Murder In America - EP. 89 ILLINOIS - John Wayne Gacy (PT. 4): Possible Accomplices and Pedophile Ring Conspiracies
Episode Date: November 19, 2022In our last episode, we ended with John Wayne Gacy’s execution - but the story does not end there. There has long been speculation that Gacy did not act alone, and after spending weeks researching t...his case we’ve learned a lot of things that are just too crazy to ignore, like one of Gacy’s PDM employees becoming a cannibalistic serial killer and another being connected to one of America’s largest pedophile rings. In this episode, we’re diving into the largely unknown conspiracy behind the killer clown’s murders. This is part four of the story of John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown, and you are listening to Murder in America. - Put fit and comfort first with Bare Necessities - get 20% off your order by visiting barenecessities.com and use our custom code MIA20! - Try HelloFresh today- America's #1 Meal Kit! Just go to https://www.HelloFresh.com/state65 and use code STATE65 for 65% off plus free shipping! - Get the best shave of your life at myfreebird.com/murder and get 20% off your order! - Stay Connected: Join the Murder in America fam in our free Facebook Community for a behind-the-scenes look, more insights and current events in the true crime world: https://www.facebook.com/groups/4365229996855701 If you want even more Murder in America bonus content, including ad-free episodes, come join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/murderinamerica Instagram: http://instagram.com/murderinamerica/ Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/people/Murder-in-America-Podcast/100086268848682/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MurderInAmerica TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theparanormalfiles and https://www.tiktok.com/@courtneybrowen Feeling spooky? Follow Colin as he travels state to state (and even country to country!) investigating claims of extreme paranormal activity and visiting famous haunted locations on The Paranormal Files Official Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheParanormalFilesOfficialChannel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The following podcast is not suitable for all audiences.
We go into great detail with every.
every case that we cover and do our best to bring viewers even deeper into the stories by utilizing
disturbing audio and sound effects.
Trigger warnings from the stories we cover may include violence, rape, murder, and offenses
against children.
This podcast is not for everyone. You have been warned.
For the past three episodes, we have told you the horrific story of John Wayne Gasey and his
crimes against young boys in the 1970s. And in the last episode, we ended with Gacy's
But the story does not end there. You see, while Gacy was awaiting his execution, he did a number of jailhouse interviews, proclaiming that he did not kill all 33 boys in the crawl space. And he claims he only killed two, and that the rest were carried out by others. And you might be thinking that that's a load of bullshit. And anything that comes out of that man's mouth shouldn't be trusted.
After all, the bodies were found in his home.
And I get that.
But after doing a little digging,
we can't help feel that there might be some truth to Gacy's claims.
We don't think John Wayne Gacy acted alone.
And before this podcast, we had never considered such a statement.
But after researching for weeks now,
we've learned a lot of things that are just too crazy to ignore.
known facts that Gacy was definitely connected to other criminals,
and many of those connections have to do with his PDM employees.
One of them went on to be a cannibalistic serial killer in Chicago,
and another was connected to one of the biggest pedophile rings in American history.
So join us as we take a deep dive into the largely unknown conspiracy
behind the killer clowns murders.
I'm Courtney Browne.
And I'm Colin Brown.
And you're listening to Murder in America.
Getting to John Wayne Gacy's alleged accomplices
and all of the wild things about this mysterious case,
it's important to note that Gacy was a copycat killer,
meaning that he took ideas from someone else that killed before him.
And that man was Dean Coral of Houston, Texas.
And there's a possible connection between these two men,
so we're going to tell you a bit about Dean Coral
before we get back to Gacy.
Dean Coral was born on Christmas Eve, 1939, in Indiana, and he had a rough childhood.
His parents fought frequently when Dean was a child and eventually divorced, which led Dean to
become a shy, introspective child.
The family eventually moved from Indiana to Texas, where Dean's mother and stepfather
started a small candy company, which they initially operated from the garage of their home.
Dean was employed in the family business from its inception, and he helped to make the candy with
his younger brother. Eventually, Dean graduated high school with a stellar report card. He was known to be
a loner, but he seemed to be a normal family-loving teenager at that point in his life. Eventually,
the family moved to the outskirts of Houston, Texas. Dean's mother and his stepfather divorced,
and in the wake of the divorce, his mother started a candy-making business of her own,
called Coral Candy Company, and Dean was made to be vice president of the business. During the first year
of this new company's existence, a young male employee complained to Dean's mother that Dean had
made unwanted advances towards him. In response, Dean's mother fired the teenage employee and kept
Dean as vice president. Soon after, in 1969, Dean was drafted into the U.S. Army. It was during
Dean's time in the Army when allegedly, he realized that he was gay. Friends of Dean's back in
Houston noticed after his service was over that Dean acted differently around young men. His mannerisms
seemed to have changed. But to them, he was still the same old Dean.
After returning home, Dean reassumed the position of vice president of his family's candy company.
As the company expanded, they moved locations and ended up relocating right across the street from an elementary school.
Dean would frequently hand out candy to local children and, in particular, to teenage boys.
And this quickly earned him the nickname Candyman amongst the local youth.
In 1967, Dean befriended a 12-year-old boy named David Brooks.
The sixth grader was one of the children that Dean frequently handed out candy to,
and the two quickly became friends.
Dean gave David money whenever he needed it,
constantly talked him up, and David said later on that Dean became a father figure to him.
David would frequently spend the night at Dean's apartment,
which he considered to be his second home,
as his parents were divorced and lived far apart from each other.
At one point, facing hard times, the family candy company closed,
and Dean took on a job working as an electrician,
and this is when the killings began.
Between the years 1970 and 1973,
Dean Coral was known to have killed a minimum of 28 victims.
There is still the possibility that he killed more, but they are yet to be discovered.
Dean's first victim would be 18-year-old college freshman, Jeffrey Conan.
Jeffrey was hitchhiking in the city, and it's believed that he got into Dean's car and was never seen again.
Dean would torture his victims before killing them, oftentimes strapping them naked to a bed.
While the victims were strapped up, Dean would torture and sexually assault them before moving on to the kill and eventual burial.
The details of the torture methods Dean used against his victims are absolutely horrific.
So let's dig into them for a second.
After investigators searched Dean's home, after his crimes eventually came to light, they found a number of disturbing items.
The most famous of these discoveries was the torture board.
Dean would often strap his victims to an eight-foot-long, two-foot-wide, unpainted board of wood,
and on it there were drilled holes.
Dean would handcuff his victim's hands to the top of the board,
and then secure their feet and legs to the bottom of the board using a nylon rope.
Dean could then keep the victim attached to the board as long as he wanted.
and he would frequently torture and molest the victims for days on end.
According to later testimony from one of Dean's accomplices,
the more Dean liked the victim,
the longer he kept them alive and strapped to the board.
A number of items were found in Dean's home that could have been used for torture,
including pliers, knives, and an 18-inch-long double-sided dildo.
One of Dean's preferred torture methods was to remove his victim's pubic hairs one by one,
either with a pair of pliers or by his bare hands.
To do this, Dean would remove the clothing of his victim,
and while the boy was strapped to the torture board,
he would individually remove every one of their pubic hairs.
Another one of Dean's favorite activities involved the use of long glass rods.
For this method of torture,
Dean would once again fasten his victims to the torture board,
then insert a long, thin glass rod into the urethra of his victim
before snapping it off,
leaving the broken glass inserted in the penis.
When the police eventually discovered Dean's torture room, they found the floor littered with broken glass rods.
This showed them that this torture method was one of Dean's favorites.
On another occasion, Dean became so enraged with the victim that he had tied up on the torture board that he bit off the boy's testicles and penis with his mouth.
The severed set of genitals was eventually discovered in Dean's mass grave boat shed, and according to forensic researchers, they had been severed in one powerful bite.
At one point, a young David Brooks, Dean's friend, walked in on Dean assaulting two young men that he had tied up to a bedpost.
Dean told David that he needed him to be silent about this and told him that if he remained quiet, he would buy him a car.
So, David remained quiet and eventually Dean bought him a green Chevy Corvette.
At this point, seeing an opportunity, Dean began to offer David cash in exchange for victims.
Dean said that he would pay David $200, which is worth about $1,000 nowadays, for every future victim.
him he would abduct and bring to him.
And so David agreed and began searching the streets of Houston for vulnerable young boys.
After a while, Dean's desire to kill grew stronger, and he decided he was going to need help
in his murder scheme.
And it was around that same time when David Brooks introduced Dean to a young man named Elmer
Wayne Henley.
At first, Dean discovered Elmer to be a potential victim.
But as they talked, he realized that he would make a great accomplice.
Dean invited Elmer to become a part of the abduction for murder scheme.
But at first, for months, Elmer denied Dean's offer.
But eventually, after his family fell on hard times, Elmer decided to accept it.
And like David Brooks, he too started finding future victims for Dean Coral.
And it should be noted that at first,
Dean told Elmer that he was finding young men to be sold into a, quote, human slavery ring,
not specifically for Dean to murder.
As time went on, the three men, Dean Coral, Elmer Wayne Henley, and David Brooks
transformed into a bona fide murder machine.
Elmer and David would bring Dean young boys,
and after Dean would torture and kill them,
they would head out to various locations to bury the bodies.
And this continued on for years.
Eventually, though, the entire story came to a bloody end
when on August 8, 1973, Dean decided to try and kill his own accomplice, Elmer Wayne Henley,
because he was angry he had brought him a young female to torture and kill instead of a male.
After passing out at Dean's home, Elmer and his two friends awoke
and noticed that they had all three been restrained with nylon rope and gagged with adhesive tape.
Eventually, Dean freed Elmer from his restraints and instructed him to rape his friend
while he raped his other friend, but Elmer had had enough.
He quickly snatched Dean's pistol and told him that he had had enough of the killing.
It was all over.
After Dean dared him to shoot him, Elmer fired a shot directly into Dean's skull.
But Dean didn't die right away.
He lunged at his accomplice, and Elmer then unloaded the pistol into his serial killer friend,
ending the reign of terror that the Candyman had enacted on the young boys in Houston, Texas.
All in all, Dean Coral and his two accomplices had led over 28 young boys to their horrific deaths,
and buried them in mass graves in the greater Houston area.
But how does this all relate back to John Wayne Gacy?
Well, there are striking similarities between their cases.
Obviously, both Gacy and Coral had a penchant for young boys.
And their body counts are similar,
with Coral having 28 confirmed victims,
and Gacy having 33.
Their crimes both took place during the 1970s,
and their victims were found and procured in very similar ways,
either through enticement or straight-up abduction.
And interestingly enough, Dean Coral was known to use the handcuff trick on his victims,
where he would place the handcuffs on himself, get out of them with ease,
and then dare his future victims to try and escape the cuffs themselves,
which is exactly what Gacy was known to do.
But the similarities don't and there.
Remember the torture board of Dean Corals that he would tie his victims to?
Well, as we mentioned in a previous episode, John Wayne Gacy had one of those as well.
And according to the book Killer Clown by author Terry Sullivan,
John Gacy himself even admitted to a detective that he had stolen the ideas of the torture board from Dean Coral.
This is important to the story because it shows Gacy had a deep understanding of Dean Coral's story.
He knew all of the details, and he was almost eager to steal some of Coral's methods himself.
Gacy took the handcuff trick.
He copied the torture board, and he even bragged that he got more victims than Coral did.
So seeing that Gacy was obviously influenced by the Candyman of Houston, Texas,
It begs the question, did John Wayne Gacy copy Dean Coral in other ways?
Possibly by hiring accomplices of his own?
It's definitely a possibility.
Years after John Wayne Gacy was convicted of murdering 33 young boys in Chicago,
he spoke with many people about how the police department got it all wrong.
He claimed they were sloppy in their investigation,
and they had tunnel vision in making him the only one who had been killing these young boys,
despite them having evidence that he didn't act alone.
So let's rewind for a second back to December of 1978.
Right after Gacy was arrested and brought into the police station for the murders,
he looks at the detectives working the case and asks them,
Have you arrested my accomplices?
So right off the bat, Gacy is admitting that he didn't act alone.
The police tell him no, that he was the only person under arrest.
Gacy would then go on to say that his PDM employees,
Michael Rossi and David Cram, who were in their early,
20s helped him in the murders. Now, we already know from the previous episodes that Rossi and
Cram admitted to digging trenches in the crawl space, the same trenches that the bodies would later be
buried in. But they claimed they had no idea why they were digging the trenches. They were just
following orders. Same for the lime. Rossi and Cram admitted to dumping hundreds of pounds of
lime in the crawl space for Gacy, but they said they never asked any questions. But Gacy said that wasn't
true, and they knew all about the bodies. Since the beginning, there has been speculative
that Gacy had an accomplice, and today for the first time it was revealed that Gacy told the
psychiatrist that someone besides himself knew that dead bodies were buried under the house.
Investigators who worked the Gacy case said that they were very suspicious of Rossi and Cram
at the beginning of the investigation, and for a while they were suspected of being his accomplices,
but they would never be charged with anything. In fact, the prosecution ended up using the boys
as witnesses in their trial against Gacy.
David Cramm 22, today's star witness was a favorite and steady employee of John Gacy who lived with him for a month.
It was when Cram demonstrated how he kneeled to dig two trenches in Gacy's crawl space that some jurors stood up for a better look.
In the center of the courtroom floor, the crawl space entrance taken from Gacy's home.
Cram spoke of the dirt mounds sitting nearby as he dug for four or five hours.
He thought it was a plumbing project.
Now, for a little background, it's important to know that both.
Both Rossi and Cram were very street smart, and they knew their way around Chicago.
They were exactly the kind of guys that Gacy would have wanted as his right-hand men.
Almost immediately after the two employees started working for Gacy,
his wife at the time Carol had a bad feeling about them.
Those two guys were around and in the house in a lot.
It's the very first time I met Rossi and Cram.
I just said to John, those two are bad news.
And she had every right to feel this way, because as it later came out, Gacy admitted to having a sexual relationship with them both.
Insofar as being bisexual, if I wanted to engage in sex, Rossi and Cram were willing to go down on me anytime I wanted to, providing they were given stuff.
But at trial, Rossi denied these claims.
When Cram was asked about his sexual relationship with Gacy, he pled the fifth.
In later testimony, Cram took the Fifth Amendment several times, as both defense and prosecution,
asked him if he ever had sex with John Gacy.
The defendant kept his eyes on the youth all the time, smiling.
Witness number two, Michael Rossi, was called late Tuesday afternoon.
He said he moved in with John Gacy when David Cram moved up.
He said Gacy ordered him to pour hundreds of pounds of lime in the crawl space to get rid of what Gacy called the foul odor.
Rossi was the one who was actually seen driving John Sik's car after he disappeared.
And Gacy would later claim that Rossi was the one who killed him.
Just want to highlight on John Zick.
You know, they want to make such an issue over John Zick.
and his disappearance.
I think he was killed for his car personally.
And your personal knowledge of the Zick case then is...
My personal knowledge of the Zick cases is that I had come home and Zick and Rossi were at the house.
I had a few drinks.
I went to bed.
When I woke up the next morning, Rossi was sleeping on the couch and Zick was dead on the floor.
I went about my own business and he was gone later on.
And where did he go?
Where do he end up?
I assumed he ended up in the crawled space.
Did you see him being transported down there?
No, it wasn't present.
Didn't do the transporting.
But when he was dead, he was dead on the floor?
He was dead on the floor, yes.
Did you have a conversation with anybody about that?
No.
In other words, I just kept my mouth shut because I didn't want to get involved.
My idea was just stay out of it.
Now, you might be thinking how convenient.
Gacy's blaming other people for his dirty work.
And how on earth would you ever believe that when the bodies were found in the crawl space of his home?
And that's what I thought at first, too.
But after looking into some of the cases, I have a hard time believing Gacy worked alone.
For one, one of his surviving victims, Jeffrey Rignall claimed that during his rape and torture,
there was someone else in the room other than Gacy.
The idea of a Gacy accomplice was raised from the beginning by Jeffrey Rignoll.
He is one of a few people who survived Gacy's attack.
He said another man was at Gacy's home the night Gacy raped him.
Attorneys Robert Stevenson and Steve Becker have been trying to help families of victims find answers.
They've been getting tips from the public and they've uncovered information that they say
shows someone else may have been involved in some of the killings.
There is significant evidence out there that suggests that not only did John Wayne Gacy not operate alone,
may not have been involved in some of the murders,
and the fact that he was largely a copycat killer.
Another reason many people believe Gacy didn't work alone
was the fact that he was obviously not in the best shape.
Murdering and hauling the bodies of the victims across the house
and down into the crawl space would have been pretty difficult.
And he himself definitely would have not been able to fit in the crawl space
to bury all of these young men.
couldn't get down in the crawl space that easy, and then I had a bum back to begin with.
You got to crawl on your belly to move around in the crawl space.
There is no way that I could have done any of the digging down there.
I had enough trouble just getting down there.
In addition, when looking at the bodies, it's clear that not all of them were killed in the same way.
Gacy would later admit that his method of killing was the rope tourniquet trick,
which would lead his victims to die from exphyxiation.
It was a part of his M.O.
But surprisingly, 13 of the 33 victims died from suffocation.
And reports state that these suffocations were carried out
by shoving a cloth-like material down the victim's throats
to cut off their oxygen.
Now, it's totally possible that a killer can switch up their M.O.,
but it's admittedly very strange.
Just for a second, let's take a look
at two of these victims that were murdered and found with the cloths in their throat.
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One victim was Russell Nelson who went missing on October 17, 1977. According to testimony from his mother,
Russell went to a disco on North Broadway with a friend who was several years older.
Later that night, the friend called the family to say that the two of them were standing
outside of the disco when Russell just disappeared.
Immediately, the family thought that this was strange.
How does your friend disappear when you're standing right next to him?
The friend would later tell Russell's family that he would stay in Chicago and look for him,
as long as they sent him money.
Russell's mother would later tell the news.
He called me two or three times a week and threatened me for money.
He said he was staying down here to look for my son.
Russell Nelson's brothers ended up going to Chicago to look for Russell, and they met up with the friend who was asking their mom for money.
And believe it or not, after revealing that he had come up empty-handed in his search for Russell,
the friend offered Russell's brothers a job with none other than John Wayne Gacy.
This is an absolutely crystal clear link between Gacy, a suspected accomplice, and a victim.
Here's Russell's sister-in-law on the matter.
Russell would later be found in the crawl space with a cloth shoved down his throat.
Another young man who was found with a cloth in his throat was Robert Gilroy, who went missing on September 15, 1977.
That day, Robert sends a letter to his girlfriend from a mailbox, not far from Gacy's home.
Later that day at 6 p.m., he's supposed to meet his friends at a bus stop, but he never shows up.
And he too would later be found in the crawl space.
But what's interesting about this case is that according to court records,
John Wayne Gacy was in Pennsylvania from September 12th to September 16th.
Robert went missing on the 14th.
So how could he have abducted him if he was hours away in a different state?
Did someone else do it?
According to Gacy's logbooks, this wasn't the only occasion where he was out of
town when one of his victims went missing.
As you know, I'm a bug about record keeping.
All of my business records confirmed where I was, who I was with, what hotel I stayed at,
what meals I ate, everything was in the files.
And all of those files on December 29th of 1978 were confiscated by the Displains Police
Department.
And those files there alone could have proven that I wasn't in Illinois 116 of these murders.
When they finally set the dates as to when these murders are.
Another interesting thing to note is that one of Gacy's victims was actually roommates with Michael Rossi.
The victim's name was John Mori.
And just four days after he moved in with Michael, John went missing.
A few days after his disappearance, two of his friends came by the apartment to ask Michael some questions about John's whereabouts.
You know, we counted him trying to find out where John was at.
and he'd be upset.
He was glad that John was gone.
He seemed like he had a little bit of a temper.
You know, he would get mad easily.
Very odd.
We were afraid of him.
The friend would go on to say that when they came over,
Michael was drinking and smoking a lot of weed.
And while they were there,
he confessed to something that sent chills down their spine.
He told us that he knew about a location
where there were a bunch of dead bodies
that nobody knew about.
not even the police, which I remember very clearly because he said this with such a terrible smirk on his face.
We left after that and felt that he still knew something about John's disappearance that he wasn't telling us.
That's right.
Allegedly, Michael Rossi admitted to John's friends that he knew of a location where there were bodies buried in Chicago.
Michael even tried to give the two girls John's dog and was acting as if he knew for
a fact he would never be coming home. Obviously this is pretty strange behavior. Keep in mind,
Michael Rossi worked with Gacy up until the time he was caught. Oftentimes, Gacy would victimize
and murder his own employees. But he never murdered Michael Rossi or David Cramm. So the question is,
why? Why would he keep these two alive and murder the others? And how could they have been digging
trenches in the crawl space all of that time and not noticed that there were dozens of bodies down
there. Michael Rossi was never officially charged with any crimes in regards to the Gacy case. After Gacy was
brought in and confessed to the murders, Rossi was interviewed extensively and then essentially
turned loose. A few years later, in 1982, Rossi was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to a
battery charge in connection with the abduction and beating of a man in Chicago, whom he believed
had been placing lewd phone calls to one of his friends' wives.
He served time for this charge.
Then, over 15 years later, in 1999, Michael Rossi was again arrested after beating a movie theater
manager with a baseball bat.
After this arrest, he was also looked at as a suspect in a string of movie theater
arsons that occurred throughout the Midwest during that same time period.
This all goes to show that Michael Rossi had some violent tendencies and that he almost
considered himself above the law.
Is it possible that he learned this from someone he knew and once?
worked for? We don't know. It's also important to note that Michael Rossi never once talked about
the murders publicly after Gacy's conviction, and that's all we really know about him. And we're
going to talk a little more about David Cramm here in a little bit, but first we're going to talk
about another one of Gacy's PDM employees, a man named Robin Geked. Robin was in his 20s living in
Chicago when he came into contact with John Wayne Gacy. And like many other men, Gacy offered him
a job. But from what I could find, he only worked for PDM for a short
period of time before Gacy was arrested, but he worked there long enough that he was on the
witness list at his trial. But by 1981, when Robin was 28 years old, he was a father of three
who didn't really have a steady job. He did carpentry, which was nice when he worked for PDM,
but Gacy had been in prison for years at this point, and it was difficult finding work.
In Robin's free time, he loved to invite teenagers over to his apartment and play loud
music at all hours of the night. Neighbors recalled seeing teenagers over at his place all the time
spending the night with him, much like John Wayne Gacy. But the difference with Robin is that he
liked teenage girls, not boys. Before 1981, Robin had gotten in trouble with the law a few times
for things like sexual delinquency of a minor on lawful use of a gun and aggravated robbery.
But nothing would compare to the crimes he committed from 1981 to 1982.
Everything seemed to go downhill for Robin when he started hanging out with three men and two brothers,
and Thomas Cocorales. Soon enough, these four men would earn the infamous name of the Chicago
Ripper crew. But before we get into that, it's important to note that Robin, Gacy's old employee
and leader of the group, was obsessed with big breast. He was a boob guy, but his obsession with
them was very unhealthy. You see, on top of liking big boobs, he was also a sexual sadist.
His wife would later say that when she and Robin would have sex,
he would beg her to let him put needles through her nipples.
And at one point, he did.
His wife would later show her friends these huge cuts all over her breast.
And she didn't like it, but she was just trying to please her husband.
But that wasn't enough for him.
Robin wanted more.
On May 23, 1981, just a few years after,
Gacy's crimes, Robin and the crew all hopped into his car and started driving around Chicago
in search of a woman. And they were specifically looking for a woman with big boobs so they could
rape and mutilate her. And soon enough, they found one. Her name was Linda Sutton, and she was a
prostitute working in the city. When the Ripper crew saw Linda, they abducted her and brought her
into the nearby forest, where they all took turns raping her. But the torture did not end there.
While Linda was on the ground, Robin took out his knife and amputated her left breast. Then the crew
took turns raping her open wound. The authorities would eventually find her body, but it would take
them two years to finally arrest the Chicago Ripper crew. And by the time they were caught, they had already
taken the lives of 18 people. When the crew was interrogated by the police, Thomas Cocorales confessed that
the crew would abduct women off the streets and take them back to Robbins Place, which they called
their satanic chapel, and once there, the women would be raped and tortured for hours. The crew would
amputate their breast with piano wire, and afterwards they would have sex with the insides of the breast.
and then they would eat pieces of it as some sort of sacrament.
Thomas confessed that at one point, Robin had 15 breasts inside of his home.
And honestly, I want to do an entire episode on this one day,
but the crew was eventually arrested and convicted.
And when the public found out that Robin was a PDM employee,
everyone was shocked.
Now, there has never been any sort of formal connection.
between Gacy and Robin, but there are some similarities,
like the fact that they both found their victims by driving around Chicago
and sometimes abducting them off the streets.
And even though authorities say there isn't a connection there,
it is crazy that one of America's most prolific serial killers employed another prolific serial
killer.
And there's one more CDPDM employee named Philip Paskey that we have to talk about,
But before we get to that, we need to tell you about a man named John David Norman.
Now, bear with us for a second because you might not understand his connection to John Wayne Gacy just yet, but it will all make sense in a second.
So let's rewind to August 14, 1973, in Dallas, Texas.
The police department is about to raid an apartment at 3716 Coal Avenue.
When they bused through the doors of this house, 45-year-old John David Norman is sitting at his kitchen table with a few teenage boys surrounding him,
and spread out on the table in front of him
where brochures and pictures of young boys,
the police quickly take Norman off to jail
and begin the search of his home.
And what they find inside this apartment
would reveal one of the biggest child sex trafficking operations
in American history.
In one of the drawers inside of the back bedroom,
investigators find a copy of John David Norman's newsletter
called The Odyssey Foundation.
But this definitely wasn't your average newsletter.
In it, Norman would advertise that
His foundation was helping young men across the United States by sending them off to sponsors around the country.
These sponsors would pick these underage boys up from bus stations and they would keep them for about one to three days,
giving the boys advice on how to improve the quality of their life.
It was advertised as a self-help program called Travel Fellowship.
And once these young boys spent a few days,
with their sponsor, they would be sent off to the next sponsor. But that's not at all what it actually
was. These sponsors were pedophiles, and the boys were not getting any type of self-help during these
days. Norman's operation was basically renting out boys for sex all over the country. Investigators
found hundreds of booklets in Norman's apartment, containing the names and photos of under
underage boys. They were able to identify about 30 of these boys and found out they were from 13
different states, and all of them were being rented out to men for sex. During the raid,
investigators also found hundreds of index cards, with the names and addresses of an estimated
50,000 to 100,000 clients or sponsors who would rent these boys. And the client, and the client
were not just your average Joes on the street.
Some of them were well-known in their communities,
wealthy politicians,
famous faces who had good reputations,
and the public had no idea that these well-known men
were renting boys for sex.
So with this discovery inside of John Norman's apartment,
the Dallas Police Department had just uncovered
one of the biggest child sex rings in American history.
And something interesting to note is that this raid on Norman's apartment came just one week after Dean Coral, the Candyman, was murdered in Houston, and the 24 bodies of young boys were found on his property.
And given that both Norman and Coral lived just hours away from one another, and they were both involved with the sexual abuse of young men, many people speculated that they worked together.
Even further, it's believed that some of the bodies found on Dean Coral's property were most likely sent to him from Norman's operation.
Coral's accomplice, Elmer Wayne Henley, even told investigators that Coral was part of a sex
trafficking ring that operated in Dallas, so it's very likely that they worked together,
although it's never been proven in the court of law.
But something unbelievable about this entire story is that none of the sponsors on the index
cards were ever even investigated for being a part of this sex trafficking ring.
No one was ever charged for anything other than John Norman, and he stayed quiet and proclaimed
his innocence. He didn't even spend a month in jail before he was released on a $7,000 bond.
And after he was released, he skipped town. Back in the 1970s, they didn't really have a way of
tracking people. So the police department was never able to find him, and he was never brought to
trial. And the index cards, you may ask, which contain the names and addresses of thousands
of pedophiles across the country, well, they disappeared, vanished straight from the place,
police department, literally gone without a trace. To this day, police officers and investigators who
currently work for the department have gone on record and interviews and stated that they can't even
find a record of these cards existing, which is pretty convenient given some of the names on the list.
No one wanted those names to be released because it would prove that trusted members in our society
were having sex with little boys.
And after John Norman skipped town,
that was really the last the public heard
of the Dallas Sex Ring investigation.
But it wouldn't stop there.
After leaving Dallas,
John Norman would assume a new identity
in Homewood, Illinois.
He was now Stephen Gerwell,
and right when he arrived,
he was back in the child sex trafficking business.
But it wouldn't be long
until the Homewood Police Department
cut on to him.
After living there for a few months, they got an anonymous tip from a woman claiming that a man living in her neighborhood was luring young boys to his apartment and having sex with them.
And the woman actually knew the name of one of the boys involved, 13-year-old Kenny Hellstrom.
And when Sergeant Frank Flannery heard this, he was shocked.
He knew exactly who Kenny Helstrom was.
He had actually grown up with Kenny's parents.
They went to grade school together when he was younger.
So to find out that their son was being sexually assaulted in his town, this was big news.
So Frank calls Kenny's dad and tells him to come into the station for questioning.
When he does, the detective sits Kenny down and asks him about his relationship with John Norman.
Kenny is apprehensive to talk about it, but he ultimately says that he met John at a restaurant called Fat Alberts,
and the two struck up a conversation.
And at the end of the night, Norman offered him a ride home, so he accepted.
But instead of taking Kenny home that night, Norman drives to his apartment.
and asks if Kenny wants to drink some beer with him.
And Kenny agrees.
From this point forward, the two spent a lot of time together.
Kenny actually lived just down the street from Norman,
so after this incident, it was very common for Kenny and his friends to go over to Norman's house to drink beer behind their parents' backs.
And after a few visits with the boys, Norman started showing them porn.
Sound familiar?
This is exactly what Gacy would do with his victims, just an hour away from Chicago.
Norman started off by showing the boys straight porn with a male and a female.
And then after that, he started showing them gay porn.
And much like with Gacy, after they got comfortable with this, he started performing oral sex on the boys.
Sometimes it was just one boy.
And other times it was a big group of them.
And again, these kids are 13 to 14 years old.
So after hearing all of this from Kenny, the Homewood Police Department raided Norman's apartment while he was gone.
and boy did they find a lot.
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In one of the bedrooms upstairs, the police find a camera and more index cards,
with thousands of names of them.
sponsors from around America. They also found huge filing boxes containing the names of over 2,000
young men and boys that were available for rent, ranging from 14 to 20 years old. Some of the
booklets read things like Timothy, 14 years old, 5-8, 150 pounds, black hair, blue eyes,
intelligent, adventurous, and open-minded. And then it would have their
picture. And some of these pictures weren't just these underage boys smiling for the camera.
Some of them were suggestive. So seeing this, the detectives at Homewood, Illinois, knew this case
was huge. A child sex ring of this magnitude was far more than they could handle. So they gave
all of their evidence from Norman's apartment to the Chicago Police Department. Then they moved forward
with their investigation of John Norman.
When they finally found him,
they charged him with three counts of contributing
to the sexual delinquency of a child
and five counts of indecent liberties with a child.
And from there, he sent to the Cook County Jail
with a $325,000 bail.
But believe it or not,
just like with the index cards in Dallas,
they suddenly disappeared.
And let's be honest here,
they were most likely destroyed by individuals within the federal government.
Once again, thousands of pedophiles, listed with their full names, addresses, and contact information on those cards, got away with it.
And once again, John Norman would be the only person held accountable for any of this.
At his trial, Kenny Hellstrom testified against Norman, revealing all of the sick things that the older man would do.
to he and his young friends.
Tragically, not long after Kenny testified, he was murdered.
Kenny was walking home from work one day
when someone came up behind him and stabbed him six times in the back.
After the stabbing, Kenny somehow made it over to his house
and collapsed on the back porch.
His mother heard a scratching sound on the back door,
and when she opened it,
Kenny was barely alive, bleeding out, and he ended up dying that night in her arms.
It was Homewood, Illinois' first murder in 22 years, and everyone knew deep down that Kenny's
murder was connected to the sex trafficking ring. After all, he did testify against John Norman,
and $250 was found in his back pocket, so it's clear it wasn't a robbery.
and the police were never able to get definitive proof that the murder was linked to John Norman.
So to this very day, Kenny's murder is still unsolved.
In the meantime, John Norman was serving out his sentence in the Cook County Jail.
It was here where he met 22-year-old Philip Paskey, the man who would later go on to work for John Wayne Gasey.
Philip was in jail at the time for attempted murder and robbery.
And believe it or not, Philip and Norman started working together.
in prison, using the prison's printing press to start up Norman's sex trafficking newsletter again.
From inside of prison. One of the newsletters sent out read,
schedules of the present fellows vary, but all are available weekends and some on other days
within range of their bases. Phil, based in New York, 22, 510, slender with brown hair and eyes,
a college graduate of diverse interests and unusual sophistication. Reggie in Maine, 21, 61, 155.
brown hair hazel eyes, an ex-sailer who likes country life in the outdoors.
Ray in Florida, 19, 58, 135, black hair, brown eyes, a student who likes travel, music, and good times.
End quote.
Now, in 1976, Philip would be paroled, and when he got out of prison, his new job was running the newsletter for Norman while he remained in prison.
Then a year later, in 1977, Norman gets paroled, and afterwards he and Philip move in together and start working full-time on.
his newsletter and they start up the sex trafficking ring again but it has a new name now the delta
project but little did john norman know the chicago police department was already well aware of the
delta project and they were doing undercover operations throughout chicago trying to find some of
these men who are connected to the sex ring as it turns out norman had accomplices other than
philip pasky who were filming and distributing child pornography there were a lot of people within this
operation and unfortunately many of these people who filmed child porn were foster parents.
While investigators were hard at work trying to unravel this child's sex ring,
they got a tip that one of Norman's men was filming child porn inside of a rundown motel.
So investigators bust into the room, there they find Norman's photographer filming two
teenage boys having sex. And one of the boys was,
his foster son, Andy Draft. Andy didn't have the best upbringing. He had trouble within his family
and he started running away from home at the early age of 10. And from there, he was passed on to
different foster families. And sadly, his foster dad ended up being Norman's child porn
photographer, and he went on to exploit Andy. Two days after this bust, the Chicago Tribune posted the
Two seized in child sex ring, boys used in film for national sale.
And for the first time, this article really exposed the truth about the child sex ring
operating throughout America.
And this was the first expose that was talked about in the media.
No one before this wanted to talk about what was going on here.
And soon enough, the entire country got word of the horrors, happening to the children.
in America.
The article read, quote,
child pornography is a nationwide
multi-million dollar racket
that is luring thousands of juveniles
into lives of prostitution.
And quote.
And because the Chicago Tribune did this,
more laws went into place
against child sex trafficking.
It also made child pornography
illegal because somehow before this,
it wasn't.
Now, Andy Drabb,
the juvenile who was being filmed by his foster dad,
ended up testifying against him in court.
And then in 1978, he disappeared from Chicago
and his body would later be discovered on a beach in San Francisco.
So now we have two young men connected to John Norman's sex ring
who were murdered after they testified against them,
which means that they clearly aren't above killing these boys
to keep the operation running.
Now, you may be wondering,
how does all of this relate back to John Wayne Gacy?
Well, if you remember,
John Norman and Philip Paskey
had been running the Delta Project together in Chicago,
renting out young boys to men all around the country.
And eventually, Norman gets arrested again
for molesting a 16 and 17-year-old.
Philip Paskey was actually there during this arrest,
and since he was on parole,
he should have been arrested too,
but for some reason, he wasn't.
And after this, the Delta Project
sort of fizzles out. So Philip Paskey is out of a job. But shortly after, he gets a job with
John Wayne Gacy at PDM contractors. You see, Philip was actually friends with David Cram,
Gacy's alleged accomplice, who dug the graves in the crawl space. And by 1977, Michael Rossi,
David Cram, and Philip Pasky were Gacy's right-hand men. It's also important to note that
1977 is the year that the bodies started to multiply in the crawl space. So to me, it's just a
weird coincidence that Gacy's employee was once employed by the ring leader of the biggest
child sex trafficking ring in America. Now, as we know, after Gacy's arrest and conviction,
he would go on to claim that he didn't kill all of the boys in the crawl space, only two of
them, Timothy McCoy, the first murder, and Robert Pist, the last. And Gacy genuinely thought by saying
all this, he was eventually going to be let out of prison. When asked who killed the rest of the
boys in the crawl space, here's what he had to say. There was 12 keys out to the house, 12 sets of
12 sets of keys. Anybody working for PDM contractors had a set of keys for the house.
So you come and go when you want it. And of course my neighbors would keep me informed.
And they would inform me, God, when you were out of town, they must have been partying all night there.
The thing of it is, they want you to believe that I and I alone committed these murders.
And I had nothing to do with the murders of anyone.
If anybody was involved, then how many people are we talking about beside yourself?
We believe there was four people involved.
And that would be Michael Rossi, David Kramm, Philip Paskey.
Gacy said that he had no idea the other boys were buried down there
and that the rest of the bodies were the work of the PDM employees.
No, I had no knowledge of them.
Why is it that your first one is there and then 20-some others are buried down there as well?
Did somebody know that you had done this?
with the first one,
giving them an idea.
More than likely when drinking
and getting high
with the others, yeah.
Admitting it to them.
So you feel others
then followed your suit
in using this as a burial ground?
Without a doubt.
For years after his conviction,
Gacy claimed that the bodies
found in his crawl space
were a part of something
much bigger than just him.
And he hinted that they were a part
of a snuff film operation.
Snuff films are videos of
people getting murdered, and they are sold to sick people all around the world who get off on
that kind of stuff. And many times after his conviction, Gacy claimed that Philip Pasky was involved
in the snuff films. Here we've got a Philip Pasky who had a newsletter going out of the Cook County
jail. And here he is involved with a guy named John Norman. And John Norman was running
boys for hire.
They were making snuff films with young boys.
To me, they were pimping them off.
They were selling them.
So is it possible that John Norman and Philip Paskey were making snuff films of young boys getting murdered
and then using Gacy's crawl space as a dumping ground?
It doesn't seem too far-fetched to me.
There was a crossover.
When we checked into John Norman's background, that he goes all the way back to
the early 70s involved in he ran the Norman Foundation he run the Epic International and the
Odyssey Foundation out of Dallas, Texas and these were organizations were wealthy men could
hire young boys for sexual for sexual weekends male prostitution.
Have you ever met Norman? Do you ever get any contact with Norman?
I have yet to see a current picture of him and therefore I
I had to say no.
Phil Pasky may have been with him at one time or another
because, see, again, I came home from out of town at times
and Phil Pasky would be at the house drinking beer
or something like that.
David Cram is the one that brought Phil Pasky.
And he didn't want to do nothing.
He got a hold of this guy and said,
well, this guy can get somebody for sex.
And I know this is a lot of information
and it can get kind of confused.
so let's just do a little recap. John Norman ran a sex trafficking ring that is suspected to be
connected to Dean Coral and his murders in Houston, Texas. And Gacy would later admit that he got his
ideas from Dean Coral. Then after this, John Norman moves to Illinois, and he starts another
sex trafficking ring there. And while in prison, he met Philip Paskey, who helped him. He helped
to run his operation.
Then Philip Paskey starts working for John Gacy,
and soon after, the bodies in his apartment start multiplying.
And according to Gacy's logbooks and flight records,
he was not in Illinois when a number of the murders happened.
In addition, the M.O. of some of the murders differentiate from the M.O. of Gacy.
and some of Gacy's employees had extremely strange ties to some of his victims.
So to us, it's very hard to deny the fact that Michael Rossi, David Cram, and Philip Pasky were a part of this story.
And it's widely believed that Pasky used Gacy's home as a dumping ground for kids in the operation.
Maybe they were put down there if they didn't want to follow orders.
Or maybe they were killed if they didn't want to be in the operation anymore.
We don't know.
And as we've previously discussed, there are still five unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy.
Dean Coral also has an unidentified victim as well.
And both of these horrible men are suspected of being connected to John Norman's pedophile operation.
It's very likely that these boys could probably be identified if the FBI looked through John
Norman's booklets of the thousands of young men in the operation.
But that can never happen because they've all been destroyed.
You see, John Norman was arrested multiple times throughout his life, and every single time
he was arrested, authorities found mountains of evidence of children being sex trafficked and
the names of the men buying them.
And every single time that evidence was found, it disappeared.
You see, on those cards were famous politicians, federal employees in Washington, even
celebrities.
There was one guy who was the head of a famous orchestra, and his card said that he liked
blonde hair and fair-skinned little boys. John Norman would later admit that the cards were
definitely destroyed, because if they ever reached the public, it would have changed our entire country.
And he would write to a man named Randy White saying, what scared the hell out of everyone,
I think, was my mailing list, and included the names of a number of noted judges, legislators,
and other officials. There were over 30,000 index cards of people from around America who had been
renting these boys for sex, and I'm sure that Dean Coral and John Wayne Gacy were definitely on
his list of clients. But out of these 30,000 men, only a handful of people would ever be held accountable
for their actions. One being John Norman himself, and the others were some Boy Scout leaders in New
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And now let's get back to today's story.
The Boy Scout leader was a man named Raymond Woodall.
And surprise, surprise, he was in John Norman's address book.
Back in 1976, Raymond attempted to get some film developed.
And in the film, he and another Boy Scout leader named Harry Kramer were having sex with an underage boy within their troop.
Authorities were notified of this discovery and after a thorough investigation, they discovered that their entire Boy Scout troop, Troop 37, wasn't actually a Boy Scout troop, but a disguised sex trafficking ring.
The two men would recruit boys from all over the United States and rent them out.
And these men were connected to John Norman.
Woodall would eventually be sentenced to 77.
years in prison, and Kramer was sentenced to 45. And surprisingly, some of their clients would be
sentenced too, like 54-year-old Hugh Scott Mallor, who was a wealthy real estate broker in Boston,
and 41-year-old Richard Jacobs, who at one point owned the New England Patriots. But Richard Jacobs
ended up posting bail and he skipped trial, never to be seen again. What all would
later say that some of their clients were top politicians who were widely known across the
United States. And the fact that he and John Norman were in contact with each other means that
Norman probably sent him a number of boys. So besides John Norman's conviction, these were the only
other man convicted for their part in the sex ring out of over 30,000 people. The New Orleans
police department contacted the FBI during this and told them, hey, we found the names of thousands
of people across the U.S. connected to this sex ring, and you may want to send someone out here
to come look at it all. The FBI ended up sending an agent to come look at the evidence and talk
with the detectives. But after a few hours, he told them, I'll be back in about an hour to
continue the investigation. So the detectives waited.
And they waited, but the agent never came back.
In 2009, John Norman was in prison in California, and his sentence was almost up.
But the courts decided that he was so dangerous that they were going to keep him in prison.
Apparently, California has laws that they can do that.
Norman claimed he did no wrong in his boys for rent operation because all of the sex these boys were having was consensual.
He ended up dying in a mental hospital in California in 2011.
This means that all the names on the cards and all of the ones,
the clients that John David Norman had engaged with will forever remain a mystery since the
cards were destroyed. Norman's pedophile ring was bigger than anyone even knew at the time,
and our government did all they could to keep it hidden. He was the Jeffrey Epstein of the 70s,
and because his client lists contained the names of influential people, the feds made sure it would
never reach the public. And that's sort of where this story ends. It's widely believed that the story
of John Wayne Gacy was connected to this child's sex operation, and that the names of some of the boys
in his crawl space could likely have been found on John Norman's list, the list that, once again,
will never see the light of day because it's either been stolen or destroyed. Even further,
there was strong evidence that there were more bodies of Gacy's buried on the property of an apartment
complex in Chicago, where Gacy's mom used to live. An advanced radar company even used ground-penetrating
radar and found that the property had 17 anomalies in the ground, but for some reason, the Chicago
Police Department only dug up two of the 17 spots, and they claimed they didn't find anything.
And then, after public pressure, they secretly did an excavation of the property and once again
claimed they found nothing. Many people don't believe that they actually looked. Terry Sullivan,
who was on the prosecution in Gacy's trial, even admitted that the Chicago Police Department
was very sketchy during this search. So who knows? It seems like there are a ton of unanswered
questions throughout this story. And to us, it's hard to deny the fact that Gage's a lot of
Gacy's claims indeed had some truth to them.
We think that the Gacy murders were connected to something much bigger,
but we'll never really know for sure what the bigger picture is.
Michael Rossi, still to this day, has never spoken out about the Gacy murders.
And in 1998, Philip Pasky died.
In the year 2001, David Cram died after he hanged himself from a tree in a forest in the Chicago area.
And obviously, in 1994, John Wain Gacy was executed.
After the execution of Gacy, the Chicago Police Department could finally dust off their hands,
seeing as the only person technically held responsible for all 33 murders was now dead.
It's easy to understand why the police would have wanted this sort of resolution to the story.
Maybe they didn't want to open up the can of worms and begin investigating accomplices and sex rings.
It would have been messy.
Maybe it was just too much work.
Maybe it was like the son of Sam case, where the police wanted to pin the whole thing on one guy
and closed the case as fast as possible to ensure the public that they were safe.
After all, if the residents of Chicago knew that a sex trafficking operation had been abducting boys
off of the streets, murdering them, and burying them underneath an unassuming house in the suburbs,
terror would have quickly spread throughout the city.
It was just easy to use Gacy as a scapegoat.
He was the boogeyman, and there were no other skeletons lurking in the closet.
But it is important to know that up until his dying day, Gacy continued to call him.
claim that he was not the only person involved in these murders.
I felt things were going to work out because I knew that I didn't do the killing and I thought
it would come out in the trial.
But Amaranthi, with this insanity defense, and again, you can call it my ignorance of the law,
it's like I explained in a letter to Chief Justice William Clark.
The evidence based is on the theory that the more sensational the case is, the more crazier
it's sound, the insanity defense would work.
think it was stupid. I think they did a disservice to me and they did a disservice to the victims.
You know what people don't understand is I feel I was wrongfully convicted for 33 murders
and it was only because of sensationalism and ego. The Displains Police did a sloppy investigation.
This is, I mean it may not be the correct way of wording it, but the thing of it is that
they had other suspects and they had tunnel vision in to say let's, it's Casey's house,
it's easier to put everything on gacy.
Say that you never painted yourself as the innocent babe in the woods.
We're going over the same thing.
We're not going to go in.
Basically, no.
But, I mean, the point is, if you feel that you're not covering up your part of the crimes,
but at the same time you open up the thought that others were involved,
would you be willing to cooperate with law enforcement people today
to avail, say, the materials that you have amassed
and to more or less pursue, if,
fact, there are others that are on the streets that have been involved in these murders.
Would you be willing to cooperate and to assist to pursue that to the ends of bringing others to
justice? Would you be willing to do that?
I got no crimes about there, but what I don't understand is why wasn't it done to begin with that?
Hey, everybody, it's Colin here. Thank you again for listening to this week's episode of Murder in America.
Now, we're done with the John Wayne Gacy series. I know this was super in-depth, but we figured that we
needed to have an extended series here because the story is just so crazy. And learning all of this
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Especially when you bring in John David Norman on that missing list.
It's kind of just hard to believe that that stuff can go missing,
and no one's ever held accountable.
But I want to shout out our new patrons this week,
Jennifer DeVilla, Kat Trejo, Corey, Hunter Holloway,
Patricia Young, Avery Fessel, Amanda is Marion, Barbara Farley,
Abby Jo, and Jacqueline Van Weren.
I hope I said your guys' names right,
but thank you for being.
patrons, thank you to everybody on Patreon.
If you're wondering what Patreon is,
it is a website where you can subscribe.
You can help support the show, and you get
the ad-free versions of every episode
posted live on Patreon as soon
as the show goes live on all
of their streaming platforms.
Once again, follow us on Instagram at Murder
in America to see photos from all the cases
that we cover and to see pictures of Courtney
and I, because right now all you know of us
is our voice, which is kind of crazy.
But I do want to give a shout out to Courtney.
She's been working so hard on the podcast,
lately and she's honestly just an amazing wife. I love her so much. And, um, yeah, none of the show
would be possible without her. I know she's not always on these outroes with me, but she loves
everybody so much online. And yeah, we're all good over here. And, and we can't wait to get
into some of these next cases that we're covering. So as always, everybody, I hope you have a great
weekend. We'll see you next week. And, uh, yeah, have a good one.
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