John Wayne Gacy Jr. was an American serial killer and rapist. He sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in Cook County, Illinois (the county Chicago is in).
All of Gacy’s known murders were committed inside his Norwood Park ranch house. His victims were typically wooed to his address by force or deception, and all but one of his victims were murdered by either asphyxiation or strangulation with a makeshift tourniquet; his first victim was stabbed to death. Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home.
Three other victims were buried elsewhere on his property, while the bodies of his last four known victims were discarded in the Des Plaines River.
Convicted of 33 murders, Gacy was sentenced to death on March 13, 1980, for 12 of those killings. He spent 14 years on death row before he was executed by lethal injection at Statesville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.
Gacy became known as the “Killer Clown” because of his charitable services at fund-raising events, parades, and children’s parties where he would dress as “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown” – characters he had created.
Gacy was born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 17, 1942, the second of three children and only son born to John Stanley Gacy, an auto repair machinist and World War I veteran, and his wife Marion Elaine Robinson, a homemaker. Gacy was of Polish and Danish ancestry. His paternal grandparents had immigrated to the United States from Poland (then part of Germany). As a child, Gacy was overweight and not athletic. He was close to his two sisters and mother but endured a difficult relationship with his father, an alcoholic who was physically abusive to his wife and children.
Throughout his childhood, Gacy strove to make his stern father proud of him but seldom received his approval. This friction was constant throughout his childhood and adolescence. One of Gacy’s earliest childhood memories was of his father beating him with a leather belt at the age of four for accidentally disarranging car engine components his father had assembled. On another occasion, his father struck him across the head with a broomstick, rendering him unconscious. His father regularly belittled him and often compared him unfavorably with his sisters, disdainfully accusing him of being “dumb and stupid.” Gacy, while regularly commenting he was “never good enough” in his father’s eyes, always vehemently denied he ever hated his father in interviews after his arrest.
When he was 6 years old, Gacy stole a toy truck from a neighborhood store. His mother made him walk back to the store, return the toy and apologize to the owners. His mother told his father, who beat Gacy with a belt as punishment. After that incident, Gacy’s mother attempted to shield her son from his father’s verbal and physical abuse, yet this only succeeded in Gacy getting yelled at for being a “sissy” and a “Mama’s boy” who would “probably grow up queer.”
The majority of Gacy’s murders were committed between 1976 and 1978, which he later referred to as his “cruising years.” One month after he had gotten a divorce, Gacy abducted and murdered an 18-year-old youth named Darrell Samson. Samson was last seen alive in Chicago on April 6, 1976. Five weeks later, on the afternoon of May 14, a 15-year-old named Randall Reffett disappeared while walking home from Senn High School; the youth was gagged with a cloth, causing him to die of asphyxiation.
Hours after Reffett had been abducted, a 14-year-old named Samuel Stapleton vanished as he walked to his home from his sister’s apartment. Both youths were buried in the same grave in Gacy’s crawl space.
On June 3, 1976, Gacy killed a 17-year-old Lakeview youth named Michael Bonnin. He disappeared while traveling from Chicago to Waukegan, and was strangled with a ligature and buried in the crawl space. Ten days later, a 16-year-old Uptown youth named William Carroll was murdered and buried directly beneath Gacy’s kitchen. Carroll may have been the first of four males known to have been murdered between June 13 and August 6, 1976, and who were buried in a common grave located beneath Gacy’s kitchen and laundry room. The three identified youths killed between June 13 and August 6 were aged between 16 and 17 years old, whereas the only unidentified male known to have been murdered between these dates is a man with medium-dark brown hair estimated to have been aged between 23 and 30 years old and between 5 ft 1 in and 5 ft 6 in tall. This man had two missing upper front teeth at the time of his disappearance, leading investigators to believe this particular victim most likely wore a denture. He was buried directly beneath the body of a 16-year-old Minnesota youth named James Haakenson, who is last known to have phoned his family on August 5, and whose body was itself buried directly beneath a 17-year-old Bensenville youth named Rick Johnston, who was last seen alive on August 6.
In March 1978, Gacy lured a 26-year-old named Jeffrey Rignall into his car. Upon entering the car, the young man was chloroformed and then Gacy drove him to his house on West Summerdale in Norwood Park, where he raped him and tortured him with various instruments including lit candles and whips and repeatedly chloroformed into unconsciousness. Rignall was then driven to Lincoln Park, where he was dumped, unconscious but alive. Eventually, he managed to stagger to his girlfriend’s apartment. Rignall was later informed the chloroform had permanently damaged his liver. Rignall was able to recall, through the chloroform haze of the night, Gacy’s distinctive black Oldsmobile, the Kennedy Expressway, and particular side streets. He staked out the exit on the expressway where he knew he had been driven until – in April – he saw Gacy’s distinctive black Oldsmobile which Rignall and his friends followed to the West Summerdale address and reported it to the police so they could get a warrant.
Armed with the signed search warrant, police and evidence technicians quickly drove to Gacy’s home. Upon their arrival, officers found Gacy had unplugged his sump pump and the crawl space was flooded with water; to clear the water they simply replaced the plug and waited for the water to drain. After it had done so, an evidence technician named Daniel Genty entered the 28-by-38-foot crawl space and crawled to the southwest area and began digging. Within minutes, he had uncovered putrefied flesh and a human arm bone. Genty immediately shouted to the investigators they could charge Gacy with murder. Genty added the remark: “I think this place is full of kids.” Gacy was arrested on July 15.
After being informed the police had found human remains in his crawl space and he would now face murder charges, Gacy told officers he wanted to “clear the air,” adding he knew his arrest was inevitable.
In the early hours of December 22, 1978, Gacy confessed to police that since 1972, he had committed approximately 25 to 30 murders, all of whom he falsely claimed were of teenage male runaways or male prostitutes, whom he would typically abduct from Chicago’s Greyhound Bus station, from Bughouse Square, or simply off the streets. The victims would often be grabbed by force or conned into believing Gacy – often carrying a sheriff’s badge and placing spotlights on his black Oldsmobile – was a policeman. Others would be lured to his house with either the promise of a job with his construction company or with an offer of money for sex.<3>
CITED REFERENCES
3. Wikipedia contributors, “John Wayne Gacy,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy (accessed April 4, 2019).
