This column is going to be somewhat different from most. It contains some history, possibly some fiction, but if nothing else, it is interesting. This story was brought to my attention by a classmate, Daryl Stalls. He came across this on a YouTube video and shared this with me via an email.
I will preface this to say that if I had the time, I would have spent it doing research on this and actually trying to locate and reach out to the persons involved. But sadly, I don’t have the luxury of spending hours doing research when there is so much work that has to be completed each day. But I decided to share the information on this video because I found it surprising and fascinating and let you draw your own conclusion. Some of you may be familiar with this story or know the person involved and if so, I would love for you to share that information with me.
Mark Laita is a photographer and has more than four million subscribers to his YouTube videos where he interviews various people. There is quite a huge selection of interviews he has conducted and one of those caught Daryl’s attention. Laita’s videos are entitled “Soft White Underbelly” and this particular one is about Tony. That is all the information that is provided except for the interview Tony gives to Laita. There is no date as to when this video was first shown. But the story is about Tony and his life growing up in western Kentucky and some encounters he had that could have changed his life.
Tony shared that he had an encounter in 1970 with John Wayne Gacy that happened at Kenlake State Park.
If you don’t remember who John Wayne Gacy is, he was a serial killer and sex offender who raped, tortured and murdered at least 33 young men and boys near Chicago, Illinois. He buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home. He murdered his first victim in 1972. He was arrested in 1979 in Cook County, Illinois, and convicted of murdering 33 young men ranging from age from 14 to 21. He was sentenced to death in 1980 and was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.
You can access this video online if you so wish. I will give the highlights of the video which will pretty much tell the story of Tony, including his encounters with Gacy.
Tony said he grew up in Aurora and was an only child. His father opened an Ashland station in the area and his mother began working at Kenlake State Park as a waitress in the hotel dining room. He said he lived in a house that was the closest to the park. The closest neighbor was about a mile away and the state park was his playground.
He said in 1970 he had a run in with John Wayne Gacy at the state park. He said he was almost 15 at the time and it was a typical August night. He was at the hotel and had been playing with some tourist kids. He would ride his bicycle across the golf course to the hotel. He said this particular night, he was sitting in the lobby and only had on a swimsuit with a towel around his neck. A man dressed in a black and brown leisure suit walked up to him and asked if he was a local. He told him he was and the man asked what there was to do at the park. Tony asked him if he liked to fish or boat and he said he did not. Tony started to get up from his chair and the man asked him again what there was to do and Tony told him he could hike, sail or camp and the man said he did not like to do those either. Tony said he was becoming annoyed with the man and started asking him questions about himself. He told Tony he was from Chicago and he was visiting someone at Jonathan Creek. Tony told him if he was looking for women or liquor that this was a family-friendly park. The man then asked Tony is he wanted to have a beer with him and he said he would. Tony and the man walked down to his room which he said was the sixth room on the left of the hallway.
Tony said he knew almost everyone who worked at the hotel and had a key to some of the rooms so he could get fresh towels if he needed them. He was a fixture on the property since his mother worked there.
Tony said the man opened the door and he walked in and the man walked in behind him. He said the man’s hand grazed his behind and he thought that was a little strange but maybe it was an accident. Tony noticed the bathroom door was open and the bath tub was filled with ice. He took a seat and the man goes to the cooler and brings him a beer. After he gave Tony the beer, he shuts the curtains in the room. As he walked past Tony, he began to ask him questions about his parents and then locks the hotel room door. Tony said he also thought that was a little strange. He thought he was going to have a man-to-man conversation because that was what he was used to when he would hang around his father’s place with all the men where his father ran a clandestine gambling joint behind the gas station.
He said the man seemed to be agitated and asked Tony is he liked sex books. Tony was thinking Playboy which he had seen once on the school bus when one of his friends took his older brother’s Playboy and brought it to school. He said the man opened a suitcase and it was full of magazine. Tony began to go through them and he didn’t see anything he was interested in but the man handed him a couple and he began to look through them and found they were full of pictures of boys. Tony said the man kept going into the restroom and when he came out, he put the dead bolt on the door. Tony said slow motion began to set in and he knew something wasn’t right and he was in a bad situation. Tony told him there were just boys in the magazine and the man told him he had something else he might like and pulled out another suitcase full of pictures of chains and shackles. Tony said he knew this was bad and he needed to figure out how to get out of the room.
Tony said his beer was about half full and he sat it on the floor. He thought if he could move the cooler to another spot in the room he could get out of the room. He said when the man went into the restroom again, he moved the cooler and when the man emerged, he kicked over his beer and asked him if he could have another one. Tony said when the man found the cooler and walked over to get another beer, he bolted for the door, managed to remove the two locks and just as he was almost out of the room, the man grabs for him. Tony said because he was only wearing a swimsuit the man didn’t have any shirt he could grab and Tony managed to get away from him and ran to his bicycle outside of the hotel and rode home as fast as he could pretty shaken. He knew this was not normal behavior.
Tony said when he got home his mother was waiting for him and asked where he had been. He told her the story and she appeared rather worried and told him she would talk to his father about all of it when he got home later that night.
Fast forward three years, Tony still lived by Kenlake State Park and he is working at the park marina. He said he was sitting out by the gas tanks and was walking to the front of the marina and bumped into a man. He said ‘excuse me’ and stepped aside and then he saw the man and it was the same man he had encountered years ago at the park hotel. Tony is now almost 18 and he asked the man if he remembered him and the man said he did not. Tony told him he knew who he was, he was from Chicago and then said ‘you do remember me, but I am not 14 any more.’ Tony said his boss walked up about that time and they went their separate ways.
Tony said it was December of 1978 and a lot of his friends had moved to Nashville, Tennessee. He had been there partying with them and he went by Rivergate Mall to pick up a present for his mother and father. Tony had walked over to another area of the mall where they were gift wrapping and he noticed a row of newspapers. He said he began starring at the papers and he could see a face on the front page and he began to get cold chills. He got a paper and he knew the picture in the paper was the man who had locked him in his motel room and then had seen again a few years later.
He said he stopped at his house and told his mother the story. She then called the Chicago Police Department. They told her they didn’t have jurisdiction over this case, the Cook County Sheriff did. But Tony said the police officer kind of blew off his mother but he did take her name and phone number.
Tony said he had forgotten about this when around 1996 he received a phone call from the Cook County Sheriff’s office and they wanted him to tell his story. He said in 2007 he received a phone call from a reporter with the Chicago Tribune who wanted to talk to him about his encounter with Gacy. The reporter told Tony that he believed Gacy was cruising many of the lakes and that included Kentucky Lake. He said there had been reports of quite a few drownings during Gacy’s time in those areas and he did not believe they had drown by accident.
Tony said when he was around 50 years old, this started bothering him and he began to tell people his story. He said he believed the reason he got away from Gacy was his mother and father let him have unlimited freedom and he was exposed to the men at his father’s establishment and he learned how to take care of himself.
Other things Tony shared about his life:
Tony said the lake was booming during the time he was growing up in Aurora. He said his father had a couple of mechanics that helped run his father’s gas station. He had asked them to build him a mini-bike, which they did. He said this was near what was called Golden Pond and said it was named that because when a whiskey still was crushed by the feds, the whiskey would roll down the hills and form a golden pond.
Tony said he was behind the gas station riding his mini-bike on the trails. He said a big part of his father’s business was putting parts in cars that would make them easier to haul whiskey. He said a couple of the guys really stood out to him and one guy was named “Scooper.” He said he was James Dean type character.
As Tony was riding, a deer jumped out and he turned his bike over. He said he could hear some men arguing and knew they were at a still. He looked at them and got back on his bike and then he heard a fight break out and then heard a loud wail. He said he didn’t know what happened and didn’t mention it to his father when he got back to the station. A few days later his father told him a guy had been killed and he told his father what he had seen. His father told him to never mention that again.
Tony said he was pretty wild, not mean, but he liked to party and got into taking pills when he was younger. He said he bought a small sail boat which he sailed around Kentucky Lake. He said something was wrong with his boat and he took it to his grandfather in Miami to have it repaired. He got to know some guys through his grandfather and they asked if they could take his boat out for a test run. Tony left the boat down there and would call periodically to check on it. He said he found out after he went to get his boat that some of those “guys” were bringing bales of marijuana into the country using his boat. They were caught and his boat was confiscated but he eventually got it back. He said some men then contacted him and asked him to take over bringing in the marijuana. He did and was arrested but beat the charge. He returned to western Kentucky and he was picked up and charged with distribution from the Miami charge. He pled guilty and went to federal prison from 1986 to 1989.
Tony said when you go to a federal prison, you are rated 1 to 6 with 6 being the worst offense which meant you were imprisoned in one of the maximum security prison. He said he started out in Lexington, then to Terra Haute, Diluth and on to Marion, Illinois. Tony said he was a model prisoner and one day his counselor told him he was going to let him go home for five days to see his family. After he was home, he came down with pneumonia and went to the doctor. He called the prison because prisoners are not supposed to take any medication without approval and he was told to bring it with him when he returned. He said he brought the medicine in and sat them down and they immediately took him across the street and locked him in a level 6 penitentiary. He said he only had one year left on his sentence and those last 11 months were the toughest time he had.
It turned out that Sonny Burkett was in the same prison. Tony said he had been in the prison about two hours and they had threatened to put him in the same cell as Burkett. Burkett, according to Tony, had killed a couple of prisoners and was serving a life sentence. Tony said there was only a window on the cell door, not bars. A face popped up in the window and said to Tony, “you are new aren’t you?” and then asked if he knew who he was? He told Tony he was Sonny Burkett and also said I am sure you have heard of me. Tony said it was like looking into the eyes of a Rottweiler. He asked Tony if he was scared of him and he told him he had no reason to be scared because he had just arrived.
Tony said he was very glad he wasn’t long term and his mother began calling his congressman and he was released in 1989. He started over and moved from western Kentucky to Lexington to be close to his children. He said work was hard to find until he got his insurance license and got his life back together.
Tony shared one more memory from his time in Aurora.
He said he always enjoyed a thrill and told about the Eggners Ferry Bridge and how he and friends began to jump off the bridge and even did flips off of it. They then began doing this at night. He said there were some boys down in southern Tennessee who came up to challenge them but they wouldn’t jump at night. One of the boys jumped and broke his leg and others came along to challenge them.
Whether you think this information is fact or fiction, it is definitely interesting. To think that John Wayne Gacy was in or near Calloway County many years ago is rather frightening. Check out the video and decide for yourself.