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Show Notes

Serial killers that make the headlines are always termed ‘the worst serial killer ever,’ and this killer may reach high up on this scale.
This chapter we will discuss the insanity and over inflated ego of Pogo The Clown, aka John Wayne Gacy.
Gacy was born on the 17th March 1942 in the Windy City, Chicago in the state of Illinois. His parent were immigrants from Denmark and Poland.
His father as we see as a trend in these guys was a tyrant, a brutal disciplinarian, he would regularly beat the children with a strap, the violence hasn’t exclusive to the children, the children’s mother was the butt of their fathers violent outbursts. Gacy’s father was a heavy drinker and was vile towards all of his children. Which has me thinking about my childhood? My father was a cruel disciplinarian, always singling me out. He was ostensibly unreasonable towards me. My childhood was thick with emotional and physical abuse that has required to date seven years of continuous therapy, which has me worried a little.

Gacy was desperate to gain the love and respect of his father, who rejected him at every turn, something his father never gave him and something that Gacy talked about after his death. His father struggled with Gacy’s effeminate demeanor. Men should be men back then. Again, something as a child I aspired to, and even in adult life, I sought my father’s approval at every turn, I never got it.

The children had to be tough, weakness in the eyes of their father was unforgivable, any perceived weakness would be stamped out. So much so that Gacy refused to cry when his father beat him. Their relationship was turbulent at best. They diagnosed Gacy with a congenital heart disease, which his father viewed as another flaw. During these times, conditions such as these were not fully understood, so Gacy couldn’t mix with the other children from a school, alienating him from the other children. I wouldn’t have thought being excluded from sports at school would have been an issue, however a colleague of mine who is in his 60s has never played soccer or gymnastics. They excluded him for school to which affected him in adult life by his own admission. Apart from these things though, Gacy’s childhood was considered normal.

Gacy at this point was developing sexually as a homosexual, it was during this time that his sexuality was tainted because of the relationship that he had with his father. As with all children, especially boys unable to develop sexually normally often become confused about what the orientation is.

Gacy dropped out of high school and never graduated. He escaped the Windy City for the bright lights of Las Vegas and worked in a mortuary as a janitor. His time in Vegas was short- lived, returning to Chicago a few months later. Gacy was a good talker, gift of the gab. He enrolled in a business school because of his natural salesmanship skills that he developed was a queue for a future in sales. It was here that Gacy met and married Marilyn Myers from a wealthy family and moved to Iowa who owned a String of KFC restaurants; they moved into the town of Waterloo, Gacy’s became popular in the community and became well known for his pleasant effervescent attitude. He also became a paid-up member of the Democratic Party, with aspirations to become the governor of Illinois and even the president.

All was not fine a dandy in the Gacy household because in 1968, Gacy was first arrested for sexual coercion of another male employee of the business

he worked which came as a huge surprise to not only the family but also I the community in which he lived.
Donald Vooheers, the son of one of Gacy’s political opponents, was invited around to the Gacy home where he was offered pornography and beer. When drunk he was forced to perform oral sex on Gacy, threatening him with the mob and that he would killed if he said anything. Dropping Voheers off at home, he gave the lad a $50 bill to insure the silence. Affected by what had happened, Voheers after some years came clean with his family, the police arrested Gacy and a string of other complaints surfaced too, which is often the case when the stone is unturned, it unearths a multitude of issues.

Gacy convinced another one of his employees, Russell Schroeder, to beat up Voorheer’s for $300 but Voorheers escaped, cementing the decision to make a complaint about Gacy.

Convinced he would pass a polygraph test, which he failed miserably. The boys that made the claims about Gacy said that Gacy was performing a ‘homosexual experiment’ for the government and the payment for this was $50, the ability to make things sound convincing to these impressionable boys was strong.

His sexual preferences didn’t go unnoticed in the community. Colleagues and friends noticing that Gacy appeared to be homosexual and that his behaviour was erratic and odd.

He pled guilty to the charges of sodomy and rape and was sentenced to ten years in the state system, his wife filing for divorce the same day. This incensed Gacy, boiling over into a rage, he cut all ties to his wife and children; they were effectively dead to him. A classic narcissistic trait, ‘how dare she do this’ he would have thought, and punished her and the children by not having anything to do with them. The judge also recommended a full psychiatric evaluation report to be conducted, part of the report said:

“the most striking aspect of the test result is the patient’s total denial of responsibility for everything that hands happened to him. He can produce an ‘alibi’ for everything. He presents himself as the victim of circumstances and blames other people who are out to get him, the patient attempts to assure a sympathetic response by depicting himself as being at the mercy of a hostile environment.”

Gacy was a model prisoner, gaining respect from inmates and prison officers alike. making steps to improve prison facilities and conditions, he even oversaw the installation of a miniature golf course in the prison exercise yard.

Paroled after only serving an 18 month stretch, he bounced out of Iowa and moved back to Chicago working construction. He kept his criminal past in Iowa, no one had the foresight to check his past. Unhappy with working for someone, he started out on his own. He met another woman called Carole Hoff who had two daughters, divorced too, they were introduced through mutual friends. They settled in Des Plaines and became known as a sharp and astute business owner. He would host street parties for friends and neighbours, dressing up as a clown. He would also go to hospitals and entertain the children by doing magic tricks dressed as the clown. He called himself Pogo and was part of a clown troupe that attended festivals, street parties and charity events.

Everything seemed to running smoothly until in 1971, Gacy again was arrested, charged with the attempted rape of a man, luckily for Gacy, unluckily for the rest of the world, the victim failed to show in court; they dropped the charges.

His second wife Carole divorced him. She stated that Gacy was unpredictable, his moods and anger would frighten her. He also had a weird fascination with homosexual literature.

In December 1978, a young stock controller of a local pharmacy by the name of Robert Piest had gone missing. The last known whereabouts of the boy, Gacy, was seen. The police surprised with Gacy’s position in the local community when doing their checks discovered that they had sentenced him to ten-year prison term for rape and sodomy. Gacy’s home was searched.

It was during this search of the property that the police noticed an unpleasant, rancid smell coming from the crawl space in the home. Gacy played it off as a backed up sewage pipe and they accepted this.

Some items that were seized for testing at Gacy’s home were the ring that had belonged to another boy that had gone missing the year before. They issued another search warrant. It was at this time that Gacy confessed to the killing of 33 boys and men over the last seven years with a detailed map of where 28 of the victims lay.

The known murders started in 1975, John Butkovich being the first. Disappeared after an argument over money the Gacy owned through wages. Although Butkovich parent’s pleaded with the authorities to investigate Gacy, the disappearance went unsolved.

Another employee by the name of Gary Godzic absconded and again the parent’s asked the police to focus their attention on Gacy, they didn’t. A friend of Godzic, John Szyc also disappeared. One of Gacy’s employees was arrested for stealing petrol in a car that was owned by Szyc. Gacy convinced the police that Szyc had sold him the car before jumping town.

It was around this time Gacy was running out of space and was tired of digging holes for his victims, hiring one of his employees David Cram to come around and make more space. Cram needed a place to live, rented one of the rooms out at Gacy’s home, and worked to pay the rent.
One day Cram arrived a Gacy’s finding dressed as a clown and wanting to magic tricks on him. He spoke in a high pitched nasally voice that disturbed Cram. He convinced him to put on some handcuffs and then tried to molest him. Cram escaped and fled. It was years before cram came forward and talked about his brush with one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. Piest disappeared after saying he was going to speak to a contractor about some work, Gacy’s was the last known person who he had been in touch with. When the police called on Gacy, he denied ever having spoken to Piest, fortunately; they did a background check on Gacy and uncovered his rape and sodomy conviction.

It was on the execution of the second warrant did the police a start finding the remains. It was at this point that Gacy’s confessed to a list of murders that corresponded to reported missing persons. Gacy said that he would prowl for victims, particularly looking for teenage runaways or male prostitutes. Strangulating his victims with his bare hands or rope while sexually assaulting them.

The blue print of Gacy was to drive around in his car dressed as Pogo. He would at gun-point force his victims into the car, take them to his house. There he would strangle or use a plastic bag while raping the victim, climaxing after the victim had expired.

Latterly he would talk people to back to the house, ply them with drink and then show them magic trick which would involve a set of handcuffs.
Gacy would have them lie down and force the victim to fallate him. Sometimes dragging the victim to the bathroom and drowning the victim, reviving them and repeating the torture “this is the last trick” he would say as he strangled them with a rope tourniquet, making the victim’s agonising death take up to two hours. All victims were murdered between 3AM and 6AM, keeping the bodies under his bed for up to 24 hours, raping the dead bodies.

The 6th February saw the start of Gacy’s trial where he pleaded not guilty through reasons of insanity. During the trial, Gacy joked that he had a cemetery without holding a licence and that the deaths were all accidental through erotic asphyxiation. The forensics disputed this. The trial ended on the 13th March with a guilty verdict and that psychiatric diagnosis that denied the insanity plea. They sentenced him to death.
On May 10th, 1994, they executed Gacy through lethal injection. His brain preserved and inspected to see if there was any abnormalities in the brain’s anatomy, there was none.
Eight of Gacy’s victims were unidentifiable and not known to the killer. They positively identified a ninth victim as Tim McCoy in 2007. McCoy is thought to be Gacy’s first victim..
It is widely considered by psychiatrists that Gacy had been killing before they discovered the known victims. This is impossible to substantiate as the trail died with Gacy being executed.
While on death row, Gacy took up art, many being sold at auction, paintings of clowns in different guises. He had books written about him and a film in 1994 made about him.
It’s difficult to confirm if Gacy was a full-blown narcissist. The behaviour of his father played a big part in Gacy’s psychopathy. Rejecting him at every turn, emotionally and violent towards his son. He particularly showed hatred towards Gacy because Gacy was effeminate in his personality. His father trying to beat the ‘gayness’ out of his son, which never ends well. Gacy did however display narcissistic tendencies, and this doesn’t mean that he was a narcissist. His early childhood would have been modelled on his father’s behaviour and along with the challenges at school with his peers would have cemented this kind of behaviour. I also don’t think Gacy was a psychopath in the clinical definition. I think he was a homosexual living in a heterosexual world. He would desire men, and while having sex would want to kill them because they themselves were gay and the shame and the guilt he felt for wanting to have sex with me. I think he was clever about things and it’s the victim selection. No one gives a shit about the runaways or the homeless. When these guys go missing, there’s no one in their corner to champion them, to worry about them. The picking of the victims was the simple part for Gacy. A master manipulator and a need to exert dominance over his victims.

It convinced Gacy that his father died of shame after the second arrest. He also said that he was innocent, claiming that the bodies buried under the crawl space were put there intentionally to hurt his political career.

When asked when he was born on the day that he was arrested, “in chaos,” was Gacy’s reply.

It has been widely postulated that Gacy didn’t work alone and that he had an accomplice and there is significant evidence to corroborate this, no one has since been charged with the murders.

If it wasn’t for all the shame he endured in his life, all of his victims would have led long lives. The behaviour of parents is key to every child’s life. The one thing I am grateful for while suffering the abuse of my father, is that I vowed to never be like him, and to be a different dad. As a testimony to this, my children, no grown up and living their own lives, are rounded and mentally healthy individuals of which they do not have to seek my approval in anything they do. They have it unconditionally and my love and affection. Being proud of my children is something that I say to them often and not because of lip service, I say it because I mean it. He may have felt the same, but never said it and that’s the critical difference, because it’s these small things in a child’s life that are important. So if you’re reading this and your a parent, go do it now.