By Courtney Lund O’Neil
ISBN No. 978-0-80654-299-7
www.penguinrandomnouse.com
Who doesn't love a road trip? Exotic locales. Fast food. Interesting people. A chance to lose or find yourself.
Courtney Lund O'Neil and her mother, Kim Byers, start their road trip with Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me" playing in the cassette deck. Yes, cassette deck because this road trip takes mother and daughter all the way back to the late 1970s. For Byers the song is nostalgic for an era when kids were sent out to play and told to come home when the streetlights come on and if they didn't... well, the police would convince you they'd run away. For O'Neil the song is more complicated. Neither, we learn, has been able to escape the loss of a childhood friend of Byers' or the serial killer who took it.
The book - and the road trip - goes from Des Plains, Illinois in 1978 (where Byers grew up and the murder took place) to present day. Childhood friends (now in their 60s), parents, prosecutors, a teenager's diary, and even a mailman try to explain, make sense of, and come to peace with the unfathomable. The book has an impressive pedigree: O'Neil's mother was a coworker and friend of Robert Piest and saw a contractor named John Wayne Gacy talking to Robert around 5PM on December 11, 1978. Robert disappeared and Byers connected Robert to Gacy. Gacy told the police he'd never talked to Robert. A search of Gacy's home found Robert's parka and the small receipt Byers had slipped into one of its pockets. They also found the bodies of 29 young men under the floorboards. Byers was a star witness at Gacy's trial where he was found guilty, sat on death row for 14 years, and was eventually executed in 1994.
Mother and daughter go back to the school Byers and Rob attended (and where the movie "The Breakfast Club" was filmed), to where the pharmacy stood, the site of the murder(s), and the river where Robert's body was dumped (and lay frozen until the Spring thaw, where it was finally found, "bloated...gummy," O'Neil writes). Along the way there's enough gore in the autopsy reports to keep even the morbidly curious up at night and some revelations I had to read twice - but O'Neil never loses the humanity of everyone involved. Byers went on to have children and a career in medicine but Robert's childhood best friend, who keeps a picture of him and Rob on his phone, was too worried about losing a child to have one of his own. Most everyone in this book is still haunted by the wide-awake-2AM questions that O'Neil asks in her final chapter: was there anything anyone could have done to stop Robert from going with Gacy? How many other boys would have been killed if Robert hadn't gone with him? What Gacy didn't anticipate, this book says, is now that Gacy's gone his legacy will be written by his victims and their families.
Popular culture still celebrates the sexy, brilliant and/or misunderstood serial killer (even C. Thomas Howell - yes! Pony boy! - played one!) even though their stories are all the same (childhood trauma, mental disorders). After reading "Postmortem", though, the most fascinating character, the real "get" of an acting role, is Elizabeth Piest, the mother of Gacy's last victim; the woman who stood there as her youngest son said he'd be back in a few minutes and then never saw him alive again. She was the mother of the child who brought down a monster and for that she carried a biblical weight of grief, remorse, and stoicism to her grave. She had a life worthy of being played by Meryl Streep. Hollywood, are you listening?
