H.H. Holmes a hotel theme; will Speck, Gacy someday get similar treatment?

Reading a Chicago Tribune report of the Acme Hotel Company’s plans to convert rooms in their River North facility into something paying homage to one of Chicago’s early serial killers is putting creepy thoughts into my mind.

HOLMES: Eventually executed for his crimes

Such as will the day come when enough time has passed that someone will think they can make money off of housing paying memory to Richard Speck? Or John Gacy?

BOTH OF THOSE men committed excessively violent crimes, and I’m sure there will be people out there who will try to claim I am sick and twisted for even suggesting such a thought?

The Richard Speck apartment complex? The John Gacy suite at a luxury hotel?

Personally, the very thought turns me ill. I don’t think I’d want to stay in such a facility – even if it is something someday being done up in a gaudy manner as the Acme Hotel’s rooms that will contain items remembering people of the crimes Holmes committed back during the Columbian Exposition of 1893 – the World’s Fair held in Chicago to pay tribute to the 400^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus.

Back from the days when Columbus was the “man who sailed the ocean blue and discovered America,” rather than the modern image some try to present of him as a slave trader who was the worst possible thing that ever could happen to the native peoples of this continent.

HOLMES WAS A man who confessed to killing some 27 people, even though only nine of those slayings were confirmed – and some of the people to whom Holmes said he killed actually turned up alive.

Book could become a Leo DiCaprio film

What the crime spree had as a theme was that it occurred during the World’s Fair, with many of the slayings taking place in what was described in the news coverage of the day as the “Murder Castle” at 63^rd and Wallace streets that Holmes (also known as Herman Webster Mudgett) built for himself.

It was a rooming house where fairgoers stayed, and some of them never checked out – so to speak.

Reports of the era say the facility had trap doors, hidden passageways, padding to muffle sounds and even a crematorium on the premises. So as to get rid of the evidence.

NOW, THE ACME Hotel is offering up suites next week through Halloween. For $229 a night, one can stay in a place with Holmes memorabilia and news clippings on hand, and even pictures of Holmes himself appearing to peer in at you from an outside window.

Murder Castle was long ago demolished

Kind of creepy, ain’t it?

But it really seems like so much time has passed (125 years since the Columbian Exposition) that the name H.H. Holmes doesn’t readily ring a mental bell for many people.

Unless, that is, if they have read the book “Devil in the White City,” which is a novel published 15 years ago that was set in Chicago during the World’s Fair and is a fictionalized account of the things that Holmes is said to have done.

Will these long-deceased criminals … 

DOES THIS MEAN that some time around the year 2100, someone will want to think it would somehow be “cool” to have something paying homage to Speck and his bloody night of killing eight student nurses (he got caught because a ninth nurse hid under the bed, and he lost count), or to the nearly three dozen young men whom Gacy was executed for by lethal injection back in 1994?

I’m sure that if someone had tried to say a “Murder Castle” theme, even if just for Halloween, would be a novel idea back around 1910, I’m sure the bulk of Chicagoans would be repulsed.

… someday become entertainmen themes?

But I can’t think of anybody who was alive in Chicago back in the 1890s would still be with us in this realm of existence. So the hotel can get away with passing off this Halloween holiday suite as a homage to a novel

All I can say is if that is what happens to the memory of Speck or Gacy or anybody else who has committed a string of crimes, I’d find it horrid. It is my “scary” thought for Halloween this year.

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Some people just determined to live in the past (and make us live there too)

I can’t say I was surprised to learn recently that a state legislator is talking about wanting to bring back the death penalty to Illinois.

HAINE: Wants to bring back death penalty

There hadn’t been an execution in this state since 1999, and then-Gov. George Ryan cleared out the state’s ‘death row’ just before leaving office early in 2003. Then, the Legislature and then-Gov. Pat Quinn did away with the capital crimes statute in 2011.

WHICH MEANS THE worst of the criminal element in Illinois get locked away in prison for life, without the option of parole. To anyone with sense, that sounds pretty bad. You can’t get more severe than letting someone know they’re going to grow old and die in a place that no one with sense ever wants to be in.

But there are always those people like Bill Haine, a state senator from Alton (near St. Louis), who last week said he plans to sponsor a bill to bring back the death penalty.

He’s falling into a line of logic that really doesn’t make much sense – some crimes are so high-profile that people are entitled to know someone will die for them.

He brought up the recent cop killing in suburban Fox Lake (which has been getting significant news coverage largely because it’s coming at a time when there’s little else happening – a “slow news day,” so to speak) as such evidence. He probably will get someone with a vengeance streak strong enough to want an execution.

NOT THAT IT would really mean anything. Chances are that anyone with a personal stake would be so offended that even an execution wouldn’t appease them.

My own death penalty stance actually got solidified on that spring night in 1994 when John Gacy was put to death at the Stateville Correctional Center. I was a reporter-type person that night, and got to see the many people who felt compelled to see blood. I was particularly peeved at the batch who felt the need to taunt a pair of nuns and a priest who were among the few who felt any compassion for human life in general.

So excuse me for not being sympathetic to those people who can’t handle the thought that the idea of homicide in the name of ‘justice’ just doesn’t make any sense.

It will be a dark day at Statehouse if death penalty actually returns

Then again, there will always be those people who want to think that the trends of society moving forward is a mistake.

JUST LIKE THOSE individuals like that clerk in rural Kentucky who did a few days in a county jail, and thinks she’s now a victim who suffered for Christianity – all because she can’t handle the idea that marriage for gay couples has the support of the law.

The people who have that hang-up are likely to focus their efforts on trying to figure out how to thwart the concept as much as possible. In their minds, they’re probably looking to all the anti-abortion activists who throughout the years have been able to push for so many restrictions that there are large swaths of the United States where it becomes next to impossible to actually obtain an abortion.

They’d probably like to have only certain places where gay couples could get married – then they’ll try to restrict the ability of their local residents to even think of going to those places.

All issues where a 19^th Century mentality is what is being sought by the ideologues of our society.

WHICH IS WHERE the death penalty becomes yet another issue where some people want to live in the past.

It’s another issue where the trend is to ditch the idea (although Wisconsin has not had a capital crimes statute for most of its existence, and it is surviving very well). Some 20 states have done away with the death penalty, some since Illinois.

Does anyone think Dahmer got off lightly?

Wisconsin, of course, was the state that gave us Jeffrey Dahmer some two decades ago. He of the cannibalistic streak whose own lengthy prison sentence came to an abrupt end when another inmate decided to kill him for who knows why!

Somehow, I don’t think that a similar fate for whoever winds up being arrested for the slaying of Fox Lake police Lt. Joseph Gliniewicz would be out-of-line.

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Is there a definitive source of criminal evidence that cannot be disputed?

The criminal case that just won't die

Learning about Michael Marino, who likely died some 36 years ago and had his killer put to death back in 1994, resurrected an old question in my mind.

How reliable are all these claims of scientific evidence that we hear being used in courtrooms? Do we ever truly know what happened in instances where an improper act occurred that warranted criminal charges?

MARINO IS ONE of the 33 people whom John Gacy was said to have strangled. His body allegedly was among the ones that were found by police investigators in the crawl space of Gacy’s home.

His body was identified at the time (the late 1970s) through that staple of criminal evidence – the dental records. The teeth in the skull recovered matched up to the records of the teeth of Marino, who was 14 in 1976 when he disappeared.

Yet according to the news reports airing these days, Marino’s mother always had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right. She wasn’t sure that the gravesite she was visiting all these years really had her son lying at rest.

Her feeling never went away, and it is what ultimately caused the remains believed to be those of Marino to be exhumed. A sample of DNA was taken, and compared to a DNA sample from the mother.

THE CONCLUSION? THERE’S no way that the woman is the mother of whoever it really is that has lay in a grave all these years with a Marino headstone identifying it.

The dental records were wrong. What next? We’re going to learn that fingerprints can’t be trusted!

Or maybe DNA itself isn’t the foolproof bit of evidence that we’ve been led to believe – particularly by all those television dramas that invariably have evidence being analyzed in all kinds of funky ways so that the TV cops can arrogantly proclaim the guilt of the person they arrested.

I realize that those TV dramas are usually phony like other entertainment programs – the bits of evidence found at real crime scenes rarely produce such definitive results as they always seem to do in the hands of people like Emily Procter, the actress of one of those CSI-type programs who looks much better than any real criminal law person I have ever met.

BUT SHOULD WE be placing such trust in genetic evidence that most of us don’t really understand – which means we’re forced to take the word of a lab technician?

It reminds me of the first criminal case I ever covered in which DNA evidence was used – it was at the Criminal Courts building in 1989 and involved the rape and strangulation of a young woman.

A young man was arrested, ultimately convicted, and the last I knew was still serving a natural life prison term – even though his mother was convinced that her son didn’t do it. Her nephew (the defendant’s cousin) did it, she said.

Even though prosecutors claimed that the DNA was definitive enough to show that it just couldn’t be!

THE JURY BOUGHT it. Yet I also remember a year later covering a criminal trial in the courts of Sangamon County (that’s the Springfield area) where the defense attorney kept mocking the idea of DNA evidence – repeatedly referring to them as “spaghetti strands” that don’t mean anything.

I find it interesting that in the case of Marino, people are taking the DNA evidence as all-definitive – even though it means that dental records now have to be questioned. Are we going to start getting a lot of claims from other people whose cases involved dental records saying that those were flawed as well?

And what happens when future technology comes up with something more precise than the current DNA tests. Will we someday learn that a lot of our “absolutely, positively guilty” verdicts we’re reaching now are somehow flawed?

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Give it a rest, already!

It has been nearly 18 years since the date that I went into the old Stateville Correctional Center to watch a homicide committed in the name of “justice” – as in the execution by lethal injection of John Gacy.

That date was some 16 years after Gacy went from being a respectable citizen who once met first lady Rosalyn Carter (left) and was a clown at children’s parties, to the guy who abducted and killed young men and stuffed their remains in the crawl space of his home.

AND SOME OF those incidents were nearly a decade old by the time police got around to arresting Gacy.

My point? This is an old case, one so old that I question how much of the physical “evidence” remains in a state solid enough to be worth anything to a credible investigation.

So I really have to wonder what the point is in terms of any law enforcement entity thinking that there is more to be found at this late date some two score after the original incidents.

Which is why I was kind of pleased to read the reports on Friday about how the Cook County state’s attorney is refusing to let the county sheriff do some more digging at sites where they think more bodies, more remains or more evidence could be found.

OFFICIALLY, THERE ISN’T enough “probable cause” to believe that anything would be found by such digging.

Although I believe even if they found “something,” it would be so weak that it wouldn’t be worth the effort.

So excuse me for thinking that the idea of continuing to investigate the “crimes” of John Gacy is something amounting to a waste of time. I’d like to think our law enforcement people have more important things to worry about.

Perhaps there are some unsolved cases that could get their attention, rather than delving into a case where the prosecution took place more than three decades ago and where the ultimate punishment has already been served.

DOES ANYONE THINK Gacy will come back to life so he could be put on trial again?

Even if that were physically possible, it’s not like we have a death penalty in this state any longer. And propping up the corpse of John Gacy in a prison cell for eternal incarceration strikes me as being even more incredibly twisted than continued investigation.

Heck, would Gacy corpse tampering qualify for prosecution under the bill being reviewed by the Illinois General Assembly this spring that makes necrophilia a crime? Because it would be corpse tampering!

But let’s get serious.

WE MAY WELL have to accept the fact that we already know all we’re ever going to know about the Gacy crimes. Too much time has passed for us to figure out the remaining unknown details.

Evidence deteriorates with time. Which may well have been the ultimate strategy of William Heirens, the longest-serving Illinois inmate who died earlier this month for a trio of slayings in 1946.

He claimed in recent years that he “didn’t do it” and that he was pressured into making the confession that prosecutors threw in his face every time he sought parole. Perhaps he thought that the fingerprints and lipstick smudges on mirrors didn’t mean as much now that they didn’t physically exist anymore.

If you want the truth, it wouldn’t shock me to learn that someone, someday tries to argue for the innocence of John Gacy himself. Not that I expect anyone of any real sense to buy into it.

BUT I WOULD give such a legal effort about as much credibility as I would any further results found in an investigation into Gacy’s guilt.

DART: Idle time?

Even if the latest effort is being inspired by a now-retired Chicago cop who claims he recalls seeing Gacy once with a shovel digging in a certain area – the area that officials checked in 1998, found nothing of substance, but want to check again.

It all comes off as too much of an effort to get one’s name in the papers (or in the 21^st Century, one’s name all over the Internet search functions).

Does Tom Dart really need any more public attention? Perhaps we should focus our attention on trying to find things for him to do that will keep him busy.

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