They said he was a pillar of the community.
Friendly neighbors watched from their windows as he shoveled snow for the elderly.
He became “Pogo the clown” for the local children, who guffawed at his tricks and happily
received a balloon for being a good boy or girl.
A close friend to politicians and professionals, when the mask was finally removed from this
sadistic killer, society was shaken to its very core.
John Wayne Gacy was a man who said in custody, “I’ve taken 3 1/2 hours of truth serum
– sodium amytal – the maximum amount I could have.
It shows I have no knowledge of the crime whatsoever.”
That’s strange because his crimes were certainly memorable.
When Gacy was not making kids laugh at his tricks, he did one-on-one shows in his house
that involved asking a young man to wear a pair of handcuffs and try to get out of them.
Having already seen that Gacy was a respectable member of the local community, the victim
gladly slipped his hands into the cuffs.
His captor would then fasten a noose around his neck, pulling it tighter in increments.
This was about the time the victim knew there was no trick, and Gacy was certainly no pillar
of the community.
But let’s go back to the start.
Like many serial killers in the making, the young Gacy suffered all kinds of physical
abuse while growing up.
He stuffed his trauma down into the far reaches of his brain in the manner of a force-fed
goose whose liver will end up on luxury plates.
Gacy was beaten and bullied and belittled.
He was powerless.
This doesn’t often bode well for the adult in the making.
​​Like many serial killers in the making, the young Gacy suffered a troubled upbringing.
He stuffed his trauma down into the far reaches of his brain, but it wouldn't be long before
his horrifying past resurfaced in new ways when he grew up.
Gacy was an outcast as a young boy and had a father who was quick to reprimand the youngster.
Gacy was powerless.
This doesn’t often bode well for the adult in the making.
But at the age of 18, it looked as though Gacy was doing alright.
That’s when he became an assistant precinct captain for a local Democratic Party politician.
It seemed like young Gacy was becoming a respectable young man.
Still, he could never do any good in his father’s eyes.
His pop, an ugly human if ever there was one, often called his son “sissy boy’ and other
similar slurs.
John Wayne Gacy was homosexual, but you can understand why he tried his hardest to repress
his sexual urges and feelings with a father like that.
A leading detective on the case said Gacy was actually a “homophobic homosexual”,
his denial being so strong.
Gacy moved away from his father and ended up working as a mortuary assistant in Las
Vegas.
There, he took perhaps a too-keen interest in the embalming of bodies.
One day he got into the coffin of a recently deceased man.
He hugged the body.
He stroked the slick, embalmed skin.
For those few moments, he didn’t feel powerless at all.
He then jumped out of the coffin in a state of shock.
With actual living young men, becoming intimate posed more problems.
Even though Gacy got married, it was just a charade.
When he became a manager at a KFC outlet, he’d often invite young male workers back
to his house to play pool and drink alcohol.
He’d usually come on to them, and when they pushed him away, he’d just say he was kidding.
The guys usually weren’t gay, and even if they were, Gacy was hardly attractive.
His solution to these unreciprocated advances was simple and vile: abduct them first, torture
them, and kill them.
This he did many times, and it seems he did so without so much as stirring anyone’s
curiosity.
He was after all a community leader, an organizer of parades, a successful businessman and fundraiser,
whose mask remained tight against his doughy face.
He was, as people later said, “The devil in disguise.”
But let’s be frank here, viewers.
Had any of you more discerning people known Gacy back then and really talked to him, you’d
have known he was screwy in about 20 minutes.
If you’d have hung around him for a few weeks, you’d likely have seen his massive
stash of pornography.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but you’d have also noticed that he spent
as much time hanging out with guys in their late teens as he did with his wife or children.
You’d then have found out he had two clown characters, Pogo, the nice clown, and Patches,
the sometimes devilish clown.
You wouldn’t have had to have read Sigmund Freud to figure out this was a two-sided man.
Sometimes he’d keep on the clown outfit, and you’d later see him collapsed over a
beer in a local bar.
Had you not come to the conclusion by then that Mr. Gacy might have been hiding something
perhaps a little dark, your intuitive faculties were as dull as a potato’s.
But you didn’t even need heightened intuition to see what he was like.
He sexually harassed a number of his staff, all young men.
He once told one of them, “Do you know how easy it would be to get one of my guns and
kill you - and how easy it would be to get rid of the body?”
You might even have seen how young men went into his house and never came out.
You could have talked with the young man who Gacy tried to handcuff, likely with the intent
to kill, only to be out-wrestled.
Gacy told that guy, “Not only are you the only one who got out of the cuffs, you got
them on me.”
There were other survivors, too.
If you were a young guy back then living anywhere near that neighborhood, you would have heard
of Mr. Gacy, the creepy clown who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.
If you’d have been able to look deeper, you’d have seen he’d served time in prison
for an assault on a young man.
This begs the question, how come he wasn’t investigated?
It was partly because people back then, even the police, didn’t expect serial killers
to look from the outside as upstanding members of the community.
Gacy wasn’t just a pillar of the community, he was a loadstone, especially once he’d
gotten his “Painting, Decorating, and Maintenance” business off the ground.
His political work even got him in a photograph with the First Lady, Rosalynn Carter.
If there was a serial killing university degree, the first thing you’d learn in “Evasion
Tactics” class is that if you want to become a prime wolf, you first have to know how to
perfect playing the lamb.
It also helps to earn money since money and power afford a killer a cloaking device.
Ask the United States Secret Service, which gave Gacy special clearance.
Ok, let’s now get down to the business of how he was finally caught.
December 11, 1978.
A woman named Elizabeth Piest went to the local drugstore to pick up her teenage son,
who worked there.
She was in great spirits that day.
It was her birthday, and she had invited all her friends to her party.
The devoted son, Robert, had helped her get things ready for the party.
Robert told his mom to wait in the parking lot.
He said he just had to speak to a guy about a possible summer job, a job that paid a whole
lot more than his drugstore gig.
All Mrs. Piest was told was that the guy offering the job worked in construction.
Robert had met him when the guy went to the drugstore to talk about possible maintenance.
Elizabeth sat in the car, giddy about the party to come and glad her son was helping
out with making sure everything went well.
But then 20 minutes passed, and he still hadn’t come out of the store.
She never saw him again.
She couldn’t enjoy the party that evening with her son still not having contacted her.
Not even a phone call just to say he got waylaid.
Later that night, when everyone had left, she called the police and reported Robert
missing, informing them about the contractor he had said he was meeting.
The cops soon discovered that the contractor was 36-year old John Wayne Gacy.
This guy was known to almost everyone in the community.
In three different cities, he’d been voted “Man of the Year” by the Junior Chamber
of Commerce.
He had a successful business and had even met the President’s wife.
When cops looked more into this man, they found out he often visited the local hospital
children’s ward.
There, playing Pogo the clown to seriously ill kids, he bounced around doing tricks.
One was handcuffing the kids and then pretending he’d lost the key and telling them they’d
stay that way forever.
Another was running around and tying them up with rope.
The children couldn’t get enough of it.
When police interviewed his neighbors, they told them Gacy was a lovely guy despite going
through two divorces and not seeing his two kids much.
Every Christmas, his house was always the one with the most Christmas lights.
When it snowed, he never failed to go out in the street and shovel old folks’ driveways.
So, police didn’t immediately think, ah, serial killing sadist.
In fact, they might have left Gacy alone had he not denied going to the drugstore on the
day Robert went missing.
Witnesses had put him there.
This encouraged the cops to dig a little deeper.
They only had to scrape the surface to find that the part-time party clown had been imprisoned
in the past for an attack on a teenager.
They also saw that similar charges had been dropped in another case that mirrored that
one.
What was just as shocking was a police report from 1978 which said Gacy had invited a 28-year
old man to smoke some weed in his car.
He told police at the time that Gacy knocked him out by putting a rag soaked in chloroform
over his mouth.
Gacy took him back to his house and assaulted him.
Police didn’t charge Gacy, and the matter was settled over a $3,000 payout.
Now a few months later, he’d been connected to a missing teen.
Police had to investigate.
Too many things just seemed wrong about Gacy.
Police got a warrant to search his house.
They found all kinds of books and films related to sex, a starting pistol, a length of nylon
rope, drugs that could make someone sleepy, police badges, and if that wasn’t suspicious
enough, lots of IDs and underwear that did not belong to Gacy.
In his bedroom was a giant clown painting.
Close to that was a TV alarm clock and radio, unbeknownst to cops, something that had belonged
to one of his victims.
On closer inspection, police found their piece de resistance, a drugstore receipt in a wastebasket
that had at one point been in Robert Piest’s pocket.
They didn’t know this just yet.
Police also found a class of 1975 Maine West High School ring.
On it was the initials J.A.S.
They didn’t know at the time that the ring belonged to one of Gacy’s former employees,
John Alan Szyc, who became a victim himself.
They surveilled his house after that and followed him everywhere he went.
Gacy seemed to enjoy this at first, going over to the police car outside his house and
telling the cops where he was about to go.
As time went on, he said the police were harassing him for no good reason, all the time trying
to prove how important he was.
One time detectives went to lunch with Gacy.
They asked him about his clown thing.
Gacy said he loved being Pogo.
Being a clown, he said, meant you could go out in public and grab women, and all they
did was laugh about it.
He told them, “Being a clown, you can get away with murder.”
Police then interviewed one of his former employees, who told them Gacy had once asked
him to spread lime in a crawl space under his house.
That’s when they started working on getting a second search warrant.
One day Gacy lost his temper and went out to the surveillance vehicle.
He said to the cops, come inside, have a coffee, look around, there’s nothing to see.
Meanwhile, the neighbors wondered why those horrible cops were harassing poor Mr. Gacy.
In the house, one of the cops noticed something when he flushed the toilet.
It wasn’t physical, it was a smell, a smell every detective knows very well: Death.
That second warrant couldn’t come soon enough.
Soon after, Gacy turned up at his lawyer’s office looking rattled and drunk.
He told his lawyers he had something to say.
When they asked what, he pulled out a newspaper.
Pointing at the article about missing boy Robert Piest, Gacy said, “This boy is dead.
He's dead.
He's in a river.”
Through the night, the drunk Gacy said he’d been “been the judge, jury, and executioner
of many, many people.”
He said some were under the house and others were in the river, although Gacy was worse
for wear throughout his rambling.
He wasn’t under arrest at this point and so left, now badly hungover.
He wouldn’t remain a free man long, but while he was, he drove over to meet a friend
and said, “I've been a bad boy.
I killed thirty people, give or take a few.”
On December 21, police got the second warrant to search his house.
As they looked around, they found a kind of trapdoor.
That led to a crawl space, so one of the detectives got in and started crawling along the tunnel.
His nostrils were immediately filled with the stench of decomposition.
He shouted up to the other detectives, “I think this place is full of kids.”
At first, police found three bodies, all in various stages of rot.
They also found bits of bodies.
What they were looking at was perhaps one of the USA’s worst serial killers.
It turned out Gacy had been killing for a while, even when he was living with his second
wife.
Once she was out of the house, he lured young men back to his place on the promise of booze
and weed.
Then he’d often play his clown game with them, strapping handcuffs over their wrists
to see if they could get out.
They’d become worried, and then he would strangle them.
He usually did this slowly.
First, by putting the rope around their neck and telling them, it too was a game.
He’d gradually fasten it tighter and tighter by twisting a stick until they could hardly
breathe.
He tortured some of his victims while they were in this state of terminal distress.
His wife would often complain about the horrid smell, to which Gacy would always blame dead
rats.
When she complained too much, he told her to mind her own business.
She asked about all the clothes and wallets she found, seemingly from young men.
Again, Gacy told her not to pry into his personal business.
That’s when she left.
Police interviewed survivors, mostly poor kids and prostitutes he’d found on the streets,
although Gacy was open to picking up any kind of hitchhiker.
He’d take them back to his house and show them that photo of himself with the First
Lady.
This was usually enough to make the men feel safe.
The only reason they survived was that they outright refused to play the handcuff game
with him.
They didn’t tell the cops, for the sad fact most of them saw the police as their enemy.
If they did take part in the trick, they died.
Gacy told police that when he was tightening that rope around his victim’s neck for the
final time, he would often recite the 23rd psalm.
It starts with the line, “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” and later comes
the unforgettable lines, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil.”
God knows what must have been going on in the minds of his victims.
Gacy was doing most of the killing when he was most famous for playing Pogo, so he could
have killed and then entertained a bunch of sick kids or the children of his politician
friends.
As for why he did it, Gacy once told FBI profiler Robert Ressler that all his victims were just
“worthless little queers and punks.”
He later denied the murders, saying he’d been set up.
In his many interviews, he said the media had made him into some kind of monster.
He said: “They’ve created this fantasy monster
image, and it’s been going on for the last 12 years, and I’ve never had no comment,
and I had no need to talk to the media for the simple reason that they were looking for
sensationalism, and they were looking for the monster.”
It wasn’t exactly a cogent defense, seeing as a mass of bodies were found under his house
and their belongings inside his house.
In a separate interview, Gacy said, “If you want to say I slept in the house of a
dead body, ok fine, I’ll buy that.
But in the same room, no!!
And besides, the dead won’t bother you, it’s the living you’ve got to worry about.”
He once created a document when in correspondence to the New Yorker.
It was a Q&A which he answered himself.
Here are some of the answers, just to give you more insight into how he either fooled
himself or was an outright liar: “My Biggest Regret: Being so trusting and
gullible, taken advantage of.
Favorite Song: ‘Send in the Clowns,’ ‘Amazing Grace.’
I Consider Myself: Liberal, with values.”
Gacy told the interviewer he hadn’t committed the murders.
He said at one point, “I’ll tell you what - I’m not going to make no damn Ted Bundy
last-minute confessions.”
The interviewer didn’t expect him to, nor did he believe much of what Gacy said over
many hours of chats.
Gacy should have been caught much earlier or at least should have set off a few lights
in the radar of the local police departments.
In 1975, an 18-year former employee of Gacy named John Butkovich had an argument with
him over some missing pay.
Butkovich went missing after that.
Gacy was interviewed by cops, but nothing came of it.
Remember, this was a man with a very sketchy record of hurting young men.
The boy’s parents called the cops over 100 times, each time demanding that they investigate
Gacy.
They didn’t.
Gacy later told police that he’d got Butkovich stoned and drunk and then inveigled him to
put the handcuffs on behind his back.
Gacy said he sat on him for at least an hour before strangling him.
He then had to rush to bury the body since his wife and kids said they were coming back.
During the trial, the prosecutor said, “John Gacy has accounted for more human devastation
than many earthly catastrophes, but one must tremble.
I tremble when thinking about just how close he came to getting away with it all.”
That is true, he could have gotten away with so many murders.
Maybe it was his political connections and air of importance that helped him escape the
eyes of the police.
That, and the fact, he was “Man of the Year.”
There was also “linkage blindness”, meaning different police departments didn’t or couldn’t
link up his earlier offenses.
Still, maybe Gacy wasn’t working alone.
An investigator later said that there was “overwhelming evidence Gacy worked with
an accomplice.”
He could also have been part of some depraved ring, which is what many people now think.
There’s fairly convincing evidence that he was involved with a man who operated such
a ring.
Gacy was convicted of 33 murders in all.
On May 10, 1994, he received a lethal injection.
He had no last words, although some dubious sources state he said, “Kiss my…”
You need to fill in the final word yourself...cursing offends some people.
Now you need to watch “How They Caught Serial Killer Ted Bundy.”
Or, have a look at...