It was hard to tell, on that humid summer night, when the air was still and thick as cotton, exactly where they were coming from, or even if they were nothing more than a remnant of troubled sleep, some dim, half-remembered nightmare. But no, fully awake now, she could hear them through the open window. They sounded like the cries of a boy, a fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old boy: a young man about the same age as her son. The muffled screams went on and on, reaching a tormented crescendo that lasted for half an hour or more. “Drugs,” the woman thought. Maybe the boy was taking drugs, and maybe the drugs made him scream. Could drugs make boys scream like that? She called the police and reported the disturbance, which, as near as she could tell, seemed to be coming from the house behind hers out in Norwood Park, an unincorporated area north and west of Chicago. Officers visited the house at 8213 Summerdale, where they talked with the owner, a contractor named John Gacy. Nothing seemed to be amiss.
