The Disappearance That Led to John Wayne Gacy’s Downfall
On December 11, 1978, Des Plains, Ill., teenager Robert Piest vanished. His mother told police that the 15-year-old had disappeared after telling her that was going to speak with a local contractor about a potential job. That contractor was Gacy.
When Piest failed to return home, his family contacted police, who quickly focused on Gacy as a suspect. A background check revealed a disturbing past, including a 1968 conviction for sexually assaulting a teenage boy in Iowa and a prison term he had served before moving back to Illinois.
Detectives from the Des Plaines Police Department, led by Lt. Joseph Kozenczak, began surveillance on Gacy’s home. At first, he appeared cooperative—friendly, talkative and even joking with officers. He claimed he had never met Piest, insisting the boy must have run away.
But as police dug deeper, inconsistencies emerged. They discovered complaints from young men who said Gacy had propositioned or assaulted them. A search warrant of his home turned up suspicious items: driver’s licenses that didn’t belong to him, a high school class ring, police badges, handcuffs, sex toys and a receipt that matched one Piest’s coworker had slipped into his jacket on the day he went missing. Police also noted a strange odor emanating from beneath the home’s floorboards. The smell, Gacy claimed, came from bad drainage.
The Pressure Mounts
For the next several days, Gacy was under near-constant surveillance. Detectives trailed him as he ran errands and visited friends. Officers later said he seemed to unravel in front of them, alternately bragging about his influence in local politics and muttering that people were out to get him.
Gacy was arrested after police saw him hand a bag of marijuana to a gas station clerk and on December 21, police executed a second search warrant and began tearing into the crawl space. Beneath the compacted earth, they found what they first thought was a piece of rope. It was, in fact, human bone.
When confronted with the discovery, Gacy’s calm façade began to crack and he started making erratic statements to friends and even his lawyers, hinting at his guilt.
A Shocking and Surreal Confession
Gacy soon revealed the depth of his horrific acts. Although a legal stenographer was not present for these initial interviews, police notes show that Gacy described the murders in matter-of-fact detail. He said he had killed at least 30 young men and that most were buried in his crawl space. He even provided authorities with a map of the space, labeling the locations of victims.
He told detectives that he would lure victims, often teenage boys or young men he hired for contracting jobs, to his home under the pretense of work or friendship. Once there, he used a “handcuff trick,” convincing them to let him restrain their wrists before turning the game into a deadly assault. Many were strangled with a makeshift tourniquet. Investigators described him as eerily calm, even proud of his efficiency, describing the gruesome details without emotion. When asked if he had ever felt remorse, Gacy replied that his victims were nobodies—drifters or runaways who wouldn’t be missed.
Yet even as he confessed, Gacy tried to distance himself from the full horror of his crimes. He claimed that some of the killings might have been committed by “others”—employees, he said, who had access to his home. Gacy alternated between admitting to dozens of murders and insisting he couldn’t remember exact names or numbers. He claimed that at times he committed the murders under the influence of a darker alter ego he called “Jack Hanley.”
Unanswered Questions and Alternate Theories
Despite the detailed statements he gave police, Gacy spent the rest of his life trying to recast the story. During his trial in 1980 (and in subsequent appeals), his defense team argued that his confession was coerced. They claimed he had exaggerated his role to protect others and that he was suffering from schizophrenia. The jury disagreed with the defense, convicting Gacy of murder after just two hours of deliberation and sentenced him to death.
Gacy himself alternated between full denial and deflection. In interviews from death row before his 1994 execution, Gacy suggested his employees were responsible for the bodies found under his house. At other times, he seemed to taunt investigators, bragging about details only the killer could know. The 2021 docuseries John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise portrays this ambiguity, a man who freely described his crimes but refused to take moral responsibility for them.
But decades after Gacy’s execution, questions remain about whether he acted entirely alone. Some wonder whether Gacy would have been able to fit within the crawlspace where most of the bodies were found and that others may have helped bury them. Police investigated two of Gacy’s employees, Michael Rossi and David Cram, who also lived with Gacy, but neither was ever charged. Still, speculation persisted, fueled in part by Gacy’s own contradictory statements. In recent years, some journalists and retired investigators pursued the theory that Gacy was part of a larger network involved in sexual exploitation of teenage boys in the Chicago area at the time of the murders.
However, most law enforcement experts insist Gacy was the primary perpetrator. They believe that Gacy’s 1978 confession reveals the depths of his depravity, and that he confessed not out of remorse, but because the world had finally caught up with him.
