John Wayne Gacy
Serial killer who murdered at least thirty-three young men and boys.
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John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer who murdered at least 33 young men and boys in Illinois in the 1970s, most of whom were gay or bisexual.[1][2] He was dubbed the "Killer Clown" by the press due to his public clown performances.[1][2]
Key facts and history
His father, an auto repair machinist and World War I veteran, struggled with alcoholism and beat John and his two sisters with a razor strap if they were perceived to have misbehaved.[1][2] As a child, Gacy was the victim of sexual violence, including being molested by a teenage daughter of one of his mother's friends and by a family friend and contractor.[1][2] Despite not graduating from high school, Gacy attended and graduated from the Northwestern Business College in Chicago, then worked as a salesman and manager at a shoe company.[2][3] Gacy became a self-made building contractor and Democratic precinct captain in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970s.[1][2]
He was a member of a Chicago-area "Jolly Joker" clown club and frequently performed as his alter egos "Pogo the Clown" or "Patches the Clown."[1][2] Gacy committed all the murders in his Norwood Park home, luring his victims there with the promise of construction work or some other ruse, then sexually assaulting and torturing them before killing them, usually by strangulation.[1][2] By 1978, Gacy's crawl space had no more space for bodies, and he started to dispose of his victims in the Des Plaines River from a bridge off Interstate 55.[1][2] On March 12, 1980, after a short jury deliberation, Gacy was found guilty of committing 33 murders.[1][2]
What the cited sources add
The Biography.com account states that Gacy later realized he was attracted to men and experienced great turmoil over his sexuality.[2][3] According to the same source, Gacy referred to the period when he committed most of his murders as his "cruising years."[2][3] The Biography.com account notes that Gacy discovered he received sexual gratification from killing and later said, "That's when I realized that death was the ultimate thrill."[2][3] The source reports that Gacy was imprisoned at the Menard Correctional Center in Chester for 14 years, appealing the sentence and offering contradictory statements on the murders in interviews.[2][3]
Many of Gacy's paintings depict him as "Pogo the Clown," and in 2017, Mullock's Auctions in Shropshire, United Kingdom, auctioned off several of his artworks.[2][3]
References
- "John Wayne Gacy Biography", Biography.com, February 11, 2019. facts only, no text reused. biography.com
- "John Wayne Gacy: The "Killer Clown"", Biography.com, June 16, 2023. facts only, no text reused. biography.com
- "John Wayne Gacy Biography", Biography.com. facts only, no text reused. biography.com
- Wikipedia, "John Wayne Gacy" (CC BY-SA 4.0): the article whose references led to the sources above en.wikipedia.org
Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article John Wayne Gacy (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: John Wayne Gacy (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Word definitions: the Codexery glossary, each quoted from its Wikipedia article.
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