Page 7 - Crawl Space News Today

And really, that was an archeological dig. it was a very slow process. reporter: are you men sifting by hand through the dirt to catch any kind of a trace of evidence, hair, teeth? yes, for the most part, yes. reporter: so youve got about half or three-quarters of this crawl space yet to go through? i would say about three-quarters. finder: what ill never forget was the stench. it just overwhelmed a persons olfactory sense. this was a mass graveyard. hachmeister: they were slowly but surely pull...

Plus $1,500 purchase allowance on a 2023 xt5 and xt6 when you finance through cadillac financial. ♪ reporter: this morning, police searched gacys home. they became suspicious when 15-year-old robert piest disappeared after he allegedly was last seen with gacy. they started tearing up the flooring and working that way in the crawl space. albrecht: it was probably like a lot of other crawl spaces that people have. it was just dirt and clay. hachmeister: and the very first dig with the shovel, th...

Quite naturally, some of the first paths that we took were to try to interview some of the people that worked for gacy. and one of the key things that they found out was that he had instructed these employees to go into his crawl space and dig trenches. and he claimed it was because they had a sewage issue and that he was trying to resolve that problem. and occasionally, the smell would come back up, so hed instruct them to go in there with lime and spread lime down there, which would cover up t...

The way he said he handled each victim. amirante: how he killed them, what he did to them. officer: what was your initial emotional response? amirante: i aged so much that night. it was the longest night of -- of my life. never showed any remorse, as if they werent people at all. thats how he felt. he was just -- it was phenomenal. but the cops would soon discover for themselves just how deep this went. and working in the crawl space.

But instead what they found was a crime scene beyond anything they had imagined. and as the public watched the terrifying story unfold on television, families of missing young men waited on pins and needles to find out if their loved ones were among the victims. reporter: cook county sheriffs police and des plaines detectives had this house under surveillance for about two weeks. last night about 9:00 pm, officers armed with warrants entered the house, arrested its owner, 36-year-old contractor ...

That this guy had to be stopped. we needed to get a second search warrant to get back into gacys house. you cant just start ripping apart someones crawl space because of a bad odor. you need judicial approval, so you have to get a warrant. the problem with getting a warrant is you have to connect john wayne gacy to rob piest on the night he disappeared. amirante: he called me and said, "its very, very important i talk to you." and i didnt know what to think. i had a zillion things going through ...

And he wouldnt have kept doing it over and over. and we had parents that had to testify. it was just heart-wrenching, to say the least. my parents both had to take the stand. and the weirdest thing of all is when we had to identify him and you lean over and you say, "yes, that is him." that to me was the hardest thing, knowing that thats the guy that did what he did to my brother. woman: john gacy -- he sat there calmly. he looked neat. he didnt seem to get upset about anything. during the closi...

And she asked rob if she could borrow his coat. and just before she did that, she processed a roll of film and took the film receipt and put it in the jacket of rob piests coat. sullivan: rob eventually borrowed his coat back. jackson: how would that photo receipt that was in rob piests jacket pocket have ended up in gacys house, unless the two of them crossed paths that night? so now police have the proof and the evidence they need to get that search warrant to go back into gacys house to exami...

Its just too much. reporter: and the police have found, at last count, 27 bodies buried under his house and garage. hachmeister: he actually ran out of room in the crawl space and he had no more room to put any bodies down there. i think one was buried under the barbecue grill, one under the garage floor. ♪ finder: what we didnt know -- and didnt know for some months -- was where was rob piest? duke: rob piest, gacys last victim, wasnt found on gacys property. gacy told police he disposed of h...

Mystery lingers after the discovery near the North Carolina state line, officials said.