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John Wayne Gacy - Doing Time

While in prison, Gacy claimed to be a quiet and kind person. He blamed some of the parents for the deaths of their own children because their sons were prostitutes. He said he was incapable of violence and allegedly received letters every day from “kind people”, most of them women. “90% of the writers are women, and I have 41 people on my visiting list. I’m allowed 3 visits a month”, explained Gacy. Although the prosecution portrayed Gacy as a skillful, competent torturer and killer who enjoyed the “God-like power” of life and death, Gacy said it was a lie: “How could I live on top of those bodies?” Yet, in a 1986 interview with author Tim Cahill, he remarked that if he could spend 15 minutes in a room with the parents of the people he killed, “they would understand”.

Gacy spent much of his prison time painting pictures and having them sold to the public. He loved the attention.

On May 10, 1994, John Wayne Gacy was put to death by lethal injection. Shortly after his death, several of his paintings were purchased at an auction for $20,000. The buyer, wanting to send a clear message to the public, burned Gacy’s artwork.

John Wayne Gacy, having his mugshot taken after being arrested for multiple homicides. He is laughing because an officer had asked him where he was from, and he replied, “a state of confusion.” 

John Wayne Gacy’s Brain

On May 10, 1994, about 3 a.m., Dr. Helen Morrison received word: John Wayne Gacy, who prowled the Chicago streets preying on lonely runaways and murdered 33 young men and boys, had been executed.

Dr. Morrison headed out to a nearby hospital where she donned scrubs and Latex gloves to assist in Gacy’s autopsy.

For Morrison, it was a strange final chapter to her 14-year history with the clown-turned-killer. The forensic psychiatrist had interviewed Gacy many times, listening to his rants, raves, lies, boasts, explanations and evasions.

Now she was back for something else: Gacy’s brain. Morrison had made arrangements to have the brain examined to see if there was anything — tumors, scars, disease — that made it abnormal.

When the autopsy was over, Morrison drove home with Gacy’s brain in a glass jar on the passenger seat of her Buick.

It took several calls to find a pathologist who would do the tests, and a few weeks later an express-mail envelope arrived at her office. She was not surprised by the summary.

“Just one simple line,” she says. “Normal brain.”

John Wayne Gacy, having his mugshot taken after being arrested for multiple homicides. He is laughing because an officer had asked him where he was from, and he replied, “a state of confusion.” 

John Wayne Gacy, in an interview with retired FBI Profiler, Robert Ressler

Ressler: The media have called you a homosexual killer. What is your position on homosexuality?

Gacy: I have nothing against it. I am an outpsoken liberal. I don’t care for the labeling. I don’t care for any labeling, for that fact.

Ressler: Do you claim to be a homosexual?

Gacy: No, I would definitely not be homosexual. I have nothing aginst what they do, and I don’t deny that I engage in sex with males, but that’s - I am bisexual.

Ressler: You’re bisexual?

Gacy: Right. My preference is women, and I have been married enough times and have children, and I see nothing wrong with it. They blew this out of proportion, because, again, it enforced their sexual angle of the case. I am not homosexual, not in any sense of the word, I says, ‘cause I was married twice; and just because I didn’t get along in my marriages - My marriages went down the drain only because I was a workaholic, working seven day a week and that -

Gacy always expressed anger that he was accused of having sex with his victims. His second wife had reported that they rarely had sex, and their children were adopted. Gacy’s father reportedly often said to him, as a child, “you’re queer”, or “you’re going to turn out to be a queer”. Robert Ressler writes:

“Gacy had a great need in general for denial, and specifically to deny the notion that he was a homosexual. In our previous conversations, however, Gacy had indicated that homosexual acts were a matter of convenience to him: he was the sort of guy who’d put in eighty-hour workweeks, and because of this heavy schedule he didn’t have time for dating women…It was much easier for him to pick up a young guy to give him oral sex and it wouldn’t cost much; that would hold him for a few weeks and enable him to go back to work. But why didn’t he go to a female prostitute, which would have been accessible? Gacy goes to great lengths to deny his homosexuality, as though there were some aspects of homosexuality that he finds reprehensible”.

John Wayne Gacy - the Murders

On February 12, 1971, Gacy was charged with disorderly conduct in Chicago, on the complaint of a boy he attempted to rape. The accuser, a known homosexual, failed to appear in court for Gacy’s hearing, and the charges were dismissed. Parole officers in Iowa were never notified of the arrest or accusation, and Gacy was formally discharged from parole on October 18, 1971.

By his own estimate, the first murder occurred less than three months later, on January3, 1972. The victim, picked up at a bus terminal, remains unidentified, but his death was typical of Gacy’s future approach. In searching for prey, Gacy sometimes fell back on young friends and employees, more often trolling the streets of Chicago for hustlers and runaways. Like the Hillside Strangler, he would sometimes flash a badge and gun, “arresting” his intended victim. Others were invited to the Gacy home for drinks, a game of pool, and John would show them “tricks” with “magic handcuffs,” later hauling out the dildo and garrote. When he was finished, John would do the “rope trick” - strangulation - and his victim would be buried in a crawlspace underneath the house. In later years, as he ran out of space downstairs, he started dumping bodies in a nearby river.

Planting corpses in the crawlspace had its drawbacks, notably a rank, pervasive odor that the killer blamed on “sewer problems.” Gacy’s second wife was also in the way, her presence limiting his playtime to occasions when she left the house or traveled out of town, but when their marriage fell apart, in 1976, Gacy was able to accelerate his program of annihilation. Between April 6, and June 13, 1976, at least five boys were slaughtered at Gacy’s home, and there seemed to be no end in sight. On October 25 of that year, he killed two victims at once, dumping their bodies into a common grave. As time went on, his targets ranged in age from nine to twenty, covering the social spectrum from middle-class teens to jailbirds and prostitutes.

Not all of Gacy’s victims died. In December 1977, Robert Donnelly was abducted at gunpoint, tortured and sodomized with a dildo in Gacy’s house of horror, then released. Three months later, 26-year-old Jeffrey Rignall has having a drink at Gacy’s home when he was chloroformed and fastened to “the rack,” a homemade torture device similar to one used by Dean Corll in Houston. Gacy spent several hours raping and whipping Rignall, applying the chloroform with such frequency that Rignall’s liver suffered permanent damage. Regaining consciousness beside a lake in Lincoln Park, Rignall called police at once, but it was mid-July before they got around to charging Gacy with a misdemeanor. The case was still dragging on five months later, when Gacy was picked up on charges of multiple murder.

On December 12, 1978, Robert Piest disappeared from his job at a Chicago pharmacy. Gacy’s construction firm had lately remodeled the store, and Piest had been offered a job with the crew, informing coworkers of his intention to meet “a contractor” on the night of his disappearance. Police dropped by to question Gacy at his home, and they immediately recognized the odor emanating from his crawlspace. Before they finished digging, Gacy’s lot would yield 28 bodies, with five more recovered from rivers nearby. Of the 33 victims, nine would remain forever unidentified.

In custody, Gacy tried to blame his murderous activities on “Jack,” an alter-ego (and coincidentally, the alias he used when posing as a cop). Psychiatrists dismissed the ruse, and the defendant was convicted on all counts at his 1980 murder trial. Life sentences were handed down on 21 counts of murder, covering deaths that occurred before June 21, 1977, when Illinois reinstated capital punishment. In the case of twelve victims murdered between July 1977 and December 1978, Gacy was sentenced to die. After fourteen years on death row, the “killer Clown” was finally executed by lethal injection in 1992.

(From the Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Michael Newton)

Serial Killers with Morbid Death Fascinations

• John Wayne Gacy - worked in a mortuary, sleeping in the embalming room, alone with corpses, but was fired after corpses were found partially undressed
• Dennis Nilsen - pretended he was a corpse and masturbated in the mirror to his own dead image
• Jeffrey Dahmer - loved the dissection in biology class, told a classmate that he sliced open the fish he caught because “I want to see what it looks like inside, I like to see how things work.”
• Ed Gein - grave robbing, lamp shades made from human skin, seat covers, and skulls used for drinking cups. He also made clothing and bracelets out of body parts

John Wayne Gacy’s Death Sentence Order

John Wayne Gacy’s Brain

On May 10, 1994, about 3 a.m., Dr. Helen Morrison received word: John Wayne Gacy, who prowled the Chicago streets preying on lonely runaways and murdered 33 young men and boys, had been executed.

Dr. Morrison headed out to a nearby hospital where she donned scrubs and Latex gloves to assist in Gacy’s autopsy.

For Morrison, it was a strange final chapter to her 14-year history with the clown-turned-killer. The forensic psychiatrist had interviewed Gacy many times, listening to his rants, raves, lies, boasts, explanations and evasions.

Now she was back for something else: Gacy’s brain. Morrison had made arrangements to have the brain examined to see if there was anything — tumors, scars, disease — that made it abnormal.

When the autopsy was over, Morrison drove home with Gacy’s brain in a glass jar on the passenger seat of her Buick.

It took several calls to find a pathologist who would do the tests, and a few weeks later an express-mail envelope arrived at her office. She was not surprised by the summary.

“Just one simple line,” she says. “Normal brain.”

John Wayne Gacy

Born in Chicago in March 1942, Gacy grew up doubting his own masculinity, taking refuge from sports and other “manly” activities through precocious hypochondria. Struck on the head by a swing at age eleven, he suffered periodic blackouts for the next five years until their cause - a blood clot on his brain - was finally dissolved with medication. Deprived of one affliction, he developed - or imagined - another, settling on the symptoms of a heart ailment that seemed to come and go, depending on his mood.

After graduation from business college, Gacy became a shoe salesman, but he had his sights on better things. He married a coworker, whose parents owned a fried chicken restaurant in Waterloo, Iowa, and Gacy stepped into a ready-made role as the restaurant’s manager. He was a whiz kid on the job, belying everything his father had to say about his intellect and drive, ascending to a post of admiration and respect among the local Jaycees. His wife and friends were absolutely unprepared for John’s arrest, in May of 1968, on charges of coercing a young employee into homosexual acts spanning a period of months. Those accusations were still pending when Gacy hired a teenage thug to beat the prosecution’s witness, and more charges were filed. Striking a bargain, Gacy pled guilty to sodomy, and the other felony counts were dismissed. Sentenced to ten years in prison, he proved himself a “model prisoner” and was released in eighteen months.

With the state’s permission, Gacy moved back to Chicago, where he established himself as a successful building contractor. Divorced while in prison, he soon remarried, settling in a middle-class neighborhood where he was popular with his neighbors, the host of elaborate holiday theme parties. On the side, he was active in Democratic politics - once posing for photos with the wife of President Jimmy Carter - and as “Pogo the Clown,” performing in full makeup at children’s parties and charity benefits. Few of his new acquaintances knew anything about the Iowa arrest, and those who heard a rumor were assured that John had merely done some time for “dealing in a little porn.”

During his time on Death Row, Gacy took up oil painting, and his favorite subject was painting portraits of clowns. He claimed to have used his clown act as an alter ego, once sardonically saying that “A clown can get away with murder.” After his execution, his paintings were sold at auctions. The main buyer burned the paintings after winning the bids. Another of his famous paintings is of transgressive punk rock singer/songwriter/performance artist GG Allin, who had visited Gacy in prison and corresponded with him until Allin’s death in 1993; the painting is in the possession of Allin’s brother and bassist, Merle Allin, and a black and white reproduction of the painting can be seen on the front cover of the soundtrack to the GG Allin documentary Hated: GG Allin And The Murder Junkies. His paintings were also used as artwork for the Acid Bath album When the Kite String Pops. As well, Gacy did some paintings for performance artist, musician and actor Glen Meadmore, who corresponded with him for a period of time. A portrait of Meadmore painted by Gacy appears on the front cover of Meadmore’s recording Hot, Horny and Born Again. Another painting of Gacy belongs to Dani Filth, frontman of the metal band Cradle Of Filth. Filmmaker John Waters owns one of Gacy’s paintings, which Waters says hangs in his guest bedroom “so people don’t stay too long.”