John Wayne Gacy

Born March 17,1942 in Chicago

Died May 10, 1994 in Crest Hill (age 52)

Execution by lethal injection

5’8 230 lbs

Sentence:

1 count of sodomy

33 counts of murder

1 count of sexual assault

1 count of indecent liberties with a child

Married twice: Marlynn Myers and Carole Hoff

2 kids

Early Life

Gacy was born March 17, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois to an alcoholic, often abusive World War I veteran and a homemaker. He was one of three children. Gacy with born with a heart defect that made it impossible for him to be active in sports, therefore he was an overweight child. He was often the victim of his father’s scorn. He reported taking a beating from a razor strop on more than one occasion. As if the beatings weren’t enough, Gacy suffered verbal abuse from his father as well. His father told him he was dumb and stupid. Gacy felt he was never good enough for his father.

His mother did her best to protect her child from his violent father. This caused his father to call him a momma’s boy and a sissy. Gacy’s mother knew her son had a heart problem. She did her best to shield him from his angry father. Gacy reports being hospitalized for much of his life from the ages of 14 to 18 due to a mysterious seizure causing illness and a ruptured appendix. In a John Wayne Gacy interview, he reports his father’s verbal abuse while sick in a hospital bed. According to Gacy, his father accused him of faking it.

Signs of trouble were present during Gacy’s childhood. When he was six, Gacy stole a truck from a store. His mother forced him to take it back and apologize. His father beat him for it. When Gacy was 7, he and another boy were accused of molesting a young girl. This earned him a beating with the trusty razor strop. Also during his 7th year, Gacy was molested by a family friend. Instead of telling his parents, he suffered this in silence out of fear of being blamed for the act by his hateful father.

The most telling sign of something amiss with Gacy takes place around 1962 after he left his abusive home for Las Vegas. In the desert city, John Wayne Gacy took a job as a mortuary assistant. In a later interview, Gacy recalls sleeping behind the embalming room. He tells of a night where he decided to climb inside the coffin of a teenage male and spent some time cuddled up with the body before disgust took over and forced him out.

An Upstanding Member of the Community

John Wayne Gacy was a man of many faces. Before giving into his murderous instincts, he played a role in multiple community organizations. He became an assistant precinct captain for his local democratic party candidate. Gacy once said he hoped this decision would gain some acceptance from his father. Instead, his father called him a patsy.

After his short stint as a mortuary assistant, Gacy returned home to Illinois to attended Northwest Business College and graduated in 1963. Not too much time passed before Gacy met his first wife, Marlynn Myers. After a brief courtship, the couple married and moved to Waterloo, Iowa.

Marlynn’s father purchased three Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in the area and Gacy became the manager. It was in Waterloo where John Wayne Gacy first joined the Jaycees, an organization that teaches leadership and offers civic opportunities for their members. Gacy quickly became vice president.

At this point in his life, Gacy appeared to be an upstanding member of society. But things weren’t all they seemed. The Jaycees had a bit of a dark side. Some members took part in prostitution, wife swapping and rampant drug use. Gacy was involved in all of this. He went as far as to open a club in his basement where young people, especially boys could be plied with alcohol and drugs.

In what appears to be a step towards the dark side Gacy will eventually inhabit, Gacy would make sexual advances aimed at the teenage boys who worked for him and came to his basement club. When the boys refused him, Gacy played it off like it was a joke. This activity is a clear foreshadowing of the darkness to come at the hands of John Wayne Gacy.

The First Offense

In 1967, John Wayne Gacy is enjoying a normal, successful life in Waterloo, Iowa. He managed three KFC restaurants. He is the vice president of the local Jaycees. His wife has given him two children. He has even gained some respect from his hardened and cold father. All this wasn’t enough to keep Gacy’s darkness at bay.

John Wayne Gacy’s first victim was a 15-year-old son of a fellow Jaycee member named Daniel Voorhees. Gacy had plied him with alcohol and forced the boy to perform oral sex. Several other young boys were assaulted by Gacy around this time. Sometimes Gacy would tell the boys they were part of a science experiment, paying some of them fifty dollars.

Voorhees notified his father of the assault. Gacy was arrested for the assault of Voorhees as well as the attempted assault of another 16-year-old boy. Gacy denied any wrongdoing and even requested a polygraph test, which showed his nervousness when denying the assaults. Gacy went as far as to say the assault accusations were politically motivated by a power-hungry member of the Jaycees.

An indictment was handed down in the case brought about by Voorhees against Gacy in 1968. In an attempt to get out of the charges against him, Gacy paid an employee to attack Voorhees and convince him not to testify. For three hundred dollars, Russell Schroeder attacked Voorhees, sprayed him in the face with mace, and beat him, all while yelling at Voorhees not to testify against Gacy. Voorhees escaped and went on to testify. Gacy was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to 10 years. Gacy’s wife filed for divorce, won, and Gacy never saw her or their children again.

Not surprisingly, Gacy thrived in prison. He was said to have been a model prisoner. He became the head cook and eventually joined the prison’s Jaycees chapter. He undertook projects to enhance the lives of prisoners, going as far as to get a pay increase for the inmates. After serving 18 months of his 10-year sentence, Gacy was released on parole.

A New Lease on Life

After his stint in prison, Gacy purchased a house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Cook County Iowa. This is the house where most of his murders took place. He reunited with Carole Hoff, a woman he had dated in high school. They eventually married and Hoff and her two children moved into the Summerdale house with John Wayne Gacy.

Gacy started his own construction company named PDM. Like other parts of Gacy’s life, the construction business agreed with him. He found some moderate success. And once again, this success wasn’t enough to keep John Wayne Gacy from straying into the darkness. In 1973, during a business trip to look into the purchase of property in Florida, Gacy attacked a young employee in their hotel room.

After the rape, the employee spent the night on the beach, refusing to share the room after Gacy’s actions. After returning home, the boy waited for and beat him. Gacy’s mother in law stepped in. Gacy told his wife the young boy was upset because he refused to pay the boy for bad work.

Gacy was once again active in his community. He worked for the Democratic Party. He was appointed the director of the Polish Constitution Day Parade in Chicago. He served in this office for 3 years. It was during this time that he had his picture taken with First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

He joined the Moose Club. He even joined the Jolly Joker clown club. This is where he came up with his characters “Pogo” and “Patches” the clown.

He performed at Democratic parties, community events, and even children’s hospitals. It has been noted that by keeping the sharp corners used in the drawing of the mouth of his clown face, Gacy went against the traditional soft lines that were thought to not be so scary to children. Even Gacy’s clown was scary. 

The Murders Begin

His first murder could have been a misunderstanding. In 1972, Gacy picked up 16-year-old Timothy Jack McCoy from the local Greyhound terminal. He took him sightseeing around the city and offered to let him spend the night with promises to take him to the bus terminal in the morning. Gacy woke up to find McCoy standing with a knife raised above his head. Gacy tackled McCoy, eventually killing him.

Gacy buried McCoy in his crawl space, under a layer of concrete. After killing the boy, Gacy said he walked into the kitchen to find breakfast laid out and an uncut slab of bacon. Chances are, the boy was merely coming to wake Gacy for breakfast while accidentally holding the knife in what Gacy perceived to be a threatening manner. In an interview after his arrest, Gacy is quoted as saying he enjoyed a mind-numbing orgasm during the killing. The experience opened the door for more killings, Gacy always seeking that initial thrill.

Another Divorce, More Freedom

Gacy honed his murderous skills while working long hours to expand his construction company. In 1975, John Wayne Gacy was working 12 to 16 hours days and then spent what little free time available “cruising” for men. That's the phrase he used to describe his driving around and picking up young boys to torture and murder.

John Wayne Gacy developed techniques to make subduing and killing easier for him, and really, the scale Gacy was killing required a skilled technique. The “Handcuff Trick” involved getting his intended victim to willingly place the handcuffs on themselves. The handcuff trick involved plying a young boy with drugs or alcohol and then employing his clown tricks to get the victim handcuffed and unable to fight back. The “Rope Trip” came next. This simply involved Gacy using a rope as a makeshift tourniquet to strangle his victims.

Perhaps it was Gacy’s constant absence that led to Carole asking for a divorce. Maybe it was an argument. Either way, the couple agreed to a divorce in 1976. The reason listed for the divorce was Gacy’s infidelities with other women. Gacy had been actively killing young boys in the house he shared with Carole and her daughters since 1972.

The Cruising Years

With the divorce and Carole moving out, Gacy was left to his own devices. It is reported that John Wayne Gacy tried to stay active in the community, but neighbors talked about changes in his activities and personality. Neighbors reported Gacy leaving at odd hours of the night, lights turning on and off, and one neighbor reported hearing screams and sounds of suffering coming from the Gacy home in the night.

Between the years of 1976 and 1978, Gacy confessed to murdering 23 teenage boys and then burying them in the crawl space beneath his house. He had young male employees of his construction company dig trenches in the crawl space. Some reported spreading lime. Lime is known to help with decomposition.

In 1978, Gacy ran into a problem. His crawl space was full. Although he dug trenches and stacked bodies, sometimes three deep, there was no room left for any more victims. At this point in his spree, Gacy began dumping bodies along the Des Plains River. One victim was left for dead and actually survived. Although Jeffery Rignall survived, he couldn’t place Gacy as his attacker.

The End of a Spree

John Wayne Gacy couldn’t keep this killing pace up forever. Eventually, he was going to make a mistake, some careless move and that would lead to his end. At a visit to a local pharmacy, Gacy offered 15-year-old Robert Piest a job that paid better than his current job at the pharmacy. Piest informed his mother of the job offer and headed off to meet Gacy. When Piest failed to return home, his mother filed a missing person report. Gacy denied meeting with Piest, however, he was seen at the pharmacy offering Piest a job by more than one witness.

The Piest investigation led to Rignall’s tale of Gacy’s violence as well as other witnesses to Gacy’s actions. He was placed under constant surveillance. He grew so comfortable with the surveillance teams that he turned it into a game. He even offered them breakfast at one point. He went as far as to tell the detectives over breakfast, “You know… clowns can get away with murder.” The constant surveillance began to really wear on Gacy. He had his lawyer prepare a civil suit against the Des Plains police to get them to stop their ceaseless monitoring.

Eventually, the detectives came knocking on Gacy’s door. During the first search, nothing of note was found. During the second search, a detective noticed a smell coming from air ducts that could have been the smell of rotting corpses. The only thing that could explain this discrepancy was that the air was cooler during the first visit. Once the air had time to warm up, the smell was very much present. 

A Killer Tells His Tale

On the morning of December 22, 1978, Gacy, tired of the constant surveillance and beginning to come apart at the ends, sat down with detectives to tell his tale. Gacy told of cruising for young boys, boys he referred to as prostitutes, liars, and hustlers. He would often pick them up at bus stations.

Gacy would take them home to his 8213 West Summerdale home where he would bound them with handcuffs and strangle them. With some victims, Gacy would partially drown them in the bathtub before reviving them to begin the torture all over again.

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He admitted to stacking bodies in his crawl space. Gacy went as far as to provide a hand-drawn sketch of the placement of the 23 bodies buried beneath his house. Detectives were already aware of this fact thanks to a search warrant.

When detectives went to search Gacy’s home, they found a flooded crawl space and a broken sump pump. After replacing the broken part, detectives simply waited for the water to drain. They were then met with soaking wet, purified flesh.

Trial, Conviction, and Sentence

The trial against John Wayne Gacy began on February 6, 1980. He was charged with the murder of 33 young men. Gacy’s defense predictably entered a not guilty by reasons of insanity plea. He spent countless hours being interviewed and screened by psychiatrists. Psychiatrists working for the defense found Gacy to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. The prosecution claimed the premeditation of Gacy’s crimes prove he was in his right mind at the time he committed his crimes.

Both the defense and prosecution presented their cases for and against Gacy. On March 12, 1980, with the jury spending less than two hours in deliberation, they found Gacy guilty of 33 murders, sexual assault and indecent liberties with a child. The jury spent a little more than two hours deciding the fate of John Wayne Gacy. The jury came back with twelve death sentences to be carried out June 2, 1980.

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