The site of Gacy's home in Des Plaines, Ill.,
where Gacy buried the bodies of 28 of the known 33 teenage boys he murdered. (Gacy's
home on this site was leveled by the authorities following the discovery of the
mass graves beneath it.)
Boy Killer: John Wayne Gacy
by David Lohr
Not many people who knew him would have suspected
that John Wayne Gacy, a respected member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce in
Des Plaines, Ill., a performing clown at neighborhood children's parties, a
precinct captain in the local Democratic party, and the owner of his own
contracting business would come to be known as one of the most prolific serial
killers in U.S. history.
Nor would his childhood in any particular way set
off red flags that a monster was in the making. Gacy, a middle child, was born
in Chicago in 1942 into a blue-collar family. He had two sisters, one two years
older and the other two years younger. According to the book Killer Clown,
by Terry Sullivan and Peter Maiken, Gacy seemed to have a regular childhood with
the exception of his turbulent relationship with his father, John Wayne Gacy Sr.
The authors describe the father as an unpleasant, abusive alcoholic prone to
physically and verbally assaulting his children. The authors describe Gacy as
deeply loving his father and wanting desperately to gain his approval and
attention, but failing to win him over.
According to the book The Man Who Killed Boys by
Clifford L. Lindecker, Gacy was struck in the head with a playground swing when
he was 11 years old. He suffered from blackouts until the age of 16, when a
doctor diagnosed him with a blood clot on the brain and corrected the condition
with medication.
After attending four high schools during his
senior year and never graduating, Gacy dropped out of school and left Chicago
for Las Vegas. While there, he worked part time as a janitor for Palm Mortuary.
Unhappy in Vegas, he returned to Chicago a few months later.
During the early 1960’s, Gacy enrolled in a
business college and developed a talent for salesmanship. A natural salesman, he
could talk his way in and out of practically any situation. Upon graduating, he
went to work as a management trainee at Nunn Bush Shoe Co in downtown Chicago.
He excelled in his position and within weeks was transferred to Springfield,
Ill., to manage a men’s clothing outlet for the company, where he remained
employed for nearly a year.
In 1964, Gacy married Marilyn Myer, a co-worker.
Shortly after the wedding, the newlyweds relocated to her hometown of Waterloo,
Iowa. Marilyn’s father prompted the move by offering Gacy a position in the
family’s chicken restaurant. A year later, Gacy's father died in Chicago.
In 1966, at the request of his father-in-law,
Gacy took over management of the family’s chicken restaurant. Gacy became a
well-known and liked member of the community, according to later accounts in the
Waterloo Courier.
But all was not well with Gacy. The future serial
killer would be arrested for the first time in 1968. The felony charge --
attempting to coerce a male employee into homosexual acts -- came as a big
surprise to those who thought they knew this likable father of two toddlers,
especially his wife of four years. Gacy pled guilty to sodomy and was sentenced
to 10 years in Iowa’s State Men’s Reformatory in Anamosa. His wife filed for
divorce following the sentencing. Angered, Gacy informed her he did not want to
see his children again and would henceforth consider her and the two kids dead.
After serving 18 months, Gacy was paroled on Oct.
18, 1971 and returned to Chicago. Unknown to his parole officer, Gacy was
arrested by Chicago police on Feb. 12 -- eight months after his release from
prison -- and charged with attempted rape and disorderly conduct. A gay youth
had complained to authorities that Gacy had picked him up at the Greyhound
station in downtown Chicago. He told police that Gacy took him back to his house
and attempted to have sex with him. However, the charges were dropped when the
boy failed to appear in court for the hearing.
Shortly after returning to Chicago, Gacy went to
work as a construction contractor. Three years later, in 1975, he started his
own construction business, PDM Contractors. That July he remarried a recently
divorced woman he had met through mutual friends and, with financial assistance
from his mother, moved into a house in Des Plaines, a middle-class Chicago
suburb.
Gacy had a talent for business. According to the Des
Plaines Journal, he was known by local merchants as a sharp businessman. He
often gained contracts by undercutting his competitors' bids. He was able to cut
costs by hiring on a number of teenage boys. (At least five of these boys became
his victims.) His business grew.
Gacy spent part of his leisure time hosting
elaborate street parties for friends and neighbors, dressing as a clown, and
entertaining children at local hospitals. He also immersed himself in
organizations such as the Jaycees and the local Democratic party. As a
Democratic precinct captain he once had his picture taken with First Lady
Rosalyn Carter.
Gacy’s second wife divorced him in March of
1976. According to accounts in Harlan Mendenhall’s book, Fall of the House
of Gacy, she felt she could no longer cope with the marriage due to her
husband's unpredictable moods and bizarre obsession with homosexual magazines.
The couple did not have children.
On Dec. 12, 1978, the police again focused their
attention on John Wayne Gacy. Robert Piest, a teenage stock boy at a Nisson
Pharmacy in Des Plaines, had come up missing. Gacy was the last person seen with
the boy prior to his disappearance. When investigators ran a background check on
Gacy, they were surprised to discover that he had previously served time for
committing sodomy on a teenage boy. With this incriminating information,
investigators were able to obtain a warrant to search Gacy’s house.
During the execution of the warrant,
investigators entered a crawl space located beneath the home. A rancid odor was
quickly noticed. The smell was believed to be faulty sewage lines and was
dismissed. Without any noticeable incriminating evidence, investigators returned
to headquarters to run tests on the evidence they seized.
During a review of the items confiscated from
Gacy’s house, investigators soon realized that they had unknowingly seized a
piece of critical evidence. One of the rings found at Gacy’s house belonged to
another teenager who had disappeared a year earlier. They also discovered that a
receipt for a roll of film found at Gacy’s home had belonged to a co-worker of
Robert Piest who had given it to Robert the day of his disappearance.
With this new information, investigators began to
realize the possible enormity of the case that was unfolding before them.
Following the discovery of their new information, it was not long before
investigators were able to obtain a second search warrant for Gacy’s home.
On Dec. 22, 1978, Gacy, realizing that his dark
secrets were about to be exposed, went to the police to confess. Shortly into
the confessions, Gacy waived his Miranda rights and told detectives, ''There are
four Johns.'' He later explained that there was John the contractor, John the
clown, and John the politician. The fourth person went by the name of Jack
Hanley. Jack was the killer and did all the evil things.
According to accounts in Killer Clown,
Gacy informed investigators that his first killing took place in January 1972,
and the second two years later in January 1974. He further confessed that he
lured his victims into being handcuffed. Gacy would tell his victim that he
wanted to show him a "pair of trick handcuffs" he used in his clown
act, claiming there was a special way to unlock the cuffs and daring the youth
to break out of them. Once the youth was securely manacled, he would kill him by
pulling a rope or board against their throats, as he raped them. Gacy admitted
to sometimes keeping the dead bodies under his bed or in the attic for several
hours before eventually burying them in the crawl space
Gacy went on to make voluntary confessions to
over two dozen murders, although he couldn't answer all the questions posed by
the police, often responding, ''You'll have to ask Jack that.'' He also drew
them a detailed map to the locations of 28 shallow graves under his house and
garage. Further he admitted to dumping five other victims into the Des Plaines
River.
Less than an hour after the initial dig at Gacy’s
house began, investigators discovered the first body in a crawl space under the
home. As the days and weeks passed, the body count grew. So did the media
coverage, exponentially. The macabre excavations at Gacy's modest home in Des
Plaines led the national news night after night. The house itself became almost
as familiar to American and foreign viewing audiences as The White House.
The details of the dig were riveting. Some of the
victims had been buried so close together that police believed they were
probably killed or buried at the same time. By the end of January, police and
construction crews had gutted the entire house and exhumed twenty-seven bodies.
The search had taken longer than expected due to the frozen ground and the
winter cold.
During this time, four bodies that had been
discovered in the Des Plaines River were linked to Gacy by driver’s licenses
and other personal items found in his home.
While the identities of the 32 victims began to
surface, investigators discovered that all of the victims were young men ranging
from their early teens to mid-twenties. While most were male prostitutes known
to solicit at "Bunghouse Square" in Chicago, some were young boys who
simply disappeared for no apparent reason, and at least five were employees of
PDM Contracting at one point or another.
Surprisingly, the excavations and the dragging of
the river did not turn up the corpse of Robert Piest.
As the search for bodies came to and end, two
young men, Robert Donnelly and Jeff Rignall came forward and spoke to
investigators. The youths both felt extremely lucky to be alive and their
stories were startlingly similar in detail even though their run ins with Gacy
happened on different days. Each claimed that sometime in December of 1977, he
had been abducted at gunpoint by Gacy, chloroformed, tortured, whipped and
raped. For reasons only know to Gacy himself, both youths were spared their
lives. Whether it was fear or embarrassment, neither youth had wished to pursue
the matter directly after it had occurred.
Finally in April 1979, the remains of Robert
Piest were discovered along the Illinois River. An autopsy later determined that
he had died as a result of suffocation. Gacy was charged with his death.
Gacy’s murder trial began Feb. 6, 1980 in the
Cook County Criminal Courts Building in Chicago. During the five-week trial the
prosecution and the defense called more than 100 witnesses to testify. The
defense strategy was to establish that Gacy was insane and out of control at the
time of the killings. To bolster this claim the defense put on the stand
psychiatrists who had interviewed Gacy prior to trial. The prosecution, on the
other hand, vigorously opposed the notion that Gacy was insane, contending that
his claim of multiple personalities was a death-penalty dodge.
The jury clearly sided with the prosecution's
version. It deliberated for only two hours before finding Gacy guilty of
murdering 33 people.
On March 13, 1980, Gacy was sentenced to die. He
was sent to Menard Correctional Center in Illinois. He would remain there for
just over 14 years until he was transported to the Statesville Penitentiary near
Joliet for execution.
On May 9, 1994, Gacy sat down for his last
meal: fried chicken, French fries, Coke and strawberry shortcake. Prison
officials later described his demeanor as ''chatty... talking up a storm.'' In a
phone interview shortly before his execution, he told a Knight-Tribune
reporter, ''There's been 11 hardback books on me, 31 paperbacks, two
screenplays, one movie, one off-Broadway play, five songs, and over 5,000
articles. What can I say about it?'' But of course, he quickly protested, ''I
have no ego for any of this garbage.''
Just after midnight on May 10, 1994, Gacy was
executed by lethal injection. For his last words, Gacy snarled, ''Kiss my ass.''
