that of Piest, Gacy says were thrown into the Des Plaines River.

Gacy is arrested and charged with Piest's murder.

Officials removing bodies from the Gacy home.
In the following 17 days, bodies are found and some remains are identified. On Jan. 8, 1979, Gacy is charged with seven murders, and on April 23, a grand jury indicts him for 26 more. At the time, the total of 33 murders is the largest number charged to one person in the U.S. The state says it will seek the death penalty.

Piest's body is identified April 9, 1979.

The trial begins in February 1980, and after five weeks of testimony from psychiatrists, police, neighbors, acquaintances and family members of the victims, a jury takes less than two hours March 13 to convict Gacy of killing 33 young men.

The next day, parents and relatives of Gacy's victims break into applause as it is announced that he has been sentenced to die. Judge Louis Garippo sets an execution date of June 2, 1980, but that date is immediately stayed while the case is appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court.

Appeals to the state Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court fail, and at 12:58 a.m. May 10, 1994, Gacy is put to death by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet.

His last meal includes fried chicken and butterfly shrimp.

Gacy's house is demolished. Did they salt the earth?
Quiet returns to Summerdale Avenue
Following Gacy’s arrest, detectives and prosecutors learned that he had been on law enforcement’s radar prior to 1978, including a case two years earlier when he was a suspect in the disappearance of a 9-year-old boy. Gacy’s case, as highlighted by a cascade of news articles and books, embarrassed law enforcement by exposing the lack of a safety net for vulnerable young people.

In the years since Gacy and other high-profile serial murder cases like that of 6-year-old Adam Walsh and a string of child killings in Atlanta, authorities have erected a system of public and private partnerships, along with implementing missing persons computer databases that can analyze patterns and reveal previous police complaints against a suspect. Also, private organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington assemble computerized information on missing people to safeguard against sex traffickers as well as sexual predators.

"The police ended up looking kind of foolish,” in the wake of the Gacy case, a University of Louisville criminologist told the Tribune in 1994 after Gacy’s execution. The criminologist, Robert C. Crouse, called Gacy “the No. 1 event” that changed how police departments operate.

After Dart took office, he ordered a review of cold cases. He said he was astounded to learn just how poorly missing persons cases were investigated by police of that era, saying he believed communication would have been similar to today.

Aerial view of the house being demolished.
“I couldn’t have been more naive if I wanted to (be),” Dart said. “You want to talk about a fragmented, broken system, where it’s amazing any missing person was found. … If people only could transport back to that time, they’d find out that missing persons throughout the country was a train wreck. It was lucky if a department was writing the name down.”

Elected officials began passing laws creating sex offender registries, and schools across the country added curriculum teaching youngsters about stranger danger and instructing them to speak out. Even Hollywood got into the act, blanketing 1980s and ’90s television with public service announcements during family sitcoms and after-school programming.

The dramatic five-week trial led to years of headlines, numerous books and a television movie starring Brian Dennehy as Gacy. The term “crawl space” entered the American lexicon, meaning any dark secret in a quiet place, as DJ Steve Dahl’s parody song, “Another Kid in the Crawl,” earned chuckles from area teens and rebukes from families of survivors. Gacy may have also helped popularize the “killer clown” archetype, though author Stephen King’s 1986 best-seller “It” likely didn’t help matters.

Today, with airliners crisscrossing the skies above, Norwood Park Township, with its small bungalows and two-flat buildings, resembles other neighborhoods at the edges of the city, popular with municipal workers and ethnic whites. In the aftermath of the gruesome discovery on Gacy’s property, his neighbors had difficulty reconciling the friendly, gentle neighbor with the killer.

“Gacy had everybody fooled, and people don’t like it — they don’t like that they were friends with an evildoer,” Moran said.

But over the years, as old neighbors moved away or died, quiet returned to Summerdale Avenue.

One neighbor, whose family moved to the block three years ago from Canada, said she had no idea about Gacy’s connection until a friend told her that she might live across the street from the infamous house.

“I still don’t know which house it is,” the woman said outside her home.

Moran said he hopes society and law enforcement have learned lessons from Gacy, though both must remain vigilant. “I’d like to believe that it would not take 33 victims in six years in one geographic area again … that we would be on top of it more.”

His boss, Dart, added that technology and social media have removed much of the anonymity that allowed serial killers like Gacy to operate in the shadows.

“I don’t think the magnitude could ever occur again like this,” he said. “I just don’t see a scenario where it would happen.”

Today a new dwelling sits atop the Gacy killing field.

HAPPY 72nd BIRTHDAY, MAXINE SANDERS!


[b. December 30, 1946, Cheshire, United Kingdom.]

Saturday, December 29, 2018

JOHN WAYNE GACY, KILLER CLOWN (PART 1)


"The scary thing about Gacy was that he wasn’t scary at all. That’s the scary thing — he could have been anyone’s brother or father, uncle.” - Sam Amirante, Public Defender for serial killer John Wayne Gacy

One of the fascinating facts that tie the stories of many serial killers together is that they nearly all seem so "normal" to the people who knew them. Forensic science and improved investigation methods have given us a better understanding of how and why these shocking crimes take place. Confessions from the killers also add to the corpus (no pun intended) of knowledge about this most dangerous breed of human species.


In the case of John Wayne Gacy, as a boy he was subjected to verbal abuse by his father. He also harbored a suppressed homosexuality that at the time was widely unaccepted by mainstream society. Was it these two mind-bending traumas that finally collided, turning Gacy into a human monster?


The following story from the Chicago Tribune is a look back at the arrest and subsequent discovery forty years ago this month, of the incredible string of unfortunates that fell victim to the tortured and twisted mind of a serial killer.




John Wayne Gacy was arrested 40 years ago in a killing spree that claimed 33 victims and shattered the illusion of the safe suburban community
By William Lee
Chicago Tribune, December 16, 2018

IN THE SHADOW OF O'HARE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, the winding, looping streets and small-town character of unincorporated Norwood Park Township look much the way they did in December 1978.


But gone are the lines of gawking bystanders, desperate families of missing young men and carloads of curiosity-seekers who choked the streets in the days before that long-ago Christmas, trying to catch a glimpse of the murder house.


John Wayne Gacy’s confession to the rape and murder of more than 30 people didn’t just awaken America to a nightmare hidden in its own backyard. The discovery 40 years ago of the dank, muddy mass grave underneath Gacy's yellow brick ranch house at 8213 W. Summerdale Ave. forever shattered the image of the safe suburban community.


A police search for missing Maine West sophomore Robert Piest led investigators to 36-year-old Gacy, a “stocky, bull necked contractor,” described by neighbors and business associates as a pillar of the community: a likable, boastful divorced businessman and Democratic precinct captain who hosted themed neighborhood parties and entertained children as a clown named Pogo.


“(The public) would feel much more comfortable if Gacy was this type of creepy, sequestered ghoul that was unkempt and heinous,” Detective Sgt. Jason Moran of the Cook County sheriff’s office, who is a point man on the Gacy case, said recently. “But instead, he dressed as a clown and bounced kids on his knee. He would knock at your door and say vote for my candidate.”


Gacy’s nice-guy persona masked something far more sinister. Once they were safely restrained — usually in a pair of handcuffs as he demonstrated a “trick” he learned as a clown — Gacy’s easy smile melted away, revealing a cold, growling predator who sexually assaulted his victims before strangling many of them with a knotted rope. He buried 29 of his 33 victims in trenches underneath and around his home and dumped four others from bridges once his property could hold no more bodies.


The horror in the tiny community and images of Gacy in his clown outfit were splashed across newspapers around the world, again associating Chicago with a killing spree 12 years after Richard Speck’s massacre of eight student nurses on the Far South Side. Gacy also had chilling similarities to another charming Chicago-area killer, Herman Webster Mudgett, also known as Dr. H.H. Holmes. Quite possibly the country’s first serial killer, he lured people into his personally designed “murder castle” in 1890s Englewood. But where Mudgett had trick rooms with vents that led to disposal rooms, Gacy had a knotted rope and a crawl space.


After Gacy’s house was razed in April 1979, the vacant lot became a notorious gathering place in the 1980s, drawing everyone from ghost hunters to rowdy neighborhood teenagers who late at night spun their wheels in the dirt lot and dumped beer bottles.


Now a new home sits on the lot, but the block still draws the occasional tourist or documentary crew, said one neighbor who lives across the street from the former Gacy property but asked not to be identified. “If you’ve got two guys in a car, or an out-of-state plate, it’s probably Gacy.”


Gacy was executed by lethal injection in 1994, but the impact of his crimes went beyond tainting his neighborhood. In response to widespread criticism of local police for taking years to connect the missing victims to Gacy, federal and local law enforcement agencies began sharing information on runaways and sex offenders, implemented a national hotline and launched a computer database for missing people.


Police departments and schools nationwide joined forces for massive public service campaigns tasked with teaching parents and children about “stranger danger.”


Experts said the case also breathed new life into old, unevolved fears about homosexuality, still a taboo subject at the time. The combination of homosexuality and the heinous nature of the murders of young men lent a tawdry element to the tale that also attached shame to the victims and their families as the unfortunately named Gacy became a punchline in living rooms and on playgrounds across the country.


Gacy dressed as a clown and entertained at kids' parties.

Case ‘cleared’ but not ‘closed’
Inside battered boxes at Moran’s Little Village office are pictures from Gacy’s arrest four days before Christmas that capture not only grisly images but also serve as a time capsule of a more worry-free era, with items like Gacy’s Tiki-style mock bar set up inside his rec room. Aging photos show law enforcement officers and Chief Medical Examiner Robert Stein working in the muddy crawl space in street clothes, where officers today would be dressed in full-body hazmat suits.

Other photos show colorful merchandise inside Nisson Pharmacy on Touhy Avenue. Fifteen-year-old Piest worked at the family-owned shop, one of many that have since yielded largely to corporate giants like Walgreens and CVS. The teen told his mother, who’d come to pick him up from work so he could attend her birthday party, that he’d be right back after he talked to a man about a summer job that paid $5 an hour.


Piest’s slaying later that night at Gacy’s home was the thread that unraveled Gacy’s six-year rampage and brought Des Plaines police to his doorstep on Dec. 12, 1978. Authorities later found evidence at his home that linked him to the pharmacy, despite his early denials. Then a shocking confession to “maybe 30” murders confirmed a police officer’s suspicion about the strange odor inside Gacy’s home.


Retired sheriff’s investigator Phil Bettiker, one of the first officers to hear Gacy’s confession, has grim memories of the early days of the case, particularly when he and other sheriff’s officers began excavating bodies from underneath the home. Inside the muddy pit, days seemed to stretch on endlessly as reporters and others gathered outside waiting for the nightly body count. He remembered officers running over to a local McDonald’s to get fry baskets to sift the soil. And he recalled with a smile how a supervisor gave him and other officers the OK to help themselves to a case of Gacy’s beer after digging up his home for more than 12 hours.


Bettiker has since become a mentor to Moran, a one-man cold-case squad who was tasked by Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart in 2010 with finding out the names of the remaining unidentified victims.


“This case isn’t cleared and closed … it’s open in that all of his victims haven’t been identified,” Moran explained. He said there’s no new evidence that links Gacy to additional victims but adds “it’s hard to put it past someone so evil.”


Gacy's bedroom.
Killer in plain sight
Attorney Sam Amirante likes to joke that he was 6-foot-4 before he began representing an acquaintance named John W. Gacy and wound up 5-foot-2 after being ground down by the immense and horrifying details of the case. Amirante, who later became a Cook County judge, wrote about his experience and how his infamous former client made a drunken confession to being “judge, jury and executioner of many, many people.”

Amirante said it took months of exposure to Gacy to recognize his chilling duality.


“He looked at his victims like he was taking out the trash. He had no feelings about them,” Amirante said, sitting in a private office at his Barrington home nearly 40 years after hearing the famous confession. “He could talk about a child who's dying of cancer and cry like a baby about this child he didn't even know or never met and feel authentically sad about this child. Then he'd talk about another child that he murdered and have no feelings whatsoever.”


Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Gacy’s case wasn’t the body count — it was that the portly, unassuming man killed 33 able-bodied young men and boys.


Over time, he’d refined his technique of trapping and killing his victims so well, it allowed him to ensnare multiple victims within days. It wasn’t until Gacy’s arrest that cracks began to appear in his carefully cultivated image. Gacy had secret gay relationships but, according to his former attorney, denied being gay. Still, he cruised the city’s North Side from Lakeview to Uptown prowling for young men. He also conditioned his neighbors to see young men coming and leaving his home any time of day or night, easily explaining visitors as young workers digging trenches underneath his home.


Amirante, a former assistant public defender who represented Gacy as his first private client, agreed that the secret to Gacy’s success lay largely in his unctuous charm developed over years as the son of a harsh, verbally abusive father and later refined as a successful shoe salesman.


“I always tell people that the scary thing about Gacy was that he wasn’t scary at all. That’s the scary thing — he could have been anyone’s brother or father, uncle,” Amirante said. “He was not an intimidating kind of person, with the exception of when he would turn and change out of the very affable, charming, likable guy into the killer that he was.”


“Everyone who ever knew John Gacy knew one thing about him — he was a master manipulator. He could sell ice cubes to Eskimos,” Amirante wrote in a 2011 book with Danny Broderick, “John Wayne Gacy: Defending a Monster.”


Gacy also knew how to set a trap, Moran said.


“He often would build up trust with his victims, so they wouldn’t need to be on guard,” Moran said. “He was their employer, their friend. He may have been someone who provided them with alcohol and drugs and maybe a place to sleep at night. That’s an easy way to kill someone.”


Bettiker recalled the elaborately themed parties that Gacy hosted at his home, where dozens of guests unwittingly celebrated over his private graveyard.


“He’d have parties at his residence where he’d invite maybe 200 people. He’d be the center of attraction,” he recalled. "One-on-one, or in a group setting, he would be the last person that you’d think was a serial killer and is as devious as he was.”


Gacy's Tiki Bar where he entertained many neighbors and friends.
Where victims were found
Most of Gacy's victims were buried in the crawl space under his home. Others were found elsewhere on his property, and four victims were recovered after Gacy dumped them in rivers south of Chicago.

Had Gacy not targeted Piest, a well-regarded Maine West athlete and student with strong family ties to the community, his killing spree may have continued. Today, Amirante speculates that the usually cautious Gacy may have subconsciously pursued a victim who he knew would get him caught.


“I think he was being absolutely self-destructive and in the good side of him — the very limited good side of him that was left — clearly wanted to be caught,” Amirante said. “He was sabotaging himself.”


Gacy became the bogeyman to a generation of boys who never considered that they could be victims of sexual violence. The case left an impact across the entire area, including the city’s South Side, where Moran spent his boyhood.


“I was only a boy during the original investigation, but growing up a boy in Chicago, the case, facts and circumstances, the Gacy serial killings stuck with you because it meant that boys could be victims of violent crime just like girls had been,” Moran recalled.


He and others who worked during Gacy’s time said the case also tapped a well of homophobia that may have scared off some families from seeking information on their missing loved ones due to the social stigma.


“These victims were primarily born in the 1950s and their parents were born in the 1920s and ’30s,” Moran said. “That generation, the parents of these victims, was not ready to accept homosexuality, and because the media constantly brought up the gay aspect of this case, Sheriff (Dart) and I thought it may be what kept people from coming forward.”


Amirante said he believed a killer with Gacy’s personal demons would be less likely to exist today.


“The police department (at the time) looked at things differently. Society looked at things differently. Gacy looked at himself differently then, because he was homosexual and, because of the trauma he went through, he couldn’t accept himself. Today, the world is more open, people are more open. People are more understanding and compassionate about people who are different,” he said.



[Continued tomorrow.]

Friday, December 28, 2018

CINEFANTASTIQUE VOL. 2 NO. 2 (PLANET OF THE APES SPECIAL ISSUE)


CINEFANTASTIQUE
Vol. 2 No. 2 (Whole issue #6)
Summer 1972 (July)
Publisher and Editor: Frederick S. Clarke
Contributing Editors: Kay Anderson; Shirley Meech; Dale Winogura
Cover: Photo cover (Planet of the Apes)
Pages: 48
Cover price: $1.00

I can't think of a better magazine to have spent a buck on back in the early 1970s. CINEFANTASTIQUE encapsulated all that was professional in a monster/sci-fi/fantasy movie mag. Hell, it validated the genres. To those of you who think Calvin Beck's CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN brought sophistication to our beloved monster movies (and it did, to an extent), one only needs to turn to Frederick Clarke's CF to see the real deal.

This issue is taken up mostly by coverage of the POTA franchise. Author Dale Winogura digs deep into Ape lore by interviewing all the people who had an influence on the making of the series. There is also an "on the set" article about the second Dr. Phibes film. Included are features on Peter Cushing, SILENT RUNNING, and more. An excellent issue.