Who was John Wayne Gacy?
John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago on March 17, 1942, the second of three siblings and only son of John Wayne Stanley and his wife Marion Elaine Robison.
By all accounts, Gacy's father was a violent alcoholic who belittled his son for seeking solace with his mother. Gacy also alluded to being molested as a child by a family friend. In a manuscript he gave to the New Yorker in 1994, he wrote, “1950, age 8, Sexual incident with contractor."
Gacy briefly worked as a mortuary attendant in Las Vegas in 1962 before returning to Illinois and attending Northwestern Business College.
He met Marlynn Myers while working as a shoe salesman and they married in September 1964. The newlyweds moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where Gacy managed several Kentucky Fried Chicken locations owned by his father-in-law. He and Marlynn welcomed a son in February 1966 and a daughter in March 1967.
Why did John Wayne Gacy go to prison before the murders?
Gacy was accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in August 1967, then charged with hiring another teenager to beat up his accuser to prevent him from testifying.
Then 25, Gacy pleaded guilty to a count of sodomy in 1968 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Marlynn filed for divorce and sole custody of their children on the day he was sentenced, and Gacy never saw them again.
When did John Wayne Gacy return to Chicago?
Gacy was granted parole for good behavior after serving 18 months and moved back in with his mother in Chicago, per the terms of his probation. (His father died in 1969 while Gacy was locked up, and his request to attend the funeral was denied.)
He was arrested in 1971 for sexual assault of a minor, but the case was dropped when the alleged victim didn't appear to testify. Another teen accused Gacy of sexual battery in 1972 but those charges were dropped after Gacy alleged the kid was trying to blackmail him over a consensual encounter.
Meanwhile, his mother helped him buy a house on West Summerdale Avenue in the Chicago suburb of Norwood Park Township. He became a local Democratic Party precinct captain and started a construction business, PDM Contractors, while also volunteering as Pogo the Clown at birthday parties and local events.
A photo of Gacy standing on his porch dressed in his full clown costume quickly became one of the case's most haunting images, contributing to his notoriety as "the Killer Clown."
Gacy married his former high school girlfriend Carole Hoff, a mother of two daughters, in July 1972. She testified during his murder trial that Gacy told her he was bisexual, but "it wasn't of any importance because I knew John."
They divorced in 1976.
Who were serial killer John Wayne Gacy's victims?
Hoff also testified that she noticed a bad odor in Gacy's house after she moved in. What she smelled was the body of 16-year-old Timothy Jack McCoy, Gacy's first known murder victim, who disappeared from a Chicago bus station Jan. 3, 1972.
Gacy hid the boy's body in the crawl space under his house and, after his wife noticed the smell, poured concrete over the remains.
Gacy's second victim, a teenage boy he killed in January 1974 whose remains were found buried in Gacy's yard, is one of five known victims who have still never been identified. Originally there were nine John Does, all of them buried with a headstone sporting a variation of "We Remember."
Gacy's third victim, 18-year-old John Butkovich, worked for his contracting business. After he disappeared on July 31, 1975, his parents repeatedly asked police to investigate their son's boss.
Ultimately Gacy was charged with killing 33 boys and young men ranging in age from 14 to 21. Some did work for him, but most were runaways or hitchhikers he lured to his car under false pretenses or solicited for sexual favors.
How did John Wayne Gacy get caught?
His last victim, 15-year-old Robert Piest, worked at a pharmacy in Des Plaines, Ill. And before Gacy killed him on Dec. 11, 1978, he told his parents that "some contractor" had wanted to talk to him about a part-time job. The pharmacy owner told police that Gacy was likely the contractor in question.
Des Plaines police started tailing Gacy, who called lawyer Sam Amirante for assistance, claiming the cops were harassing him and could the attorney find out what they wanted.
Amirante at first didn't believe his new client could have anything to do with a missing boy.
But Gacy confessed to him on the night of Dec. 20, 1978, after the increasingly suspicious lawyer showed him a newspaper article about Piest. According to Amirante's 2012 book John Wayne Gacy: Defending a Monster, Gacy told him, "This boy is dead. He is in a river."
Gacy proceeded to tell Amirante he had been the "judge, jury and executioner of many, many people," per the book. There were times he woke up next to "dead, strangled kids" whose hands were cuffed behind their back, Gacy said, and then he buried them.
It didn't take long for police to find human remains in the crawl space, and Gacy—who was arrested during a traffic stop—was charged with murder on Dec. 21.
Over the next few months, investigators dug up the remains of 29 victims from Gacy's property, including 26 from the crawl space and three more buried elsewhere. Piest was one of four boys Gacy dumped in the Des Plaines River.
What happened to John Wayne Gacy?
After initially confessing to police the night he was arrested, Gacy then claimed to know nothing about any murders but admitted to killing one boy in self-defense. He posited that anyone with keys to his house could have buried bodies in the crawl space. He eventually denied confessing at all.
His lawyers entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity at trial. But after a barely six-week trial, the jury took less than two hours to find him guilty of 33 counts of murder. He was sentenced to death the following day, on March 13, 1980.
His execution was originally set for June 2, 1980, but he remained on death row at Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Ill., for 14 years while his appeals played out.
Behind bars, Gacy responded to the thousands of letters he received and was a prolific painter—including of many clown tableaus—and his work has been exhibited and sold at auction.
"For a while, I would tape newspaper pictures of the victims to the wall beside my bed and go to sleep seeing if I would dream about them or if I could recall if I ever met them," Gacy told the New Yorker in early 1994. "I would look at them and say, ‘Who the hell are you, and how did you die?’ I don’t have fantasy-type dreams, and I don’t ever have nightmares."
He was 52 when he died by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.
Where are John Wayne Gacy's wives and children?
Both of his ex-wives remarried and any surviving Gacy family members have been leading private lives.
After he was arrested for murder, his first wife Marlynn—who did not want to reveal her new married surname—told the New York Times, "I just couldn't believe it. I never had any fear of him. It's hard for me to relate to these killings. I was never afraid of him."
As for Hoff, who testified against Gacy at trial, she told the Times he "broke a lot of my furniture. I think now, if there were murders, some must have taken place when I was in that house.”