The Killer Clown
John Wayne Gacy was not a textbook psychopath. There was nothing in his childhood psychologists could point to as the cause of his violence and rage. Even his family was baffled as to the reasons he became one of America’s most sinister and notorious serial killers. To friends, neighbors, and business associates, he was the “man of the year.” This, however, was his external self, the self he showed the world. Under his carefully-constructed façade was an evil inside that knew no control.
By all accounts, Gacy had a normal childhood. He grew up on Chicago’s North Side in the 1940s and ’50s. A self-described “sickly child,” Gacy suffered from a head trauma that left him with an undetected blood clot on his brain which would cause him blackouts and fainting spells until he was in his teens. As a young adult, he suffered from a non-specific “heart ailment.” As a child, John shied away from sports and physical activity, favoring instead activities his mother and sisters enjoyed, like baking and gardening. Gacy’s father, a heavy drinker, would often publicly ridicule his son, calling him a sissy and a great disappointment. It was this abusive relationship with his father that Gacy often referenced as a formative experience in his life. John Sr. would often drink heavily in the basement before dinner only to come to the table and turn his family into targets of his verbal and physical abuse.
One of the great disappointments to Gacy’s father was his son’s inability to succeed in school. In his later years of high school, he blamed his failures on his fainting spells, and his grades dropped dramatically. After attending four different high schools in his senior year alone, Gacy finally dropped out. He moved out west to Las Vegas to seek his fortune only to find himself alone and miserable, hoping to return again to Chicago once he’d saved enough money.
Many rumors surround the work Gacy did in Las Vegas. That he worked as a janitor in a funeral home is certainly true, but many said he often slept in the empty caskets when he would get tired, a rumor he would always deny. He admitted that he’d lived in the funeral home but never slept in the caskets or did anything to violate the dead. What he was to do in his later life, however, fueled these rumors, and they became believable.
In 1962 Gacy returned to Chicago and enrolled in business college. It wasn’t long before he had distinguished himself as a gifted salesman and began working for the Nunn Bush Shoe Company. He eventually moved south to Springfield to manage a men’s clothing outlet store, and there he met his first wife, Marlynn Myers, in 1964. Marlynn was from a rather prosperous family in Waterloo, Iowa. Her father owned a chain of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, and Gacy set his sights on working his way into the family business.
One of the most startling qualities about Gacy, if not the most sinister, was his ability to ingratiate himself into the good opinion of the townspeople where he took up residence. He was very active in local politics and was a leading member of the Jaycees. He often sought leadership roles, whether as manager or recruiter, and he always craved the limelight. Affable and outgoing, this was what everyone remembered.
John and Marlynn Gacy moved with their newborn son to Waterloo, Iowa, where John was to manage one of his father-inlaw’s restaurants. Almost right away, he was seen as a pillar of the community, active in local affairs organizations; yet, when Gacy was arrested in 1968 for molesting a minor, not many seemed shocked. Rumors were circulating before the crime about John’s penchant for young boys. He always seemed to be in the company of teenagers and was often organizing projects in which he could employ many local teens. Gacy was charged and convicted of sodomy after he’d forced himself on a young employee named Mark Miller. In his testimony, Miller claimed that Gacy had tricked him into being tied up and that Gacy had then violently raped him.
Gacy denied these charges. He claimed that Miller was a willing partner, and he later sent another boy, Dwight Andersson, to beat up Mark Miller.
During his trial, Gacy underwent a psychological evaluation. It was determined that he had an antisocial personality. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for sodomy, which was the maximum sentence he could receive in the state of Iowa. He spent eighteen months of his ten-year sentence at the Anamosa Prison before being paroled in 1970.
At age twenty-eight, Gacy was back in Chicago and living with his mother. His father had died while he was incarcerated, nbbnand his mother helped to support him until he decided to buy a house six months later. In 1971, Gacy bought a house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in then-unincorporated Chicago, on the far Northwest Side. His mother and sisters owned half the house, and he owned the other half. It was a nondescript ranch-style house on the quiet outskirts of Chicago. The community was very close, and most neighbors knew one another. They quickly embraced their new, very friendly neighbor. Gacy had put his arrest far behind.
Next door lived Edward and Lillie Grexa. They immediately took to Gacy, often having him over for cookouts, card games, and even Christmas dinner. They were charmed by the young man. In 1972, Gacy married again, this time a divorcée named Carole Huff, and he brought his new wife and her two daughters to live with him. The Gacy’s appeared to enjoy the ideal household. Popular and accepted, the family often hosted elaborate themed parties and backyard barbeques, and Gacy even entertained at children’s parties where he would dress up as “everyone’s favorite clown, Pogo.”
Lillie Grexa would often complain about a stench coming from the Gacy house. She told John that she thought an animal had died beneath the floorboards of the house, and that he should have that looked into. Gacy reassured Lillie that it was not a dead animal but most likely mold built up from an abundance of moisture under the house. This seemed to satisfy her curiosity and certainly did not keep the Grexas from the company of the Gacys.
Gacy himself set the year 1972 as the date of his first killing. On January 2, 1972, Gacy found a young Timmy McCoy at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Chicago, at Randolph and Dearborn. McCoy came home with Gacy, and the two had sex.
Afterward, Gacy went to the kitchen, got a knife, and stabbed McCoy in the chest.
Thereafter, Gacy took to cruising the bus stations in downtown Chicago or headed over to Bughouse Square (Washington Park), a known hangout and pickup place for local gays. He became frustrated at home, eventually admitting to Carole that he preferred the company of young men to women.
In order to keep himself in the company of boys and young men, in 1974 Gacy started PDM (Painting, Decorating, and Maintenance), Inc. He employed a number of local high school boys, supposedly to keep costs low. It was also about this time that he began to set his sights on the political arena. Gacy threw himself into projects for his local Democratic committeeman. He was appointed Lighting Commissioner. He would have liked a life in politics, but public life, he found, could make things messy.
It was during a project at the Democratic headquarters that Gacy had hired a boy named Tony Antonucci. Antonucci claimed that Gacy had made advances toward him but had left him alone once Antonucci threatened to hit him with a chair. Gacy claimed it was all a joke and tried to laugh it off. Antonucci continued to work for him, and on a visit to Gacy’s house, he claimed that Gacy had tricked him into being handcuffed. Antonucci made sure he was able to escape, got himself free, and then handcuffed Gacy in the scuffle. He made Gacy promise to leave him alone, and Antonucci left, not realizing how close he had come to his own death.
By 1976, Gacy’s marriage had all but dissolved. His wife, Carole, claimed that they no longer had a sexual relationship, he was increasingly violent and suffered terrible, unpredictable mood swings, and she had discovered a number of hidden magazines in the house featuring naked young men and boys. It was at this time that Gacy confessed his love of boys to her, and she soon filed for divorce.
With Carole out of his house, there was nothing stopping Gacy from committing a string of the most atrocious murders in American history. Between 1972 and 1978, Gacy killed thirtythree young men and boys, some as young as fourteen, none older than twenty-one. Of those identified, a number of them had worked for Gacy at his contracting company, including John Butkovich. Johnny, as he was called, worked for Gacy in 1974, when he was seventeen years old. After a confrontation at Gacy’s house, Johnny was seen driving home, and this was the last anyone saw of him.
Michael Bonnin was also seventeen. In 1976, he was on his way to meet his stepfather’s brother and never made it. Gregory Godzik, also seventeen, worked for Gacy at PDM. The last anyone saw of Godzik was when he’d dropped off a date at her house. Gregory had a 1966 Pontiac, and this was all that was found of him. Billy Carroll was sixteen years old. Unlike the other boys, Billy had been in trouble with the law since he was a boy, having had multiple arrests and altercations. He survived on the streets by setting up meetings between boys and adult men. On June 13, 1976, he left home and was never seen again.
John Szyc, nineteen, drove away from his home in his 1971 Plymouth Satellite and vanished. A little while later, the car was stopped for failing to pay at a gas station, but it was being driven by another boy. The boy told police they should talk to the man he lived with and he would sort it out; the man was John Wayne Gacy.
Gacy told the police that Szyc had sold him the car. If they had checked the car title, they would have seen that it was signed eighteen days after Szyc’s disappearance. A similar fate befell Robert Gilroy, eighteen years old. Robert was going to meet friends when he disappeared. His father, a police sergeant, launched an investigation that yielded little.
In 1977, Gacy changed his routine slightly. He had picked up a man downtown, Jeffrey Rignall, twenty-seven years old. He asked him if he wanted to share a joint, then Gacy forced him into his car at gunpoint. Gacy repeatedly chloroformed Rignall and brought him to his house. There, for countless hours, Gacy tortured, raped, whipped, and chloroformed Rignall before returning him to the city to dump him in Lincoln Park. Rignall woke up in the park, very lucky to even be alive.
Finally, in 1978, Gacy’s number came up. When a local boy, Robert Piest, fifteen, went missing from the pharmacy where he worked, the last person he was seen with was John Wayne Gacy. Witnesses claimed they saw Gacy talking to Piest about hiring him to work for his contracting company. Given his description and name, it was very soon that the police were knocking on Gacy’s door.
Gacy told police he would meet them at the station and answer any questions they had about Piest. He went down and answered their questions, but they had nothing to hold him on, so they had to release him. Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak had a bad feeling about Gacy, though, and put a twenty-four-hour surveillance on him. Gacy went about town as though he had done nothing wrong, even picking up the officers’ check in the diners where the police had followed him. Kozenczak was so sure about Gacy, though, that he was quickly given a search warrant to enter Gacy’s house.
While he was away, police began to search Gacy’s home. There they found some very bizarre collections: class rings, a police badge, nylon rope, a stained piece of carpet, pornography, boys’ clothing, a pair of handcuffs, sexual devices, marijuana,
various pills, a hypodermic needle, and a small vial. They impounded Gacy’s vehicles; in the back of one were found pieces of hair that would later be determined to belong to Robert Piest. Police did make their way into Gacy’s crawl space, but were deterred by a rancid smell. Lime had been sprinkled in the crawlspace, but nothing else appeared to stand out.
This time when Gacy returned to the police station, he was not calm and collected. He was enraged and demanded a lawyer. Under the strain, with all his dark secrets on the verge of exposure, Gacy finally confessed—but to only one killing. He claimed he killed a young man in self-defense and then buried him under his garage. The police marked that, but they began digging in Gacy’s crawlspace, and within fifteen minutes discovered the first of twenty-seven bodies.
On December 22, 1978, Gacy finally confessed to killing some thirty people and burying most of them under the house. He drew police a detailed map of where they should dig to find the bodies. He told the same story as Tony Antonucci had related: that he had tricked them into being handcuffed, that he had then raped them, and to muffle their terrified screams, stuff their socks or their underwear down their throats. One grizzly detail he offered police was that he kept some of the corpses under his bed for a few days before burying them. In all, police removed twenty-seven bodies from Gacy’s crawlspace.
The body of Frank Wayne “Dale” Landingin had been discovered in the Des Plaines River a few weeks before. No one was looking for Gacy at the time, so no one was able to connect him to the crime right away. His driver’s license was found among Gacy’s collections. There were four more bodies that would be found in the Des Plaines River, but by February 1979, Robert Piest had still not been found. It was not until April 1979 that Piest’s body washed up at the Dresden Dam in the Illinois River. The death toll was now up to thirty-three. This was the most heinous crime ever recorded in American history. Though other killers had claimed more victims, no greater number had ever been credited to one man.
In 1980, the trial of John Wayne Gacy was to begin. The prosecution called some one hundred witnesses to testify against Gacy. The defense, of course, clung to an insanity plea. While being interrogated, Gacy had created a split personality for himself.
“There are four Johns,” he explained. “John the contractor, John the clown, John the politician, and Jack Hanley.” Jack Hanley was the killer. Often during questioning, he would tell police, “You’ll have to ask Jack that.” He seemed to be laying the groundwork
for the insanity plea. The prosecution had been ready for this, and they called in a expert of their own. Gacy was determined fit for trial. He would answer for his crimes.
Gacy was convicted on thirty-three counts of murder and would receive the death penalty. He was sent to Menard Correctional Center in downstate Illinois. For fourteen years he remained there on death row before being transferred to Stateville Prison in
Joliet, Illinois, to face execution. On May 10, 1994, at 12:48 a.m., John Wayne Gacy was given a lethal injection, and he died eighteen minutes later. His last words were reported to be, “Kiss my ass.”
Gacy maintained he was innocent and that the twenty-seven bodies found in his basement were planted there by police, a rather remarkable claim in the face of such evidence. He also claimed he was not a homosexual. He seemed baffled by the fate he had constructed for himself. Most, however, were unmoved by tears of this clown.
In 1983, during his incarceration on death row at the Menard Correctional Center, John Wayne Gacy was stabbed by fellow inmate Henry Brisbon, the notorious “I-57 Killer,” who in 1973 had, among other atrocities, dragged a woman from her car and forced her to walk naked through a barbed wire fence before shooting her in the vagina. The bizarre altercation found Gacy, unbelievably, at the mercy of someone at least as diabolical as himself.
Just before Christmas in 1978, Gacy had attended a party where fortunes were being read. Florence Branson, a renowned local psychic, was reading palms for the guests. Always one to join in the festivities, Gacy sat down opposite Branson. She noted that she was extremely disturbed by his aura and almost became physically sick when she tried to read his palm. Years later, when Branson read about his atrocities in the newspaper, she was not surprised at all.
While Gacy was being interrogated by police, he sent a neighbor over to check on his house. The neighbor got the key and put it in the lock at the back door. Before he could open it, he claimed he’d heard voices, a number of them, coming from inside the house. He described it as a moaning sound, though there didn’t seem to be any particular place it was coming from—not upstairs nor down but as though the house itself was moaning. The neighbor later believed it was some sort of unrest contained inside the house. At the time, he’d passed it off as his mind “playing tricks on him” out of paranoia and fear.
The house Gacy lived in at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue became a place of pilgrimage to those seeking ghoulish thrills. After the police were finished with their search, nothing but rubble remained of the house, and in 1979 it was leveled. Still, the curious came. Strangely, nothing grew on the site of Gacy’s house. It was as though the land itself was blighted by the evil it tried to contain. Skeptics claimed that the lime Gacy had used to cover his victims made the land inhospitable to vegetation; however, the entire property, down to several feet under the basement, had been dug up and hauled away during the investigation. All of the earth was new.
Eventually the property was purchased, and a new house has been built on the site, the address changed, and as though it has found some sense of renewal, there is vegetation and life growing on the land once again.
At the Cook County Courthouse where Gacy was tried, however, deputies say the courtroom is still haunted in a very unusual way by the trial. Since those days, they say, the sounds of children playing and laughing in the court have been heard--almost as if in beautiful defiance of the abominable deeds of the Killer Clown.
Ursula Bielski is the author of 12 books on Chicago's haunted and dark history and the founder and owner of Chicago Hauntings Tours. She is the host of The Hauntings of Chicago on PBS and the co-host of "The Haunting of M.R. James." Scroll down for a coupon for Chicago Hauntings Tours, available year round, and a link to the website.
All material on this website is copyright Ursula Bielski 2019. Do not republish anything anywhere.
Ghosts of the White City: Ghosts Stories of the World's Fair, the Great Fire and Victorian Chicago. History Press. 2019
Also see :
Ursula Bielski: Chicago Haunts: Ghostlore of the Windy City.
Ursula Bielski: More Chicago Haunts: Scenes from Myth and Memory
Ursula Bielski: Chicago Haunts 3: Locked Up Stories from an October City
Ursula Bielski & Matt Hucke: Graveyards of Chicago
Ursula Bielski: Creepy Chicago
Ursula Bielski: There's Something Under the Bed!
Ursula Bielski: Haunted Bachelors Grove
Ursula Bielski: Haunted Gary
Coming in 2020/21:
Ursula Bielski: Chicago Hauntings: A Treasury of Classic & Contemporary Ghostlore
Ursula Bielski: Permanent Paranormal Objects
Ursula Bielski: The Ghost in You
Ursula Bielski: The Bluebird Tap: A Memoir
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