Andrew Rule: Karen Conti, lawyer for serial killer John Wayne Gacy talks about his evil crimes

Thirty years ago this month, savage serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed. Now, the lawyer who represented him through his final appeals has told why — and how it felt to look evil in the eye.

Serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the lawyer who denfended him on death row, Karen Conti.

This week in his renowned podcast Life and Crimes, Andrew Rule speaks with American lawyer and author Karen Conti, who has written a book about her unique experience as a female lawyer defending one of the most notorious US serial killers of all time. John Wayne Gacy murdered at least 33 young men and boys and was executed for his crimes 30 years ago, on May 10, 1994.

Andrew Rule: Karen, tell us the story of how you came to represent John Wayne Gacy.

Karen Conti: Well, John Gacy killed 33 young men and boys and buried most of them under his home in suburban Chicago, back in the 1970s. He was arrested and convicted and sentenced to death in 1979.

Flash ahead 14 years, I graduated college and then law school, and I’m really a raw rookie of a lawyer. And I heard on the radio that Gacy had an execution date coming up. And I thought to myself, what a strange thing. I haven’t heard of this guy in a long time. And wouldn’t it be funny if I represented him.

The next day, I got a call that Gacy wanted me and my law partner to come down to the prison and visit him with the idea that he wanted to hire us. So it was a strange set of circumstances.

And because I was very curious about meeting somebody who was so evil, and so horrific, I couldn’t say no, I had to go. I wanted to see what death row was like. I wanted to see what it was like to look evil in the eye. And then at that point, I couldn’t say no, I couldn’t say no to handling his case.

John Wayne Gacy.

The death penalty is something I’ve always been against my whole life, even as a child. And even though I never imagined that I would be in a situation where I would represent somebody on death row, I thought, wow, this is a chance for me to stand up against capital punishment, something that I think should be abolished in our country.

And so it’s sort of like when you are a runner, you want to run a marathon. Or if you’re a mountain climber, you want to climb Mount Everest. I wanted the ultimate challenge, which was really to represent somebody who was horribly guilty, clearly guilty, unremorseful, but save him from the death penalty, not get him out of jail, but save him from the death penalty. That was my goal.

AR: How do you compare Gacy to some of the other big famous serial killers like Ted Bundy

KC: Gacy was very typical of a serial killer in a lot of ways. Gacy had a double life. He lived a very upstanding life. He went to church every Sunday he was a successful construction person, he had his own company. He was connected politically with all of the politicians in the Democratic Party in our county here in the Chicago area. He was pictured with Rosalynn Carter, the First Lady, in a parade. He was living this life of generosity and goodwill. And at night, he was going and trolling for young men and boys and he would take them home and he would sexually torture them and kill them. And he would get up the next day and be that upstanding citizen. At a certain point in time his wife even lived in the house with him while he was committing these crimes, sleeping in the same bed with him. Everybody was shocked that this person who lived this life of accomplishment and respectability would do these horrific things at night.

John Wayne Gacy would dress as a clown at charitable events and parties. Picture: Supplied

AR: What about his background? I’ve been writing about crime and criminals and bad people for decades. And it seems to me that many of these outrageously evil killers have a back story that they themselves mostly, were abused in some way as children. What is the story with John Wayne Gacy? Did he come out of nowhere? Or was he the product of the way he was treated as a child?

KC: That’s a very good question. Really, it wasn’t so out of the ordinary that would result in what he became. But I will tell you there are some characteristics. His father was an alcoholic, and he was abusive, and he used to beat Gacy. His mother was passive, a very nice person, but passive. His father would call him gay and those types of things.

Even though he was named after John Wayne, the very masculine actor, Gacy was not masculine at all. He was not athletic. He didn’t like hunting and fishing, he preferred spending time cooking with his mother and gardening and doing those types of things.

So his father would make relentless fun of him. He also was sexually abused when he was young, probably about eight years old by a person who was associated with his father.

I think the psychiatrists will tell you that Gacy did not like the part of him that was homosexual. He was taught that was wrong. He was in the Catholic church, his father looked down on him for maybe being one. And he hated that part of himself.

So what he was doing was finding young men and boys who were small in stature like him, and torturing them and killing them, because he was killing off that part of himself that he hated so much.

AR: I see. So that does explain it. He did not just come fully formed out of the blue sky, he came from somewhere else.

KC: And the other thing that’s interesting, and I talked about this in my book, is that a lot of people on death row, like a vast majority of them, have all had serious head injuries when they were young; Night Stalker, Son of Sam, Henry Lee Lucas, almost all of them had a significant head injury.

Gacy had two significant head injuries that landed him in the hospital. So they think that sometimes when a certain part of the brain is injured, it might damage the impulse control, or that part of the brain that has remorse. Again, his brain was examined after his death, and they found nothing organically wrong with him. But again, that could be a factor.

Karen Conti’s book ‘Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy’.

AR: One of the greatest True Crime books in our lifetime, is undoubtedly In Cold Blood written in the early 60s by Truman Capote, about two drifters who kill a whole family in rural Kansas. But the lead killer in that case, had a bad injury, I think from a road crash. And I think his offsider Perry, who is a slightly more sympathetic character, he’d had a bad motorbike crash. Both these guys that end up, you know, just turning up and killing a family were survivors of serious crashes. And in the case of one of them, it had certainly changed his personality. So that chimes with the experience of a lot of law enforcement people that see this come up, over and over?

KC: I think those defendants were a little different than Gacy, in that that was kind of a crime of opportunity. Gacy was more of a predator. He planned it out. He knew he had his kit. He had his torture devices. He knew his type. He knew exactly what he was doing.

And again, the combination of things that led him to do that, one of the things that the psychiatrists will also tell you is that somehow people who do this kind of rape-torture-kill are people who have fantasies.

There’s a fantasy that goes on that associates killing and injuring someone with sexual gratification, which for most people, obviously is the opposite of what they connect. So Gacy had those, must have had those fantasies. He could have had those fantasies about killing his father. And certainly, those fantasies became stronger and stronger, until he became what he was.

AR: Did you know his wife? Did you meet her?

KC: I’ve never met his wife, there were two wives actually, both of whom had nothing really bad to say about Gacy, said he was a sensitive lover, he was a decent father, a good provider, and that he just lost interest in them and lost interest in sex. So that was a very unusual thing to see that he maintained those relationships with his wives. And even after their divorce, they maintained a relationship.

The boys and young men whose bodies have been definitely identified as the victims of John Wayne Gacy. Picture: Supplied

AR: Can you remind us how the police actually worked out that it was Gacy doing these killings?

KC: What was interesting, he had served time in another state for sodomy ... then he came to Chicago and at the time they didn’t really connect the jurisdictions like they do now. So he started doing his crimes, and these kids would go to his house and be missing. And the police would be called and nothing was done.

There was one victim who escaped, and they never brought charges. So there were a number of opportunities for the police to catch him. But they didn’t. And I don’t know if there was some cover up. I don’t know if it was because Gacy was so prominent in the community that nobody could possibly believe he would do anything like this.

But the last victim was a young man, a very handsome young man named Robert Piest. He told his mother that there was a man who wanted to hire him for his construction company. His mother drove him to a store, and it was her birthday. And she dropped her son off and waited in the car. And her boy went into the store and never came back.

Within an hour, Gacy had taken him, abducted him, brought him to his house, tortured him, raped him and killed. So the mother knew it must have been this guy. And so all of a sudden, all eyes were on Gacy.

And the police went over there. Sure enough, there was a smell that the police knew was the smell of death. And that was the smell of 27 bodies under his house. And they found school rings and IDs and little souvenirs that serial killers like Gacy like to keep. He then confessed to the police, and he had an amazing recollection of who they were, where he picked them up what he did to them, and exactly where they were buried.

People work at excavating the crawl space under Gacy's home circa late 1978 or early 1979. This photograph was used at Gacy's trial. Picture: Supplied

AR: Now, this is 27 bodies under the house. Can you describe where he hid these bodies?

KC: Underneath (the house) there’s a crawlspace and he went into the crawlspace and he buried them under the house in trenches and he put lye on them to quicken the process of decomposition. He ran out of space underneath his house (and) buried a few under his driveway. And then he threw four in the river nearby.

AR: Had that mother not taken her son to that address, he might never have been caught.

KC: He might never have been caught. However, the frequency and the intensity of what he was doing was escalating. This happens with serial killers, where they’re in a frenzy, and it becomes very stressful for them, because they know they’re gonna get caught if they keep it up. But they need more and more to feed that evil side of them. And Gacy was in that mode, he was taking a lot of drugs, drinking a lot of alcohol. And it just took more and more for him to satisfy. So I mean, I think Robert Piest was, you know, was the reason he was caught. But I don’t think he was long for the serial killer world.

AR: When you met him in jail, he struck you as often very funny. And in fact, he was a wise cracker all the way to the day that he was executed. Can you tell us about that?

KC: He was funny. And listen, I talk in my book about how people who are funny can have a very dark side ... And sometimes humor is a way for them to vent some of that darkness. I also think that a sense of humor makes a person attractive. And I think Gacy could disarm you with his sense of humor. And he could, you know, even though he was a sociopath, and he, you know, didn’t have any real true emotions, he could engage you with that sense of humor to the point where he was kind of likable. And so he was always cracking jokes.

AR: In fact, he was funny all the way to (his) lethal injection ...

KC: I had a little part in my book where he says to the guard, ‘Hey, you know, I wish we had the electric chair here’. And the guard said, ‘why?” He goes, ‘Because then you could hold my hand’.

Get more information on Conti’s book Killing Time with John Wayne Gacey or the audio version