John Wayne Gacy

John Wayne Gacy was born on March 17, 1942, in Chicago, the only son among three children. His father, an auto repair machinist and World War I veteran, was an alcoholic who verbally and physically abused the family, often calling his son “dumb and stupid.” His mother tried to protect him, which led his father to accuse him of being a “sissy” and a “mama’s boy” who would “probably grow up queer.” At age four, Gacy was beaten for accidentally disarranging engine parts. In 1949, his father whipped him after he and another boy were caught fondling a young girl; that same year, a family friend began molesting him. Gacy never told his father, fearing blame. Overweight and unathletic, he was barred from sports due to a heart condition and began experiencing blackouts in fourth grade. Between ages 14 and 18, he spent nearly a year in the hospital for these episodes and a burst appendix, though his father suspected he was faking.

At 18, Gacy worked as an assistant precinct captain for a local Democratic candidate, drawing more criticism from his father, who called him a “patsy.” After a dispute over a car his father controlled, Gacy left for Las Vegas in April 1962 with $136. He worked in an ambulance service and then as a mortuary attendant for three months, where he once climbed into a teenage male’s coffin, embraced the body, and felt shock. He returned home, enrolled in Northwestern Business College despite not finishing high school, and graduated in 1963. He took a management trainee job with Nunn-Bush Shoe Company, was transferred to Springfield, Illinois, in 1964, and became engaged to co-worker Marlynn Myers that March. He joined the Jaycees, where a colleague plied him with drinks and performed oral sex on him while he was drunk. By 1965, he was vice-president of the Springfield Jaycees and named the third-most outstanding Jaycee in Illinois.

Gacy married Myers in September 1964. Her father bought three Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa, and the couple moved there so Gacy could manage them, living in her parents’ former home. In 1968, he was convicted of sodomizing a teenage boy and sentenced to ten years in prison, but served only eighteen months. He committed his first murder in 1972, killed two more by the end of 1975, and murdered at least thirty victims after his divorce from his second wife in 1976. He became known as the “Killer Clown” because he performed as a clown publicly before his crimes were discovered. All known murders occurred inside his ranch-style house in Norwood Park Township, a Chicago suburb. He typically lured victims by pretending to demonstrate a magic trick, duping them into wearing handcuffs, then raped and tortured them before killing by asphyxiation or strangulation with a garrote. Twenty-six bodies were buried in his home’s crawl space, three elsewhere on his property, and four were dumped in the Des Plaines River.

The disappearance of Des Plaines teenager Robert Piest led to Gacy’s arrest on December 21, 1978. He was convicted of thirty-three murders, then the most homicides by one individual in U.S. legal history. Sentenced to death on March 13, 1980, he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.