ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. (AP) - Former Arlington Heights resident David Bolton’s terrifying, disturbing and heartbreaking childhood vacation memory still intrudes on his daily life more than six decades later. It’s a cold day, but the front door of his house is propped open so the 10 stray cats he feeds can come and go as they please, explains the 71-year-old man, who now lives on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Aside from a dining room table and chairs and a few perches for cats, his living room is bare. A framed poster for a booklet he wrote, “A Hike Around The Lake,” hangs on the wall.
Even before that hike during the summer when he was 10 years old, “my childhood was horrible. It really was,” Bolton says. His father and mother divorced when he was a toddler and his mom remarried an abusive man when Bolton was 5. His much older siblings already were grown and out of the house, and Bolton said he saw his stepdad beat his mother at times.
“I hate men,” his mother told the boy repeatedly. When he brought home poor grades, she’d say, “Oh, Dave, you’re so dumb.” He feared his stepdad and hated spending time at home. That’s why he was looking forward to a trip with his mother to a resort on one of the little Wisconsin lakes between Chicago and Milwaukee.
He met other boys his age there, and one older teen.
“He had a round face and said his name was John,” Bolton says of the teen. Decades later, Bolton came to conclude that kid was serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was executed May 10, 1994, after a jury convicted him of murdering 33 boys and young men and burying most of them in the crawl space of his home in unincorporated Des Plaines.
“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Bolton says, adding that an attorney who worked on the Gacy case told him the killer had worked in Wisconsin as a teen. “I can’t prove it, but that was him.”
The internet features stories from people who claim they escaped encounters with Gacy.
“There were plenty of his victims that got away, thankfully,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told ABC 7 in 2011. “Some of those came forward back then and gave a lot of the details. Some of them didn’t know who this guy was.”
Bolton says he believes he came close to being Gacy’s first murder victim.
“He said he had a day off and asked me if I wanted to go fishing,” Bolton remembers of the teen he believes was Gacy. “I said, ’Yeah, let’s go fishing.’”
The next day, they set off in a little row boat.
“We didn’t catch anything,” Bolton says. “Then it got really ugly. He took me over to this area out of view of people and there was this big tree hanging over the water. There were lily pads there. He taught me how to catch frogs.”
“As long as you don’t move they won’t notice you,” Bolton remembers the teen saying. Both boys caught frogs.
“Then he pulled out a knife and stabbed the frog,” Bolton says, recalling that he was horrified by the cruelty. “Then he told me to do the same thing.”
Bolton, grimacing at the memory, explains how he felt powerless to refuse the order from an older, bigger boy.
“I was scared of him. I didn’t want to do it, but I did,” Bolton says.
“We killed quite a few frogs. He hung them over the branch. He acted tough, ’We’re men. We’re hunters,’ that kind of baloney,” recalls Bolton, who felt more sick than anything else. “I can’t even look at a frog to this day. If TV ads come on with a frog, I have to turn away.”
Unable to stand up for himself, Bolton says things got worse.
“A couple days later, he said, ’Let’s go for a hike around the lake,’” says Bolton, who still anguishes over his inability to refuse. “He took me to a thicket. It wasn’t that far from the resort, but it was very thick and out of view.”
The older boy unzipped his pants. “He said if I didn’t do what he said, he’d throw me in the lake and drown me,” says Bolton. “He said people drown all the time. People will think it’s an accident.”
Bolton says he was the victim of a quick and violent sexual assault. He didn’t dare tell his mother, fearing an upset mom would take out her anger on him. “That’s a horrible way to grow up, but that’s the way it was,” Bolton says.
Unable to do well in school or at home, Bolton spent his junior year of high school living with a sister’s family in Arlington Heights and attending Arlington High School. He moved in with his biological father, but dropped out of high school to join the Navy at age 17. He served two stints in Vietnam, on destroyers the USS Hamner and the USS Radford.
“We shot thousands and thousands of shells,” Bolton says, holding his hands apart to indicate the size of the 30-pound shells. He witnessed a gruesome accident.
After his service, he went through a bad marriage, a divorce and “getting drunk every day.” Haunted by his memories, Bolton says it was May Sundberg, a nurse practitioner at Hines VA Hospital, who helped him overcome his problems.
“Every veteran, in fact every person, suffering from post-traumatic stress, whether related to combat or other traumatic events, is impacted a bit differently by their unique experience,” says Dr. Tom Nutter, chief of mental health at Hines VA, who says Sundberg builds trust.
Bolton worked for a vending company, invested wisely, got his real estate license and continues to make money by flipping houses. “I still get jittery,” Bolton admits. But he says finally dealing with the assault from his childhood has helped.
“I thought I’d go through life with the story buried in me,” Bolton says, noting Sundberg inspired him to tell a fictionalized version of his assault in a 37-page booklet, published in 2014. Now he wants to get the entire story off his chest and O’Connor Communications in Lake Forest is helping David tell his story as a way to warn parents about how a childhood horror can last a lifetime.
“I think of it every day of my life. I wish I could erase it,” Bolton says of Gacy. “I’m glad he’s dead.”
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Source: (Arlington Heights) Daily Herald, https://bit.ly/2F82Efu
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Information from: Daily Herald, http://www.dailyherald.com
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