Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - John Wayne Gacy: The Night He Got Into a Coffin with a Corpse Pt. 1

Episode Date: September 12, 2026

John Wayne Gacy seemed like your ordinary neighbor. But underneath the surface, he was hiding urges he couldn't explain: ones that started in a Las Vegas funeral home basement, and ended with a body buried under his own house. In the first part of our 3-part series on John Wayne Gacy, Katie Ring traces the childhood that shaped him, and the double life he kept carefully hidden.Follow America's Most Infamous Crimes to hear the rest of the story: https://pod.link/1882861002If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this.

Except Sabrina and Alexis. are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. On the outside, John Wayne Gacy was the kind of neighbor everyone wished they had. He threw block parties that drew hundreds of people. He helped run the summer parade. He volunteered for the local Democratic Party and worked his way up in local politics. He ran his own construction company and on weekends he'd put on a clown costume and make sick kids laugh at the children's

hospital. But under that suburban lawn in the crawl space beneath his house, John Wayne Gacy was keeping a secret that would horrify the entire country. To understand how a man builds a life like that, the smile, the handshake, the costume, and hides what he was hiding underneath it, you have to go back to the beginning, back to a little boy in Chicago who could never do anything right in his father's eyes. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are that decades later, we're still asking how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring and this is America's most infamous crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases

that have a lasting imprint on society and still on us today. This is the first of our three episode series on John Wayne Gacy. The man the press would one day call the killer. clown. Today, I'll get into the origins and the childhood that shaped him, the respectable life he built, lost, and built again, and the first body he buried in his own home. John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago on March 17, 1942. He was the middle of three children and the only boy, an older sister on one side, a younger sister on the other. His mother, Marion, took care of the house and his father, John Stanley, was a machinist and a car mechanic, and a World War I veteran. To the neighbors and men he worked with, he was a solid, respectable, hardworking family

man. At home, he was somebody else entirely. Most nights, John Stanley would come home and disappear into the basement, into his workbench, his tools, and his liquor. The whole family learned to read his mood by how long he stayed down there and how quiet he was when he came back up. Because more often than not, the anger that had built up in him over the course of the day came back up with him. And it landed on the people closest to him, most of all his son. Part of it was that John Stanley had a very specific idea of what a son should be. Tough, athletic, someone who could take a hit and give one back. But that's not the boy he got.

John was born with a congenital heart condition and his doctors told him he had to take it easy. No sports, no rough housing, nothing too strenuous. He was overweight and in and out of the hospital as a kid. So while the other boys were out running around, John was stuck on the sidelines, and his father didn't see a child with a medical problem. He saw a kid who was soft, weak, another disappointment. And John Stanley wasn't afraid to tell him so. He called John a sissy, a mama's boy, stupid.

If John got sick, his father accused him of faking it to get out of things. If John did poorly in school, that was just laziness. And when words weren't enough, John Stanley hit him with the kind of leather strap used to sharpen a straight razor. Marianne did what she could, which mostly meant playing piece piece She'd smooth things over, make excuses, keep everyone calm, but smoothing things over isn't the same thing as protecting someone. When it really mattered, there was no one in that house willing to stand between the boy and his father and say enough is enough. So John adapted the

way a lot of kids in that position do. He went quiet. He kept his head down and his feelings to himself, because in his house, saying how you felt only made things worse. He took to building little forts out of boxes and furniture, small hidden spaces he could crawl into and disappear for a while. And here's the piece that's hardest to make sense of. Even with all of the insults, the beatings, the flat-out contempt, John spent the rest of his life trying to win that man over. He'd do the chores, jump up to help, try to guess what his father wanted before he even asked. And somehow it was never quite right, but he never stopped trying. He wanted his father to be proud of him and that hunger never faded. If anything, it informed almost everything he did. And by his own telling, the harm

didn't end with his father. John would later describe being sexually abused as a young child, first by an older girl in the neighborhood, and then by a family friend, a contractor who offered to teach him about the building trade and used their time alone to molest him. John said he never breathed a word of it to anyone. He was too afraid of what his father might do if he found out. Now, I want to flag something here, and I'm going to keep breathing. bringing it up. A lot of what we know about John's childhood comes straight from his mouth. In interviews and psychiatric evaluations, he gave many years later at a point when he had a lot of reasons to present himself as damaged goods. So those particular stories are worth eyeing with some skepticism,

but even the parts nobody disputes add up to a grim picture, a boy humiliated at home, who bounced between schools and never really found a friend, and who grew up certain that something inside him was broken. Then there's the injury. Somewhere around the age of 11, John said he was struck hard in the head, and afterward he started blacking out. He'd lose whole stretches of time with no memory of them. He was hospitalized on and off through his teenage years,

and at first doctors couldn't find a cause, which of course confirmed his father's theory that he was faking it for sympathy. But eventually they found it, a blood clot in his brain. Whether that injury actually changed anything in him is something experts still go back and forth. on, and there's no good answer. But it left John holding onto one idea that would have a big impact later, the belief that his own mind couldn't be trusted, that parts of his life could simply vanish on him. None of this served him in school. He fell behind, moved between different

schools, and at 17 he dropped out for good without a diploma. By his teens, he was a heavyset kid who didn't date, didn't have a crowd, and mostly felt like he was watching other people's lives from the outside. For a stretch after he dropped out, he bounced around from job to job and never really stuck to anything. And then he found the first thing that ever made him feel worse something, politics. He started volunteering for the local Democratic Party, running errands, and doing the grunt work nobody else wanted, and he loved it, not because he cared so much about the issues, but because of how it felt. For the first time, people counted on him. He felt useful and like he belonged somewhere. That feeling being the reliable guy, the one who shows up, he would chase it for the rest of his life.

You might think a father would be glad to see his son finally latch on to something. Not John Stanley. He looked at his boy and called him a patsy, a sucker, a pushover. It seemed like there wasn't any version of John his father would ever accept. By the time he was 20, John had had enough. In 1962, he did something out of character for a boy who'd spent his whole life keeping his head down. he got in his car and drove away all the way to Las Vegas, a city he'd never laid eyes on where he didn't know a single person.

He told himself it was a clean break, a fresh start. But he had no idea this fresh start was about to put something in front of him that he'd never be able to walk away from. Family blood runs deep. It binds, but getting along is an easy when jealousy and hunger for power take over. Killer Kin from ID explores real cases about family men. members who turn against one another, unleashing betrayal and violence from the inside. Here investigators, experts, and family members try to understand what actually happened and how

kinship can unravel into terror. Does evil run in the family? Listen to killer kin wherever you get your podcasts. John Wayne Gacy rolled into Las Vegas with almost no money and no plan. He needed work and a roof over his head fast. He took whatever job he could, first a job with an ambulance service, Then a second one that solved his housing problem too. A funeral home was hiring an attendant and the job came with a place to sleep. A cot down in the basement in the same room where the bodies were prepared for burial. So that's where John slept, just a few feet from the dead. For most people, that would be unbearable.

But John found it strangely peaceful. Nobody down there could hurt him or criticize him or tell him he wasn't enough. And over time, he became fascinated by the work itself. the embalming, the stillness, the routine of being around death every day. He would later describe testing himself down there in the dark, seeing how close he could get to the bodies without flinching. In his own words, he called it an experiment. Then one night, that fascination morphed into something he couldn't explain to himself.

Alone in the dark, unable to sleep, John got up and crossed the room to one of the coffins. The body of a young man was inside, and instead of turning away, John climbed in beside him and laid down. After a few minutes, he came to his senses and scrambled out, but it shook him badly. Not just what he'd done, but how much of him hadn't wanted to stop. In the daylight, he was humiliated by it. He hadn't actually done anything except lie there next to a body,

but that was disturbing enough, and what frightened him most was how much a part of him had liked it. He didn't last much longer out west, and after only a few months in Las Vegas, he called his mom, asked if he could come home and drove back to Chicago. Once he was back home, John set out to become the one thing his father had always sworn he'd never be, a success. He enrolled at Northwestern Business College in Chicago and actually finished the program. It turned out he had a real knack for sales.

He was warm, chatty, quaked to size up a person and tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. For a kid who'd always felt like the outsider, being good at reading people was a revelation. He landed a job with a shoe company, impressed the right people, and got himself transferred to Springfield, Illinois as a management trainee. And it was there at work that he met a young woman named Marlon Myers. The two of them clicked, and in September of 1964, when John was 22, they got married. Marlon's family opened the door to his next big opportunity. Her father owned three Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises up in Waterloo, Iowa, and he offered

to bring John in to run them. so the newlyweds packed up and moved to Waterloo, where John threw himself into work, long days, opening the restaurants in the morning and closing them at night. By every account, he was a relentless worker, and for a few years, things were good. The restaurants did well under him, and in 1966, Marlon gave birth to a son, Michael.

The next year, they had a daughter, Christine. On paper, it was the picture of a mid-60s American dream, the young manager, the wife, the two kids, the nice house in a good part of town. And John was taking full advantage of it. He joined the local JCs, a club for up-and-coming young men, and became one of their leaders. He organized their events, ran their fundraisers, sat on different committees, and even served as the chapter's chaplain, leading the prayer at meetings.

In 1967, the group named him its outstanding vice president and put him on the board of directors. He was talked about as a rising star, the kind of member who might climb all the way to the up to state office someday, and people trusted him completely. When one of his restaurants was robbed, John was the county's best witness. A respected, local businessman, the prosecutor was glad to put on the stand. Years later, one former prosecutor would remember him simply as a nice guy to have a round, before adding that he'd learned way too late how wrong that was.

But to everyone around him, John Wayne Gasey was exactly the man his father had told him he could never be, and that didn't go unnoticed. Late in his life, John Stanley actually admitted that he'd been wrong about his son. For a man who'd spent decades tearing him down, that was about as close to, I am proud of you as John was ever going to get. And according to him, these were the happiest years of his life. But the private urges he couldn't explain in that Las Vegas basement hadn't gone anywhere. Underneath the Good Job, the young family, and the civic awards, there was a whole other side of John,

one he kept carefully out of sight. He'd later described sexual encounters with other men during this period and the wave of shame that crashed over him every single time. But the shame never stopped him. It just pushed the behavior deeper underground. By day, he was the devoted husband and the civic golden boy. The rest he kept walled off, sealed away from the life everyone else could see. And in a small Iowa town, a man can only keep two lives apart for so long.

The rumor started as a whisper. People around the JCs noticed that John seemed unusually interested in the teenage boys he worked with and hired around town. He kept a lot of young men on the payroll at his restaurants and he spent a lot of his off hours around them and many times would provide them with alcohol. There was talk that he'd made a pass at one of them but nothing anyone could prove, just a nagging feeling that something about John Gacy didn't quite add up. For a while, he outran it. His reputation was strong enough to carry him. But in the summer of 1967, the two halves of his life finally collided.

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And if you're one of the bad guys, they are coming for you. It all started with a 15-year-old boy named Donald Voorhees. Donald was the son of one of John's fellow JCs, and in August of 1967, when John was 25, he lured Donald to his house by offering to show him some stagreels, basically soft-core porn videos the guys would put on at some of their meetings. Donald took him up on it and once he was inside, John put on the movie. He kept handing him drinks and then sexually assaulted him.

Afterward, he told the boy it was just a normal part of growing up, and Donald wasn't the only one. Over the following months, John did the same thing to other local teenagers, leaning on a mix of pressure and shame to keep them quiet. It worked until it didn't. In the spring of 1968, Donald finally told his father what had happened, and they went to the police. That made, John was indicted and charged with sodomy,

the legal term at the time for the assault he'd committed. When investigators searched his home, they found the same kind of films Donald had described. And then a second young man came forward, a 16-year-old named Edward Lynch, who'd worked for John. Edward said John got him drunk in the basement over a game of pool. And once Edward was drunk enough, John wrapped a chain around him and started to choke him,

stopping only when he seemed to realize how close he'd come to killing him. John denied everything. His wife Marlon stood by him and insisted the police had it all wrong. John was so confident he demanded a lie detector test to prove his innocence. Ironically, he failed it terribly. So when that didn't clear him, he went with a story he'd used for the rest of his life. He claimed the whole thing was politically motivated. After all, Donald's father had opposed John's wrong.

in the JCs. In John's version, he wasn't a predator. He was the victim of a smear campaign. Then he did something that told you exactly how his mind worked. Rather than face the charges, he decided to make the main witness go away. While he was out on bail, John paid one of his employees $300 to track Donald down and beat him, to scare him out of testifying, but it backfired completely. Donald went straight to the police, the employee was arrested, and he immediately gave up the name of the man who'd hired him, which meant John was now facing brand new charges of attempting to suborn perjury and malicious threats to extort. As the case moved forward, the court ordered a psychiatric evaluation, and the doctors came back with a finding that would

echo through the rest of John's story. They diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder, but concluded he was entirely fit to stand trial. He knew right from wrong, he just didn't seem to care which side of the line he stood on. In November of 1968, John pleaded guilty to one count of sodomy. He still swore he was innocent of everything else, but it didn't matter. On December 3rd, the judge handed him the maximum sentence of 10 years and sent him to the state penitentiary at Anamosa. He lost almost everything.

The very same day he was sentenced, Marlon filed for divorce. She took the two children and kept her word in which she said he would never see them again. And then behind bars, he did something that tells you how deep his need to be admired ran. He became a model prisoner. Within months, he'd worked his way up to Head Cook. He joined the prison's own inmate chapter of the JCs, and in under a year and a half, he grew its membership from around 50 men to more than 600. Even locked up for assaulting a teenage boy, John was still chasing the same thing he'd always gone after.

To be the guy in charge, the one everybody responsible. All the while, he told his fellow inmates that he'd been framed and that jealous rivals had set him up. But there was one loss even his new persona couldn't overcome. At the end of 1969, his father, John Stanley, died, and John wasn't allowed to leave prison for the funeral. The father he had spent nearly 30 years trying to win over was gone, and they had never made peace. It gutted him, but John was good at surviving. He followed the rules, kept his record clean, and after serving only 18 months of that 10-year sentence, he was paroled in the summer of 1970.

As a condition of his release, the 28-year-old moved back in with his mother, this time in Chicago, and took a job as a short-order cook. And this is where the system failed tremendously. Less than a year after his release, John was arrested again, accused of assaulting another teenage boy. As always, John flipped it around and insisted the boy had come onto him, that the whole thing was consensual and he'd done nothing wrong. It was the same move he always made, turn himself into the victim. And it worked. When the court date arrived, the accuser never showed up and the charges were dropped. Worse, that arrest never made its way back to the

parole board in Iowa, so the one thing that could have sent John straight back to prison fell through the cracks. Free and starting over yet again, John did the thing he did best. He rebuilt the respectable version of himself. In late 1971, he and his mother founded a construction company, PDM contractors, short for painting, decorating, and maintenance. He hired teenage boys and young men to work for him, telling clients it kept his prices down while giving the kids some real experience. And he was good at it. The same easy salesmanship that had once moved shoes now landed him contracts. Before long, he and his mother bought a modest ranch house on Somerdale Avenue, in a quiet township on the northwest edge of the city. He also started making

the kind of connections that fed his other life. He confided in one client about his attraction to young men, and instead of recoiling, the client offered a tip. There was a Greyhound bus station downtown where you could find young men passing through, mostly travelers and runaways who might be talked into things for a little bit of money. A lot of them were alone, far from home, the kinds of people who wouldn't be reported missing right away, if at all. Around the same time, John reconnected with someone from his past, a woman named Carol Hoff, an old acquaintance who was now divorced with two young daughters.

They started dating, and once again, it looked like John's life was clicking back into place. But a few days into 1972, that other side of him took over. And this time, it didn't stop at assault. On a night in early January, John roved down to that greyhound station and met a 16-year-old named Timothy McCoy. Timothy was passing through Chicago on a long layover back home. John offered him a ride in a place to rest and Timothy left with him. By morning, Timothy was dead.

John had stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. The only real account we have of that night comes from John himself. He claimed he woke up to find Timothy standing in the doorway holding a night. and that he panicked and attacked him in self-defense, thinking he was about to be stabbed. But by his own later admission, he'd misread the whole thing. Timothy hadn't come to hurt him at all. He'd been in the kitchen making breakfast and was simply carrying the knife for that. Whatever John told himself in the moment, the autopsy was blunt about the result.

Timothy hadn't fallen on a blade. He'd been stabbed again and again. Whatever happened in that room, John didn't call for help and he didn't call the police. Instead, he dug into the crawl space beneath his house, put Timothy's body in the ground, and covered it over. Then he cleaned up and went on with his day. Six months later in July of 1972, John Wayne Gacy married Carol Hoff, and she and her two little girls moved into the house on Somerdale Avenue.

But they were completely unaware of the secrets that were buried beneath him. It's time to ring the alarm where I answer questions about the case and give my unfiltered thoughts, so make sure to comment below. So we always hear he had a terrible childhood offered up as the explanation for someone like this. How much stock do you actually put in that? A difficult childhood can absolutely shape someone's emotional development, their ability to form healthy relationships, and how they deal with rejection, anger, shame, or control. But it does not automatically produce a violent person. And with Gacy, I think we have to be especially careful about turning his childhood into a neat little origin story because plenty of people experience,

abuse, humiliation, or dysfunctional families and never hurt anyone. What I find more useful is looking at what someone does with those experiences. Trauma can be one ingredient, but it interacts with personality, environment, choices, opportunities, and other psychological factors. And ultimately, Gacy was an adult who made repeated, deliberate choices to manipulate, sexually assault, torture and murder people. His childhood may help us understand him, but it doesn't explain away what he did. Millions of kids grow up with a cruel, violent parent, and the overwhelming majority of them never lay a hand on anyone. If a bad childhood reliably produced serial killers, we'd be drowning in them. So a rough upbringing might be part of the picture, but it's never the

whole picture, and it absolutely is not an excuse. You kept saying he said, and by his own account tonight? Why the hesitation on his version of things? I think the hesitation is because, honestly, I don't trust John Wayne Gacy as a narrator of his own life. He lied constantly, manipulated people, and he had every incentive to control the story around what he did. So when I say he said, or by his own account, I'm being very intentional. I'm telling you, this is what Gacy claims happened, not necessarily what actually happened. And that's really important with someone like him, because he had a reason to give us explanations that made him seem less responsible. He could blame his childhood, alcohol, other people, his memory, whatever helped him create

a version of Gacy that was more complicated or less culpable. We can absolutely listen to what he said, but we shouldn't confuse a killer's explanation of himself with the truth. In fact, sometimes the most interesting question isn't, is Gacy telling the truth? It's why does Gacy need us to believe this version of his story? That blackout story, the blood clot, that comes up with a lot of these cases, doesn't it? It does, and a lot of violent offenders have had brain injuries in their past. There is genuinely real research on head trauma and changes to the brain

specifically in areas connected to impulse control, so I'm not going to completely write it off. But when the story conveniently appears around the most incriminating parts of someone's behavior, I think we have to be pretty careful about taking it at face value. With Gacy, there really was reportedly a blood clot following a childhood head injury, but his blackouts apparently stopped right after it was treated. So again, I think this is where we have to be much more skeptical and separate what Gacy said happened to him from what is actually reported. Gacy leaned on the story hard.

The idea that he could lose time, that whole pieces of his life just vanished on him, turned out to be incredibly convenient for him down the line. The thing that personally stuck with me in this episode was how badly he still wanted his father's approval, even after everything. What do you make of that? This dynamic is extremely common in cases of child abuse and especially between a boy and his father who he desperately wants approval from. And this might honestly be the most important thread in the whole first chapter. This is a man who was told he was worthless by the one person he most wanted to impress, and he spent his entire life trying to earn it. The drive to earn his father's approval also became his most effective mask.

Every single time he blew up his life, he rebuilt the exact same thing. The successful businessman, the community guy, the one everybody trusts. Even in prison, he's running the inmate JCs. That hunger to be seen as good, important, and powerful never switched off for a second. The awful irony is that the mask kept getting more convincing while the person underneath it kept getting worse. We're going to watch him perfect that mask in part two, and we're going to watch just how many people it fooled. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode.

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Come back tomorrow for the next episode on John Wayne Gacy. Some mysteries have haunted us for centuries. Others are unfolding right now. How does a modern airliner with 239 people on board disappear from the sky without a trace? This is History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Adapted from the hit TV show,

every episode dives into one of the world's greatest enigmas, the vanishings, the myths, the lost relics, and the unexplained. With contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers, we separate fact from folklore and evidence from rumor, from unsolved crimes to buried treasure, to the deaths and disappearances of famous figures. These are the stories we think we know, but dig beneath the legend and the truth gets far stranger. Follow history's greatest mysteries, available now wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa.

Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a third. Reddit 2 a.m. that starts with You have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat

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