Secret accomplices, unidentified victims,
and claims of innocence. So many mysteries still remain in the John Wayne Gacy case.
On March 12, 1980, John Wayne Gacy was convicted of 33 murders. The former contractor,
aspiring politician, and part-time clown went undetected until Chicago
police searched the cramped crawl space beneath his house.
"One of the things we discovered was a crawl space."
There, they unearthed the bodies of teenage boys and young men who were later found to have been
sexually assaulted and murdered. Some still remain unidentified, and there are possible victims who
were never accounted for. Gacy was subsequently sentenced to death, and executed in 1994.
The problem with convictions is that they don't always reflect how many crimes were
actually committed. In Peacock documentary "Devil in Disguise," investigator Rafael
Tovar revealed to NBC News that he'd asked Gacy how many people he had really killed.
According to Tovar, Gacy suggested that he may have killed as many as 45 people,
"Almost a twinkle in his eye, he says, '45 sounds like a good number.'"
However, Gacy apparently wouldn't reveal where any of the alleged bodies might be.
Others working on the case believed he could have buried bodies somewhere other
than his house. It's also important to note that Gacy was suspected of
misleading authorities. Gacy's death-row attorney, Karen Conti,
remembered him sending police on a labyrinthine search. As she said in "Devil in Disguise,"
"That was typical Gacy. Sort of like, 'Don't look over here, Look over there.'"
During John Wayne Gacy's trial, his mental health was debated, but some self-incriminating things he
told authorities couldn't possibly be ignored. Gacy admitted he would drink heavily and wake
up hungover only to find a body on the floor. He allegedly had no recollection of killing anybody
and blamed his alter ego, Jack Hanly, or the victims themselves for not knowing better.
In his book "Bad Boys, Bad Men," psychologist Donald W. Black claimed
that Gacy had antisocial personality disorder. Witnesses who testified at
Gacy's trial led the prosecution to believe that Gacy had known what he
was doing. As reported in the American Justice documentary "John Wayne Gacy: Buried Secrets,"
At one point, John Wayne Gacy worked as a maintenance man in a Chicago apartment
complex where his mother was living. Former homicide detective Bill Dorsch started to
grow leery when he ran into Gacy around 3 a.m. on a snowy night and noticed what he
had clutched in one hand, per The Verge. It was not a snow shovel but a spade,
which aroused Dorsch's suspicions that Gacy might have been digging in the dirt,
instead of clearing out snow. Gacy tried to pass off this incident as being a workaholic.
However, Dorsch couldn't shake his suspicion and called the sheriff's
office. He met with investigators and told them about the strange incident,
per The Shadow Reports. Dorsch realized he had been right to suspect something after bodies
were dug up from the crawl space beneath Gacy's house and recovered from the Des Plaines River.
It was years after Gacy's execution that Dorsch learned the Cook County Sheriff's office had done
absolutely nothing. Later, a 1998 radar scan around the complex revealed possible evidence
of human remains, and Dorsch was the one who pushed for that to happen, per The Shadow Reports.
"My dad struck all of us children, all of the time."
Some believe that John Wayne Gacy was irreversibly changed after suffering
abuse as a child. The chief psychiatrist for the defense told A&E True Crime that Gacy
was ruthlessly abused by his father who was a heavy drinker. Gacy's sister Karen confirmed
in "Devil in Disguise" that her brother was the main target of their father's outbursts.
"When he drank too much, John got the brunt of it."
From the time Gacy was young, he went to the hospital complaining
of back pain and headaches. A 1984 study published in University of West
Virginia Law Review examined whether epilepsy might have had something to
do with Gacy's behavior. Records referenced in the study explained,
According to the reports, hospital staff needed to hold him down and sedate him,
and Gacy would experience lapses in memory. His violent seizures continued,
too. He would end up hospitalized several times, during which he attacked staff,
and was given strong sedatives to keep him from inflicting harm on anyone.
Whether he continued to experience these blackouts later in life remains unknown.
John Wayne Gacy was the last person anyone would suspect of murder. Joe Berlinger,
the director of Netflix's "Conversations With a Killer," told "Tudum,",
Despite a 1968 stint in prison for sexual assault and a failed marriage, Gacy appeared to have
his life together. In fact, he was such a model prisoner that he was released early. He remarried,
had children, ran his own company, and was a local politician. Gacy would also put on a
clown act for parties, which made him seem even more innocuous. However, he would reportedly go
on to murder some of his victims in that very same costume, earning him his "killer clown" nickname.
"The clowning was relaxation for me. I enjoyed entertaining kids."
Another reason Gacy almost got away with taking at least 33 lives is that many were
thought to be runaways or male sex workers, according to "Devil in Disguise." It didn't
help that most of Gacy's victims were gay men, who were highly stigmatized
at the time. As a WLS-TV reporter said in a 1978 clip included in the documentary,
"They came to him either paid or looking for a good time and got more than they bargained for."
Gacy often spoke to the media, but insisted he had not committed most of
the murders. In a transcript from a CBS News interview with Gacy before he was executed,
the prolific killer insisted there were several reasons he couldn't have been responsible for the
crimes. He pointed to his image as a family man, and said that he was no more than an
accomplice who threw one of the bodies in the river. Of course, this stood in contrast to the
much more incriminating things he confessed to the police right after he was arrested.
Director Joe Berlinger knew Gacy kept lying during their interview,
but he didn't stop the camera. As the director told "Tudum,"
Many believe that the police force didn't do enough in the John Wayne Gacy case.
For instance, one of the killer's few surviving victims, Jeffrey Rignall, informed the police
of the abuse he'd allegedly experienced at the hands of Gacy. However, the police
were reportedly skeptical of Rignall's account, especially as he couldn't describe his attacker.
Due to this inaction, Gacy remained free, and he was able to kill four more men as a result.
"Even though the police refused to acknowledge or believe anything that I told them."
Local authorities seemingly remained in denial of the horrific crimes happening around them.
As most of Gacy's crimes involved gay men, a persistent stigman affected the investigation.
"You know, people were looking down at gay kids at the time, gay young men."
Missing young men were often categorized as runaways, and little
urgency was given to finding them. Even when Gacy was linked to these missing young men,
detectives generally believed whatever the businessman told them. Whenever
he was brought in for questioning, he was soon released, only to kill again.
Mystery still surrounds whether John Wayne Gacy killed every one of his victims alone,
or whether he had help from accomplices. In 1994, The New Yorker reported,
Gacy tried to assert his innocence by pointing his finger at possible accomplices, such as
his employees David Cram and Michael Rossi. While they were never convicted of any crime,
Peacock's "Devil in Disguise" documentary revealed that Cram and Rossi were involved
in carrying out some suspicious jobs for Gacy. Both allegedly dug graves in the
crawl space underneath Gacy's home, apparently believing that the work was related to plumbing.
Rossi and Cram also reportedly had sexual relationships with Gacy,
but neither was killed, unlike most of the men Gacy was involved with. At one point,
Rossi was also discovered to be driving the car of one of Gacy's victims.
"Then talking to Mike Rossi, we found he'd gotten the car from John Gacy."
Despite these strange occurrences,
Cram and Rossi were never proven to have been accomplices in any of the murders.
John Wayne Gacy was allegedly associated with other criminals who hunted teenage boys.
According to the Toronto Sun, another employee of his, Phillip Paske, sparked the suspicion of
the police. As it turned out, Paske's alleged boss was the notorious child sex offender John
David Norman. Not only did Norman sell child pornography, but he also ran a sex trafficking
ring for men seeking much younger prey. Police eventually found out that two of Gacy's victims
were last seen alive with Norman. This pushed them to investigate further and led them to
think that Gacy was somehow involved with Norman and procured young victims from him.
As Gacy's death row attorney Karen Conti recalled in "Devil in Disguise," Gacy tried
to shift some of the blame on to Norman. Gacy also allegedly suggested to Conti that some of
the murders may have been captured on camera as part of an illegal snuff film operation.
"A snuff film operation and that some of
these young men and boys were being killed and videotaped."
It remains unclear if there was ever any truth to Gacy's claims.
Michael Marino was just 14-years-old when he vanished on his way to a nearby arcade. He was
first dismissed as a runaway. However, police later apologized to Michael's mother, Sherry,
and told her that her son had been identified as one of Gacy's victims, per USA Today.
Forensic odontologists initially believed they had found Michael's body following dental analysis
of a body. The radiologist who X-rayed the remaining bones came to the same conclusion,
but Sherry Marino was far from finding closure. As reported by USA Today,
Sherry believed that another victim may have been mistaken for Michael,
and that whoever was buried in her son's grave was not actually him. A mysterious
collarbone injury in the victim's medical records, and inconclusive DNA test results,
only further stoked Sherry's suspicion that her son hadn't been found. According to USA Today,
In 2012, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that a laboratory in North Carolina had determined that
Sherry's DNA wasn't a match with the DNA of the remains in Michael's grave. It remains unknown
whether or not Michael was killed by Gacy, or if victim number 14 is someone else altogether.
Among John Wayne Gacy's 33 known victims, five remain unidentified. While the case
was closed after the killer's 1994 execution, it was reopened in 2011.
In late 2021, ABC57 News put out a call for anyone who could help put
names to the faces of these victims. The news channel also showed facial
reconstructions released by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
showing what two of the teenage victims would have looked like at the time of their deaths.
The Cook County Sheriff's Office also asked for help in identifying these unidentified victims,
and requested that anyone who had a male relative
go missing between 1970 and 1979 to contact the police.