Brushes with fame create anecdotes; brushes with infamy leave a scar. Such is the case with author Courtney Lund O’Neil’s mother Kimberly Byers-Lund, and by extension O’Neil herself. In her book Postmortem: What Survives the John Wayne Gacy Murders, O’Neil looks at her mother’s role as a key witness against the titular serial killer. Postmortem gives the impression that O’Neil wants to produce a different kind of true crime book focused on the victims and individuals affected by a case. While an admirable goal, she doesn’t quite accomplish that. Postmortem is a jumbled collection of sympathetic vignettes and observations, but not terribly rich or compelling ones.
Gacy, of course, is notorious—Chicago’s own child-killing ogre. Among many other repellent qualities, Gacy presented a terrifyingly normal public face. A politically connected and locally respected North Side contractor, Gacy raped, tortured, and killed 33 young men and boys in his Norwood Park home between 1972 and 1978. Compounding the horror, he buried 29 bodies on his property—most famously in his crawl space—and dumped four in the Des Plaines River. Tried and convicted, Gacy served several years in prison, selling paintings of clowns and other subjects and unconvincingly insisting on his innocence, before being executed by lethal injection in 1994.
The less said about John Wayne Gacy the better—a solid argument for damnatio memoriae. Unsurprisingly, his story persists, and many books about the man and murders remain in print, including prosecutor Terry Sullivan’s Killer Clown, his attorney Sam Amirante’s Defending a Monster, Tim Cahill’s Buried Dreams, and others of varying quality and levels of sensationalism. Now we have O’Neil’s Postmortem. It takes the tack of removing the spotlight from Gacy and training it on his final victim Robert Piest, and O’Neil’s mother Kim, a good friend of Piest’s, who ensured Gacy’s conviction. A unique but not unheard of approach, suitable for such well-tilled ground, so to speak. Postmortem mostly skips the usual coverage of the investigation, arrest, trial, killer’s psychology, and every titillating/excruciating tidbit about the crimes. Instead it favors O’Neil’s reconnection with her mother through revisiting that particular hellish season in her teen years.
Regardless, Postmortem never finds its footing. While Byers-Lund’s testimony certainly helped strap Gacy into the gurney, her involvement was vital, but not enough to sustain an entire book. Working in the same pharmacy as Piest, she borrowed his coat to stay warm on a chilly day. Unmindfully, she stowed a tag from a film-developing envelope in the coat's pocket. At the same time, Gacy was taking measurements in the store for a future contracting job. When Piest's mother came to pick him up from work, he recovered his coat and told her he was going outside to talk to a contractor about a potential job.
Piest never returned, but the stage was set for Gacy’s arrest and conviction. O’Neil provides a brief account of how it played out: the families numbly awaiting word; CSI techs taking Gacy's home to pieces and sifting through the waxy soil beneath; the recovery of Piest’s body from the Des Plaines River; and how finding Piest’s coat and the photo slip in his house established Gacy’s guilt. As true crime writing goes, Postmortem presents serviceable coverage in a few chapters.
Unfortunately, that leaves many pages to fill. Unlike many true crime books, Gacy doesn’t get the dark star treatment here. Instead, O’Neil tries to focus on Piest—as a person rather than a victim—and explore what went through her mother’s mind, back then and now. Postmortem features many time-skips. Bouncing back and forth from 1978 to the present day, some chapters are drawn from a diary her mother kept as a teen. O’Neil uses these as launch pads to describe her mother’s life, interactions, and thoughts back then. Latter-day chapters feature present-day interviews with her mother and Piest’s friends—soberingly, now in their 60s—as well as crime scenes like the former pharmacy and Gacy’s property. Despite her travels and talks, the writing falters. She doesn’t discover much new about Piest, her mother, or their lives back then.
Piest was, by every account, a good kid and a high achiever. A cruelly young 15 when extinguished, he remains a pleasant phantom in the book. The diary passages O’Neil shares are brief and emotional but meager. Befitting a teen’s diary, but providing little illumination of what it was like to experience everyday '70s teendom in Chicago's northern burbs, much less in the presence of the unthinkable.
O’Neil’s writing is clear enough, but I suspect, like many a true crime writer, she wants to season every sentence with exquisite and evocative descriptions and observations of her surroundings and the midwestern characters she meets. She seems determined to describe the bad karma and juju she feels everywhere.
For instance, when she and her mother visit the former Touhy Avenue pharmacy in 2017—occupied during their visit by a daycare/school called Angel Town (an ironic name, we are informed), she steps “…up on a crossbar of a six-foot-tall wood fence to peer behind , where children are playing on a new playground.” Letting that odd bit of peeping slide, she goes on to describe “a mummy-like corpse with a human skull covered in a gray-haired wig” in the window of a house behind the school. No further explanation is given or pursued, but the point is made with a hammer.
As happens several times during the book, O’Neil returns to her mother, who while willing to accompany her, never seems thrilled to dredge up the worst time of her young life. “There was some sick skull peeking out a bedroom window back there,” O’Neil informs her mother. “Want to see?” Her mother declines. For our benefit, O’Neil further comments on the skull’s resemblance to the taxidermied corpse of Mrs. Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho, based on Robert Bloch’s ur-slasher Norman Bates. Unlike Gacy, she assures us, Bates was fictional. It’s an odd sequence, but one of many where it feels like O’Neil is attempting to make Des Plaines, four decades after the murders, seem spookier than it is.
Indeed, O’Neil finds Des Plaines, home of Rivers Casino and the first McDonald’s franchise, to be a place pervaded with grimness. Might be she finds it so a bit too hard. The California-based O’Neil perhaps imagines Chicago burbs are like the many small and rustic rural towns she’s encountered on “murder-durdur” shows and heard about through certain serialized NPR podcasts, populated by oddballs and salt of the earth types. She and a companion visit the Beacon Tap—a wood-paneled family sports bar surrounded by strip malls. There she makes the peculiar assumption that a local patron automatically pegs them as outsiders due to her “all-black outfit” and camera bag and her associate's "button-up shirt" with Ray-Bans tucked into it. Most likely he figured they were Winnetkans, grabbing a burger on the way back from O’Hare. Note for future writers from elsewhere: it's Waukegan that Ray Bradbury probably imagined as October Country, "whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts." Waukegan. Des Plaines is where they filmed The Breakfast Club.
As much as she finds modern Des Plaines to be slightly sinister, Postmortem doesn’t do well when it comes to communicating the time when it was more so. That’s a weakness for a story mostly situated in the late 1970s. What’s more, with the flashbacks, it’s unclear where she’s quoting her mother’s memories and where she takes literary liberties. At one point, Piest leaves the pharmacy, and a local coquette pelts him with a snowball. It leaves a light dusting of December frost on his coat at which Piest smiles and lightly protests, whilst the girl giggles and runs back into the school dance she’d just left. Which suggests the question, “According to who?”
In spots, her editors were too kind, perhaps because it’s such a touchy subject. Groaners creep in. O’Neil reports that Byers-Lund and Gacy allegedly bumped into each other in the pharmacy’s aisles and “the two looked into each other’s eyes. Kim’s light glacier blue. The man’s dark omen indigo.” Online photos show Gacy’s eyes were a fairly standard blue—cold and piggish in retrospect, perhaps, but sans dark omens or indigo. The true in true crime becomes wobbly.
Elsewhere, we get more of what may be O’Neil’s or her mother’s multi-decade reassessment of her thoughts back in the day:
“She began, then, to view herself and Rob as Hansel and Gretel, and the receipt as the little breadcrumb Rob left behind in Gacy’s house to do his part in stopping Gacy.”
The metaphor is further muddled with:
“She visualized the two of them as a team, stopping a goliath monster.”
Postmortem feels like an attempt to scream back through time. To re-condemn a terrible man who died 30 years ago, and angelically rescue the last poor kid tricked and destroyed by him. Understandable, but also ungainly over a dozen or so chapters. But I think O’Neil knows her readership. They’re here for the feels, not the frisson.
Let me clarify. Once upon a time, true crime was a sleazier field, populated by quickly written supermarket paperbacks and garish police and detective magazines. They secretly fed the former American taste for sex, blood, and ink. Yet, on occasion, 20th century true crime fostered masterpieces like In Cold Blood, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and other works that met the establishment litmus test for respectable literature. In short, true crime buffs could enjoy their sordid interests through grilled steak, bloodied veal, or both.
Postmortem, on the other hand, is very much a product of 21st century true crime podcasts, documentaries, and long-form essays. Less about Gacy and more about the author, dealing with generational trauma, and reconnecting while exploring her mother’s brief interaction with darkness. Surely, there’s a healthy market for that nowadays, but Postmortem doesn’t quite satisfy that artisanally brewed market’s demand either.
Postmortem is available in bookstores and through the Kensington Books website.
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