CHICAGO -- Richard Szyc minces no words. He wants John Wayne Gacy dead.
"I want to pull the switch," Szyc says. "He's lucky. He gets to go down like I did when I had (back) surgery. That's too good for him. They should do him like he did my son: take a couple of days; make him know he's getting it."
Gacy, perhaps the most notorious serial killer in the USA, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 12: 01 a.m. Tuesday at the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet for the sex murders of 33 young men and boys from 1972 to 1978.
Most were buried in the crawl space beneath his house near O'Hare airport. But they weren't his only victims.
Their families still struggle to cope.
Divorce, psychotherapy, attempted suicide and alcoholism illustrate just how difficult life became even after Gacy was sentenced to die June 2, 1980.
"It's been such a lousy 14 years," says Harold Piest.
His son, Rob, 15, was Gacy's last victim. "We have had such a tragedy in our family. Maybe this will put an end to it. Be a new day. Begin life all over again for us."
Fighting to the last
Meanwhile, Gacy - who calls himself the 34th victim - works desperately to stave off his own death.
The Illinois Supreme Court and a Cook County judge this week rejected last-ditch appeals. Friday, a Circuit Court judge is expected to rule on a suit by Gacy's lawyers that says the state's lethal-injection apparatus is flawed.
"We're just trying to keep him alive, not free him. We don't want to turn him loose on the children of the world," says Karen Conti, one of four lawyers working on his appeals.
Gacy is unwilling to accept the idea he'll be dead in a week, says John Greenlees, a defense lawyer. "He doesn't believe he'll be executed."
He fills his days on death row at Menard Correctional Center, near Chester, compulsively attending to details.
He keeps a diary in which he records every meal he's eaten in prison; the score of every Cubs game; tallies of visitors (400, including his sister) and letters (more than 27,000); and a brief, daily weather report.
He uses a letterhead that says "Execute Justice . . . Not People" and he calls his lawyers daily. He also is building dossiers on each of his victims, scraping together every detail he can find for "The Victims Book."
'Obsessed with this case'
Gacy is 52 and clean-shaven, with a mottled pallor. At 5-foot-8 and 230 pounds, he weighs about 50 pounds more than when he was arrested.
He has refused all but a handful of 3,500 interview requests. Earlier this year he spoke with Alec Wilkinson, a New Yorker magazine writer.
"People ask what would I do if I got free, and I tell them I'm still obsessed with this case," Gacy says in the article. It has been like this for 14 years. Long enough that Gacy has outlived two of the jurors who sentenced him to die.
He was arrested Dec. 21, 1978, 10 days after Rob Piest disappeared. Over the next four days, he confessed, even demonstrating with a rosary how he strangled his victims.
Lawrence Finder, then an assistant state's attorney, remembers watching Gacy wrap the beads around a detective's wrist and twist them like a tourniquet. "I remember feeling like my knees were turning to jelly," says Finder, now a lawyer in Houston. "He is the most evil man I ever met."
The killings began in 1972. His first victim was one of nine who could not be identified. Police called him the Greyhound Bus Boy because Gacy said he had picked him up at the bus station.
His other tactic was to lure young men to his house by offering them high-paying jobs at his construction company. Once at his home, Gacy would handcuff and rape them.
Death was always slow. Except for the first victim, who was stabbed to death, he strangled victims slowly with a knotted rope and screwdriver.
'This has been hell'
From Richard Szyc's anger to Finder's recurring nightmares, the effect of Gacy's crimes has been immense.
"This has been hell," says Dolores Nieder, whose son, John Mowery, 19, was killed 14 months before Gacy was caught. "Call me and the other mothers the 34th victims, not that jellyfish."
Nieder recalls the rainy Sunday when her son came over for dinner. He borrowed an umbrella and promised to return it the next day.
The next time she saw John, police were dragging his body from Gacy's crawl space.
They tagged him Victim 13. His wallet was in a dresser drawer filled with keepsakes Gacy collected from victims.
Dolores Nieder has no desire to attend the execution. She doesn't think she could tolerate the candlelight vigil of death-penalty opponents.
"It's already been such on a drain on our lives," she says.
For Richard and Rosemary Szyc, the drain began Jan. 20, 1977, when their 19-year-old son, John, disappeared. A co-worker stopped by his apartment when John Szyc didn't show up for work that Monday. On Tuesday, Szyc's landlord called his parents.
Nearly two years later, John Szyc's high school class ring was found in Gacy's dresser drawer.
The Szycs still live in the house where their son grew up. Richard Szyc was diagnosed with diabetes and has had surgery for a herniated disc.
"Between digging up the bodies and the trial - stress must have brought it all on him," his wife says.
The passage of time has been excruciating for the Piest family.
Rob Piest disappeared on a snowy December night, after he said he was going to talk to a man named Gacy about a job. His mother, Elizabeth Piest, told him to hurry home for cake. It was her birthday. Rob never came home.
Ten days later, police arrested Gacy. Four months later, Rob's body was found floating in the Des Plaines River.
The Piests divorced. Neither remarried. Elizabeth Piest, who declines to talk to reporters, was hit hard. "It just blew her mind," says Harold Piest, 62, who lives in Elk Grove.
Stuffed animals are on his sofa. His son's high school picture is on a table.
Piest has six scrapbooks, duplicates of the originals his wife keeps in her house. With incredible sadness, Piest says, "I think of him every day."
