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SERIAL KILLERS

Date Added
John Wayne Gacy July 2003
 
Bio
  Full Name John Wayne Gacy
  Date of  Birth 17th March 1942
  Known Also As ?
  Hit Count 33
Information & Pictures
Elizabeth Piest sat on a stool at the candy counter in the Nisson Pharmacy, in the city of Des Plaines on the northwest outskirts of Chicago, wishing that her son would appear.  She had come to collect him from his evening job at the pharmacy, but 15 year old Robert had asked her to wait while he went to talk to 'some contractor guy' about a summer job.  It was a freezing cold night in midwinter, with snow hard-packed on the ground, and Mrs Piest did not like the idea of her son walking home.


Finally, tired of waiting, she asked the girl behind the counter to phone her when Robert came back.  Then she drove home, puzzled.  Robert knew it was her 46th birthday and the rest of the family were waiting at home to begin a birthday party.  It simply was not like him to keep them all waiting, without at least phoning with an explanation.


Back home, she told her husband Harold: 'There's something wrong - I can feel it.'  At 9.45pm , she rang the pharmacy, but there was still no sign of her son.  She called again ten minutes later.  She asked the owner: 'Do you know the name of this contractor he went to see?'
'Yes,' came the reply, 'John Gacy.'


At 11.30 that night, 11th December 1978, Mrs Piest and her husband went to the Des Plaines police station to report her son missing.  The whole family spent the rest of the night driving slowly through the local streets, peering into dark corners in case Robert had been in an accident, and was lying unconscious.  It was the worst birthday of Elizabeth Piest's life. 

   ELIZABETH & HAROLD PIEST :

 
 Elizabeth Piest, seen here with her husband Harold, knew that something terrible must have happened to her son Robert when he did not come home on the night of her 46th birthday party.  He had fallen into the lethal clutches of John Gacy.
At 8.30 the next morning, the Des Plaines police department began the task of trying to locate Robert Piest.  A check with the telephone information service revealed that Gacy's telephone number was listed under the name of his building company, PDM Contractors, at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, Norwood Park Township, between Des Plaines and Chicago.  Detective James Pickwell then rang the Chicago police to see if a John Gacy of Norwood Park had a criminal record.


The answer came within minutes, and was ominous.  Gacy had a record of sodomy involving teenage boys, and was known to be capable of violence.


In 1968, he had been sentenced to ten years in jail on a charge of handcuffing a youth, and sexually assaulting him; he had been released for good conduct after 18 months, but had since come to the attention of the police on several occasions.

At 9.30am on 12th December, Police Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak and a colleague went to call on John Gacy.  Kozenczak had a 15 year old son of his own, which could be why he decided to take charge of the case personally.  The door of 8213 West Summerdale Avenue was opened by a short, fat, swarthy man in his mid-30s, with a moon face and sagging belly.  When the policemen announced their mission, he smiled amiably and invited them in.  When asked if he had offered Robert Piest a summer job, he shook his head.  No, he did not even know the boy.


Gacy, however, had been seen in the Nisson Pharmacy at 6pm the previous evening, when Rob Piest came into work, and had been seen talking to him.  'Oh, that boy?' said Gacy.  Yes, they had exchanged a few words.  But there had been no offer of a job, and he certainly hadn't agreed to meet Piest later.


Kozenczak asked him if he would mind coming down to the station.  Gacy replied smoothly that it would be impossible right now, as a beloved Uncle had just died, and he was awaiting a call from his mother.  The policeman suggested he ring his mother and then come to the station.


Gacy's bland amiability suddenly switched to anger: 'Ain't you got no respect for the dead?' he yelled.
  8213 WEST SUMMERDALE AVENUE :


The search for Robert Piest led the police to this modest bungalow at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, in Norwood Park Township.  When the police visited Gacy to enquire about the missing boy, Piest's body was lying in the attic.
After making Gacy promise to come to the police station as soon as his mother had called, Kozenczak left.  The interview had set off an alarm bell in his mind.  Of course, it was possible that Piest had run away from home, but it seemed unlikely.  Kozenczak was fairly certain that John Wayne Gacy knew the whereabouts of the missing boy.


Robert's frantic parents were waiting for Kozenczak at the police station.  His mother had already talked to the drug store owner about Gacy, and was convinced that her son was being held against his will in Gacy's home.  She wanted the police to storm it immediately.  Kozenczak tried to soothe her, pointing out that, at this stage, they had no evidence to go on.  As soon as he had talked to Gacy, he would get a search warrant.


He waited all day, and until 1am the following morning, but the moon faced contractor failed to appear.  When Kozenczak came in to his office later that morning, he was told that Gacy, covered in mud, had finally turned up at 3.20am, saying he had had a car accident.


Gacy then returned to the station just before noon.  He seemed in a confident mood, and apologised for failing to turn up on the previous day - his car had got stuck in the snow.  Once again, he flatly denied knowing anything about Robert Piest.  He seemed in no hurry to leave, and talked expansively about his highly successful building business.  It was word a million dollars a year, he confided.  He also spoke about influential friends, such as the mayor of Chicago and Rosalynn Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter.


It seemed that Gacy worked for the local Democratic Party as a volunteer, and was well known for his charitable activities.  He even visited the local hospital and entertained sick children, dressed as a clown.
   JOHN WAYNE GACY :


A police mug-shot of John Wayne Gacy.  After he moved into his Norwood Park Township bungalow, he set out to become a model citizen, offering gifts of food to his neighbours and inviting them in for drinks.
While Detective Pickwell encouraged him to talk, Kozenczak was obtaining a search warrant.  At 3.30 that afternoon, the police informed Gacy of the warrant and asked him for his house keys.  Something in Gacy's unperturbed manner as he handed over the keys told Kozenczak that they would not find the body of the missing boy at Gacy's home.


He was right.  But a search of the house confirmed the lieutenant's suspicions.  Hidden in the attic were books on homosexuality and pederasty (sexual relations between men and boys), with titles like Tight Teenagers; Pederasty: Sex Between Men and Boys; and Bike Boy.  There were also pornographic videos, a pair of handcuffs and nylon rope.  Most ominous of all, there was a rug with what looked like bloodstains on it.  As far as they could see, however, nothing suggested that Robert Piest had been in the house.


The investigators did find one item that looked as if it might be a clue - a receipt from the Nisson Pharmacy for a film that was being developed.  When they showed it to Robert's mother, she said she though it belonged to Robert's girlfriend, Kim Beyers.  The 16 year old girl confirmed this.  She had borrowed Robert's jacket a few days before - the same one he had been wearing when he disappeared - and had left the receipt in the pocket.  She even recalled two digits of the serial number.


Now Kozenczak had proof that Robert Piest had been in Gacy's house.  The chances were that the teenager was dead. But where was his body?  Kozenczak realised that Gacy would have had time to dispose of it in the 24 hours before he reported to the police station.  He would not have risked doing this during the day so he had to have done it at night.
    ROBERT PIEST :


Robert Piest, 16, was a second year student at Maine West High School.  He achieved good grades and, at the time of his murder, was working after school to earn money to buy a jeep for cross-country trips.
The night after Robert's disappearance, Gacy had come into the station in the early hours - a strange time for a suspect to decide to report - claiming that his car had been stuck in mud.  Had he been out dumping the body?  A helicopter and police dogs combed the forest along the banks of the Des Plaines River, but found no trace of the teenager.  It was possible, of course, that the boy's body was in the river.


Meanwhile, Gacy was showing signs of strain.  The police who had been assigned to trail him made little attempt to hide their presence, and he felt they were trying to break his nerve.  He told a fellow contractor named Donald Czarna that the police were trying to pin drug offences on him, and persuaded Czarna to drive to his - Gacy's - house to see if the police were still there.  The place was empty.

Czarna had no doubt whatever that his good-natured friend was innocent, and was being subjected to police harassment.  Czarna's sympathy seems to have prompted Gacy to go on the offensive, and he filed a $750,000 civil rights suit in the US District Court in Chicago, demanding that the harassment cease immediately.


Just a week after Robert Piest had vanished it was clear that Gacy was cracking; he looked haggard and unshaven.  Once, he drove so erratically that the surveillance team had to stop and caution him to drive more carefully.  Then, one day, Gacy took a long, aimless car ride.  At the end of the journey, he invited the two police who had followed him to visit his home.


This was a mistake.  As soon as Officer Robert Schultz walked into Gacy's house, he recognised the sickly-sweet smell that pervaded its heated atmosphere.  It was the smell of corpses.  The officers who had previously searched the bungalow had failed to notice it because on that occasion the house had been cold.


Lieutenant Kozenczak decided it was time to make an arrest.  That smell, coming from the heating duct, could only mean one thing - that there was a corpse under the house.  On 21st December, police surrounded Gacy's car and arrested him, on a charge of possessing marijuana.  Gacy had been seen handing several joints of marijuana to a garage attendant.
   THE SEARCH :


Gacy directed the police to his garage, where he claimed he had buried the body of a man he had killed in self-defence, but they were not fooled, and made a thorough search of the house.
  Once home, Gacy was told that the police intended to tear up the floorboards.  Turning pale, he told them it would not be necessary.  He had, he explained, buried the body of a man he had killed in self-defence under the floor of his garage.


At this stage, the police were not going to be side-tracked into drilling up a concrete floor.  In the house, in a living room closet, they found a trap door.  When they opened it, they found themselves staring into a dark pool of evil-smelling water.  Noticing an electric plug they plugged it into a wall socket, and a pump began to work somewhere down below. 


It took a quarter of an hour for the water to drain away, and when it did, a technician from the sheriff's office, Daniel Genty, dropped three feet into the mud of the crawl space.  When he dug into the mud, he was almost over-powered by a sickening stench of decay.  He had uncovered a lard-like, soapy substance that he recognised as adipocere, a by-product of rotting flesh.  Seconds later, he dug up a human arm bone.

This was obviously not the body of Robert Piest, which could not have decayed to such an extent in the time since his disappearance.  But the question was - if it was not Robert's body, whose was it?  And could there be more?  Without hesitation, Genty called up to Kozenczak: 'You can charge him with murder.'
   CAROL LOFGREN & JOHN GACY :


A confident John Gacy seen after the wedding to his second wife, Carol Lofgren, on 1st July 1972, in Norwood Park Township.  Everything now seemed set for happiness.
  At around 12.30am on 17th March 1942, John Wayne Gacy Jr, was born in Chicago's Edgewater Hospital.  His parents were Marion Elaine Robinson, aged 33, and John Stanley Gacy Sr, the son of Polish immigrants, who was eight years older than her.


Professionally, his father was a machinist.  He was also a perfectionist, who could not abide weakness of any kind, especially in his only son.  He was a violent man, who used the ever-present razor strop on John at the drop of a hat.  The father preferred John's elder and younger sisters.  John was the 'ugly duckling', overweight and frequently ill.


Gacy senior was a heavy and solitary drinker - he would vanish into the basement to drink alone every evening, usually emerging in a foul temper.  He often accused his son of stealing things, such as tools.  John feared his father, yet, when questioned on his family relationships, Gacy passionately denied that he hated him.


It seems probable that Gacy's illnesses were some kind of unconscious defence against his father's endless bullying.  He had heart problems from an early age, and when he was ten years old, he began to have blackouts.  Inevitably, his father suspected that he was trying to gain sympathy, and sneered that John was a mama's boy who would probably grow up 'queer'.


At 16, Gacy had a serious epileptic fit, and had to be placed in a straitjacket.  At the age of 20, he left home for a while and worked at a mortuary firm in Las Vegas.  Returning home, Gacy now decided to disprove his father's view of him as a dumb, stupid failure.  He entered the Northwestern Business College, and this time applied himself until he graduated a year later.  From then on, life took a spectacular turn for the better.


Gacy's talkativeness made him an ideal salesman, and his craving to be liked made him trusting and friendly.  He was so successful with the NunnBush Shoe Company that by the age of 22 he had been transferred to Springfield, Illinois, to manage their retail outlet in a leading men's clothing store.
The absence of paternal love as a boy left Gacy dangerously unprepared for adult life.  The death of his father, John Stanley Gacy, the Christmas before Gacy's release from prison put the final seal on the troubled relationship between father and son.  Now there was no hope of discussion or reconciliation.  Gacy had never come to terms with his father's animosity towards him, and bitterly regretted being unable to attend the funeral.  He regularly visited his father's grave to 'talk to him', and was seen there on one occasion sobbing uncontrollably.
  No longer under the shadow of his father, he developed confidence, charm and persuasiveness.  As an active member of the Springfield Junior Chamber of Commerce (the Jaycees), he was in his element - popular, enthusiastic and regarded as a man to be watched.


Gacy discovered, to his delight, that his pudginess and lack of height were no longer obstacles to social success, and it was not long before the energetic young manager had courted and married, in late 1964, a pretty co-worker, Marlynn Myers, whose father was a successful businessman.  That year, Gacy also had his first sexual experience with a man.


When Marlynn's parents bought a chain of Kentucy Fried Chicken franchises in Waterloo, Iowa, their go-getting son in law was the natural choice as manager.


He must have felt like Cinderella after the good fairy had waved her magic wand.  All the childhood misery was behind him - he had emerged like a butterfly from a chrysalis.  In Waterloo, he also joined the Jaycees, becoming a tireless worker for their fund-raising projects and attaining a high rank.  In 1966, he became a father for the first time.

Gacy's downfall was his deviousness and violence, and the abundance of young male employees that came his way through the fried chicken business.  Gacy probably felt that, as a now-successful businessman, he deserved a little self-indulgence.


If the story of Richard Westphal is true - that Gacy allowed him to sleep with Marlynn in exchange for a 'blow job' - it would seem that his wife partly condoned his extra-marital activities.  But when his sexual liaison with Donald Vorhees brought him to the attention of the police, his natural dishonesty led him to seek a crooked solution to the problem.  He engineered a young employee, Russell Schroeder, into a position where he could blackmail him, then ordered Schroeder to spray Mace in the eyes of his accuser and to beat him up until he agreed not to testify.


The plot misfired, and Gacy found himself in prison.  At a single blow, all his newly won security vanished.  His father's prophecy that he would be a failure had been fulfilled with a vengeance.
   GACY FAMILY :


Mrs Karen Gacy Kuzma, John Gacy's younger sister, leaves court during his trial in 1980.  She said family life at the Gacys' could be 'very stormy'.
  After 18 months in prison Gacy went to Chicago.  He was now a cynical manipulator whose traumatic childhood had once again caught up with him.  If he had stayed in Waterloo, it is possible that he would never have committed murder, as the desire to appear a respectable member of the community might have overruled his sexual urges.


In Chicago, he was once again open to overwhelming temptation - gay bars full of young men who could be bought for a few dollars, and a bus station with a constant supply of in-coming country boys with nowhere to sleep.


Where his business life was concerned, he soon started up a successful contracting company.  He even married again, although the craving for boys remained strong.


Gacy considered himself to be bisexual, not homosexual.  To admit that he was would have fulfilled his father's other prophecy - that he would grow up 'queer'.  He told himself he only wanted oral sex from his pick ups; that, he reckoned, did not involve love.  But his hatred of gay men meant that he felt they deserved to be killed.


Gacy suspected that his carelessness in picking up his last victim, Robert Piest, was an unconscious desire to be caught.  Tragically, one more innocent teenager had to pay the price before Gacy was finally apprehended.
  JOHN GACY :


One of the last photographs of John Gacy, taken while he was a prisoner of the Illinois Department of Corrections.  As the police searched the crawl space under his home for bodies, Gacy was admitting guilt - even drawing a map showing the exact spots where he buried his victims.
  The arrival of police cars and ambulances outside the house of John Gacy, on 21st December 1978, caused a tremendous stir.  The neighbours were incredulous.  They all knew Gacy as a 'nice guy', good natured and helpful.  In snowy weather, he would voluntarily clear his neighbour's drives with a snow-plough, and even got street lights installed.  He was known as a man who drank sparingly, disapproved of drugs and who hated homosexuals.


They did not know about his recent troubles with the police, because he had confided in them that he was suing the police.  It was also true that there had been some talk a few years ago about a kid whom he had employed, and who had disappeared.  But Gacy told them the boy was a runaway.


One friend, however, knew that Gacy was suspected of something more serious than possessing marijuana.  Shortly before his arrest, Gacy called on a close friend, Ron Rhode, in a state of near hysteria, and told him in a broken voice: 'I've been a bad boy.  I killed 30 people, give or take a few.'  He leaned his head on his friend's shoulder and began to cry.


Now, as they dug in the stench filled crawl space, the investigators were learning for themselves that John Wayne Gacy was one of the worst serial killers in American history.  Five years earlier, police in Texas had dug up 27 bodies of young men, most of them from a boat shed rented by a man named Dean Corll, who had been shot to death by his lover Elmer Wayne Henley.  But it looked as though Gacy's count was going to outstrip Corll's.  Body after body was being uncovered - all of them young men, and most of them decomposed.


The conditions the investigators had to work in were appalling.  They had to take all kinds of medical precautions, wear disposable overalls and gas masks.  Even so, the methane gas in the air made them feel sick and dizzy.  It also meant that anyone who struck a light could cause an explosion.  Afterwards, they had to bathe in disinfectant.
   KILLER IN THEIR MIDST :


The discovery by neighbours of a serial killer living in the heart of their community usually produces an understandable psychological reaction.  Often, they feel that the person they knew had betrayed them; had used them as camouflage, and therefore - in some strange way - implicated them in his crimes.


The residence of West Summerdale Avenue were appalled when they learned that Gacy, kindly neighbour, was a multiple murderer.


Many gathered at the house to watch the police as they searched for bodies.  One though that the murder house should be exorcised; another jumped over the police barrier to shout abuse at Gacy's next door neighbours, alleging that they must have known what was going on.


One reporter observed that the neighbours began to 'live like hermits', as if they felt a sense of common shame at having lived on the same street as Gacy, almost justifying their very existence.
  Meanwhile, Gacy, the cause of all this, was at police headquarters, confessing to seven years of brutal killing.  His face was strangely lifeless, as if he was in shock or on drugs, and he occasionally lapsed into a semi-comatose state from which he would wake up with a jerk, apparently not sure where he was.  If this was just acting, it was a strangely convincing performance.


According to him, he, John Gacy, had not committed the murders.  The culprit was a sinister alter-ego named 'Jack', who hated gay men, and killed for that reason.  But that story failed to explain why he had killed Robert Piest, who was definitely not homosexual.


Gacy proceeded to explain.  The kid had come over to his truck while he was writing down figures, and asked about a summer job.  Gacy told him to jump in and they would talk about it.  Back in his house, he had tried hinting that the boy could make money by selling his body, but it was obvious that Piest was straight, and not at all interested in Gacy's suggestion.


Then Gacy picked up a pair of handcuffs from his sitting room bar and began to fiddle with them idly.  The boy asked what they were for, and Gacy explained that they were trick handcuffs.


'Look, I'll demonstrate,' Gacy said.  'Put your hands behind you.'  The boy did as he was told.  'Now,' said Jack - for it was no longer John in charge, but his evil alter-ego - I'm going to rape you, and you can't do nothing about it.'  But the boy was obviously so upset and scared that Gacy - who was now back in charge - changed his mind, and decided to release him.
   COOK COUNTY SHERIFF'S POLICE :


On 17th March 1979, Cook County sheriff's police removed the remains of the last body - the 29th - found either under John Gacy's house or elsewhere on the property.  By this time, the house had been reduced to a shell in the search for bodies; these were taken to the Cook County Forensic Institute for autopsies and identification.
  Gacy took the teenager into the bedroom to get the handcuff key, and found himself drifting into a fog that blotted out his memory.  Suddenly the telephone rang.  It was a friend asking him why he was late for a meeting.  (The friend later stated that Gacy sounded perfectly normal and controlled.)  After making some excuse, Gacy hung up and went back to the bedroom.


The boy was lying on the floor, wedged between the wall and the bed.  It was clear that he had been strangled by the rope that was tight around his neck, twisted into a tourniquet with a hammer handle.  By the time Elizabeth Piest rang the Nisson Pharmacy to ask if her son had returned, 15 year old Robert Piest was already dead.

 
Instead of immediately disposing of the body, Gacy left it in the bedroom, and drove to visit his dying Uncle who had been hospitalised.  When he got there, he found that his Uncle had already died, so he then visited his aunt for a couple of hours.


Back at his house, Gacy carried the dead boy, via a ladder, up into the attic, and left him there for the night.  Later asked by the doctors if he had slept with the body, Gacy indignantly denied it - what sane man would want to sleep with a corpse?  Piest's body had been in the attic at 9.20 the next morning when Lieutenant Kozenczak and another officer called to ask about the teenager's disappearance.
SAM STAPLETON ROBERT WINCH JAMES MAZZARA RICHARD JOHNSTON


LOST BOYS :


Young men who hustle on the Chicago streets know they are taking risks, but many of Gacy's victims were ordinary boys still living at home.  For example Samuel Stapleton, aged 14, was merely walking home from his sister's place, in May 1976, when he vanished.  Eighteen year old Richard Johnston was on his way home from a concert in Uptown.
  Gacy had heaved a sigh of relief when the policemen left.  But now Bad Jack had left him, as usual, with the problem of disposing of the corpse.  There was no more room in the crawl space under the house, where he had buried almost all the bodies.  Robert Piest's corpse would have to be dumped in the local Des Plaines River, just as three of his other recent victims had been.


After the police had left, a former employee, Michael Rossi, called to borrow some Christmas tree lights.  'They're in the attic,' said Gacy, and hurried up there before the youth - who was familiar with the house - could offer to go and get them.  Then Gacy and Rossi spent some time drinking beers and smoking a joint.


Later that night, Gacy lost no time in wrapping the corpse in a blanket and carrying it out to his Oldsmobile.  He put it into the boot and drove south on I-294 to the bridge over the Des Plaines River.  There he stopped and heaved the body over the parapet into the water.  He then hurried back to Des Plaines, and his long-delayed interview with Lieutenant Kozenczak.


By now in a rush, Gacy skidded on the icy road, landing in thick mud on the riverbank.  A highway patrolman spotted the car and asked Gacy if he wanted a tow-truck.  Gacy, who was inherently mean, declined the officer, as it would cost money.  Instead, he tried to get the car out by jacking up the rear wheel and placing the spare tyre under it.


When that failed, he reluctantly asked the patrolman to call a tow-truck.  It arrived 20 minutes later, and the operator winched the car out of the mud and on to the road.  Gacy, unwilling to part with his cash, pretended he was a police officer, and tried to persuade the truck driver to charge the tow to the Cook County Lighting Department.  When this was flatly refused, Gacy took out his wallet and suddenly handed over $20.  He then drove to the police station where, at 3.20am, he was surprised to find that Kozenczak had given up waiting for him.
ROBERT GILROY MATTHEW RONAN JOHN SZYC FRANK LANDINGIN


VANISHED :


When their children disappeared, many parents eventually assumed they had run away.  Incredibly, no one - not even the police - saw any significance in the number of young men who had gone missing on the north side of Chicago within a few months.  Among Gacy's victims in 1977 was John Szyc, whose car Gacy later sold, and hitchhiker Robert Gilroy.
  On 23rd December 1978, two days after Gacy's arrest, the police dug up the first two corpses from the crawl space beneath the bungalow.  One of them was encased in concrete, the second in a plastic wrapper.  Over the two days of Christmas, the 24th and 25th, the search for bodies was halted.


On 28th December, six more bodies were exhumed; one was buried under the floor of the garage.  A driving licence in the name of Frank Landingin indicated that Gacy was also responsible for the death of a bearded young man whose naked body had been taken from the Des Plaines River in November, and had been identified from fingerprints.


The discovery of more driving licences and identification papers pointed to the identity of other victims.  A few days later, ten bodies were removed and the day after that, six more.  Three of them were placed so close together, and were in such a similar state of decomposition that the police surmised that they had all been killed together.


The murders were creating a nationwide sensation.  The house was permanently surrounded by TV cameras and newsmen, and every news bulletin showed photographs of the ordinary looking house, with Christmas lights twinkling outside.


The apparent innocuousness of the house and its fairly harmless looking owner heightened the shock and revulsion that viewers felt as the foul reality of Gacy's deeds were revealed.  Parents all over the country were suddenly terrified that their missing teenage sons might be buried in that terrible crawl space at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue.


A few had already had their worst fears confirmed.  These included the families of John Butkovich - who had been missing since August 1975 - Gregory Godzik, John Szyc and Rick Johnston.  About a fortnight after the search began, Dr Robert J. Stein, the Cook County Medical Examiner, had 27 corpses in his morgue.  The count of those recovered from Gacy's house or elsewhere on the property would eventually reach 29.  With another four victims discovered dumped in the Des Plaines River (including the body of Robert Piest), Gacy's murder tally came to 33.  It gave him the record for committing the most murders in US history.  How, everyone wanted to know could he have got away with it?
   JOHN GACY :


John Gacy, with a moustache, sitting in the rear of a police car after his arrest in December 1978.  For days, he had been overtly followed by a police surveillance team in order to put him under pressure.
  From a fairly young age, it was clear that John Wayne Gacy had psychiatric problems and that they were linked to his father, John Stanley Gacy.


Gacy senior was a violent bully and an alcoholic.  He was also a man who would never admit that he might be in the wrong.  'If my father said the sun wouldn't rise tomorrow,' Gacy remembered, 'you couldn't disagree with him.  He'd argue you into the ground.'


From John Gacy's earliest childhood, his father used a razor strop on the little boy; he equated punishment with teaching.  The child could never do things right, was 'dumb and stupid', did not want to learn.  The father screamed and threatened and beat him.  His father detested him for his sickly weaknesses, and for not being interested in manly sports.


Even the many blackouts he suffered - the result of a head injury he received as an 11 year old - did not bring him sympathy; Gacy senior accused him of play-acting.


Once, when he was older, Gacy junior tried to stop his father beating on his mother; in the fray, he managed to pin his father against the wall, but could not bring himself to punch him.  It was a struggle of love and hate.


Lack of acceptance by his father helps to explain how he became obsessed with being liked and admired by other people.  He also learnt how to kill his finer feelings, absorbing his father's percept that the other person was only out to exploit him - and that he, John Gacy, had better do it first.
   GACY'S ART :


Gacy made these two striking pictures when he was in prison after his arrest in 1978.  They give vivid expression to two sides of his complex personality.  The clown reflects his desire to be loved and accepted, while the cracked skull illustrates his fascination with death.
  Gacy's sexual history began at the age of four, when a retarded 15 year old girl removed his trousers and played with him.  At six years old, Gacy was caught with a neighbours son and the boy's little sister, all naked and playing sex games.


For this, John was badly beaten by his father, but it did not prevent a contractor friend of his father's from taking him for rides in his truck, and fondling him.


In the same year, 1949, his mother found her underwear draw empty, and discovered all her knickers under the front porch in a box; Gacy said he liked the soft feel of the material.  Again, he was beaten.


Gacy's father never spoke to his son about sexual matters; however, his mother had impressed upon him that sex was something marvellous and sacred.  At 18, however, he weighed nearly 200 pounds, and felt so ugly that he did not bother to find a girl to date.  One day, though he encountered a willing girl whom he managed to undress in his father's car.  He was fascinated by the sight of her naked body, but when it became clear that she expected him to make love to her, he fainted.


Conflicts with his father soon drove him away, to Las Vegas, where he worked in the Palm Mortuary as a janitor.  Being obsessively tidy, he made an excellent caretaker.  He was fascinated by the sight of dead bodies, particularly those of young men.  One teenager who was brought in actually had an erection in death.  Gacy was so excited by this that, as he later told prison psychiatrists, he got into the boy's coffin, and positioned himself under the corpse.  It was a moment that married horror, sex and death in his soul.
   PROFESSOR LAWRENCE Z. FREEDMAN :


Professor Lawrence Z. Freedman, a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago, made a study of Gacy, involving 50 hours of interviews with him.  Freedman believed that the 'most common mass murders are committed by killers frustrated with society...', who often wish to be liked and admired.  He summed up Gacy as a 'pseudo-neurotic schizophrenic paranoid'.
  Gacy shared another thing with most sex killers - he was a pathological liar and thief from an early age.  He lied - for example, inventing a career in the Marines - to impress people.  He stole because it made him feel clever and superior.  His sadism may have been built on his childhood experiences of violent beatings by his overbearing father.


Gacy was not necessarily lying when he insisted that he was a kind of Jekyll and Hyde figure, though he claimed he had no less than four personalities (three of them variants of an alter ego called 'Jack', including 'Bad Jack' and 'Smart Jack').  But such an admission is not evidence that he was a multiple personality, such as the patient in the famous 'Three Faces of Eve' case.  Here there was medical testimony to prove that Eve had three personalities; however, no such testimony supported Gacy's claim.


There was plenty of testimony about his sexual confusion, and denial of homosexuality - he preferred to project this onto the other person.  It was this hate of the homosexual within himself, and the furious rage it provoked, that probably underpinned the murders.


Gacy may well have been telling the truth in asserting that many of his murders were, on the surface, the outcome of quarrels.  Gacy was intensely self-assertive.  His upbringing had left him with a powerful need to impose his will on others.  When someone quarrelled with him, he had no doubt whatever that he was in the right, and would have felt no compunction in killing.  But killing also fed his craving for dominance, so that sadism became a basic part of the murders. (The screams heard by the neighbours suggest that he tortured his victims.)


Yet, it is probably true to say that he was, on another level, an apparently decent person who needed to please people and receive respect.  It is not surprising then that at the trial, the psychiatrist Lawrence Z. Freedman said that Gacy was one of the most complex personalities he had ever encountered. 
   KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN :


During the 1960's, held a responsible job running three Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, owned by his father in law, Fred Myers, in Waterloo, Iowa.  But Gacy used his position to exploit and blackmail his young mail employees.
  As the facts about Gacy began to emerge, the Des Plaines Police Department fount it hard to conceal its embarrassment.  Gacy's record was so appalling that it seemed incredible he had still been at liberty to murder Robert Piest.


In 1968, when Gacy was 26 years old and running a flourishing fried chicken business, he was suddenly accused of attempting to rape one teenage boy and committing an indecent act with another.  The community in which he then lived - the town of Waterloo, Iowa - was stunned, as was Gacy's wife.  After all, he was a prominent and active member of the local Jaycees (Junior Chamber of Commerce), known for his charitable and social work; the kind of man who looked likely to end up as mayor.


Gacy had invited Edward Lynch, a 16 year old employee of his Kentucky Fried Chicken business, to his home while his wife was in hospital, giving birth.  The boy described how they had played in the pool, and Gacy had suggested the loser should perform oral sex on the winner.  The boy flatly declined.  After showing his pornographic films, Gacy made a sudden attack on his guest with a kitchen knife.


Lynch succeeded in wrestling free, whereupon Gacy apologised profusely, and explained that he was under strain.  When the boy agreed to forget it, Gacy showed him another blue movie.  Towards the end, he went out of the room and returned with a chain and padlock.  Slightly ashamed of reacting so violently to the earlier 'horseplay', and afraid of losing his job, the boy allowed Gacy to manacle his hands behind him.  Moments later, he realised that he had been too trusting as Gacy hurled him face downward on the floor, and locked his hands around his throat.


Lynch then lost consciousness briefly.  When the boy recovered, Gacy was unchaining his hands and asking if he was all right.  'I'll take you home,' he said.  'I didn't mean to do that...'  A few days later, Lynch was sacked.


In the case of the second accusation, it was obvious that the sexual acts had taken place by mutual consent.  The youth, Donald Vorhees, was the 15 year old son of a fellow Jaycee, and had accepted an invitation to go back to Gacy's home to watch a pornographic movie.  Once again, Gacy's wife was away.  After watching the film, Gacy initiated a discussion about sex, then said he had head that the boy had been known to perform fellatio.  According to the youth, he was then forced to have oral sex with Gacy.
   MARLYNN MYERS :


Gacy's first wife, Marlynn knew little of her husband's sexual activities with teenagers.  It was while she was out of town that he brought them back to the house.
  On two occasions, Vorhees went back to borrow money from Gacy, and each time, oral sex had occurred.  But when the youth's father mentioned that Gacy was standing for president of the Jaycees, and the he was going to be Gacy's campaign manager, the boy warned him that Gacy was not as honest and decent as he appeared.  The father demanded that his son give him more information, and when the secret came out, he went straight to the police to report Gacy.


Gacy was accused of threatening and abusing Edward Lynch as well as Donald Vorhees.  His first reaction was to deny everything and demand a lie detector test.  When this was given - twice - it showed unmistakably that he was guilty.


Yet he continued to maintain his innocence with a passion that convinced many people.  Gacy's explanation was that Edward Lynch was simply trying to get back at him for giving him the sack.  As for Vorhees, he later admitted that the charge of having sex with the boy was true, but insisted that it had been with full mutual consent, and that anyway, he was merely 'experimenting' with homosexuality to see what it was like.


Those who were inclined to believe him had their faith severely tested when he was further accused of hiring a teenage boy to beat up Donald Vorhees, followed by a completely unrelated charge of burgling the storeroom of a lumber company in nearby Raymond.


The burglary had been carried out by Gacy and one of his young employees, Russell Schroeder, and the motive was fairly obvious - to place Schroeder in a compromising position so that he could be blackmailed.
   JOHN GACY & HIS WIFE MARLYNN :


Gacy was living in Waterloo, Iowa, when he was arrested in 1968 on sodomy charges.  He was so well respected in the community - he is seen here at a function - that many thought he had been framed.
  Gacy had another personal quirk.  He sometimes pretended he was a policeman and drove a car equipped with a spotlight and police radio.  On this occasion, he had invited Schroeder to go with him on his 'rounds', then crow-barred his way into the lumber company building, where Schroeder was ordered to break into the Coke machine and help himself to the cash.  This amounted to just three dollars.  Gacy stole an extension cord and a can of paint.  Later, they burgled yet another business, which Gacy was supposed to be 'guarding'; he even got Schroeder to steal some hubcaps off a few cars at an Oldsmobile lot in Waterloo.  Schroeder insisted that he had never previously stolen anything in his life, and that he had only done so because he had been ordered to do so by Gacy.


The blackmail came later, when Gacy told Schroeder that he wanted Donald Vorhees beaten up and forced to promise not to testify.  At first, Schroeder refused, but under pressure, allowed himself to be 'persuaded'.  The following day, 30th August 1968, Schroeder introduced himself to Vorhees on the local campus, and explained that he had been selected to act as his 'big brother' for a few days.


Vorhees, flattered that a youth two years his senior should show an interest in him, readily agreed to go for a drive to help his 'big brother' pick up some stolen liquor hidden in a remote wooden area.  Once there, Schroeder sprayed a can of Mace - supplied by Gacy - in his eyes; Vorhees fell screaming into a creek.  As he scrambled out of the water, Schroeder sprayed more Mace, then began to punch him, shouting that he was not to testify against John Gacy.  Vorhees lashed out and succeeded in hitting his assailant on the nose, and making it bleed.  Running blindly into the woods, Vorhees managed to escape while Schroeder tried to staunch the flow of blood.


The next day, Schroeder was arrested.  He refused to implicate Gacy, saying that he had been hired by a man named Jim.  But the next day he had a change of heart, and told the story of the burglary, and of being blackmailed into attacking Donald Vorhees.
   JUDGE PETER VAN METRE :


Judge Peter Van Metre sentenced Gacy to ten years' imprisonment, the maximum time permitted for a charge of sodomy in the 1960's.  Van Metre had previously been criticized for his lenient sentencing.
  While Gacy was in jail awaiting trial, the police collected the testimony of two more teenage employees.  One, Richard Westphal, described how Gacy had joked that if he caught him sleeping with his wife, Westphal would owe Gacy a 'blow job'.  One night, in January 1967, when the boy was working late at Gacy's house constructing a basement bar, Gacy told him he could stay the night.


As soon as the boy was in bed, Gacy's wife Marlynn came in and seduced him.  The light went on and Gacy burst in.  'Now you owe me a blow job,' Gacy cried triumphantly.  He and his wife went off - it had obviously been prearranged - leaving the embarrassed youth in bed.  A few days later, Gacy insisted on receiving his 'payment.'


The other boy had a more sinister story to tell.  He had spent an evening with Gacy getting drunk at a local quarry, and clambered out of the car to vomit.  The next minute, Gacy was standing beside him holding a six-shooter.


'Let's play Russian Roulette,' said Gacy, removing five bullets from the chambers.  The youth objected: 'I might get killed.'


'That's the idea,' said Gacy.  'You know too much.'  He pointed the gun at the boy's head and pulled the trigger.  It clicked on an empty chamber.  Four more times he pulled the trigger on empty chambers.  'This is it.'  He pulled it a sixth time - and again it clicked.  Gacy burst into laughter, and drove the boy home. 
   THE GACY CASE :

The Gacy case made headlines in the local newspapers, shocking friends and associates.  Gacy was sent to the Iowa State Reformatory for Men where he quickly became a model prisoner.
  He had even, it emerged, persuaded some of his male employees that he was a sex researcher, appointed by the Governor of Illinois, to conduct scientific research in order to change the sex laws of the state.  This involved experimenting with homosexuality.  At least one 15 year old allowed himself to be taken to a motel room in the interests of science.


Gacy stood trial in November 1968, and pleaded guilty to sodomy. (Under American law, the charge covers oral sex.)  For a while, it looked very much as if he would receive probation.  But Judge Peter Van Metre rejected the psychiatrists' plea that Gacy, a bisexual and sociopath, was just 'thrill-seeking' in his sexual activities with Vorhees, and that all he needed was 'intense parole supervision'.  Recognising that the evidence showed Gacy to be a highly manipulative personality who would go to enormous lengths to seduce young boys, and who had a disturbing sadistic streak, the judge sentenced John Gacy to ten years in jail.  The next day Marlynn Gacy - now the mother of two children - sued for divorce.


In the Iowa State Reformatory for Men at Anamosa, Gacy displayed his chameleon-like ability to appear decent, hard-working and respectable.  He became prison cook, and threw himself into the job with enthusiasm.  Incredibly, there was a chapter of the Junior Chamber of Commerce even in prison, and Gacy joined it and became one of its most prominent members.  His conduct was so good that he was paroled after only 18 months.


He had told some friends in Waterloo - who still believed he had been framed by political rivals - that he intended to re-establish himself in the town.  But within 24 hours of his release, he was on his way to Chicago.
   8213 WEST SUMMERDALE AVENUE :


John Wayne Gacy committed all the murders we know about at his one storey, ranch-style house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in unincorporated Norwood Park Township, on the northwest corner of Chicago.  Here he buried 28 bodies in the crawl space below his house, and one under his garage floor.  The rest he threw into the nearby Des Plaines River.
  A man with Gacy's energy, charm and determination was bound to succeed, which was why Gacy's parole officer allowed him to move to Chicago.  Gacy soon proved him right.  He moved in with his mother - his father had died while he was in jail - and found a job as a short-order cook.  There were plenty of jobs of this kind, and he moved regularly to better himself.  Soon, he decided to start his own business.  He called it PDM (standing for Painting, Decorating and Maintenance) Contractors.


On one of his first jobs in June 1971, he met the room-mate of the man whose apartment he was decorating.  The room mate, who was gay, lost no time in offering sex.  He also told Gacy where to pick up hustlers - at the local Greyhound bus terminal.  He added that the corner of Clark and Broadway, on Chicago's North Side, was a well-known gay area, bustling with male prostitutes.


This advice was to lead to Gacy's first encounter with the law in Chicago.  In February 1971, a young man went to the police and complained that Gacy had picked him up at the Greyhound depot and tried to force him to have sex, using violence.  But the youth failed to appear in court, and the charge was dropped.  The Parole Board never learned of the incident, and Gacy was released from his parole eight months later, in October 1871.


By now, Gacy had moved into his own home, a two bedroom bungalow in West Summerdale Avenue, Norwood Park Township, an unincorporated community on the northwest edge of Chicago, just a few streets south of the John F. Kennedy Expressway.  The place had only one problem: the crawl space under the floor was inclined to fill with water from an underground stream.  To deal with this, Gacy installed a pump.  He introduced himself to his next door neighbours, the Grexas, and invited them in for Christmas to meet his mother and family.  They found him charming.  John also introduced them to a woman named Carol Lofgren, a divorcee with two young daughters, and the Grexas sensed romance in the air.
   MARION GACY :


While he was at the Iowa State Reformatory for Men, John Gacy's mother, Marion, moved into an apartment in north Chicago.  It had been paid off by Gacy senior before he died.  When Gacy was released on parole, he moved in with his mother - a step approved of by his parole officer, believing it would give him the stability he needed.  Only a year later, he had readjusted so well that his mother helped him to buy his own home, at West Summerdale Avenue.
  Christmas was also the time Gacy visited his father's grave, something that upset him greatly.  This time, ten days after Christmas 1971, Gacy committed his first murder.  The victim was an unidentified youth of about 18, whom he had picked up late at night outside the Greyhound depot.


Gacy's own later account of the murder sounded, to say the least, unlikely.  He insisted that, after taking the young man home and having mutual oral sex, he - Gacy - fell asleep in his own bed.  At about 4am, he woke up to find the youth standing over him with a butcher's knife.  They wrestled, and fell down.  The knife went into the young man, killing him.  So Gacy buried him in the crawl space - because, he explained, with his record for homosexual offences, the police would never have believed it was an accident.

When, on 1st July 1972, he married Carol Lofgren in the local church, neighbours who attended the reception at his house notice an odd, musty odour - like a dead rat or a sewage leak.  Gacy said it was the water that kept leaking into the crawl space.


To the Grexas, the marriage seemed happy enough.  Gacy even had his mother in law to live with them.  But one day, when Mrs Grexa jokingly asked Carol when a little one would be on the way, she replied that you have to have sex before you could get pregnant.  She did not add that her husband made no secret of his taste for pornographic magazines full of nude men, or that he had openly admitted that he preferred boys.
   GACY DRESSED AS POGO THE CLOWN :


In 1975, Gacy joined the Jolly Joker Club, whose members dressed as clowns to entertain children at parties or hospitals.  Gacy went as Pogo.
  John Gacy, meanwhile, was becoming something of a local celebrity.  Now too old (at about 33) for the Junior Chamber of Commerce, he approached the local Democratic organisation and offered to work for them, even volunteering to use his young building workers to keep their offices clean.  They accept eagerly.


He also joined a lodge of the Loyal Order of Moose - a fraternal, do-gooding society - whose Jolly Joker Clown Club entertained many children over the public holidays.  Gacy designed himself a clown's costume, and 'Pogo the Clown' became a familiar figure in the children's wards of the local hospitals, and at Democratic fund-raising activities.  'When I was Pogo,' he said, 'I was in another world.'


His young male employees saw another side of his character.  Most obviously, he was mean with wages.  He insisted, for example, on paying them only for the time they worked, not for travel between jobs.  Since they had to move from one job to another, sometimes several times a day, the young men lost a great deal of money.  One employee, 16 year old Tony Antonucci - whom he had hired in May 1975 - had another complaint.


One evening in July, Gacy came to his home late at night with a bottle of wine.  After watching some stag films, Gacy started to wrestle, supposedly playfully, with the boy.  Suddenly, he slipped a pair of handcuffs onto Antonucci's wrists; however, one cuff was quite loose, and when Gacy left the room for a moment, the boy freed himself from it.


When Gacy returned, the youth tackled him, slipped the loosened cuff onto Gacy's wrist, seized the key, unlocked the other wrist, and manacled both of Gacy's hands behind him.  Gacy struggled and screamed threats, then finally calmed down and persuaded the youth to remove the cuffs.  He made no further attempts to force sex on Antonucci, who stayed in his employ for another nine months.
   JEFF RIGNALL :


Jeff Rignall's photograph was taken soon after he had been chloroformed , raped and savagely beaten by Gacy.  On partly recovering from the ordeal, he took out a private lawsuit against him.
  The Grexas' son Ron, also had a reason to get angry with Gacy.  He too went to work for him, and turned down propositions of sex for payment.  But what caused the rift was Gacy's usual meanness - his refusal to pay him for all the hours he had worked.  Ron Grexa became so angry that he threatened to burn down Gacy's house.  Gacy reported the threat to police, then called on his neighbours to apologise, and hoped that their friendship would remain intact.  They accepted his apology and assured him it would.


Another young employee, John Butkovich, resented Gacy's meanness as well.  At the end of July 1975, he was complaining to his father, Marco, a Yugoslav immigrant, that Gacy was refusing to pay him for his last two weeks' work.  Marco suggested that his son should inform the authorities that Gacy was not deducting tax from his employees' pay cheques - a legal requirement.


That evening, John Butkovich and two friends called on Gacy to demand the money.  Gacy calmed them down and argued that Butkovich owed him money for materials purchased on his contractor's account, and used for redecorating Marco Butkovich's apartment.


Finally, the young men, smoked marijuana, drank beer and left.  Gacy - according to his later account - decided to go out and look for sex.  In the early hours of the morning, he saw John Butkovich getting out of his car.  Butkovich agreed to go back to Gacy's house and discuss their differences.


The following morning, said Gacy, he woke up in bed and went into the living room.  There he found John Butkovich lying on his back, hands cuffed behind him, and a rope knotted around his throat.  Gacy's evil alter-ego Bad Jack had been at work again.  Fortunately Carol and the children were away for the weekend.  Gacy lost no time in dragging the body to the garage and burying it under the floor, which he concreted over.


The Butkoviches reported their son's disappearance to the police, who over the next two years held over a hundred conversations with Gacy about the missing boy.  Finally, they gave up.  They concluded that Butkovich was a run-away.
   WILLIAM CARROLL JUNIOR :
William Carroll Junior, known as Billy, had been missing for two years when his father, William Senior, finally learnt of his whereabouts: his body was one of the 29 found under Gacy's house.  A street-wise boy, he was only 16 when he died.  Gacy's victims were either strangled with rope or asphyxiated by a gag - often the boy's own underwear - thrust down the throat.
  Gacy and Carol divorced in March 1976.  She was thoughtful enough to accuse him of infidelity with another woman.  Alone now, there was nothing to prevent him from bringing his pick-ups back to the house.  His neighbours became aware of changes in Gacy's behaviour.  Lights would come on in his house in the small hours; his car was heard driving away and returning at odd times in the night.  Banging sounds were also heard.


A month after Carol had moved out, a young man named Darrell Sampson went back tot he house on West Summerdale Avenue, and vanished.  He was last seen alive on 6th April 1976.  On 14th May, a youth named Randall Reffett joined Darrell Sampson in the crawl space.  That was a busy day for Gacy, for he also picked up 14 year old Samuel Stapleton as he was walking to his home a block away.  The two corpses were found buried together.


On 10th June 1976, Billy Carroll, who occasionally made money as a hustler, was buried under the house.  Two months later, Rick Johnston, aged 18, vanished on his way back from a concert; his body, too, was exhumed from the crawl space.  On 11th December, another Gacy employee, 17 year old Gregory Godzik, made the mistake of calling at Gacy's house on his way home from a date with a girlfriend.  His car was later found abandoned.  His frantic parents hired a private investigator to search for their son, but he made no headway.  On 20th January 1977, another youth who worked for Gacy, 19 year old John Szyc, disappeared.


A clue to Szyc's disappearance emerged nine months later when a young man named Mike Rossi was arrested for a minor offence while driving John Szyc's car.  Rossi referred the police to the man in whose house he was living, John Gacy.  Smoothly, Gacy explained that he had bought the car from John Szyc, who had needed money to leave town.  And they believed him.
   JOHN GACY'S FUND-RAISING :


John Gacy, shakes hands with Chicago's mayor Michael Bilandic at the ground-breaking ceremony for a retirement centre in early 1978.  Gacy had donated trucks and performed as Pogo the Clown to raise funds for the scheme.
  Gacy was beginning to acquire a bad reputation among Chicago's male hustlers.  One, named Jaimie, went back to Gacy's soon after Gacy's divorce, and was shocked when, after getting undressed, he was struck violently in the face.  He managed to avoid being handcuffed, but was hurled on the bed and violently raped.  Since he had been perfectly willing to do whatever Gacy wanted, the force was unnecessary.  He realised that Gacy was one of those men who need to inflict pain to obtain maximum enjoyment out of sex.  After the rape, Gacy paid him $100 and drove him home.  He had been so badly beaten that he needed a month to recover.


On 6th January 1978, Gacy was arrested and taken to the police station.  A male prostitute, Robert Donnelly, had made a complaint.  He had gone to Gacy's house, agreeing to 'slavery sex', but not to what actually happened.  Gacy had handcuffed him, then spent the night alternately choking and raping him, and holding his head underwater in a bath until he passed out.  But since Donnelly had agreed to 'slavery sex', the police decided not to pursue the case.


The incident that came closest to causing Gacy's downfall occurred the following Spring.  On 21st March 1978, 26 year old Jeff Rignall accepted a lift from a jocular fat man in the early hours of the morning.  As they drove along in his Oldsmobile, the man offered him a joint, which they smoked as they talked.  Suddenly, the fat man stopped the car and thrust a wet rag into his face.  It smelled of chloroform.


Rignall came to in a basement room, which had a picture of a clown on the wall.  Rignall's head and hands were locked in a kind of pillory.  The floor was covered with leather whips and plastic dildos, and he had been stripped naked.  Rignall was alternately raped and chloroformed.  Finally, he woke up in the snow in a park, in a state of physical agony, with bleeding and facial burns.  Medical examinations revealed that he had suffered permanent liver damage from the chloroform.


Rignall was enraged, and decided to hunt down his assailant.  He spent a month sitting in a car at freeway entrances, watching for the black Oldsmobile with its fat driver.  In late April, he spotted it and followed it until he got the licence number.  He went to the police and told them he had found his assailant.  Yet even when he had identified John Gacy from a mug shot, the police decided there was insufficient evidence for a conviction.  Rignall then went to an attorney and issued a civil warrant for Gacy's arrest.
   RONALD E. RHODE :


Ronald E. Rhode, a close friend of Gacy, was told by him that he - Gacy - could 'fool any psychiatrist' into believing he was insane, and thus get away with murder.  Sanity became the key issue at Gacy's trial.
  Meanwhile, Gacy was taking part in a Polish Constitution Day parade, being photographed shaking hands with Rosalynn Carter, the wife of the President.  When he learnt of the warrant for his arrest, he promptly filed a countercharge, saying that Rignall had tried to anaesthetise him with Rush, a liquid - isobutyl nitrate - whose fumes are said to heighten sexual pleasure.


So Gacy remained at large.  His crawl space was now so full that there was no further room for corpses.  In mid-June 1978, a youth named Tim O'Rourke went out one night to buy cigarettes.  His body was thrown into the Des Plaines River.  So was that of Frank Landingin, picked up on 3rd November 1978, and James Mazzara, who vanished some time in late November while he was out looking for lodgings.


But success was making Gacy increasingly careless.  When picking up his latest victim, Robert Piest, in December 1978, Gacy unwittingly left a trail of clues behind him.
   DEMOLISHING THE HOUSE OF DEATH :
The search for Gacy's victims under and throughout his house on West Summerdale Avenue, in Norwood Park Township, left it looking like a ruin.  The brick facing had been torn down to reveal the wooden under-cladding typical of 1950s tract housing.  It was certainly unfit for living in, being too hazardous - not that anyone would have cared to stay there anyway.  So, in April 1979, the one-storey ranch-style home was demolished, although the vacant lot was still owned by Gacy and his mother.  Today, the weed-infested site remains empty, visited only by the occasional tourist.
  By the time the 29 corpses had been removed from the crawl space, in early 1979, Gacy's house was little but a shell.  In the spring, it was declared unsafe and torn down, so that nothing but swamp-like yellow mud remained.  The empty lot became an attraction for morbid-minded tourists, but most of them clearly found it a disappointment.


In late April, 1979, with the recovery of Robert Piest's body from the Des Plaines River, all of Gacy's victims were finally accounted for.  Piest's parents formed the Robert J Piest Foundation, to help fight the crime against children.


In Chicago's Cermak Mental Hospital, Gacy was examined by a battery of psychiatrists.  From the beginning, he insisted he was the victim of the evil alter-ego called Jack, who actually committed the murders (although he later conceded that he, john, had committed a few of them).  Jack himself was split into separate characters, such as Smart Jack and Bad Jack.  The latter would take over late at night, when Gacy had been drinking, and make John go out and look for victims.  But Gacy altered his story so frequently that in the end it was hard to believe anything he said.  One of his psychiatrists even threatened to quit if he did not stop lying.


Gacy insisted that many of the murders had been self-defence, including the first, the Greyhound bus boy.  Others had taken place in the course of quarrels - the one preceding the Butkovich murder was about wages, the one before the Godzik murder was about drugs, the one before the Szyc murder about a car and so on.


Then Gacy gave another explanation for some of the deaths.  The boys had engaged in sexual relations willingly, and had agreed to have a rope tightened around their necks in order to induce an erection and orgasm.  His defence team decided that most of these explanations would only alienate a jury.  They decided to plead insanity.
   JOHN GACY :
After his arrest, Gacy was taken for psychiatric examination and confined to his bed by the use of leather restraints, allegedly because of a suicide attempt.
  John Gacy's trial opened on 6th February 1980, before Judge Louis B. Garippo, with a speech in which the prosecution lawyer, Robert Egan, argued that Gacy was quite simply an evil man.  Defence attorney Robert Motta argued that a man who could sleep in a house with 29 dead bodies was not evil, but insane.  Gacy, it emerged later, was indignant that his own defence could not think up a story that might lead to his acquittal.  For, as the psychiatric examinations had disclosed, Gacy felt no remorse whatsoever about his crimes.  He had a self-justifying excuse for each and every one of them.


One the second day of trial, parents of the dead boys gave evidence, many of them crying or even fainting.  Gacy looked on with an irritable sneer, convinced all this was play-acting.  A few days later, two youths who had lived in Gacy's house (and been, according to Gacy, his lovers) gave evidence.  Both David Cram and Mike Rossi described how they had dug trenches in the crawl space, on Gacy's instructions.  The trenches, he told them, were for pipes.  Then detectives who had interviewed Gacy gave evidence about his confessions.  One of them, Greg Bedoe, described how Gacy had admitted to reciting the 23rd Psalm to one victim as he strangled him.


During one confession, Gacy had demonstrated how he had killed many of the boys.  Using assistant State's attorney Larry Finer as a guinea pig, Gacy used a ballpoint pen to twist his rosary around Finder's wrist, asking him to pretend his wrist was a neck.


The defence case opened with the evidence of Jeff Rignall, who, in answer to the questions of defence lawyer Sam Amirante, described the night of rape and torture, and agreed that man who could do such things was not legally sane.  Prosecuting attorney William Kunkle, on cross-examination, pointed out that Rignall; had written a book about his encounter with Gacy, and argued that his appearance in court was merely designed to promote sales.


Inevitably the major role in the trial was played by psychiatrists.  Dr Thomas S. Eliseo, for the defence, testified that Gacy's intelligence was well above average but said his tests indicated that he was a paranoid schizophrenic; he was psychotic at the time of each murder.  Kunkle then undermined Eliseo's credibility by asked whether he was alleging that Gacy had committed 33 murders without being aware that he had done wrong.
   'JUDGE LOUIS B. GARIPPO' :


 Judge Louis B. Garippo, 48, one of America's most respected trial judges, was chosen to preside over the Gacy trial.  Years earlier, as State attorney, he had handled part of the case against another notorious Chicago murderer, Richard Speck.
  The second defence psychiatrist, Lawrence Z. Freedman, said that Gacy was one of the most complex personalities he had ever studied, but also insisted that Gacy was psychotic (that is, insane).  He agreed with the previous psychiatrist that Gacy's psychosis had probably begun in the Anamosa prison around Christmas 1969, on the death of his father - who had always predicted that John would be a failure, and who had died with his prophecy confirmed.


Freedman also underlined Gacy's total lack of feeling when describing these crimes, and explained that Gacy killed when his psychological defence mechanisms - such as repression of his murderous impulses - broke down.  The deadly anger was triggered when he engaged in sex acts with men: 'he projected his own frightened awareness that this was homosexual... and he thought of them as trash, to be put out of their misery...'.  He thus killed them instead of himself.


Two more psychiatrists, Dr Robert Traisman and Dr Richard G Rappaport, also testified that Gacy was abnormal.  Rappapport survived a gruelling cross-examination by Kunkle, and made a powerful case for the view that Gacy's sadism was some kind of reaction against his father, who was a bully and an alcoholic.  Gacy himself, was plainly delighted with Rappaport's testimony, smiling at the jury as if to encourage them to listen carefully.


He looked less pleased when Robert Donnelly described his terrifying night in Gacy's home, being alternately raped, strangled and half-drowned, and even less so during the testimony of psychiatrist Arthur Harman, who insisted that, although suffering from a personality disorder, Gacy was not insane.

Dr Robert Reifman underlined the point when he stated that Gacy was a 'narcissistic type'.  'I don't believe you can have 33 cases of temporary insanity,' said Reifman.  The very fact that he got Cram and Rossi to dig graves in the crawl space indicated that he planned the murders.  Gacy, he argued, had simply faked insanity.  Another prosecution psychiatrist, Dr James Cavanaugh, confirmed this view.


In closing speeches, the prosecution repeated its view that Gacy was evil.  The defence again argued that he was insane.  On 12th March 1980, the jury took only two hours to decide it agreed with the prosecution - Gacy was not insane. On the following day, as Judge Garippo sentenced Gacy to death, the courtroom applauded.
   GACY'S EXECUTION :


One member of the crowd gathering for Gacy's execution outside the Stateville Correctional Centre wears a wig and ghoulish T-shirt in reference to Gacy's days as children's entertainer Pogo the Clown.
 

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