Search Fails To Find Gacy Victims

Police sealed off a parking lot behind an apartment building in Chicago Monday and began digging to find out whether it was a graveyard for some of serial killer John Wayne Gacy's victims.

After four hours, police announced that no new evidence of bodies had been found.

News media and police had been on the scene before daybreak. The sky above was full of helicopters, and some television cameras were perched on a nearby rooftop.

Gacy, who was executed May 10, 1994, killed 33 young men and boys, burying most of their bodies in a crawl space beneath his house several miles west of the parking lot that was the subject of Monday's investigation.

CBS News Correspondent Maureen Maher reports that attention was focused on the lot after retired Chicago police detective Bill Dorsch said he remembered seeing Gacy near the building at 3 a.m. in 1975 with a shovel.

"I said 'John, it's 3 in the morning, what are you doing here?'" Dorsch recalled, adding that Gacy replied, "Well, you know me, Bill, not enough hours in the day."

At the time Gacy's mother lived in the basement of the three-floor building. Gacy also did some repairs in the building and repaved the parking lot adjacent to the building.

Dorsch said he was shocked when Gacy was arrested in 1978. Recalling the encounter, he said he immediately told authorities. Nothing, he said, happened until this year, when he told his story to Chicago's Better Government Association.

Six weeks ago, the civic watchdog group brought in a ground radar expert from New Jersey to scan the property with technology that wasn't available earlier.

That scan indicated the possibility that as many as four bodies could be buried in the lot. Additional tests were conducted Monday before digging began.

Gacy, who restrained and had sex with his victims before strangling them, was arrested in December 1978.

The neighborhood in a far northwest corner of Chicago is one of trim bungalows and apartment buildings. Police have suspected Gacy may have killed others, since some of his victims were drifters or people with no apparent family ties. Eight of his 33 known victims have never been identified.

If John Wayne Gacy took ghastly secrets to his execution, no evidence of them were found on Monday.