Case File: John Wayne Gacy

Gacy, born in 1942 in Chicago, was the son of John Stanley Gacy and Marion Elaine Robison. His father was a violent, abusive alcoholic who would often drink alone in the basement while having imaginary conversations with fellow World War I veterans.

Gacy’s childhood was not a happy one. Teased and bullied at school, Gacy was also being sexually molested by a family friend, a secret he kept from his family. He was a sickly child who was hospitalized multiple times, including once for a burst appendix, but his father accused him of faking his illnesses.

In 1961, he left home and drove west, staying in Las Vegas with a female relative who was a sex worker[1] [2] [3] . During his stay there, he worked at a mortuary where he may have engaged in necrophilia with cadavers—but Gacy’s own accounts of that period vary, part of a pattern of inconsistency that would recur in his later confessions.

After returning to the Midwest, Gacy married Marlynn Myers in 1964 and began managing her father’s three Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in Iowa. He also became a prominent member of the Jaycees, a member of the United States Junior Chamber, and soon a father to two children. But all the while, Gacy was having homosexual trysts with co-workers and other young men.

In 1967, he seduced Donald Voorhees, the 15-year-old son of a fellow Iowa Jaycee after plying him with alcohol. After the teenager told his father, Gacy then paid another teenager $300 to assault Voorhees so he wouldn’t testify against Gacy.

The gambit failed, and Gacy was arrested in 1968 and returned to Iowa, where he pleaded guilty to sodomy; his sentence was 10 years behind bars, and his wife quickly divorced him. But as a model prisoner—he earned his GED diploma and was given a service award as a distinguished member of the inmate chapter of the Jaycees—Gacy was out on parole by June 1970 after serving 18 months of his sentence.

After returning to Chicago, Gacy bought a house in suburban Norwood Park. He continued to have sexual encounters with young men, though by 1972, he had married again and started a contracting firm. Around this time, Gacy began dressing up as Pogo the Clown for parades, parties and charitable events.

Gacy committed his first known murder in 1972, luring 16-year-old Timothy McCoy to his home, stabbing him repeatedly, then burying McCoy’s body in the crawl space under his house. By the time his second marriage ended in 1976, Gacy had made seducing young men and teenage boys in his house a regular occurrence.

Gacy typically met young males through his contracting business, at his KFC franchises or by picking them up at bus stations. He often showed them his clown outfits and pretended to do a handcuff trick, which fooled the youths into allowing Gacy to handcuff them. He then used chloroform to subdue his victims, after which Gacy tortured, raped and murdered them by strangulation or stabbing.

During the 1970s, Gacy evaded detection by authorities, due in part to his civic activities—he was a Democratic Party precinct captain—and his mild-mannered skill at convincing people to believe him. In 1977, he allegedly handcuffed and molested 27-year-old Jeff Rignall. Gacy settled a $3,000 civil suit and was charged only with misdemeanor battery. Later that year, after allegedly kidnapping and sexually molesting a 19-year-old, an assistant state’s attorney decided not to prosecute Gacy.

Meanwhile, the number of bodies buried in Gacy’s crawl space continued to grow. When he ran out of room, some corpses were buried on top of previous victims, and Gacy was eventually forced to throw bodies into the nearby Des Plaines River.

In December 1978, Gacy met 15-year-old Robert Piest at a drug store in Des Plaines, Ill., and after tempting him with a job offer, murdered Piest at his house. When Piest failed to return home, his family filed a missing person report with the police.

Police were able to link Gacy to the drugstore where Piest was last seen, triggering an investigation that turned up Gacy’s prior conviction in Iowa for sodomy. Under questioning, there were numerous inconsistencies in Gacy’s statements, leading police to obtain a warrant to search Gacy’s house.

The search revealed a number of suspicious materials—fake police badges, handcuffs, sex toys, several driver’s licenses—but not enough to arrest Gacy. Police did, however, begin to put Gacy under constant surveillance.

Further investigation led police to former employees of Gacy’s, who told police they had been asked to spread lime in the crawl space under Gacy’s house and to dig trenches in the crawl space, ostensibly for drainage pipes.

Shortly before Christmas 1978, as the police investigation continued, a visibly exhausted Gacy visited his attorney and, after a few drinks, began a long-winded confession that stretched into the early hours of the morning. He made a similar confession to a friend later the next day, saying, “I've been a bad boy. I killed 30 people, give or take a few.”

A second search warrant led investigators to discover putrefying human remains under Gacy’s house. On December 22, Gacy confessed to police that he had killed about 30 young males. He assisted police by drawing a diagram of where on his property the bodies were buried.

Gacy’s house was slowly dismantled, and the forensic investigators found 26 bodies under Gacy’s house; three were discovered elsewhere on his property, prompting one investigator to say, “If the devil's alive, he lived here.”

Gacy also showed police the bridge where he had dumped four or five bodies—including that of Piest—into the Des Plaines River. Piest’s remains were finally discovered on the riverbank in April 1979.

In February 1980, Gacy—charged with 33 murders—was brought to trial. His jury was chosen from Rockford, Ill., because of exhaustive media coverage in Cook County.

Prior to the trial, a number of psychiatric professionals interviewed Gacy to determine if he was mentally competent to stand trial. Gacy’s defense team included three professionals who stated that Gacy was a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personality disorder. The prosecution argued that Gacy’s actions were premeditated by a sane person in control of their actions.

Some of Gacy’s victims who had survived—including Voorhees—recounted their horrific ordeals in emotional court testimony. After five weeks, Gacy requested a mistrial on the grounds that he disapproved of his attorneys’ insanity plea, among other objections; his request was denied.

It took the jury less than two hours to find Gacy guilty of all 33 counts of murder, which in 1980 made him the serial killer with the most murder convictions in U.S. history. The following day, he was sentenced to die by lethal injection.

Gacy was incarcerated in the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Ill., where he began to file dozens of appeals and other motions, all of which failed. He also made a number of wildly inconsistent statements regarding his innocence, such as having knowledge of only five murders, claiming that other bodies under his house were buried there by his friends.

It took until 1993 for Gacy to exhaust all his appeals, including one that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Before his execution in May 1994, Gacy requested a last meal of a bucket of KFC chicken—a lifelong favorite—but he never showed any remorse for his murders.

As a crowd gathered to watch, Gacy’s house in Norwood Park was completely demolished in 1979; a new house was built on the site in 1986.

As recently as 2021, investigators were still identifying the people whose bodies were found on Gacy’s property, partly because many of Gacy’s victims were hitchhikers, teenage runaways or prostitutes who were never reported missing. Gacy himself stated at one point that he may have killed as many as 45 people.

Of the bodies attributed to Gacy’s murder streak, all but five have been identified. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office has DNA samples from the five unidentified victims and has requested the public’s help in identifying them.

Gacy’s attorney spearheaded an effort to make it faster and easier to file a missing persons report so that there was no waiting period before police could search for a missing child or adolescent. Other states soon adopted similar measures, which led to the Child Abduction Emergency network, now commonly known as an Amber Alert.

Gacy’s life and his serial murders have been portrayed in numerous films and television series, including To Catch a Killer with Brian Dennehy as Gacy; Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes featuring conversations between Gacy and his attorney; and Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy with Michael Chernus in the lead role.