John Wayne Gacy the original killer clown
LONG before killer clowns hit our big and small screens, a real killer in face paint stalked the American suburbs. John Wayne Gacy was the friendly clown who visited sick kids in hospitals. But behind the colourful mask lay a true monster.
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LONG before the killer clown horror trend hit our big and small screens, a real killer in face paint stalked the American suburbs.
John Wayne Gacy was the friendly neighbour who dressed as a clown at parties and visited sick kids in hospitals.
A captain of the local Democratic Party, who in 1978 shook the hand of then first lady Rosalynn Carter.
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But buried under the floor of his suburban Chicago home were the bodies of 28 boys and young men.
Another was entombed in his driveway, while four more were dumped in a nearby river.
The killer clown, as he would become known, is one of America’s most prolific serial killers.
Gacy would eventually confess to his horrific crimes, but later try to recant in a bid to avoid execution. He failed.
On May 10, 1994 crowds gathered outside the Stateville Correctional Center chanting “kill him”.
The 52-year-old’s final words were: “Kiss my ass”, before he was put to death.
Prior to his crimes Gacy, a stocky construction company owner, had seemed the perfect citizen.
A civic minded man, who would regularly take on the identity of Pogo the Clown to entertain local children.
To those who knew him Gacy also appeared to be a dedicated father who loved his own children and stepchildren.
But bubbling at the surface was a sick infatuation for teenage boys.
In 1968 he was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to ten years prison, but with good behaviour he was freed in less than two years.
But he didn’t stay good for long — less than four years later his killing spree began.
The year 1972 had just begun and Gacy’s family were away.
Gacy picked up 16-year-old Tim McCoy, who was travelling from Michigan to Omaha, at bus station, promising to show him around Chicago and offering him a place to stay.
He took the teen home and had sex with him before stabbing him to death.
Dave Hachmeister, a police officer who investigated Gacy’s crimes believes Gacy’s first killing was impulsive, but it excited him.
“He really hadn’t planned on killing him,” Hachmeister told a Biography Channel documentary.
“But I think once he did make that move it gave him the ultimate power trip.”
After killing Tim, he buried him under his floor, a fate that would befall more than 20 other young men.
His second victim 17-year-old John Butkovitch was an employee at his construction business.
Gacy got the teenager to come to his house to sort out a dispute about unpaid wages.
He then convinced John to put on a pair of handcuffs pretending it was part of a magic trick, before gagging him with his own underwear while he sexually abused him.
Gacy then looped a rope around the teenager’s neck and put a stick between the knots.
“It cut off the air,” the serial killer explained in a 1992 interview with CBS.
“So if you are going to kill somebody you would just put it around their neck and then twist it three times or four times or whatever ‘till the person stops moving.”
It was around this time that Gacy began to become distant from his wife and no longer intimate with her.
With his marriage now over Gacy was free to pick up boys when he chose.
There were many more victims, with Gacy donning the clown suit to kill some of them.
One of the few to survive his torturous strangulation routine was an employee David Cram who Gacy had employed to dig a trench so he could bury bodies.
Gacy told the boy the trench was for pipes.
While at Gacy’s home he found him dressed in a clown suit.
Gacy convinced the boy to put on handcuffs and then told the boy he was going to rape him.
David told Gacy he would kick his arse.
“It was just like a light switch went off and in the middle of the conversation, middle of the sentence, middle of a thought, he just starts growling like a mad dog,” David said in a television interview.
Somehow David managed to grab the key and escape.
He was one of the few to survive the killer clown’s reign of terror.
Gacy’s killing spree was finally brought undone when 15-year-old Robert Piest disappeared.
Robert worked at a pharmacy after school and when his mother came to pick him up, he told her he wanted to speak to a man about getting a job doing some construction work.
He was never seen again.
Unlike the families of Gacy’s other victims, Robert’s parents were able to convince police to investigate.
When they checked his record they noticed he had a sodomy conviction.
A search warrant was soon obtained for Gacy’s house.
Although police did not find anything linking Gacy to Robert’s disappearance they found items linking him to other missing boys.
They also noticed an awful stench in his house.
A few days before Christmas 1978 Gacy was arrested and investigators began digging up the floorboards of his home.
They soon found bones.
The search underneath Gacy’s home continued for many weeks, with the media and neighbours watching on as investigators pulled out more human remains.
Late each day a senior investigator addressed the media, delivering the grim news of how many bodies they had found.
By the time they finished they had uncovered more than 20 bodies.
Gacy confessed his crimes to police, but insisted he was insane.
A jury rejected his defence, finding him guilty of 33 counts of murder and sentenced him to death.
Just why Gacy committed his horrendous crimes remains a mystery.
As child Gacy had battled for the acceptance of his drunkard father who saw him as a “wimp” and told him he wouldn’t amount to anything.
At school he wasn’t accepted by other kids, one reason being a congenital heart condition that prevented him from playing with them.
But by the age of 30, when his killings began, Gacy had found success with his construction company and with high-ranking positions in local civic and political organisations.
Gacy spent his time in prison painting.
He painted pictures of clowns, cartoon characters resembling Disney’s Seven Dwarfs and of Jesus among other subjects.
After his death, relatives of his victims symbolically burnt some of his paintings.
In 1992, Gacy was on death row and running out of appeal options when he did a television interview.
He recanted much of his confession, admitting only to paying an accessory role in a few of the murders.
“I don’t believe in hitting children,” he told the interviewer.
“At the time of my arrest there was four other suspects, all employees of (his company) all with keys to the house.”
“When they paint the image that I was this monster, who picked up these altar boys along the street and swatted them like flies — this is ludicrous.”
Gacy said he was not afraid to meet his maker.
“If you believe you’ve lived your life in the right way then you do not have nothing to fear, in my case.
“No I’m fairly comfortable with him (facing God). I’ve been at the Catholic services, I’m the servant for the priest, for the last 10 years. I have no qualms about doing that. I’m a peace with myself.”
He rejected comparisons between himself and killers like Charlie Manson.
“I hate that when they put me in the some club with them,” he said.
Most disturbingly Gacy showed utter disdain for the families of his victims.
“That one mother that gets on television all the time who thinks that I should be, given 33 injections ... I think she ought to take 33 valiums and go lay down,” he said.
Crowds gathered outside the prison cheering and chanting “kill him, kill him” as authorities prepared to execute Gacy on May 10, 1994.
One man wore a clown wig, another wore a T-shirt that read: “No tears for the clown”.
After saying a final goodbye to his sister Gacy ranted that “this was the state murdering him and it wouldn’t serve justice”.
Gacy closed his eyes at 12.40am and took a deep breath before the doctor injected the needle.
Eighteen minutes later he was dead.
Within hours his body was taken to a nearby hospital where a doctor extracted his brain.
But after examination, forensic psychiatrist Helen Morrison found nothing that could shed light on his horrific crimes.
“I believed and continue to believe that what we don’t know about John Gacy is more vast than we will ever imagine in my lifetime or in yours,” she told a Biography Channel documentary.