Varning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
John Wayne Gacy, The Killer Clown, prowled the streets at night and killed over 30 men.
Known as ‘The Killer Clown’, John Wayne Gacy buried his young male victims under the crawl space of his suburban home. John Wayne Gacy was a monster in human form, who viciously snuffed out the lives of more than 30 men. He prowled the streets at night, luring hitchhikers and runaways back to his home where he tortured and killed them. Gacy was found guilty in 1980 and sentenced to death.
John Wayne Gacy, a sadistic serial killer that fooled even his closest friends and neighbors.
A pillar of society with a shoking secret,he would become one of the most profilic serial killers in American history.
But was John Wayne Gacy a product of his uprbringing or was he born to kill..
CHICAGO , ILLINOIS
John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago in 1942,the only son of Marion and John Gacy senior.
John Wayne Gacy was a son of a blue -color worker a mother who was a pharmacist, his biological father drank alcohol but continued to work,he was considered a functioning alcoholic,he was physically abused by his father and his father was often not available or was intoxicated.
His father was also known for abusing Gacy’s mother in fact engaging in physical fights with her that Gacy must have witnessed.
Now ,clearly those sorts of things have an impact on a person’s development and the way they look at the world.
The young John was close to his mother but to his father the overweight unathletic boy was a disappointmet one that he made little effort to hide.
The father would come home he would go down into the basement into his workshop not to interact with anyone in the family.
But had this special thing about his son whom he felt should be better,more like the father ,become a business person,become someone who was admired in the community.
Gacy’s fatherregularly called him stupid, a mama’s boy,his father frequently told him he was a failure,he wouldn’t amount to anything,so ,again you think of how someone growing up with that kind of verbal abuse and emotional abuse with would develop as an adult.
John entered his teenage years and began to complain of body problems headaches , faintness,dizziness, which the father must have seen as a weakening that this was not a strong person this was not a person who could stand up and be tall and be successful.
At school , the young Gacy continued to disappoint,he entered serially high schools and to great disappointment to his father he tended to fail and there were reasons for failure perhaps put forward ,he was ADHD he had really problems concentrating.
Despite his failures John Gacy jr was getting a reputation as a braggart, he told fanciful stories, and could confidently talk himself out of trouble.
At 11 years old, Gacy was struck on the head by a swing,resulting a series of blackouts,his father accused him of faking, at age 16 he began taking medication for a heart ailment ,Gacy was seen as weaker than other teenagers.
These conspired but overriding most of these excuses for his failure was the basic fact that John Wayne Gacy was very good at producing justifications and excuses for why he failed.
Aged 20 and without qualifcations, Gacy left Chicago and struck out on his own, he traveled to Las Vegas where he found a job cleaning up in a mortuary.
He entered the world on a one -to- one basis, he no longer as it were living in the shadow of his family and particularly his father,he kind of felt a bit of a release,working in there and sweeping up was probably not the kind of high status job but it was a job he attained on his own and it was a job that he managed to hold down.
The work was low paid and menial,and Gacy often worked alone with only dead bodies for company.
A number of serial killers will go through a variety of experiences which will mean that they come into close proximity with dead bodies.
In Gacy’s case we know that he acted as a janitor in a mortuary, we have a kind of familiarization with dead bodies a familiarization that would take away the taboo of being around a dead body.
John Wayne Gacy’s new life in Las Vegas didn’t last long, after only three months he used what little money he’d saved to return to Chicago.
There he enrolled in a business college and for the first time Gacy began to flourish,he’d always had the gift of the gab and he son discovered a flare for salesman ship.
Gacy suddenly realized that there was something that gave him a steam,it’s something that made him stand up in the world where he could as it were stand shoulder to shoulder and even beyond that with those individuals around him.
By the age of just 21,Gacy’s business talents had won him the position of manager at a shoe store,he realized that his abilities,his acting abilities his charm and disarm abilities that most kind of inherent psychopaths seem to have ,this cold indifference actually works for you in interactions.
He then found this success and he found his career success could even match the expectations of his father.
Waterloo ,IOWA
In september 1964 Gacy met and married his co-worker Marlin Myers, Marlin’s father saw promise in his ambtious new son i-in- law.
And appointed him the manager of his three fast food franchises in Iowa.
John and Marlin began a new life in Waterloo,together they had two children Gacy was now a family man a rising star in the local business world and a popular member of the community, on the surface,it was a storynook existence.
Gacy was a role model , he was a role model of a businessman should be, he should be involved in all these political organizations all of these business organizations,he should be the upstanding citizen in his small town ,but it really had no meaning for him, otherwise if it had ,he wouldn’t have needed to go into the remainder of what he did for the rest of his life.
What JohnWayne Gacy would become would shock his suburban neighbors to their core…
After a childhood plagued by illness and failure JohnWayne Gacy now had a wife two children and was a successful manager of a chain of fast food outlets.
The Gacy’s appeared the perfect nuclear family,but behind the respectable facade JohnWayne Gacy had begun to inhabit a world att Odds with the straight – laced image of midwestern suburbia.
He got started abusing teenage boys sexually and there are few chilling incidents where he actually threatened some of these young men ,that he didn’t injure of kill anyone as far as we know.
In 1967 Gacy lured 15 year old Donald Voorhees Jr. to his home, they watched pornographic movies,drank and played pool,then without warning Gacy forced Voorhees Jr. onto a bed at knifepoint,handcuffed him and started to shoke him.
In the case of Donald Voorhees ,he followed the usual getting the drunk and showing pornography and ten turning suddenly and using violence or threat and in this case a knife to force that person into handcuffs into a power submissive role and then to actually inflict sexual torturous sexual behavior taunting,shoking, threats to that individual who would generally speaking and many occasions not report these.
But Voorhees did reort his ordeal and other boys would follow.
Gacy was arrested,the 26 year old family man and bright light of the community was charged with sodomy.
And sentenced to 10 years in Anamosa State Penitentiary
It’s a high wall intitution,there are armedguards on the towers and very restricted movement inside, the compound of the prison.
Fellow inmate Ray Cornell became Gacy’s close friend.
it was rigorous as prison should be ,it was dangerous,there were numerous murder attempts while Cornell was serving the two years .
A convicted homosexual sexoffender Gacy should have been high on the prison hit list,but John told everyone that he was time for showinf pornographic movies to teenage boys.
John was very careful never to reveal in the fact that he in fact was in there for molesting or attempting to molest teenage boys.
With the truth behind his crimes successfully hidden Gacy showed the same ambitious streak as he had as a free man only this time he was striving to be a pillar of a very different community.
Richard Snavely was a prison counselor at the time he came into contact with inmate Gacy.
He kind of got himself ingratiated into the system , he was very responsible very adult in his style he was older than the average inmate,he was able to try to develop a position and he was pretty successful in doing that.
But his friend Ray Cornell, wittnessed another side to John Wayne Gacy during an encounter with an openly gay convict known as mt connect.
Mr connect and some of his friends were in the lower yard of the prison playing basketball and the ball got loose and went rolling past John and John got the ball and threw it as hard as he could and connect not showing a lot of good jugement then said” missed me missed me now you’ve got to kiss me” and John went after him.
Just for a second Cornell thin he saw just a glimpse of what his victims saw at the end of their lives because he had every intention of going after mr Connect and hurting him badly or killing him,Cornell said he thought he saw a monster.
At chrismas 1969 Gacy received news that would affect him profoundly.
Cornell was sitting in the lower yard in the card playing area when a guard came down and got jaunt and took him up to the security officer.
Gacy’s father had died from cirrhosis and the authorities were not to permit him to attend the funeral,when Cornell saw him again the following morning in the chow hall he was a wreck.
He requested permission to visit his father and supposently make amends with him is that when his father died that was difficult because what it means is that you can never repair this relationship
People always want the approval of their parents no matter how old they are.
He talked about his father over the next several days and he also talked about how deeply hurt he was at the fact that he would not be going over to Chicago to see his father buried.
In 1970 less than two years after his conviction Gacy’s model behavior paid off. what’s interesting about Gacy’s prison experiences as a result of the the sodomy charges is firstly he’s released very quickly .
His sentence was 10 years he was out after 18 months,he was able to convince people that his behavior wouldn’t be repeated.
But within thtt 18 months he rises to the top of the priso hirearchy despite the fact as a sex offender one would have expected him to be at the bottom of the prison hierarchy,so what we seeing here is the skills that actually underlie Gacy’s behavior over a long period of time.
Skills that allow other people to gain confidence in him , to see him as a responsible,to see him as trustworthy of course ultimately he would abuse that responsibility, he’d abuse that trust.
In 1970, Gacy now divorced returned to his home city of Chigago,eventually settling into the quite suburban neighborhood of Norwood.
Leaving his past in Iowa ,Gacy continued his ambitions to be seen as an importat valued pillar of the local community.
He married divorcee Carol Hoff .
And she and her two children moved in to his home.
There was an indomitable spirit in Gacy,he really did he waws beginning to become invulnerable that he could rise again and simply getting married was just another strategic plan as far as Gacy was concerned,there was no real sexual intent in this marriage it was convenience.As in Iowa, Gacy’s image as the perfect suburban neighbour was amir facade.
In 1971 he was charged by Chicago Police with disorderly conduct after a teenage boy complained that Gacy had picked him up at thebus station and forced him to commit a sexual act,the case was dropped when the boy failed to appear in court..
In 1972,Gacy was charged with battery when a youg man complained he had been forced to perform oral sex after Gacy had told him he was as a sheriff’s deputy, the case never went to trial.
Timothy Jack McCoy was just 15 years od when he picked up by Gacy at a Chicago Bustation in 9172, after spending the night together.
Gacy stabbed him to death,Gacy would later claim the killing was accidental and in self- defense.
Many murderers commit a murder because of the force of particular circumstances at a particular point in their life,but crucially .
The vast majority of murderers are overwhelmed psychologically by the fact they’ve taken another person’s life and they never want to repeat that experience because they understand how difficult that has been not just for the victim’s family but also from themselves .
Sadly a small number of murderers want to continue to behave like that because hey found that experience visceral vital exiting sexy.
Gacy had his first taste of murder , it would be far from his last..
In 1970 after serving time in prison for molesting teenage boys Gacy remarried and began builing a new life in Chicago but his image as a loving family and generous neighbor was a sham.
In 1982 he’d picked up fifteen year old timothy McCoy for sex and killed him.
Gacy would not be arrested for the murder of a teenager as far as the rest of the world was concerned the 15 year old had simply disappeared and to the local community John Wayne Gacy seemed ever more the perfecct suburban neighbor.
The neighbors on the block liked he was a very friendly man ,he would give these tremenous outside parties for 100 to 200 people.
Gacy regularly entertained his neighbors by dressing up as a clown and performng magic tricks.
Gacy was the kind of person that knowing how evil he was , you would like to have him in your community he was active in the Jaycees which is the junior chamber of commerce and he was a volunteer for the political party of his choice and he was very thought of in the very small world of his community.
In 1974 Gacy established his own painting decorating and construction business hiring a string of young men to carry out the work.
His charisma and bravado ensured there was no shortage of potential employees.
The boys knew John Wayne Gacy, he was a big name in town and when he walked in,he was John ,he had the big car outside, he had the money, everybody knew he was wealthy, he had a big business and when he approached boys that were 14 ,15 16 year old making minimum wages and he was promising them almost double salary just to work in a construction site and help him build these boys jumped at the chance.
Gacy’s upstanding image as generous neighbor successful businessan and do good in the community meant his motives for employing many of th young men went undiscovered.
It’s very interesting that people have a hollywod image of the serial killer as being this rather scary man that’s going to pop up from behind a bush and attack and kill.
Whereas in fact serial killers by large are very well socialized into their community often hoding down very responsible jobs within the community often seen as being pillars of the community and indeed Gacy is almost living out a fantasy that he must have had about being a pillar of the community.
So here’s somebody living out the fantasy of normality allbeit all the time we know he’s also a closet homosexual who’s engaging in sodomy with young men that he’s able to convince to engage in sexual activity with him perhaps through the status that he had bying those sexual services.
Behind mid- 70s behind closed doors Gacy’s wife began complaining of his violent mood swings,he’d lost interest in marital sex and was keeping homosexual pornography around the house, she divorced him and moved out.
Chicago , Illinois.
Gacy began actively crusing chicago’s city streets, looking to pick up young men from gay districts,known pickup spots and areas where waves and strays would congregate.
Gacy was able to actually use one of his roles that of a pseudo police officer, he had the wherewithal in terms of a radio and he would often hide behind a badge and have bits of what looked like police paraphernalia.
He would picl them up here cruising the streets in a car that had a very large light on it as the police often did and he would be able to stop people using that as if he were a police office,picking up strays,taking them home ,torturing them.
In 1975,boys began disappearing, some had been selling sex on the streets, some were young runaways,some were conected with his construction business.
Gacy’s technique of charming and disarming his victims was pretty much similar to the way he actually engaged people in a legitimate business way,he would keep tem entertained with his verbal rapport and be able to actually charm them quickly and rapidly into situations that they could not escape from.
And once he had got them into a position where he felt that he was totally in power he would change,he would change very quickly and in the twinkling of an eye he would become the commanding,frightening, torturous monster.
The young men would frequently drugged,handcuffed subjected to repeated rapes and terrifying ordeals of torture.
Then they would be strangled,he always picked the kind of attractive guy that he could never be himself but these individuals became less individualistic because as far as he’s concerned they became more and more objects .
I mean, the more they became simply objects for him to do as he whished the more horrific and torturous their experience was within his company.
Gacy seems to fall into the criteria of the hedonistic serial killer,in other words the person who kills simply for the sexual thrill of killing.
In particular strangling his young victims and sodomizing them.
Rumors circulated amongst the gay community about the dangers of a large man with a liking for violent sadistic sex, but depit an ever increasing number of disappearing young men,they were simply assumed to have left town or runaway with no bodies discovered they were chalked up as just another of the thousands of missing persons reported in the city each year.
The police tend to call young kids of that kind blue dross,they tend to call them that as a way of saying they don’t matter as much,as kids from normal background so we don’t give them as much attention.
We also know because of their sexuality that often that means the police don’t take enough notice of the violence in gay men’s lives,even when police were alerted to Gacy’s sadistic behavior they failed to act.
On the night in march 1978 27 year Geoffrey was lured into Gacy’s car by his offer to share a joint, he was he was chloroformed driven to Gacy’s house and subjected to prolonged agonizing sexual torture.
After being repeatedly drugged he eventaully awoke sprawled under a statue in Chicago’s Lincoln park,despite reporting the incident Gacy remained at large.
Gacy’s protection from investigation and prosecution was this established good citizen that he’d managed to fabricate in the community where he felt to some degree,he was pretty much invulnerable from accusations from young lads who were probably not thought of very well in the community.
He also knew that it was pretty difficult for someone to make accusatios of homosexual nature and of someone who would suddenly want to torture someone ,this was out of context,particularly out of context given his standing.
But John Wayne Gacy was about to make a fatal mistake…
When Gacy stopped targeting young gay homeless men who weren’t really part of the community but instead targeted Robert Piest who was an all- American high school kid with a good family who were going to report him as missing who are going to say”how is the police investigation going” it was only by choosing that of victim that really was the unraveling of Gacy.
15 year old Robert Piest was consideered the archetypal clean-cut all-american boy with his peers and loved by his close family.
On December the 11th 1978,he was working his regular job bin a pharmacy saving money towards college,he was looking forward to joining his mother’s birthday celebration that evening,when she came to collect him at 9 pm.
He asked her to wait for a moment while he went to talk to a man who was in the parking lot about an offer of a construction job,he did not return.
Chief of detectives Joseph Kozenczak received the missing person report.
The owners of the drugstore told that they hasd a contractor who was to do repair work inside of their pharmacy,they supplied with some information,pertaining to his telephone number and through the phone numbers the police were able to determine hisful name an adress.
And that’s first time the police knew the name John Wayne Gacy.
Detectives headed to the businessman’s home to question him,hoping they would find the missing 15 year old safe and unharmed.
Gacy had a diamond shaped window in his front door and the front part of his house was dark but there was a street lamp on the sidewalk in front his residence and in front of his door ,with the reflection of the light into the window and chief Kozenczak could see a face staring back at them and the face faced in to the darkness of the house.
And as they walked along the side of the house and looked inside of a window they could see Gacy sitting in a chair watching television drinking a beer.
Chief Kozenczak felt an uncomfortable feeling being inside his residence.and Gacy was belligerent uncooperative and seemed nervouse.
Suspecting Gacy knew more than he was revealing detectives obtained a search warratnt and discovered a concealed void beneath the house.
The crawl space was actually hidden by a secret trap door in a closet and one of the investigtors found that and pointed it out to Chief Kozenczak.
police officers took a screwdriver into a little crack in the floor and pried it up and when they did the whole floor lifted up and that led them into the crawl space and Chief Kozenczak went down there with a flashlight and looked around and everything was dry and solid . there was no evidence.
Teenager Robert Piest was nowhere to be found,detective placed casey under 24 hours surveillance.
When they started there surveillance, Gacy initially responded by telling many of his friends that they were FBI agents , that they were bodyguards .
But ultimately what happened is he really started to break down psychologically in a sense that he couldn’t maintain his day-to -day facade of being mr nice guy or businessman,because every time he went out his front door there was a police car sitting there waiting to follow him around.
Despite finding no bodies at his house, the police had discovered a stash of personal possesions that appear to have been collected as trophies.
Chief Kozenczak had started to find case reports based on pieces of ID they found on the first search warrant and identifyied those little pieces of identification as being missing persons.
who were former employees of Gacy’s.
The mounting evidence convinced detectives that they should begin digging in the crawl space under Gacy’s house.
prosecuting attorney Robert Egan was one of the first on the scene.
The first body was excavated and everyone was kind of standing around waiting for the excavation,there was a lot of water in the crawl space as a matter of fact the body had to be taken up literally out of water.
The evidence technician had to reach down and feel rib cage then pull the rib cage up out of the water, the parts were put into a body bag and as thatwas taking place the evidence technician that was doing the excavation was feeling down under the water and he yelled out.
Everybody kind of turned around worried he said
“i’ve got another rib cage down here.”
Beneath the unassuming suburban home detectives had made a discovery that would see it beome one of the most infamouse houses in American history.
In 1978 the search for fifteen year old Robert Piest had led detecties to the home of John Wayne Gacy, a businesman and pillar of the local community there they discovered the remains of a decomposing body in a hidden crawl space beneath the house.
But that was only the beginning…
The second set of remains was merely the tip of the iceberg,body after decomposing body was being unearthed.
Gacy kept the bodies of his victims under the house,it’s an ideal way to remember where his victims were, it’s an ideal way of keeping control over those victims even after they’ve died.
A total of 29 young men were discovered buried on Gacy’s property 27 of them in the crawl space beneath his home.
In police custody Gacy began to confess, he admitted to strangling all but his first victim,he would choke them with a tourniquet as they were sexually assaulted,he referred to this as his “rope trick”.
He claimed some victims convulsed for an hour or two…before dying.
When the investigation started.
the neighbors essentially were to shock beyond belief.
This is a hard driving very hard hard-working individual this is guy who appeared to have social norms and the social values of the average middle american right down the ground.
But none of the bodies under the house was 15 year old Robert Piest his whereabouts were finally discovered in April 1979,Robert had been killed the night of his abduction.
With no spacce left under his house Gacy had thrown the teenager’s body from a bridge into the river.three other boys had suffered the same fate.
On february the 6th 1980,37 John Wayne Gacy stood trial for the murder of 33 young men.
The defense argued that he was insane because he couldn’t control his actions obviously he couldn’t control his actions he killed 33 people that we know of.
But as an insanity defense in a legal courtroom that’s not going to hold up.
the prosecutors was convinced they could prove Gacy had been sane and fully aware of his wrongdoing.
He had underlined passages and read in his family bible indicating his knowledge of his own guilt as a catholic, the blaphemers the idiolates the abusers of themselves with mankind shall ot inherit the kingdom of god he had that underlined.
He had the illinois statute book with the paper clips and underlining on the sexually dangerous persons act. he knew excactly what he was doing and he even knew what the consequences of it was.
So he never showed any remorse never any contrition no emotion and that’s what psychiatrists call a flat affect.very narcissistic.
Well he was all that mattered.
On March the 13th 1980 John Wayne Gacy was found guilty and sentenced to serve 12 death sentences and 21 natural life sentences.
They asked him why did you do this stuff and he said well ,there were several reasons, with some of the kids i was afreaid they would expose me,others threatened to expose me, so i had to kill them. he said they were all just human trash anyway. that was his reason.
On may the 10th 1984 after 14 years on death row …
John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection.
Gacy remains one of america’s most profilic serial murderers but what drove him to snuff out the lives of 33 young men?
Was the belittling and abuse of the hands of his alcoholic father the catalyst.
Was the blood clot on his brain from his childhood accident with a swing the trigger…Or was John Wayne Gacy simply born to kill?