John Wayne Gacy, Jr., (March 17, 1942 May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer. He was convicted and later executed for the rape and murder of 33 boys and young men, 29 of whom he buried in the crawl space under his house, between 1972 and his arrest in December 1978. He became notorious as the "Killer Clown" because of the many block parties he attended, entertaining children in a clown suit and makeup.
LIFE OF CRIME
Gacy was born and raised in Chicago. He had a very distressed and distant relationship with his stern and abusive alcoholic father. He worked briefly in Las Vegas before returning to Illinois. He attended a business college and started a moderately successful career as a shoe salesman in Springfield, Illinois, where he became a prominent member of the Jaycees. In 1964 he married and moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he managed a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant belonging to his wife's family.
However, Gacy's first marriage fell apart after he was convicted of child molestation in 1968. He was sent to prison for this crime, but he was a model prisoner and was paroled in 1970 after serving only 18 months. After he was released, he moved back to Illinois. He successfully hid this criminal record until police began investigating him for his later murders.
In 1971 he bought a house in an unincorporated area of Norwood Park Township which is surrounded by the northwest side Chicago neighborhood of Norwood Park, lived there with his widowed mother, and established his own construction business, PDM Contracting. He married a woman he had known since high school, she and her two daughters moved in with him, and his mother moved out. He became a prominent and respected member of the community. In addition to his clown act, he became a committee member for the Democratic Party. In this capacity, he was even able to meet and be photographed with future-First Lady Rosalynn Carter [1].
It was also during this time that he claimed his first known victim, a teenage boy he picked up at a bus depot. His marriage fell apart and his wife divorced him in mid-1976. Gacy began a double life: respected member of the community by day, sexual predator and murderer by night.
No suspicion fell on him until December 12, 1978, when he was investigated following the disappearance of a teenage boy, 15-year-old Robert Piest, who was last seen with Gacy.The investigation into his disappearance would lead to not only the discovery of his body but the bodies of Butkovich, Bonnin, Carroll, Szyc, Gilroy and twenty-seven other young men who had suffered similar fates. It would be a discovery that would rock the foundations of Chicago and shock all of America.
Robert Piest was only fifteen when he disappeared from just outside the pharmacy where he had worked just minutes earlier. His mother, who had come to pick him up from work, had been waiting inside the pharmacy for Robert, who had said he'd be right back after talking with a contractor who had offered him a job. Yet, Robert never returned. His mother began to worry as time passed. Eventually her worry turned to dread. She searched the pharmacy area outside and inside and still Robert was nowhere to be found. Three hours after Robert's disappearance, the Des Plaines Police Department was notified. Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak led the investigation.
Soon after learning the name of the contractor who had offered the job to Piest, Lt. Kozenczak knocked at the man's door. When Gacy answered, the lieutenant told him about the missing boy and asked Gacy to go with him to the police station for questioning.
Gacy said he was unable to leave his home at the moment because there was a recent death in the family and he had to attend to some phone calls. Gacy showed up at the police station hours later and gave his statement to police. Gacy said he knew nothing about the boy's disappearance and left the station after further questioning.
Lt. Kozenczak decided to run a background check on Gacy the next day and was surprised to find that Gacy had served time for committing sodomy on a teenager years earlier. Soon after Lt. Kozenczak's discovery, he obtained a search warrant for Gacy's house. It was there that he believed they would find Robert Piest.
On December 13, 1978, police entered John Wayne Gacy, Jr.'s house on Summerdale Avenue. Gacy was not at his home during the investigation. Inspector Kautz was in charge of taking inventory of any recovered evidence that might be found at the house. Some of the items on his list that were confiscated from Gacy's home were:
A jewelry box containing two driver's licenses and several rings including one which had engraved on it the name Maine West High School class of 1975 and the initials J.A.S..
A box containing marijuana and rolling papers.
Seven erotic movies made in Sweden
Pills including amyl nitrite and Valium.
A switchblade knife.
A stained section of rug.
Color photographs of pharmacies and drug stores.
An address book.
A scale.
Books such as, Tight Teenagers, The Rights of Gay People, Bike Boy, Pederasty: Sex Between Men and Boys, Twenty-One Abnormal Sex Cases, The American
Bi-Centennial Gay Guide, Heads & Tails and The Great Swallow.
A pair of handcuffs with keys.
A three-foot-long two-by-four wooden plank with two holes drilled in each end.
A six mm. Italian pistol with possible gun caps.
Police badges.
An eighteen-inch rubber dildo was also found in the attic beneath insulation.
A hypodermic syringe and needle and a small brown bottle.
Clothing that was much too small for Gacy.
A receipt for a roll of film with a serial number on it, from Nisson Pharmacy.
Nylon rope.
Three automobiles belonging to Gacy were also confiscated, including a 1978 Chevrolet pickup truck with snow plow attached that had the name "PDM Contractors" written on its side, a 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and a van with "PDM Contractors" also written on its side. Within the trunk of the car were pieces of hair that were later matched to Rob Piest's hair.
Further into the investigation, police entered the crawl space located beneath Gacy's home. The first thing that struck investigators was a rancid odor that they believed to be sewage. The earth in the crawl space was sprinkled with lime but seemed to have been untouched. Police found nothing else during their first search and eventually returned back to headquarters to run tests on some of the evidence and research the case more.
Gacy was called into the police department and told of the articles that they had confiscated. Gacy was enraged and immediately contacted his lawyer. When Gacy was presented with a Miranda waiver stating his rights and asked to sign it, he refused when instructed by his lawyer. Police had nothing to arrest him on and eventually had to release him after more questioning about the Piest boy's disappearance. Gacy was put under twenty-four hour surveillance.
During the days following the police search of Gacy's house, some of his friends were called into the police station and interrogated. Gacy had told his friends earlier that police were trying to charge him with a murder but claimed he had nothing to do with such a thing. From the interviews police gathered little information on any connection with Gacy to
Robert Piest. Friends of Gacy could not believe he was capable of killing a teenage boy.
Frustrated due to the lack of evidence that police had linking Gacy to Piest they decided to arrest Gacy on possession of marijuana and Valium. Unknown to police at the time, Gacy had recently confided in a friend and co-worker a day before his arrest that he had indeed killed. Gacy further confided in his friend that he killed about thirty people because they were bad and trying to blackmail him.
Around the time Gacy was arrested, he was awaiting action on the Ringall case, in which he had been charged with rape. Determined to find his rapist, Ringall had months earlier waited by one of the highway exits that he was able to remember during one of his wakeful episode in Gacy's car, before being chloroformed again. Finally, after hours of waiting by the exit, he spotted the familiar car and followed it to Gacy's house. Upon learning Gacy's name, he immediately filed charges of sexual assault.
Finally, after intense investigation and lab work into some of the items confiscated by police from Gacy's house, they came up with critical evidence against Gacy. One of the rings found at Gacy's house belonged to another teenager who had disappeared a year earlier named John Szyc. They also discovered that three former employees of Gacy had also mysteriously disappeared. Furthermore, the receipt for the roll of film that was found at Gacy's home had belonged to a co-worker of Robert Piest who had given it to Robert the day of his disappearance. With the new information, investigators began to realize the enormity of the case that was unfolding before them.
It was not long before investigators were back searching Gacy's house. Gacy had finally confessed to police that he did kill someone but said it had been in self-defense. He said that he had buried the body underneath his garage. Gacy told police where they could find the body and police marked the gravesite in the garage, but they did not immediately begin
digging. They first wanted to search the crawl space under Gacy's house. It was not long before they discovered a suspicious mound of earth. Minutes after digging into the suspicious mound, investigators found the remains of a body.
That evening, Dr. Robert Stein, Cook County Medical Examiner, was called in to help with the investigation. Upon his arrival at Gacy's house, he immediately recognized a familiar odor --the distinctive smell of death.
Stein began to organize the search for more bodies by marking off the areas of earth in sections, as if it were an archaeological site. He knew that the excavation of a decomposing body must be done with the utmost care to preserve its integrity and that of the gravesite. Throughout the night and into the days that followed the digging progressed under the watchful eye of Dr. Stein.
On Friday, December 22, 1978, Gacy finally confessed to police that he killed at least thirty people and buried most of the remains of the victims beneath the crawl space of his house. According to the book Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders by Sullivan and Maiken, Gacy said that, "his first killing took place in January, 1972, and the second in January, 1974, about a year and a half after his marriage." He further confessed that he would lure his victims into being handcuffed and then he would sexually assault them. To muffle the screams of his victims, he would stuff a sock or underwear into their mouths and kill them by pulling a rope or board against their throats, as he raped them. Gacy admitted to sometimes keeping the dead bodies under his bed or in the attic for several hours before eventually burying them in the crawl space.
On the first day that the police began their digging, they found two bodies. One of the bodies was that of John Butkovich who was buried under the garage. The other body was the one found in the crawl space. As the days passed, the body count grew higher. Some of the victims were found with their underwear still lodged deep in their throats. Other victims were buried so close together that police believed they were probably killed or buried at the same time. Gacy did confirm to police that he had on several occasions killed more than one person in a day. However, the reason he gave for them being buried so close together was that he was running out of room and needed to conserve space.
On the 28th of December, police had removed a total of twenty-seven bodies from Gacy's house. There was also another body found weeks earlier, yet it was not in the crawl space. The naked corpse of Frank Wayne "Dale" Landingin was found in the Des Plaines River. At the time of the discovery police were not yet aware of Gacy's horrible crimes and the case was still under investigation. But, investigators found Landingin's driver's license in Gacy's home and connected him to the young man's murder. Landingin was not the only one of Gacy's victims to be found in the river.
Also, on December 28th, police removed from the Des Plaines River the body of James "Mojo" Mazzara, who still had his underwear lodged in his throat. The coroner said that the underwear stuffed down the victim's throat had caused Mazzara to suffocate.
Gacy told police that the reason he disposed of the bodies in the river was because he ran out of room in his crawl space and because he had been experiencing back problems from digging the graves. Mazzara was the twenty-ninth victim of Gacy's to be found, yet it would not be the last.
By the end of February, police were still digging up Gacy's property. They had already gutted the house and were unable to find anymore bodies in the crawl space. It had taken investigators longer than expected to resume the search due to bad winter storms that froze the ground and the long process of obtaining proper search warrants. However, they believed there were still more bodies to be found and they were right.
While workmen were breaking up the concrete of Gacy's patio, they came across another horrific discovery. They found the body of a man still in good condition preserved in the concrete. The man wore a pair of blue jeans shorts and a wedding ring. Gacy's victims no longer included just young boys or suspected homosexuals, but now also married men. The following week another body was discovered.
The thirty-first body to be found linked to Gacy was in the Illinois River. Investigators were able to discover the identity of the young man by a "Tim Lee" tattoo on one of his arms. A friend of the victim's father had recognized the "Tim Lee" tattoo while reading a newspaper story about the discovery of a body in the river. The victim's name was Timothy O'Rourke, who was said to be such a fan of Bruce Lee's that he took the Kung Fu master's last name and added it to his own name in his tattoo. It is possible that Gacy had become acquainted with the young man in one of the gay bars in New Town.
Yet, another body was found on Gacy's property around the time O'Rourke was discovered and pulled from the river. The body was located beneath the recreation room of Gacy's house. It would be the last body to be found on Gacy's property. Soon after the discovery, the house was destroyed and reduced to rubble. Unfortunately, among the thirty-two bodies that were discovered that of Robert Piest was still unaccounted for. Piest was still missing.
Finally in April 1979, the remains of Robert Piest were discovered in the Illinois River. His body had supposedly been lodged somewhere along the river making it difficult to find his body. However, strong winds must have dislodged the corpse and carried it to the locks at Dresden Dam where it was eventually discovered. Autopsy reports on Piest determined that he had suffocated from paper towels being lodged down his throat. The family soon after filed a $85-million suit against Gacy for murder and the Iowa Board of Parole, the Department of Corrections and the Chicago Police Department for negligence.
Police investigators continued to match dental records and other clues to help identify the remaining victims who were found on Gacy's property. All but nine of the victims were finally identified. Although the search for the dead had finally come to an end, Gacy's trial was just beginning.
LIFE OF CRIME
Gacy was born and raised in Chicago. He had a very distressed and distant relationship with his stern and abusive alcoholic father. He worked briefly in Las Vegas before returning to Illinois. He attended a business college and started a moderately successful career as a shoe salesman in Springfield, Illinois, where he became a prominent member of the Jaycees. In 1964 he married and moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he managed a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant belonging to his wife's family.
However, Gacy's first marriage fell apart after he was convicted of child molestation in 1968. He was sent to prison for this crime, but he was a model prisoner and was paroled in 1970 after serving only 18 months. After he was released, he moved back to Illinois. He successfully hid this criminal record until police began investigating him for his later murders.
In 1971 he bought a house in an unincorporated area of Norwood Park Township which is surrounded by the northwest side Chicago neighborhood of Norwood Park, lived there with his widowed mother, and established his own construction business, PDM Contracting. He married a woman he had known since high school, she and her two daughters moved in with him, and his mother moved out. He became a prominent and respected member of the community. In addition to his clown act, he became a committee member for the Democratic Party. In this capacity, he was even able to meet and be photographed with future-First Lady Rosalynn Carter [1].
It was also during this time that he claimed his first known victim, a teenage boy he picked up at a bus depot. His marriage fell apart and his wife divorced him in mid-1976. Gacy began a double life: respected member of the community by day, sexual predator and murderer by night.
No suspicion fell on him until December 12, 1978, when he was investigated following the disappearance of a teenage boy, 15-year-old Robert Piest, who was last seen with Gacy.The investigation into his disappearance would lead to not only the discovery of his body but the bodies of Butkovich, Bonnin, Carroll, Szyc, Gilroy and twenty-seven other young men who had suffered similar fates. It would be a discovery that would rock the foundations of Chicago and shock all of America.
Robert Piest was only fifteen when he disappeared from just outside the pharmacy where he had worked just minutes earlier. His mother, who had come to pick him up from work, had been waiting inside the pharmacy for Robert, who had said he'd be right back after talking with a contractor who had offered him a job. Yet, Robert never returned. His mother began to worry as time passed. Eventually her worry turned to dread. She searched the pharmacy area outside and inside and still Robert was nowhere to be found. Three hours after Robert's disappearance, the Des Plaines Police Department was notified. Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak led the investigation.
Soon after learning the name of the contractor who had offered the job to Piest, Lt. Kozenczak knocked at the man's door. When Gacy answered, the lieutenant told him about the missing boy and asked Gacy to go with him to the police station for questioning.
Gacy said he was unable to leave his home at the moment because there was a recent death in the family and he had to attend to some phone calls. Gacy showed up at the police station hours later and gave his statement to police. Gacy said he knew nothing about the boy's disappearance and left the station after further questioning.
Lt. Kozenczak decided to run a background check on Gacy the next day and was surprised to find that Gacy had served time for committing sodomy on a teenager years earlier. Soon after Lt. Kozenczak's discovery, he obtained a search warrant for Gacy's house. It was there that he believed they would find Robert Piest.
On December 13, 1978, police entered John Wayne Gacy, Jr.'s house on Summerdale Avenue. Gacy was not at his home during the investigation. Inspector Kautz was in charge of taking inventory of any recovered evidence that might be found at the house. Some of the items on his list that were confiscated from Gacy's home were:
A jewelry box containing two driver's licenses and several rings including one which had engraved on it the name Maine West High School class of 1975 and the initials J.A.S..
A box containing marijuana and rolling papers.
Seven erotic movies made in Sweden
Pills including amyl nitrite and Valium.
A switchblade knife.
A stained section of rug.
Color photographs of pharmacies and drug stores.
An address book.
A scale.
Books such as, Tight Teenagers, The Rights of Gay People, Bike Boy, Pederasty: Sex Between Men and Boys, Twenty-One Abnormal Sex Cases, The American
Bi-Centennial Gay Guide, Heads & Tails and The Great Swallow.
A pair of handcuffs with keys.
A three-foot-long two-by-four wooden plank with two holes drilled in each end.
A six mm. Italian pistol with possible gun caps.
Police badges.
An eighteen-inch rubber dildo was also found in the attic beneath insulation.
A hypodermic syringe and needle and a small brown bottle.
Clothing that was much too small for Gacy.
A receipt for a roll of film with a serial number on it, from Nisson Pharmacy.
Nylon rope.
Three automobiles belonging to Gacy were also confiscated, including a 1978 Chevrolet pickup truck with snow plow attached that had the name "PDM Contractors" written on its side, a 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and a van with "PDM Contractors" also written on its side. Within the trunk of the car were pieces of hair that were later matched to Rob Piest's hair.
Further into the investigation, police entered the crawl space located beneath Gacy's home. The first thing that struck investigators was a rancid odor that they believed to be sewage. The earth in the crawl space was sprinkled with lime but seemed to have been untouched. Police found nothing else during their first search and eventually returned back to headquarters to run tests on some of the evidence and research the case more.
Gacy was called into the police department and told of the articles that they had confiscated. Gacy was enraged and immediately contacted his lawyer. When Gacy was presented with a Miranda waiver stating his rights and asked to sign it, he refused when instructed by his lawyer. Police had nothing to arrest him on and eventually had to release him after more questioning about the Piest boy's disappearance. Gacy was put under twenty-four hour surveillance.
During the days following the police search of Gacy's house, some of his friends were called into the police station and interrogated. Gacy had told his friends earlier that police were trying to charge him with a murder but claimed he had nothing to do with such a thing. From the interviews police gathered little information on any connection with Gacy to
Robert Piest. Friends of Gacy could not believe he was capable of killing a teenage boy.
Frustrated due to the lack of evidence that police had linking Gacy to Piest they decided to arrest Gacy on possession of marijuana and Valium. Unknown to police at the time, Gacy had recently confided in a friend and co-worker a day before his arrest that he had indeed killed. Gacy further confided in his friend that he killed about thirty people because they were bad and trying to blackmail him.
Around the time Gacy was arrested, he was awaiting action on the Ringall case, in which he had been charged with rape. Determined to find his rapist, Ringall had months earlier waited by one of the highway exits that he was able to remember during one of his wakeful episode in Gacy's car, before being chloroformed again. Finally, after hours of waiting by the exit, he spotted the familiar car and followed it to Gacy's house. Upon learning Gacy's name, he immediately filed charges of sexual assault.
Finally, after intense investigation and lab work into some of the items confiscated by police from Gacy's house, they came up with critical evidence against Gacy. One of the rings found at Gacy's house belonged to another teenager who had disappeared a year earlier named John Szyc. They also discovered that three former employees of Gacy had also mysteriously disappeared. Furthermore, the receipt for the roll of film that was found at Gacy's home had belonged to a co-worker of Robert Piest who had given it to Robert the day of his disappearance. With the new information, investigators began to realize the enormity of the case that was unfolding before them.
It was not long before investigators were back searching Gacy's house. Gacy had finally confessed to police that he did kill someone but said it had been in self-defense. He said that he had buried the body underneath his garage. Gacy told police where they could find the body and police marked the gravesite in the garage, but they did not immediately begin
digging. They first wanted to search the crawl space under Gacy's house. It was not long before they discovered a suspicious mound of earth. Minutes after digging into the suspicious mound, investigators found the remains of a body.
That evening, Dr. Robert Stein, Cook County Medical Examiner, was called in to help with the investigation. Upon his arrival at Gacy's house, he immediately recognized a familiar odor --the distinctive smell of death.
Stein began to organize the search for more bodies by marking off the areas of earth in sections, as if it were an archaeological site. He knew that the excavation of a decomposing body must be done with the utmost care to preserve its integrity and that of the gravesite. Throughout the night and into the days that followed the digging progressed under the watchful eye of Dr. Stein.
On Friday, December 22, 1978, Gacy finally confessed to police that he killed at least thirty people and buried most of the remains of the victims beneath the crawl space of his house. According to the book Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders by Sullivan and Maiken, Gacy said that, "his first killing took place in January, 1972, and the second in January, 1974, about a year and a half after his marriage." He further confessed that he would lure his victims into being handcuffed and then he would sexually assault them. To muffle the screams of his victims, he would stuff a sock or underwear into their mouths and kill them by pulling a rope or board against their throats, as he raped them. Gacy admitted to sometimes keeping the dead bodies under his bed or in the attic for several hours before eventually burying them in the crawl space.
On the first day that the police began their digging, they found two bodies. One of the bodies was that of John Butkovich who was buried under the garage. The other body was the one found in the crawl space. As the days passed, the body count grew higher. Some of the victims were found with their underwear still lodged deep in their throats. Other victims were buried so close together that police believed they were probably killed or buried at the same time. Gacy did confirm to police that he had on several occasions killed more than one person in a day. However, the reason he gave for them being buried so close together was that he was running out of room and needed to conserve space.
On the 28th of December, police had removed a total of twenty-seven bodies from Gacy's house. There was also another body found weeks earlier, yet it was not in the crawl space. The naked corpse of Frank Wayne "Dale" Landingin was found in the Des Plaines River. At the time of the discovery police were not yet aware of Gacy's horrible crimes and the case was still under investigation. But, investigators found Landingin's driver's license in Gacy's home and connected him to the young man's murder. Landingin was not the only one of Gacy's victims to be found in the river.
Also, on December 28th, police removed from the Des Plaines River the body of James "Mojo" Mazzara, who still had his underwear lodged in his throat. The coroner said that the underwear stuffed down the victim's throat had caused Mazzara to suffocate.
Gacy told police that the reason he disposed of the bodies in the river was because he ran out of room in his crawl space and because he had been experiencing back problems from digging the graves. Mazzara was the twenty-ninth victim of Gacy's to be found, yet it would not be the last.
By the end of February, police were still digging up Gacy's property. They had already gutted the house and were unable to find anymore bodies in the crawl space. It had taken investigators longer than expected to resume the search due to bad winter storms that froze the ground and the long process of obtaining proper search warrants. However, they believed there were still more bodies to be found and they were right.
While workmen were breaking up the concrete of Gacy's patio, they came across another horrific discovery. They found the body of a man still in good condition preserved in the concrete. The man wore a pair of blue jeans shorts and a wedding ring. Gacy's victims no longer included just young boys or suspected homosexuals, but now also married men. The following week another body was discovered.
The thirty-first body to be found linked to Gacy was in the Illinois River. Investigators were able to discover the identity of the young man by a "Tim Lee" tattoo on one of his arms. A friend of the victim's father had recognized the "Tim Lee" tattoo while reading a newspaper story about the discovery of a body in the river. The victim's name was Timothy O'Rourke, who was said to be such a fan of Bruce Lee's that he took the Kung Fu master's last name and added it to his own name in his tattoo. It is possible that Gacy had become acquainted with the young man in one of the gay bars in New Town.
Yet, another body was found on Gacy's property around the time O'Rourke was discovered and pulled from the river. The body was located beneath the recreation room of Gacy's house. It would be the last body to be found on Gacy's property. Soon after the discovery, the house was destroyed and reduced to rubble. Unfortunately, among the thirty-two bodies that were discovered that of Robert Piest was still unaccounted for. Piest was still missing.
Finally in April 1979, the remains of Robert Piest were discovered in the Illinois River. His body had supposedly been lodged somewhere along the river making it difficult to find his body. However, strong winds must have dislodged the corpse and carried it to the locks at Dresden Dam where it was eventually discovered. Autopsy reports on Piest determined that he had suffocated from paper towels being lodged down his throat. The family soon after filed a $85-million suit against Gacy for murder and the Iowa Board of Parole, the Department of Corrections and the Chicago Police Department for negligence.
Police investigators continued to match dental records and other clues to help identify the remaining victims who were found on Gacy's property. All but nine of the victims were finally identified. Although the search for the dead had finally come to an end, Gacy's trial was just beginning.
