Monday Maniacs - John Wayne Gacy

March 17, 2008

This week’s Monday Maniacs features John Wayne Gacy (aka Pogo the Clown and The Killer Clown).  Between 1972 and 1978 Gacy raped and murdered 33 young men and boys, of those nine victims remain unidentified.  Stay tuned after the article, page 2 contains the A&E Biography on John Wayne Gacy.

John Wayne Gacy, Jr. was born on March 7, 1942 to father John Wayne Gacy and mother Marion Elaine Robinson.  He was raised in a middle-class Chicago suburb where he would routinely take jobs after school.  His father was abusive towards him and an alcoholic.  During childhood, Gacy’s father would hit him and call him a "sissy."

During Gacy’s senior year of high school he attended four separate schools and eventually dropped out.  He would go to spend some time in Las Vegas working odd-jobs, but was never happy there.  Gacy worked for three months to save enough money for a ticket home where his mother and sisters gladly took him back.

In 1964, Gacy was married to Marlynn Myers.  He would go on to work as a manager at a KFC owned by his father-in-law.  He worked hard to learn everything he could from his father-in-law in the hopes that he could one day take over the chain of restaurants that his wife’s family owned.

His dream of running the chain of restaurants would come to an end in 1968 when Gacy was convicted of child molestation.  Gacy had committed sodomy with a boy named Mark Miller.  The judge in his case would sentence him to 10 years, the maximum for this crime, in prison.  However, Gacy would be out in 18 months due to his exemplary behavior.

When Gacy got out of prison, his wife’s family had turned their backs on him and his relationship with his wife started to go down hill.  His wife began finding magazines with naked boys and men in their house.  By March of 1976 she had had enough and filed for divorce.  Gacy would begin killing a month later.

As boys continued to disappear around Gacy’s neighborhood, people started to get suspicious of Gacy.  When Robert Piest disappeared from outside the pharmacy he worked at while his mother waited for him, the police finally had reason to suspect Gacy.  Piest had told his mother that he would be right back because a contractor had offered him a job.  When police found out who the contractor was they went to talk with Gacy.

After the meeting between police and Gacy, something just didn’t sit right with the detectives.  After discovering that he had previously done time for child molestation and sodomy, the police obtained a search warrant and returned to his house.

When police entered Gacy’s house on December 13, 1978 they found some interesting items.  Some of the items included: marijuana and rolling papers, stained sections of rug, handcuffs, police badges, a dildo, and a hypodermic needle among other things.  The real shock for police, however, would come when they started to investigate his crawl space.

On their first search, they didn’t notice anything out of place besides a rancid odor (chocked up to being sewage) and the fact that the floor was covered in lime.  Gacy was booked on possession of marijuana charges, while police tested the evidence.  Before the second search, police had done some tests on the items found in his house.  They found that one of the rings in Gacy’s possession had belonged to a missing boy.

Gacy would eventually admit that he had killed someone, in self-defense.  With a second search warrant in hand, police would head back to Gacy’s house to further inspect the crawl space.  They would soon discover a mound of dirt, once dug up they discovered the remains of a body.

Gacy eventually confessed that he had killed at least 30 people and buried them under his house to hide the evidence.  The police continued to dig under Gacy’s house.  They had brought in a professional house mover to determine if they could life the house and move it so they would have more space to work.  That was quickly ruled out as the pneumatic jacks needed would most likely disturb evidence and the beams wouldn’t fit between the houses.

In total, the police removed 27 bodies from the crawl space.  Police were still digging up remains well into February.  As search members dug, the holes would fill in with mud and before long the entire crawl space was nothing but a mud pit.  Police conducted the dig much like an archeological dig, roping it off into quadrants and recreating them in the back yard where they could sift through the dirt for any evidence and bones.

Gacy’s trial would begin on February 6, 1980.  The trial would last almost the entire month of February.  Gacy’s defense attorneys had tried to argue that he had a mental disease and should be a ward of the state.  However, when the jury finally went to deliberate on March 13, 1980, it would only take then two hours to return a verdict.

John Wayne Gacy Jr. was executed on May 10, 1994 by lethal injection.  However, his death would not be the end.  Shortly after being declared dead, his brain was removed at autopsy for private study and is currently in the possession of Dr. Helen Morrison.

Gacy’s house would eventually be torn down and the land allowed to grow over in an effort to keep from reminding people of its horrific past.

The Victims

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