← UNMARKED: A True Crime Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
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A
I knew what I was getting into with him. So had I not known that he was John Gacy the killer, I wouldn't have picked up on these things. But he did try to manipulate everybody around him.
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B
There are certain cases that catch the public's attention for one reason or another. Names that stop being names and become a shorthand for evil names like Manson, Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy.
- [01:15]
A
I think that he was one of the most compulsive sociopaths that we've seen in our lifetimes.
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B
Between 1972 and 1978, John Wayne Gacy murdered at least 33 young men and boys, hiding most of the remains beneath his suburban home just outside of Chicago.
- [01:38]
A
When we saw that first body bag coming out, we're like, oh, that's horrible. And then two, and then five, and then 10. And, you know, it was a stunning thing for the world to see that
- [01:48]
B
like Bundy and Manson, Gacy's case has hardened into something closer to me, myth than reality. Over time, the details blur, the narrative simplifies, leaving uncomfortable questions. But that's why I'm revisiting this case. I'm going back to the original records through the lens of Gacy's death row attorney, a woman who sat across from him, studied him, and asked him the questions most people never get answered.
- [02:23]
A
How could you not ask these questions? What made this guy who he was, sitting in this little jail cell?
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B
I'm James Buddy Day. This is unmarked. Even in the case of someone as remorseless as John Gacy, I find the label of evil reductive. It takes a person and turns him into a caricature. When we do that, we lose sight of the nuance, the strange, uncomfortable, intangible details that give us a more complete picture. That's why I'm speaking with Karen Conti, one of Chicago's most prominent lawyers, legal analysts and law professors.
- [03:09]
A
Gacy's death date was set for May 10, 1994. And I kind of laughed at myself saying, wow, are they going to really execute him? Finally, after all these years. And wouldn't it be weird if I got a call from him? And just a few days later, I did get a call from him.
- [03:23]
B
I've known Karen for many years. We first met in 2020 when I began researching the Gacy case for a number of projects that never saw the light of day. More recently, Karen has published a book, Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy. It recounts her extensive interactions with Gacy in the final days of of his life.
- [03:46]
A
I couldn't pass up the opportunity to drive down and meet the most prolific serial killer at the time on the notorious death row in Menard Correctional Center. And so that's exactly what I did.
- [03:59]
B
When Karen Conti meets Gacy, he's 52 years old and fighting execution.
- [04:05]
A
Gacy adapted to prison. He did. He almost, I think. I don't say enjoyed it because it took away all of those possible bad things that he could do.
- [04:16]
B
That detail stays with me because there's something chilling about the idea that prison didn't break Gacy. It just contained him.
- [04:25]
A
I think that was sort of a relief for him. Not to say that if he had gotten out, he wouldn't have gone right back to his world of torture and killing. But I think it relieved him, and he told me in no uncertain terms that he did not want to get out.
- [04:41]
B
Before we go too far, a brief step back. The full extent of John Wayne Gacy's crimes remain unknown, but at the time of his conviction, he was found guilty of 33 murders, the most murder convictions for any one person in American history to that point, 12 death sentences and 21 life sentences. Most of the victims were found inside Gacy's home. 26 were recovered from the crawl space beneath the house, another found elsewhere on the property. Four more recovered from the Des Plaines river near Chicago. That final victim count, 33. It comes from the known victims connected to Gacy. But even that number has always carried an asterisk because Gacy himself suggested there were more. And this is just one of the reasons that this case feels unfinished. What makes Gacy so disturbing is not only the number, it's how public facing he was. This is not a killer hiding entirely in shadow. Gacy wanted admiration. He wanted proximity. He wanted to be seen as useful, charming, connected.
- [06:01]
A
He was gloriously normal. And, you know, you expect somebody who is this disordered to act disordered and look disordered and be inappropriate and be evil and give you some sign that he was capable of these horrible, horrible things, but he didn't. He was affable. He was funny. He was charming. He was intelligent.
- [06:25]
B
That phrase, gloriously normal. It's key. That was Gacy's camouflage. The respectable businessman. The guy at the fundraiser, the man in the clown makeup, the neighbor in the yellow house. After his arrest, Gacy kept performing in prison. He gave interviews. He wrote extensively. He corresponded with hundreds of people. He painted and sold artwork, most famously paintings of clowns. I can't tell you the number of people that I've met over the years who've reached out to show me a painting they received from John Wayne Gacy. But all of this contributes to the creation of a myth. John Wayne Gacy has become the name of a monster instead of a man. And that's what I want to dig past with Karen.
- [07:16]
A
He was about 5, 9. He. He was paunchy, you know, he had, like, double triple chins. He was very pale, which is very typical when you go to a prison. There's nobody out there who's got a suntan. And, you know, he was handcuffed. He stood up, you know, so not imposing.
- [07:33]
B
Who was this man, really? What drove him? Where did he come from? Karen looked into Gacy's eyes. She spoke with him. She watched how he behaved when the appeals were gone and the execution date was no longer theoretical.
- [07:50]
A
I had to give him the news that the U.S. supreme Court denied the very last appeal and that was it. And he laughed about it. He made some joke about there was a dissenting justice and he said, you please send him a thank you note from John Gacy. And either he was in denial because he was really good at that, really good at denying reality, or he was just putting on a big bluff. I. I don't know, but I was upset, I was nervous, I was shaking. I was sick to my stomach. Gacy was jovial to the end.
- [08:23]
B
As I'm speaking with Karen, trying to piece together the Gacy puzzle, it becomes clear that the myth doesn't begin with the clown costume or the crawl space or the courtroom spectacle. It begins much, much earlier. To understand John Wayne Gacy, the man behind the mythology, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. Before we continue, a brief pause. Like everyone else, I've heard all the talk about weight loss injections because the results are so dramatic. These work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. So what if you're looking for a way to lose weight but not interested in a painful weekly injection, Especially when you hear about some of those intense side effects? That's why doctors created a weight loss supplement called Lean and the Results are remarkable. The studied ingredients in Lean have been shown to lower your blood sugar, burn fat by converting it into energy, and curb your appetite and cravings so you're not as hungry. But listen, Lean is not for the casual dieter with only a few pounds to lose. The doctors at Brickhouse Nutrition created Lean for frustrated dieters with 10 or more pounds to lose. But here's the even better news. They're having a huge Memorial Day sale, and lean is now 25% off. There has never been a better time to visit takelean.com and enter thankyou25 for 25% off. That's promo code. Thankyou25@takelean.com and now, back to the record. Chicago in 1942 is not the polished skyline that people picture now. It's a working city, a city of rail yards, stockyard, steel mills, those brick bungalows and parish churches. The elevated trains grind over the streets. Families live close together, but what happens behind the front door often stays there. This is the world. John Wayne Gacy is born into a boy in a hardworking Chicago household.
- [10:52]
A
I did come to know his family, and I knew his sister who just passed away a little while ago. And, you know, she and her sister were normal. And she said, yeah, dad was rough with all of us, but, you know, that was the time, that was the 50s. You know, the dads came home and drank a couple martinis, and if you did something wrong, you got the belt.
- [11:13]
B
It's often reported that Gacy's father names him John Wayne, after the actor, as if he's trying from infancy to mold his only son into some ideal of American masculinity. But that doesn't appear to be true. Gacy's father is John Stanley Gacy, and at least some contemporaneous reports indicate John Wayne Gacy is given the name because he's intended to be John Gacy Jr. He's the second of three children and the only son of Stanley and his wife Marion.
- [11:50]
A
He would fluctuate between saying, oh, my dad was a good guy. He was a disciplinarian. And everyone needs discipline. And some of these people in this prison could have used a lot of discipline. I'm thinking, yeah, John, you got it, but you're sitting here. But on the other hand, he would say things like, yeah, my dad was mean, he was abusive, and he drank too much, and, you know, he wasn't nice to us as kids.
- [12:14]
B
We don't have Stanley Gacy's medical records. Even though John later describes behavior in his father that suggests Underlying mental health issues. John Gacy reports his father going down into the basement and staying there alone for hours, talking to himself in different voices, drinking, followed by violence.
- [12:38]
A
He was rough on everyone in the family, including his wife.
- [12:41]
B
In one documented instance, Stanley Gacy hits his wife so hard that her teeth are. Are knocked loose. He then chases her out of the house and assaults her in the street in full view of the neighbors.
- [12:56]
A
He was really treated horribly by his father, and I'm not making an excuse for what he did at all, because a lot of people are mistreated by parents and they don't kill 33 boys.
- [13:06]
B
Now, a lot of people grow up in frightening homes and never harm anyone. But when you're looking at Gacy through the larger pattern, his father's association with the basement is significant. It's part of the house that no one else is allowed to enter. The basement becomes Stanley Gacy's private territory, a hidden space under the family home. A place of secrecy, isolation, and control. And years later, John Wayne Gacy creates his own hidden world beneath his house. I don't think that detail should be overplayed. It's not a neat psychological key that unlocks this entire case, but it's hard to ignore. The father has his forbidden space under the home. The son later builds his own. And this is compounded in the spring of 1950, when Gacy is 8 years old. He reports being abused repeatedly by a contractor working on an empty lot next door. In later years, Gacy describes a pattern that is now much better. Grooming, boundary testing, threats, and silence. According to Gacy, he eventually tells his mother his father speaks to the man, but the crimes are never reported to police. And again, this is not a simple cause and effect equation. It's not. Abuse creates a killer. That's both wrong and unfair to the millions of people who survive abuse and never hurt anyone. But in Gacy, you can see how these forces begin to stack people with a tortured childhood.
- [14:56]
A
Either run from it and deviate from it, or. Or they adopt it and they become it. And I think Gacy clearly became the latter.
- [15:07]
B
This is not cause and effect. But when you explore Gacy's childhood, what becomes remarkable is how much of his adult life seems to mimic the world he grows up inside. The secrecy, the hidden rooms, the construction jobs, the access to teenage boys and. And young men. The way Gacy pushes boundaries, tests people, manipulates them, and then reframes himself as the one in control.
- [15:37]
C
You have to assume that every human being has a capacity for growth and the capacity for empathy and the capacity for understanding their place in the world. He didn't have any of that.
- [16:00]
B
That's Dr. Helen Morrison, an American forensic psychiatrist and author who has spent over four decades studying more than 100 serial killers in person. In the 1990s, she was another part of Gacy's defense team and worked with him directly. She later gained possession of Gacy's brain for scientific study.
- [16:24]
C
I had spoken with his sister and had expressed an interest in studying his brain, so that when the autopsy happened, I was there and I got the brain.
- [16:41]
B
According to both microscopic and macroscopic exams facilitated by Dr. Morrison, Gacy's brain shows no physiological deficits.
- [16:51]
C
I have to express that my feeling is it's in the electrical system of the brain that gives the impulses, and that is what makes them do it.
- [17:08]
B
And this research points us towards Gacy's underlying psychopathy. We know he mimics events from his childhood, but why? By adolescence, we begin to see the outline of the psychopath Gacy will evolve into. Picture a pudgy teenager in Chicago, awkward and frustrated, continually trying and failing to bond with his father, not just because of his father's behavior, but because Gacy himself lacks the innate ability to attach in the way that others can.
- [17:53]
C
That is the most awful feeling. That I may spend about 400 hours with him, but he has no attachment to me. Every time I went into his place where he was staying, it was as if he were meeting me for the first time.
- [18:17]
B
What Dr. Morrison is describing is not that Gacy has no practical memory. It's not amnesia. It's something more difficult to understand. For Gacy, there's no emotional continuity. Most of us remember people not just by facts, but by feeling. The last conversation, the tension in the room, the emotional meaning of what is said is what registers with Gacy. That's absent. So each meeting resets and that fits the pattern we keep seeing. Gacy can perform connection. He can mimic warmth. He can act familiar, charming, even personable. But underneath that performance, there's no true attachment driving the exchange.
- [19:05]
C
He was so charming and very solicitous of me and of the circumstances that we found ourselves in. He wanted to know that I was comfortable, that I had everything that I needed. But he was very fake.
- [19:29]
B
This, again, is Karen Conti.
- [19:32]
A
He asked you questions about yourself to gain information so he could use that when the time came. And he was always the smartest guy in the room, too. A little bit of a braggart and a know it all.
- [19:44]
B
Back in the late 1950s, during Gacy's adolescence. That lack of attachment begins to compound as he begins to understand his sexuality in a world that gives him no safe way to process it.
- [19:59]
A
Gacy, at an early age, I believe, knew he was gay, maybe didn't understand it fully because back then it was a different world. But I think that he tried to please his father and he tried to please his family and be the person that his dad wanted him to be, which was an important, affluent, connected human being.
- [20:19]
B
Gacy struggles with his sexuality for his entire life. Despite the fact that his sexual encounters are overwhelmingly with men, he never considers himself gay. In interview, he often describes himself as bisexual. But when you dig into that, it seems to reveal something else. It's not intimacy or identity, it's control.
- [20:43]
A
His dad realized that he was the only son and he liked gardening and he liked cooking and he liked other things. He didn't like sports and he didn't like hunting and fishing. And so his dad be berated him and called him these horrible names.
- [21:00]
B
John Gacy's father, Stanley, is a bigot in the way a lot of men in the era are bigots, and Gacy absorbs that bigotry. But more than that, Gacy reports that all of his sexual experiences with both men and women are completely devoid of emotion. That's the critical point here, because Gacy is not just a man living in denial. He's a man who experiences other people as objects.
- [21:31]
C
You knew that there was nothing that was inside him. That's very hard to describe. All of the serial killers that I've worked with have the same lack of personage. They aren't really able or have the capacity to relate to another human being.
- [21:56]
B
Like all human conditions, psychopathy exists on a spectrum. Some people have reduced empathy, higher risk taking, and inflated self regard without becoming violent. But Gacy appears to sit at the extreme end of that spectrum. He doesn't just struggle with attachment, he's completely severed from it. So when Gacy calls himself bisexual, I don't think he's giving us a clean description of his identity. I think he's describing access. His partner and later his victims are not people that he bonds with. They're objects inside a fantasy system where his experience is the only one that matters. And when we dig into that fantasy, we see an attempt to reverse the terms of his own trauma.
- [22:48]
A
I always think that him being gay, he. He couldn't deal with that because his dad couldn't deal with it. And the times didn't allow that and neither did the Catholic church. And he was a devout Catholic. So you know, the psychologists and psychiatrist opined, at least some of them, that he was killing himself over and over again when he was killing these boys. And that makes sense to me.
- [23:13]
B
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- [26:24]
A
Gacy made a life of being normal. You know, he was married, he was politically connected. He threw parties, he helped his neighbors. He was successful businessman. I mean, in all aspects of his life, he wasn't a bad guy. It was just this thing he did at night. And when he was bad, it was some of the worst crimes that you can ever imagine.
- [26:47]
B
By this time, Gacy is abusing young men and. And boys. He begins a lifelong ruse of hiring teenagers to do labor around his house and businesses. He gives them jobs at his restaurant. He gives them alcohol. He blurs boundaries. He calls it teasing or rough housing, but those words make it sound spontaneous. With Gacy, what we see again and again is something more purposeful.
- [27:16]
A
You see this all the time. The Boy Scout leaders, the PE Teachers, the people who work at the church with young people, youth group leaders. You know, you hate to say that, but if you are so inclined, you're not going to get a job in a corporate office. No, you're going to get a job where you have access and you have trust of parents and children and young people, the people you want to groom.
- [27:40]
B
People often imagine these offenders as masterminds, but research on grooming and predatory behavior suggests something less cinematic and more disturbing. Men like Gacy, they don't move in straight lines. They probe, they withdraw, they adjust, they repeat. The point is to see who resists and who doesn't. This is predatory behavior. We'll see from Gacy throughout his entire entire life, but it doesn't go unnoticed. In 1967, Gacy abuses two boys, both connected to him, who he physically and sexually assaults. One is an employee. The other is the son of a man well known to Gacy through the Jaycees. A grand jury in Blackhawk county hears testimony from both victims.
- [28:33]
A
When I talked to Gacy about that case, he basically called the kids. You know, they were all after his money. He was an important guy. You know, they had, you know, everything to gain, and they were going to, you know, get gang up on him. Poor, poor John. So, yeah, basically he was a victim. That was kind of his mantra about anything in life.
- [28:53]
B
This is Gacy's psychology in miniature. He harms people, then recasts himself as the victim. The boys are after his money. The system is unfair. Yet his actions illustrate the complete opposite. At one point, he hires another high school senior to attack one of the witnesses to prevent him from testifying. It's a clumsy plot. Gacy is caught immediately, and In September of 1968, one year after the allegations, Gacy pleads guilty. He expects probation. Instead, he's sentenced to 10 years at the Iowa State Reformatory for Men in Anamosa. Despite this, he's released in 18 months.
- [29:41]
A
He got a big sentence, but he served very little time because, of course, he was a model prisoner.
- [29:48]
B
When Gacy returns to Chicago, he's a divorced sex offender. It's now 1971, only months after Gacy's release, and according to arrest records, a teenage boy tells Chicago police that Gacy picks him up at the Greyhound bus terminal, brings him home, and tries to force a sexual encounter. And even though Gacy is on parole at the time, his criminal history is not thoroughly checked and the case is decided dismissed when the witness does not appear in court. But remarkably, just a few months later, Gacy is arrested again after another victim says Gacy flashed a sheriff's badge, lured him into his car and assaulted him. But those charges, they're also dropped. The Iowa parole board never learns about either incident. So despite two victims coming forward, Gacy's parole ends in October of 1971, his record sealed. And a man who's already been convicted once and accused twice more is allowed to disappear back into ordinary life.
- [31:01]
A
The system did not work with Gacy. Now you can make some excuses because it was a different time. And, you know, frankly, I think there was an anti gay bias.
- [31:11]
B
This is where the case becomes more than one man's pathology. Because Gacy is not operating in a vacuum like all serial offenders. He requires access to a vulnerable population. And these arrests, they teach Gacy that he's moving through systems that will not talk to each other, that will treat vulnerable young men as less credible and easy to dismiss.
- [31:37]
A
I think things have changed now and I'm glad they've changed. But yeah, the fact that he escaped all, all of those, those incidents and how many times the police came to his door and say, hey, did you employ this kid? He's been disappeared, you know, for this long and no, never heard of him. No, I saw him once. Yeah, he just walked out. You know, they gave him a pass.
- [31:57]
B
Before his final arrest, Gacy will have at least six more meaningful contacts with police or the legal system. Serious accusations, violence, multiple interviews with investigators, direct complaints that should have been impossible to ignore. And like so many of These cases, that failure carries a real world cost. It's unclear exactly when Gacy begins killing. What we know is that the earliest remains recovered from his property date back to 1972. At that point, Gacy is building a new life. He's remarried to a woman he's known for years, Carol Hoff, a single mother of two young girls. He buys the house on 8213 West Summerdale Avenue near O' Hare Airport. This is where the majority of his crimes will be committed. On the outside, it's an L shaped suburban home with a detached garage and a yard. No basement, but elevated above a dirt crawl space. Inside, there's a tiki bar in the living room. And when police enter years later, it's decorated in bizarre design choices, including artwork depicting Gacy's fascination with clowns. On January 3, 1972, Gacy encounters 15 year old Timothy McCoy. McCoy is only passing through Chicago at a Greyhound bus station. How Gacy gets McCoy back to his house is difficult to know with certainty. We have Gacy's account, but Gacy is an unreliable narrator, a psychopath blinded by his own indifference to other people. In his version, McCoy comes willingly, spends the night, and the killing is at least partially self defense. But that doesn't stand up. For example, we know McCoy only had a 13 hour layover on his way to Grand Glenwood, Iowa, and was scheduled to start a new job the next day. So here's what we know. Timothy McCoy is never reported missing in Chicago or Iowa. He's murdered inside Gacy's home. Gacy uses a trap door located in the floor of the front hall closet to move the body underneath the house. He buries it under the living room within about 10ft of the front door. And in the weeks after the murder, visitors come and go, family members move through the house, neighbors stop by. Gacy hosts gatherings, he performs normally. While beneath the floor is the truth of who he is becoming. And that raises some fundamental questions. Why bring the victims back to his own house? Or why bury them beneath the floor? What is it about Gacy that makes him want to keep them close? Later evaluations of John Gacy describe a pattern of compulsive ritualized behavior, but not in the way that people usually think of obsessive compulsive disorder. This is not simply about anxiety relief or intrusive thoughts. This is about control.
- [35:35]
A
He was obsessive and compulsive. He kept records of everything he ate while he was in prison, every phone call he made or received, every letter he made. Or received. And he received a lot of them. He had a whole list in the 14, 15 years of all his visitors, how long to the second they stayed, what they talked about. I mean, he was very, you know, very obsessive compulsive about things, for sure.
- [36:00]
B
In speaking with Karen Conti, she recalls a story scrapbook that Gacy kept in prison, one that illustrates how John Wayne Gacy viewed his victims.
- [36:11]
A
One time that I recall distinctly, he had a book one time I went to visit him. It was like a notebook and it was thick and it said body book on the top, and it grabbed it from him. I said, john, what is this? And I look. And it was a color coded tabbed, basically a catalog of all of his victims. And it had their pictures, their. Their pictures of their childhood home, their school pictures, their dog, their car, whatever. And it was all compiled at the
- [36:40]
B
time Gacy claimed the scrapbook was part of his defense. In the years before his execution, he denied responsibility, suggesting other people may have been involved in the murders and trying to recast the evidence around him. But this body book, it feels like something more.
- [37:00]
A
I said, and why are you calling it a body book? These are human beings. These are boys and men. He said, well, what were they doing out late at night anyway? And where were their parents? So in one sentence, I saw what he did, which was to dehumanize those boys.
- [37:17]
B
It's a window into Gacy's mind. Controlling victims in life is not enough. The fantasy demands that he keep them. In forensic literature. Offenders who take or preserve items connected to the victims are often understood as extending the crime beyond the moment itself. A 2024 study on theft by sexual homicide offenders describes the taking of victim related items as part of the broader process, not merely simple theft. It's a way to revisit the fantasy and preserve a feeling of control long after the victim is gone. And this extends into Gacy's professional life. By this time, Gacy is running a home based business called PDM Contractors. And through that company, he hires young men and teenagers to do work around his house and job sites. Picture young day laborers subcontracted for things like painting and demolition.
- [38:23]
A
He would say things like, I was always a father figure to every boy who I came in contact with. I, I gave them, you know, jobs. I gave them hot cooked meals. I helped them and gave them sex advice, you know. Yeah. Did I give them drugs and alcohol? Yeah, I did. But, you know, I, I was a father when their fathers were nowhere to be found. So he would, he had that sort of mantra that he was the father of the year. So he did have a business that was lucrative. But yes, he used those jobs as a lure to get these poor kids in who all they want to do is work hard, make a money and buy their first car.
- [39:01]
B
Now, there's gaps here. We know Gacy kills a victim in 1974 because the remains are recovered from from his backyard. Years later, though that victim remains unidentified to this day. And In July of 1975, Gacy murders one of his employees, 18 year old John Butkovich. This is a person well known to Gacy, his employees, even his family. And not only is the disappearance reported to police, the night Butkovich is last seen, two other employees witness a violent argument between him and John Wayne Gacy over money. Authorities even question Gacy, but ultimately they dismiss Butkovich as a runaway. And the following year, Gacy murders another employee, Gregory Godzik. Detectives question Gacy again, but that investigation is is soon abandoned. Unbeknownst to the police, who knock on Gacy's front door and ask him questions. The victims are buried right under their feet. But this is the pattern at the time. Gacy's victims are not taken seriously because police file them under those old familiar categories. Runaways, hustlers, troubled kids, boys from the bus station.
- [40:27]
A
The news at the time, if you go back and look at the news, it was like, they're prostitutes, they're runaways, they're found at the Greyhound bus station. Well, there were some, but largely they weren't. And many of them worked for him
- [40:41]
B
and disappeared by 1976. Gacy is working with the Democratic Township Committee. It's often reported that he was president of the chapter, but in fact, he only told people he was president and used false business cards. And this is when he begins developing the character of Pogo the clown, partly as a way to become more visible in the community and partly as another layer of performance. And that costume becomes the detail that history remembers.
- [41:17]
A
I think he was very proud of clouding. He loved it. He knew how to put on the makeup. He was very adamant about how it should be done and how you conduct yourself when you're a clown. It's like a world of clowning. But I really believe it was a way to mask who he really was.
- [41:35]
B
Psychopathy research going back to Hervey Cleckley's book the Mask of Sanity describes the psychopath as someone who can present a convincing surface of normality while lacking the emotional depth underneath. Now, modern psychopathy models still emphasize these traits, like superficial charm Shallow affect, grandiosity, and a lack of empathy. So with Gacy, Pogo is not a separate personality. It's not an alter ego. It's a costume that makes the mask of sanity literal.
- [42:15]
A
I think Gacy did not like who he was. He knew who he was. He knew what he was capable of and what his predilections were. And I think this was his way to maybe make himself happy, make himself look like a good guy, a charitable kid, entertainer. And he was basically just masking that really dark side of him, which was sad.
- [42:38]
B
By 1976, Gacy's second marriage is on the verge of divorce. As he's becoming all consumed with seeking out victims, he stays out all night. He leaves the house at strange hours and offers bad excuses. He claims he has to meet a client or take care of some business. But the truth is that Gacy's public life and private life are now fully split. So by 1976, the marriage is over and Gacy is no longer experimenting. He's built the system, the house, the business, the crawl space, the confidence that nobody is coming to stop him. And over the next two years, Gacy spends an astonishing amount of time doing this. Finding victims, isolating them, attacking them, and keeping their remains beneath his home.
- [43:39]
A
He had to take stuff to go to sleep, he had to take stuff to wake up. He would stay up all night sometimes. I never really heard bipolar with him, but he probably was bipolar too. I, I don't know.
- [43:52]
B
I want to stress the scale of Gacy's crimes. This is not a sudden break. It's a project, a routine. At points, Gacy is killing someone every few weeks. Eventually he even runs out of room. The crawl space beneath 8213 West Summerdale becomes so crowded that bodies are buried close together, sometimes stacked or overlapping. One victim is buried in the yard, another beneath the garage. And when there's no room left beneath the house, Gacy begins disposing of victims in the Des Plaines River. This is what escalation looks like when nothing interrupts it. In April of 1976, Gacy murders 18 year old Darryl Julius Sampson, who most likely met Gacy through his construction company. About a month later, on May 14, Gacy murders 15 year old Randall Reffet. His body is found found beneath the front hall closet. Around the same time, Gacy abducts 14 year old Sam Stapleton, who's last seen after his shift at a pizza parlor. His remains are recovered about 6ft from Gacy's front door in the same grave as another victim, 17 year old Michael Bonin, who Gacy murders roughly a month later. And in the case of the last two, neither Stapleton nor Bonin is known to have been closely associated with Gacy. And that's because some victims appear to cross his path only briefly. Some are kids from unstable homes, some are young men trying to work. Some are simply vulnerable in the wrong place at the wrong time in a city where law enforcement is unwilling to act.
- [45:47]
A
Even in Chicago, the different police districts did not have a cross referencing. If a boy went missing here, and even if the station was just a few miles over here, there was no connection. So they couldn't have even seen a pattern at the time. So this was a very different time.
- [46:05]
B
Gacy abducts and murders 16 year old William Billy Carroll in June of 1976. Rick Johnston in August. The latter dropped off by his mother to attend a concert. At some point meeting Gacy in October, Gacy murders 19 year old William George Bundy. Gacy places his body in the crawl space along the far west wall of the house. This victim is not identified for 35 years, even though Bundy's first family reports him missing immediately. And friends tell authorities Bundy had been employed by Gacy doing electrical work. Still, the police take no action. And in the last half of 76, Gacy murders a runaway named James Byron Hackinson, not identified until 2017. Back in 1977, John Cizek disappears in January. John Prestige disappears in March, Matthew Bowman disappears in July, Robert Gilroy disappears in September, John Mowry disappears later that same month, Russell Nelson disappears in October, Robert Winch disappears in November, Tommy Bowling disappears one week later. David Talsma disappears in December. One after another, another, month after month, these young men vanish. Many are connected to Gacy. And the city fails to see the shape of the thing happening inside it. And this list might not be comprehensive. Gacy's own words suggest the known victims may only be the surface.
- [47:51]
A
He also took jobs out of state and I saw his business records and you can't tell me that during his crime spree and before that he wasn't going to the Pacific Northwest or Wisconsin or Florida. And finding young boys and men in a place that he's not known, and harming them, killing them and burying them.
- [48:11]
B
And then there are the survivors, the boys and young men who encounter Gacy but live. Tony Antonucci is 19 when Gacy lures him to his home with wine and stag films, then tries a handcuff trick, the same kind of boundary testing performance. Gacy Uses again and again, he escapes. But on New Year's Eve 1977, authorities get another chance. Gacy is finally arrested after a 19 year old says Gacy kidnapped him at gunpoint point and forced him into a sexual encounter. According to the police report, Gacy admits the encounter happened and even acknowledges the brutality, but denies the young man was unwilling. An assistant state's attorney decides not to prosecute. Once again, the decision is devastating. The system keeps failing to close the distance between what is known and what is obvious. And by 1978, Gacy begins disposing of victims in the river. Gacy abducts Tim o' Rourke in June. His body's found in the Des Plaines River. Frank Wayne Dale Landigan disappears in early November. His body also found in the river. And investigators later find his dream driver's license inside Gacy's bedroom. James Mazzara disappears on November 13th. His body's found in the Des Plaines River. And all of this is happening right before Gacy's final victim walks into his orbit and the case finally breaks open. On December 11, 1978. 15 year old Robert Piest is working at Nissen Pharmacy in Des Plaines. His mother is waiting outside. That detail is what makes this disappearance feel so different from the others. Robert isn't gone for days before anyone notices. He isn't dismissed as a runaway. He isn't someone whose absence can be explained away by a bad home life or a vague assumption that he simply moved on.
- [50:36]
A
His mom was sitting in the parking lot waiting to take her son back so they could celebrate her 40th birthday. And he never showed up and he never came out.
- [50:45]
B
Before leaving the store, Robert tells his mother to wait a few minutes. He says he's going to speak with a contractor about a summer construction job. The contractor is John Wayne Gacy. Mrs. Peast waits, 20 minutes pass, then she goes inside and starts looking for her son. What we know is that Robert Piest leaves the store at approximately 9pm and is never seen alive again. A fellow employee, Kim Byers, sees Gacy in the pharmacy and tells authorities police now have a name. Not a vague suspicion, not a family begging someone to listen. And when investigators begin looking at Gacy, all the pieces that had failed to connect before begin moving towards the same house. Remarkably, police search Gacy's home and come up empty. But on December 21, 1978, they obtain a second search warrant for 8213 West Summerdale. They go back into Gacy's house and this time they're not Just looking at the surface of his life, they go underneath it.
- [52:02]
A
Back in the 70s, I mean, it was a much more innocent time. So when we saw that first body bag coming out, we're like, oh, that's horrible. And then two and then five and then 10. And, you know, it was a stunning thing for the world to. To see that. But when you live just 10 miles away from this guy who is conducting himself in a normal fashion in a normal suburb, it was something that really changed you as a kid.
- [52:29]
B
That image, the body bags coming out of a suburban house, it changes the Gacy case from a missing person investigation into something almost impossible for the public to process.
- [52:43]
A
When Gacy first was arrested, he admitted to the crimes, and he had a photographic memory of where the bodies were buried, where he picked the boys up, the souvenirs he had. And then shortly thereafter, he basically said, I never confessed, which was a typical Gacy thing, because he was a liar.
- [53:01]
B
That reversal is pure Gacy. First the confession, then the denial. First he draws a map. Then he thinks the lies will somehow supersede it. Robert's body is recovered months later on April 9, 1979, from the Des Plaines River. But by then, the truth beneath Gacy's house has already come out. The crawl space has given him up. And the myth of John Wayne Gacy, the clown, the contractor, the community man, has collapsed in into what he really is. A predator who was seen way too many times before being finally stopped. In March of 1980, a jury convicts John Wayne Gacy of 33 counts of murder. After a failed insanity defense, the same jury sentences him to death for 12 of those killings. The 12 that prosecutors can prove occurred after Illinois enacted its post Furman death penalty statute. And then Gacy waits. Year after year, appeal after appeal, the public version of him grows larger. The killer clown, the suburban monster, the name people use when they want to describe evil in its purest form. But the real Gacy is still there, inside a cell about half the size of a parking spot.
- [54:38]
A
I think by the time that I got to him, he did what he did. He was institutionalized, which is what happens when you wake up every morning in a cell and you have no outside privileges really to speak of, and you have crappy food and you have all these. You're surrounded by predators and crazy people.
- [54:56]
B
When Karen Conti enters his life, Gacy is no longer the successful contractor. He's no longer the jc, the neighbor, the political volunteer, or the man in the clown suit. He's a condemned predator trying to survive. The final machinery of the system. And Karen does something that is easy to misunderstand. She defends him.
- [55:20]
A
I realized this case was not just about Gacy. It was about other people on death row who may have actual defenses and good arguments. And I thought, I've always been against the death penalty. I went on the team and I became one of Gacy's final death row law lawyers.
- [55:37]
B
Not because she believes John Wayne Gacy is innocent, not because she excuses him, but because the system is supposed to. To be tested most rigorously when the defendant is hardest to defend.
- [55:49]
A
All I know is that John Wayne Gacy got all of the defense that he deserved and zealous defense that we made, all the arguments that we possibly could make, and he was executed anyway. So I'm happy that I was part of that process because hopefully that makes sure that we have the right person who committed these crimes go away.
- [56:10]
B
The same society that failed to stop Gacy also has to prove it can punish him lawfully, carefully, and without becoming what it claims to condemn.
- [56:22]
A
Executing people, I just, I can't, I can't buy into it. It's just the way I'm wired. Doesn't matter what they did, doesn't matter who they are. Throw them in jail, throw away the key. But executing, I think, is barbaric, and I think we get it wrong a lot.
- [56:36]
B
On May 10, 1994, John Wayne Gacy is executed by lethal injection. By then, the myth is already fixed in the public imagination. But I don't think the myth helps us understand him. Gacy is a man who operated in a specific time, inside specific institutions, with specific access to vulnerable young men. We have to be careful not to turn him into something supernatural outside of society, something that could have been prevented, because that's the danger of John Wayne Gacy. He was never outside society. He was always inside it. Something he was painfully aware of.
- [57:22]
A
Gacy, to his discredit, really kind of promoted that. I think he enjoyed the celebrity, I think he enjoyed his notoriety, and he, he tried to capitalize on it. And, you know, and that's why I always say, you know, between Dahmer and Gacy, at least Dahmer had the grace to be pathetic.
- [57:47]
B
Before we wrap a few show notes, I had a great conversation with Dr. Helen Morrison and I'm going to be posting it inside Unmarked Case Files, our research portal on Patreon, where you can examine the evidence for yourself. And if you've already subscribed, I hope you're enjoying our early and ad free episodes. There's much more to come. Aside from the podcast, I'm also an independent journalist and author and my new book, A Plague of Steel, is now available in paperback. I've been working on on this book for years. I've been living with these characters for years. The book is about a drunk knight on a mission no one expects him to survive, a zealot priestess who's been given everything but wants more, and a mad princess who sees a truth no one else can see. This is the first in a planned series I'm going to be writing over the next several years. I'm halfway through the second book. The series is called the Sons of the Ten Tempering, and if you do pick it up, please leave a review because that is so important for independent authors like myself. Unmarked is produced by John Nadeau. Our associate producer is Jesse DeMarais, and this episode is edited by Dave Alderson. Thank you so much from our team here at Unmarked. Until next week,
- [59:07]
A
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B
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