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...
