Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - The Serial ‘70s: John Wayne Gacy

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

The "Killer Clown" likely contributed to people's fears of makeup-wearing jesters. But the truth is, John Wayne Gacy's personas, "Pogo" or "Patches," didn't harm a soul. It was the successful suburban businessman hiding in plain sight who was preying on young men and boys. This is the second episode in our 5-year anniversary special, looking back on the serial killer boom of the 1970s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, listeners, it's Carter. Here to tell you about an incredible event celebrating the launch of Parcast's first book, Colts. On July 13th, crime junkies Ashley Flowers and Parcast founder Max Cutler are coming together for a night of true crime to remember. And you can be part of it virtually on Spotify Live or in person. The evening will take place in Los Angeles and feature discussions about the book, a live Q&A, and so on. much more. All ticket sales up to $125,000 will be matched by Max Cutler and donated to Season of Justice, a nonprofit founded by Ashley Flowers that provides financial resources to help solve cold cases and support families impacted by unsolved violent crimes. It's a wonderful cause and an

evening perfect for any true crime fan. But time is running out. Register for your spot today at Parchast.com slash Colts. All attendees will receive a special signed copy of Pardcast's new book, Colts. So don't wait, sign up at Pardcast.com slash cults. Due to the graphic nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder, sexual assault, child abuse, and torture. We advise extreme caution for children under 13. A Greyhound Bus Terminal is nobody's ideal place to spend the night.

But at 1 a.m. on a below zero evening in Chicago, it felt hellish. 16-year-old Timothy McCoy huddled against a wall, rubbing his hands together to try and get the feeling back into them. He cursed himself for booking a bus trip with an overnight layover. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. The price was right, and he'd be back to his dad's house in Nebraska before school started later that week. But now, with the night stretching out ahead of him,

he wished he'd sprung for a motel. Suddenly, he noticed headlights approaching, a car pulled up, and the window rolled down to reveal a man in his 30s, smiling at him. With a friendly, doughy face, the guy looked like someone's dad. He introduced himself as John and asked if Timothy needed any help. When the teen explained his predicament, John suggested a solution. He was on his way to look at a display of ice sculptures downtown. He asked, want to come see the sights with me? Timothy hesitated.

Of course, he knew that getting into cars with strangers was a bad idea, but was it any worse of an idea than spending all night at the bus terminal? John added that his wife was out of town, and he had their house to himself. If Timothy wanted, he could get a few hours of sleep in the spare room. In the morning, he'd drive him back in time for his 7 a.m. bus. In that moment, with the chill air rattling his bones, the idea of a warm bed was too tempting to pass up. So Timothy opened the car door, climbed to.

inside and let John drive him away into the night. Hi, I'm Greg Paulson. Welcome to the second episode of our special fifth anniversary series. I'm here with my co-host, Vanessa Richardson. Hi, everyone. You can find episodes of serial killers and all other Spotify originals from Parcast for free on Spotify. For this four-episode series, we're taking a step back from our usual approach.

Normally, we chronicle a killer's development from cradle to grave and seek to understand their crimes by digging into their twisted psychology. We're trying to answer the question, what makes a murderer? But in these episodes, we're starting with a different question. What makes a legendary murderer? Out of the hundreds of serial killers that have operated in the U.S. over the years, only a handful have been mythologized. As we look back on five years of serial killers, we want to understand why that is. Last time, we explored the infamous crimes of Edmund Kemper, and the unusual role he played. played in his own myth-making.

Today, we're continuing our journey with the story of John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown. Gacy was a pillar of his neighborhood. He was a successful businessman, was active in local politics, and even hosted block parties. When his monstrous crimes came to light, they shattered America's image of the safe suburban haven. We're going to explore how that happened. We've got all that and more coming up. Stay with us.

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Try Activia today. Enjoying Activia twice a day for two weeks as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle may help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort, which includes gas, bloating, rumbling, and abdominal discomfort. Most of us don't encounter a lot of clowns in our daily lives, and yet they occupy an outsized role in our minds. They're one of the most common fears of all. According to the Chapman University survey on American fears, which was conducted in 2014,

7.6% of us are terrified of clowns. They aren't even appealing to their target audience. Research has shown that most children either dislike or fear them. There's something about the chalk white face, the rictus green, in the unprovoked laughter that's deeply unnerving. But why? Unlike other common fears like heights, snakes, or needles, there's no evolutionary reason for us to fear clowns. They pose no danger to us. At least most of them don't, and it's not clear that the evil clown was an archetype that really existed until a few decades ago. But during the 1980s, there was one clown

so monstrous that he might have single-handedly turned the tide. John Wayne Gasey. was one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. He raped, tortured, and murdered more than 30 victims, burying most of them in a crawl space beneath his home. He was also a registered clown, who sometimes dressed up to entertain children under the name Pogo. As far as we know, Gacy never killed anyone while wearing his clown costume. It was when he was in street clothes that he became dangerous,

yet he became known as the Killer Clown, a nickname that suggests a face-painted maniac, hunting down children at birthday parties. Gacy's clown persona was incidental to his crimes, but it gave him a larger-than-life quality. It's the one thing most people know about him. In our last episode, we discussed how the most famous serial killers often reinforced beliefs that the public already has about murder.

They're the exceptions that prove the rule. For example, in Kemper's case, he was a genius who outsmarted the police and hated his mother. Most murderers don't fit that mold, but for some reason we're more inclined to remember the ones that do. Gacy tapped into our irrational fear of clowns and probably worsened it, to be honest. But he also contributed to a much subtler and more pervasive kind of fear. Gacy's spree contributed to a nationwide panic about stranger danger.

After his arrest, police departments and schools launched campaigns to warn parents and children about the dangers that lurked around every corner. However well-intentioned these campaigns were, they inspired a kind of mass hysteria. Parents became terrified that their children could be snatched at any second, and this had a devastating ripple effect. According to Paul Renfro, a historian at Florida State University, stranger danger contributed directly to mass incarceration. Under the guise of protecting children, politicians passed a slew of tough-on-crime laws that introduced harsher sentences across the board.

The horrific details of Gacy's spree also fed into a deeply harmful fallacy, which claims a correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia. Needless to say, no such correlation exists, but some seized on Gacy's crimes as a way to prop up their bigoted beliefs. The years after its arrest saw some of the highest ever disapproval numbers for homosexuality in America. At that time, conservative politicians and groups openly claimed that it was harmful to children, and that even allowing same-sex marriage would lead to child molestation. And while Gacy may have contributed to these homophobic attitudes, he was also shaped by them. He came of age at a time when living freely as a gay man seemed impossible. Gacy's defense attorney Sam L. Amarante described him as a homophobic homosexual.

After his arrest, he was willing to confess to something unimaginably heinous, raping and murdering 33 young men. Yet he went to his death. still refusing to admit his other secret, the fact that he was gay. Amarante, who wrote a book about his experience defending Gacy, believed that internalized homophobia was what drove him to kill, and it started when Gacy was still a child. Gacy's father was an abusive alcoholic, who showed nothing but contempt for his son. He ridiculed him as a sissy and a mama's boy,

who he said would, quote, probably grow up queer. Before we continue with the psychology for this episode, please keep in mind that neither Vanessa or myself are licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but we've done a lot of research for this show. Thanks, Greg. P parental abuse of any kind can have a serious impact on a child's physical and mental health, and for LGBTQ plus youth, being rejected by a parent because of sexuality or gender identity can create a unique and toxic kind of self-loathing. According to a 2020 paper in the Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, parental rejection can cause a child to internalize negative feelings about their sexuality or gender identity. In turn, this can make them develop homophobic attitudes as a way to separate themselves from the identity they consider shameful. They may live a heterosexual life, marry a partner of the opposite sex, and in some cases openly fight against LGBTQ-plus writes,

Gacy did all of the above. According to attorney Danny Broderick, who worked with Amarante on the book, he was an example of internalized homophobia taken to horrific extremes. He targeted gay victims projecting his self-hatred onto them. Broderick said he would really, in essence, be killing himself over and over again. So it's possible that homophobia drove Gacey to violence, but it also helped him avoid detection. Because of the stigma around homosexuality, many of his victims' disappearances weren't taken seriously. The police dismissed these young gay men as runaways or as hustlers.

Some of Gacy's surviving victims went to the police to report being attacked, but because they were gay, or at least the cops assumed they were, they weren't taken seriously. As a result, it took years for the authorities to link Gacy's murders. But there was another reason for that delay. Gacy was careful. In fact, he was a master of disguise. To entertain children, he put on a clown costume, but to move through the world, he wore a much more elaborate mask. As far as his neighbors were concerned, Gacy was an upstanding pillar of the community. He was a family man, an active member of the local Democratic Party, and a mainstay at local charity events. He even hosted parties at his home

in the Chicago suburbs. The fact that Gacy appeared so ordinary as a huge, huge part of his mythology. He was a white middle-class businessman with a family, living behind a figurative white-pigot fence. He was the epitome of quote-unquote normalcy, and that made his crimes uniquely terrifying to the public. Until Gacy, when people pictured a murderer, they imagined somebody who was clearly unhinged, lurking in the shadows, jumping out to ambush unsuspecting victims. But he hid in plain sight, and most of his victims went with him willingly. Casey's attorney described him as a master manipulator. He often took time to build up trust with his victims.

Sometimes he targeted young men who worked for him, taking advantage of an already uneven power dynamic. To other victims, he offered alcohol and drugs, and sometimes even shelter when they needed it. He came off as a good Samaritan, a successful older man just looking out for his employees and neighbors. But once their guard was down, he turned into a vicious predator.

and that transformation must have been startling to witness. The schism between Gacy's public and private selves is extreme. So extreme, you may wonder if he had a personality disorder. At his trial, Gacy did claim to have multiple personality disorder, which is an outmoded term for what's now called dissociative identity disorder. D.I.D. describes the presence of at least two completely separate personalities within one person. These different identities often have different mannerisms and beliefs. beliefs, and the primary or host personality often experiences memory loss and a degraded sense of self.

But despite his claims, there's no indication that Gacy ever suffered memory loss, or that anyone in his life noticed distinct personalities. So if it's not dissociative identity disorder, what did Gacy have? The thing is, there's no single diagnosis that can explain John Wayne Gacy, but as we try to understand his legacy, it'll be helpful to consider how experts have tried to make sense of his actions over the years. During his 20s, Gacy underwent a psychiatric evaluation, and two doctors diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder. Any true crime fan worth their salt knows this term.

It's the formal diagnosis for what's often called psychopathy. It involves a combination of superficial charm, a pattern of manipulating, exploiting, exploiting, or violating the rights of others, and a lack of empathy. Gacy fits the bill of this diagnosis to some extent. According to his attorney, he demonstrated a startling lack of feeling toward his victims. He looked at them like he was taking out the trash. Yet Gacy didn't lack feelings altogether. Amarante said that he would sometimes cry when he was talking about children who were dying of cancer.

But the next moment, he could switch to talking about a child he had murdered and displayed no emotion whatsoever. His empathy was selective and could seemingly be switched on and off at will. If Gacy really did have this level of control over his emotions, it begs the question, where did he learn that skill? Looking into his past, it's easy to see why it might have been valuable to him in childhood. So that's where we're going next. In a moment, we'll see how Gacy's early years sowed the seeds for his spiral into violence. Hi, listeners, it's Carter with some truly exciting news. To commemorate the launch of Colts, Parcast's first book,

Crime Junkies Ashley Flowers and Parcast founder Max Cutler are coming together on July 13th for an in-person and virtual experience you do not want to miss. The evening will take place in Los Angeles and feature a live Q&A about the book, an exclusive meet-and-greet, and a discussion on all things true crime. All ticket sales up to 125. $1,000 will be matched by Max Cutler and donated to Season of Justice, a nonprofit founded by Ashley that provides funding to law enforcement agencies and families to help solve cold cases. It's an amazing organization near and dear to both Ashley and Max, and another great reason

to enjoy this wonderful night. And it's just days away, so visit parkast.com slash cults to register today. You can also catch the event virtually on Spotify Live if you were unable to join us in person. All attendees will get a signed copy of the book and at night they'll never forget. July 13th is fast approaching, so be sure to join Ashley Flowers and Max Cutler for a very special evening celebrating the release of Parcast's new book, Colts, all for an incredible cause. Register today at Parcast.com slash Colts. It is brought to you by Prime. Obsession is in session.

And this summer, Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice. Off campus, L. Every year after, The Love Hypothesis, Sterling Point, and more. Slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Now back to the story. The mythology around John Wayne Gacy is rooted in his indelible costume.

It doesn't get much larger than life than a killer in a clown outfit. And one of the surprising things about Gacy's side hustle is that he seemed to truly enjoy entertaining children, often volunteering at hospitals and charity events. Despite his affinity for making kids smile, Gacy's own childhood was no picnic. Born in Chicago, Illinois, 1942, he grew up under the thumb of a domineering, abusive father. As we discussed earlier, Gacy's father, John, openly ridiculed his only son. He'd named him after one of the most masculine icons of the time, actor John Wayne, and hated him for being unable to fill those shoes. Gacy was close with both his mother and his two sisters,

and those relationships helped him to weather the storm of his father's abuse. Yet he never stopped trying to get his father's approval. John worked as a contractor, and the young Gacy often made clumsy attempts to help out with DIY projects. Of course, this only made John more impatient and snappy with his son. Sometimes he'd get so angry that he'd physically assault the boy. This wasn't the only violence Gacy experienced as a child. He later reported that when he was eight, he was repeatedly molested by a friend of his father's. The friend would take Gacey out for ice cream, then offered to show him wrestling holds,

which were just a pretext for sexual assault. Eventually, Gacy told his father that he didn't want to be alone with his friend anymore, and the abuse ended. But these encounters may have planted a seed in his mind, an awareness of just how easy it is to gain a child's trust. It's possible that this predator lured Gacy by giving him the approval and attention that his father never gave. But he soon began seeking validation in other, safer places.

At school he was a self-described teacher's pet, and worked as an assistant to the Truitt officer. He never fit in with his peers. He was an awkward, unathletic child who struggled with his weight. But as he grew older, he started to find his place in the world. When Gacy was 18, he heard that a local Democratic candidate needed volunteers for their campaign. He worked there as an assistant precinct captain, spreading information and support to local voters. He enjoyed the work and made some solid friends in local politics,

but according to Gacy himself, he chose the job, at least in part, to antagonize his father. John had no patience for politics. He said it was for crooks and phonies. But Gacy found himself caring less and less about his father's approval. Thanks to his volunteer work, he knew what it was like to feel useful and accepted. For the first time, he could see a path forward. At 20, Gacy left home and went to stay with a cousin in Las Vegas. After working a few odd jobs, he found steady work at a mortuary. Little did he know this would be a turning point in his life. Gacy became fascinated by the dead bodies at the morgue.

One night he reportedly climbed into a coffin that contained the body of a teenage boy. He was enthralled. But then, all of a sudden, he was afraid. His eight months in Vegas came to an end after this incident. He went back to Chicago and resolved to get his life back on track. He'd glimpsed something in himself that night in the morgue. And it alarmed him.

He knew he had to keep himself busy and find a real career. So Gacy enrolled in business school and graduated in 1963. He got a job at a shoe company and was quickly promoted to management at a location in Springfield, Illinois. The city was around 200 miles south of Chicago, and Gacy didn't know a soul there. But that didn't stop him. In fact, within weeks of making the move, he'd already found a girlfriend. Marlon Myers was one of his co-workers, the couple of his co-workers, the couple of started dating in the spring of 1964 and married six months later.

At 22, Gacy felt his ordinary American life was finally beginning. But around this same time, Gacy also had his first gay experience. According to his account, he got drunk with a colleague who then performed oral sex on him. It seems that the encounter was consensual, but afterward Gacy felt depressed and ashamed. The homophobic abuse he'd endured from his father over the years. was surely ringing in his ears. Gacy's relationship to his own sexuality is a bit of a mystery. Given how intensely closeted he was,

there's no way for us to know if he considered himself gay or bisexual. But what we do know is that he was deeply afraid to face that side of himself. At around this time, perhaps in a bid to distract himself from whatever urges he was having, Gacy began taking on more extracurricular work. He got involved with the local United States Junior Chamber, a.k.a. the JCs, a nonprofit devoted to leadership training and civic organization. His colleagues there thought he was hardworking and outgoing, if a little arrogant. But those weren't bad traits to have if you were looking to get ahead. Within a year, Gacy was vice president

of the Springfield JCs. Gacy's professional career was also gathering steam. His father-in-law offered him a lucrative opportunity to run three KFC franchises in Waterloo, Iowa, about 100 miles south of Springfield. So he and Marlin made the move in late 1965. After settling into their new home, the couple soon welcomed two children. To the outside world, Gacy looked like a successful young man, working hard to support his family. Even his father, who'd never had a kind word for him in his entire life, finally came around. During a visit to Gacy and Marlin's suburban home, John looked him in the eye and said, I was wrong about you, son. These were the words Gacy. Gacy's. he had always longed to hear from his toxic father. And yet, despite having everything he should want,

he felt unfulfilled. He longed for something more, something he hadn't felt since that night at the morgue, and the longer it went unspoken, the darker and more violent the urge became. In August of 1967, Gacy set his sights on Donald Borges, the 15-year-old son of another JC. The details of their first meeting aren't clear, but it seems that Gacy persuaded Borgesse, to come to his house, promising to show him some pornography. Once he had Donald alone, Gacy got the teen drunk and then sexually assaulted him. Somehow he persuaded him to stay silent, possibly by threatening him, or maybe he just told him that no one would believe him if he told them.

Either way, getting away with the attack seemed to emboldened him. Donald wasn't the only minor who Gacy preyed on during this time. He sexually abused several other teenage boys, including some who worked for him at KFC. Clearly, it wasn't sex that Gacy was craving. If it were, he could easily have found consenting adults to seduce. What he wanted was control, a feeling of total dominance, and the more power he got, the more he wanted. Around eight months into Gacy's twisted spree, his first victim finally broke his silence. Donald Voorhees told his father that Gacy had sexually assaulted him. Horrified his father immediately called the police, and Gacy was arrested and charged,

with sodomy. Historically, sodomy laws have been used as a way to criminalize homosexuality by prosecuting sexual acts between same-sex partners. It's important to note that the charge of sodomy doesn't necessarily indicate that the act was non-consensual. So the fact that Gacy was charged with this, rather than with sexual assault, speaks volumes about how his victims were treated. Far from admitting to what he'd done, Gacy went on the offensive against the Vorhees family.

He claimed that Donald's father had opposed his appointment as Jacey's president, and now had a grudge against him. And Gacy was well-liked enough in his community that many people believed the story. But the authorities weren't convinced, and Gacy was indicted. After that, Gacy doubled down in a remarkable way. He bribed an 18-year-old employee of his to physically assault Donald, to try and intimidate him out of testifying. The scheme backfired badly.

Donald escaped and reported the incident to police. So Gacy ended up charged both with sodomy and with hiring the employee to intimidate his victim. In November of 1968, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. That sentence represented the end of his life as he knew it. Marlin filed for divorce the very same day the verdict was handed down. Gacy never saw her or his children again. It's hard to know what impact this had on him, if any. What we do know is that Gacy was a model prisoner during his time

behind bars, reverting to his teacher's pet persona from school, he befriended several of the guards and even the warden. Much like a subject from last week, Edmund Kemper, Gacy was good at ingratiating himself with authority figures, so much so that he was released after just 18 months of his sentence. Now a free man, Gacy went back to his hometown of Chicago and started figuring out his path forward, but there was a stark difference between his new life and the one he left behind. He found work as a short-order cook, which was a significant downstep from his previous role as the manager of several KFC restaurants.

He had no power anymore, no feeling of validation from his job, and no young employees to prey on. But deep down, Gacy knew he was still the same man. His status might have been stripped away, but he still wanted to feel powerful. Unsurprisingly, his brief time in prison hadn't reformed him. If anything, it had crystallized for him just how easy it was to manipulate. people. Within a few months of returning to Chicago, he began staking out a new hunting ground, the Greyhound Bus Terminal. It was an easy place to find kids from out of town, often runaways with only a few dollars to their name. In February of 1971, Gacy carried out his first of many

attacks at the Greyhound Bus Terminal. He lured a teenage boy into his car there, offering him a place to sleep for the night. When the boy got home, he tried to sexually assault him. The boy was able to escape, and he reported the attack to the police. But after he failed to appear in court, the charge against Gacy was dropped. Remarkably, the parole board wasn't alerted to this incident, and so in 1971, Gacy's parole came to an end, and his criminal record was sealed. At 29, he'd been handed a clean slate, and he intended to make the most of it. He'd had it all before going to prison, the suburban American dream,

and he was determined to get it back. That summer, he reconnected with a high school friend, Carol Hoff, and the two began a courtship. If he told her anything about his time in prison, it was surely a heavily edited version. That same year, Gacy also founded a contracting business. At first, he worked there part-time alongside his job as a cook, but the company was successful and soon expanded into interior design and landscaping. His life was starting to come back together, and Gacy's mother, clearly eager for her son to get back on his feet, offered to help him buy a house.

So that fall, he and Carol found their dream home in Norridge, a village close to Chicago O'Hare Airport. It was a sizable ranch house with a large crawl space beneath for extra storage. After he and Carol married, they moved into the house together. It had taken barely any time at all for Gacy to rebuild what he'd lost. Just like in Waterloo and Springfield, Gacy was active in his new community. He was friendly and outgoing and went out of his way to help his neighbors, shoveling snow and lending out tools for home improvement projects. Yet beneath the affable facade, Gacy hadn't changed at all. Despite being given the undeserved opportunity to start fresh, he felt an unshakable pull towards violence. And that dead boy, whose body he'd laid with in the coffin, was never far from his mind.

As he turned that night over and over in his memory, Gacy came to a realization. He didn't just want to dominate his next victim. He wanted to end them. Coming up, how Gacy went from sexual predator to serial killer. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound terseptide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity.

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Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Now back to the story. As the new year dawned in 1972, 29-year-old John Wayne Gacy was settling into his next chapter. On January 3rd, he and his wife Carol hosted a dinner party for their families. The mood was celebratory and warm, but Gacy was right.

restless. As the festivities were winding down, he told Carol he wanted to go for a drive to see a display of ice sculptures at the Civic Center. But instead, Gacy headed for the Greyhound Bus Terminal. There, he set his sights on 16-year-old Timothy McCoy, who was waiting for a bus back home to Nebraska. He had a long, cold wait ahead of him. The bus didn't leave until dawn. Gacy offered to show Timothy the sights in downtown Chicago and then take him back to his house to spend the night. He'd have him back at the terminal in time to catch his bus. He promised. But Timothy never made it onto that bus. According to Gacy's account, he took the teenager home and the pair had consensual sex. He then claims that they got into a physical altercation

the next morning, and he stabbed Timothy to death during the fight. He buried Timothy's body in the crawl space beneath his house, covering it with a layer of concrete to seal in any odors. Since we only have Gacy's version of events to go on, there's no way to know if the murder really was unplanned. But since he willingly confessed to his later killings, there's no clear reason for him to lie about this one. And though he'd enjoyed the feeling of killing Timothy, it seems that something about the encounter spooked Gacy. As far as we know, he didn't kill again for the next several years. During this time, his contracting business was taking off, and Gacy often worked 16-hour days. His apparent dedication to his company concealed his true, twisted intent.

Most of Gacy's employees were young men or teenagers, and he had no qualms about praying on them. He sometimes demanded sex in exchange for promotions or raises. On multiple occasions he raped or tried to rape his employees. In July of 1975, one of these young men made the mistake of standing up to Gacy. Eighteen-year-old John Butkovich confronted his boss about unpaid back wages, demanding to know when he'd see the money. A few days after the confrontation, Gacy invited John over to his house to discuss the issue. He plied the young man with alcohol and then offered to show him a magic trick.

Gacy explained that he knew a technique to get out of any pair of handcuffs. He demonstrated it on himself first, then offered to show John how to do it. Intrigued, John let Gacey cuff him. But as soon as he did, Gacy's demeanor shifted. His eyes darkening, he began to strangle John and didn't let go until the young man stopped breathing. Afterward, Gacy calmly buried the body underneath the concrete floor of his garage. This crime was an unusual one for Gacy, in that it seemed to be motivated by revenge rather than sex. But killing John unleashed something horrific inside Gacy, a twisted genie that couldn't be put back in the bottle,

especially not after what came next. Gacy hadn't made any effort to conceal his interest in men from Carol, who often saw teenage boys coming and going from the garage, and by October of 1975, she'd had enough. She asked Gacy for a divorce. It's worth noting that Gacy's clown days started around the same time he was getting divorced. In late 1975, he joined a local clown club and started performing at fundraisers and children's hospitals. Never wanted to do anything by halves. Gacy developed not just one, but two separate clown personas. The first, Pogo was a happy clown, whereas the second, Patches, was darker and more melancholic.

Though probably unconscious on Gacy's part, this feels like a clear nod to the schism within his own personality. As we discussed earlier, there's no evidence that Gacy had dissociative identity disorder, despite what he claimed. But he was clearly aware of the wide gulf between his public self and his horrific true nature. And that gulf only grew wider as the years ticked by. By the spring of 1976, Carol was long gone, and Gacy had the house to himself. Looking around, he felt nothing but relief. His marriages had been shams. He'd always known it deep down.

But finally, the guard rails were off. There was nothing to stop him now. On April 6th, Gacy abducted, raped, and murdered, 18-year-old Daryl Julius Sampson, and buried him beneath his dining. room floor. The following month, he killed two teenage boys in a single night. That accelerated pace was a signal of things to come. Over the next three years, Gacy murdered over 30 victims, all of them young men and teenage boys. He found some of them at the Greyhound Terminal, others hitchhiking on the streets of Chicago. His techniques varied,

but he usually gained their trust by offering them alcohol, drugs, or money. He rarely took victims by force, he seemed so affable and ordinary that he didn't need to. But once he got them back to his house and drunk enough to be off their guard, his dark side took over. In almost every case, the murders played out in the same horrifying way. He would persuade his victim to let him cuff them under the magic trick pretense. Then he would rape them, torture and degrade them, and finally kill them. Once they were dead, Gacy buried almost all of his victims in the crawl space. beneath his house, making no effort to distance himself from the evidence of his crimes.

It's remarkable how unconcerned he seemed to be about getting caught. But that began to change in late 1977. That December, Gacy abducted 19-year-old Robert Donnelly from the Greyhound Terminal at gunpoint. He drove Robert home, raped and tortured him, and appeared to be gearing up to kill him. But for some reason, he didn't. At one point, Robert was in so much pain that he begged Gacy to kill him, so it's possible that Gacy refused to do it out of spite. Still, this doesn't explain what happened next.

After hours of torment, Gacy abruptly announced that he was done. He bundled Robert into his car and dropped him off back at the bus terminal. Before letting him go, he warned Robert that if he told the police about this, they wouldn't believe him. Heartbreakingly, he was right. Donald did report what happened to the police, and they questioned Gacy in early January. But Gacy insisted that everything they'd done that night had been consensual, part of what he called a slavery sex relationship.

He claimed that Donald was a sex worker who was angry that Gacy hadn't paid him. Gacy likely knew that the police were a lot less likely to care about what happened to Donald if they thought he was a sex worker. Sure enough, the cops believed him, and Gacy walked free. Letting Donald go was clearly reckless, and yet Gacy did the same thing with another victim. In March, he kidnapped, raped, and tortured 26-year-old Jeffrey Rignal, then left him in a Chicago Park. Jeffrey was badly injured, but alive. He went to the police and was able to identify his attacker.

This time, Gacy was arrested and charged with battery. Out on bail while he awaited trial, Gacy had no intention of stopping his spree. But he did reconsider bearing his victim. at his house. For one thing, he was running out of space, and perhaps his brush with the police had made him think twice about disposing of evidence so close to home. Gacy killed four more people that year and left their bodies in the Desplains River. His last victim was 15-year-old Robert Peast. On December 11, 1978, Gacy told Robert that he could make a lot more money working for his contracting business than at his pharmacy job. Intrigued, Robert agreed to meet up with

Gacy to discuss the opportunity and told his mother he was going to talk to a contractor about a job. Gacy took Robert to his house and sexually assaulted and murdered him there. He dumped his body in the river and thought nothing more of the crime. Robert was just another disposable victim to him. But Gacy had miscalculated. Robert's mother became alarmed when her son didn't return and she filed a missing person's report. After interviewing the store owner, police identified Gacy as the contract. he'd left with. Gacy denied any involvement in Robert's disappearance, but the cops kept digging

and eventually uncovered his criminal history and the pending battery charge from Jeffrey Rignall. A search of Gacy's house turned up several suspicious items, including weapons and a syringe, but nothing that conclusively tied him to Robert. Yet they were certain they had their man. So the police began surveilling Gacey in 12-hour shifts, hoping to catch him next time he slipped up.

At first, Gacy played it cool. He befriended the police officers who were surveilling him, even inviting them out for meals. As we discussed in our Edmund Kemper episode, this is another classic serial killer trope, the murderer who's so smart that he outwits the police. At least Gacy thought he was that smart. Over one breakfast, he opened up about his life, his business, and the fact that he was a registered clown. At one point, he said, you know, clowns can get away with anything. This feels like Gacy was winking at the police, perhaps even toying with them.

But as the investigation wore on, his sense of humor faded. He became angry with the police and filed a civil suit to try and get them to stop surveilling him. Perhaps he sensed the walls were closing in on him. The authorities were undeterred by Gacy turning on them. In fact, it only made them redouble their efforts. During a second search of his house, one police officer noticed a foul smell coming from a heating Once they started digging, the cops uncovered something unspeakable, a mass grave, encased in lime and concrete. They'd been looking for Robert's body, but instead they got a lot more than they bargained for.

Over the course of the next few weeks, they uncovered the remains of more than two dozen victims. The enormity of the crimes were hard for even the most seasoned officers to process. The bodies just seemed to keep coming. Gacy was finally arrested on December 20. After that, he finally changed his tune and confessed to raping and murdering more than 30 people. He couldn't name all of those young men, though. Some had been his employees, but others were strangers whose names he'd never bothered to remember. To this day, some of Gacy's victims have never been identified, but their sheer number made the case close to unprecedented.

Gacy's trial began in February of 1980, and the case drew international media attention. the likes of which had never been seen before at the Cook County Courthouse. Though the 24-hour news cycle was still in its infancy, TV news was growing fast and favored stories with a shocking or sensational hook. Gacy was irresistible, a seemingly ordinary Joe who moonlighted as a clown and had dozens of bodies buried in his house. The feverish coverage of his crimes helped to create the mythology of John Wayne Gacey. and both the prosecution and the defense tried to use the attention to their advantage.

Prosecutor William Cuncle had the trapdoor from Gacy's crawl space brought into the court as evidence. Then he wrapped up his closing arguments in dramatic fashion by dropping photographs of each victim into the trap door one by one. It was the kind of mic drop you usually only see in courtroom dramas, a made-for-TV moment. One of Gacy's living victims also got to. to be heard of the trial. Jeffrey Rignall appeared in court to recount how Gacy had abducted, raped, and tortured him, before inexplicably letting him go. Rignal was so distressed on the stand that he vomited, which surely only made his devastating testimony more impactful. In the end, no one was surprised when Gacy was convicted of 33 murders

and sentenced to death. After a series of failed appeals, he was executed by lethal injection in May of 1994. point, the mythology around him was so fervent that several different versions of his last words have been reported. According to some accounts, Gacy used his final breaths to rail against the state of Illinois for murdering him. According to others, he simply said, kiss my ass. But it seems that both of these are fabrications. In reality, Gacy said nothing. Like a game of telephone, Gacy's story has been told so many times that embellishments and exaggerations like this are inevitable. He He had no snappy final words, just as he never killed anyone while wearing his clown costume,

yet those details endure because they fit the larger-than-life narrative around Gacy. But despite the blurring of fact and fiction, the truth of Gacy's story is just as terrifying. He created a mass grave underneath his idyllic home, all while successfully passing as a pillar of the community. Gacy wasn't some horror movie villain, wielding a chainsaw or hissing from behind a paint of glass. He was worse. He was the monster you never saw coming. Over time, Gacy has come to symbolize an idea that exploded in the years following his arrest, popularized in movies like David Lynch's Blue Velvet, the rot that lies beneath the surface of

suburbia, and he wasn't the only one who broke that particular mold. Thanks again for tuning in to serial killers. We'll be back soon with the next episode of our anniversary series about the mythology, of American murderers. Next time, we'll turn our focus to arguably the most notorious American serial killer of all time, and his bizarre cult of personality that endures to this day. Much like Gacy, this killer didn't fit the murderer profile at all. He was a handsome, clean-cut young law student who used his charm like a lasso, and his victims rarely

sensed anything was wrong until it was too late. You can find all episodes of Serial Killers and all other Spotify originals from Parcast for free on Spotify. We'll see you next time. Have a Killer Week. Serial Killers is a Spotify original from Parcast. Executive producers include Max and Ron Cutler, sound designed by Carrie Murphy, with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Trent Williamson, and Carly Madden. This episode of Serial Killers was written by Emma Dibdin, edited by Joel Callan, fact-checked by

Haley Milliken, researched by Brian Petrus and Chelsea Wood and produced by Joshua Kern. Serial killers stars Greg Poulson and Vanessa Richardson. Hi, it's Carter, here to remind you that a very special evening with crime junkies, Ashley Flowers,

and Parcast founder Max Cutler, is just days away. It's an event celebrating the release of Parcast's first book, Colts, and you can be a part of it virtually on Spotify Live, or in person. The evening will take place in Los Angeles on July 13th

and feature discussions about the book, a live Q&A, and more. Plus, all ticket sales up to $125,000 will be matched by Max Cutler and donated to Season of Justice. A nonprofit founded by Ashley Flowers that provides financial resources to help solve cold cases and support families impacted by unsubased. solved violent crimes. This has all the makings of being the true crime event of the year.

So don't miss out. Register for your spot today at parcast.com slash cults. All attendees will receive a special signed copy of Parcast's new book, Cults. That's pardcast.com slash cults to sign up today. A beloved 75-year-old man washing up getting ready for bed is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcasts this year, but they're not crime beat.

Search for and follow the award-winning podcast Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Do you want to hear something spooky? Some monster. It reminded me of Bigfoot. Monsters Among Us is a weekly podcast. featuring true stories of the paranormal. One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession. Stories straight from the witnesses' mouths themselves. Something very snake-light lifted its head out of the water.

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