“John Wayne Gacy is obsessively fond of defending his innocence, which is imaginary.” So begins Alec Wilkinson’s 1994 story, “Conversations with a Killer,” about how Gacy became America’s most notorious killer. NewYorkerArchive
A snapshot taken of Gacy on death row in Illinois. He says, “I didn’t know how to think like a con; it wasn’t part of my nature.”
For twelve years following his conviction, while his lawyers filed appeals, Gacy said no to anyone who asked for an interview. The requests were constant. Oprah Winfrey sent a handwritten letter. So did Truman Capote. Two years ago, Gacy spoke with a television reporter from Chicago, and then fell silent again. His reticence has mainly to do with his feeling that the press has portrayed him as a monster, and that the bulk of what has been written and broadcast about him is “theory and fantasy.
He seems to have no capacity for intimacy or friendship. Another person makes no impression on him at all. One day, he and I looked through a scrapbook of photographs. There were pictures of his father and mother, his two sisters, his two wives, his son, his daughter, and people who visit and write letters, but there was not a single image of anyone he described as a friend. He says that he has no friends in the prison, either.
The following account of Gacy’s background is based on conversations with Gacy and with his lawyers, and on his confessions, the records of his psychiatric interviews, newspaper stories, Gacy’s writings, his correspondence, the record of his trial, and the books “Buried Dreams,” by Tim Cahill, and “Killer Clown,” by Terry Sullivan. A grand jury in Black Hawk County heard testimony from two boys.
Gacy pleaded guilty to sodomy. He expected to receive probation and to be allowed to move back to Illinois. Instead, he got ten years at the Iowa State Reformatory for Men at Anamosa. The judge said that the severity of the sentence was intended to make certain that “for some period of time you cannot seek out teenage boys to solicit them for immoral behavior of any kind.” While Gacy was in the reformatory, his wife divorced him. His father died.
Gacy ran away from home when he was twenty. He wrote the following account, for his own purposes, a few years ago. It is part of a manuscript composed of a series of entries, usually a page or two long, but sometimes longer, covering nearly every year of his life. He gave it to me one day as I was leaving the prison. I have made a very few changes for the sake of clarity.
“Next morning I stopped in a gas station and after cleaning up in the rest room got a city map, as I wanted to know where the ambulance company was. I had decided I would just go and be honest, telling the owner I would work it off, had no money. I went into the office and told him my problem and that I would wash his ambulances, or anything else he wanted to pay the bill. He said that he liked my honesty and wondered if I would want a steady job. I told him I would, but had no place to stay.
Gacy told me that he grew homesick and went back to Illinois in the beginning of July. Other accounts say that one night in the mortuary he climbed into a coffin containing the body of a boy whose manner of death had left him with an erection, and arranged the body on top of him. He grew frightened and jumped out and, the next day, called his mother and asked if she thought that his father would allow him to come home.
While cooking at the restaurant, Gacy double-jobbed at painting and renovation, mostly for people who lived in his mother’s building and occasionally for people he met at the restaurant’s bar. He and his mother came up with a name for his sideline: P.D.M. Contractors, for Painting, Decorating, and Maintenance. He needed a place to store the lumber and paint cans and ladders he used, and his mother’s apartment was too small.
Throughout the summer of 1972, Carol noticed a smell that seemed to come from something decaying in the crawl space. In a back room was a swarm of flies, which she thought might be feeding on whatever was down there—maybe dead mice. Gacy said the odor was the result of a runoff from a broken sewer pipe, and he spread lime in the crawl space to try and control it, but the odor got worse.
In 1977, Gacy was briefly engaged. His fiancée moved into his house in April. They argued often, though, and after a few months he told her he was leaving for a week on business and wanted her gone by the time he got back. Of the thirty-three boys Gacy is convicted of killing, only twenty-four were identified. The names of some became known from dental records brought to the police by parents who had heard about the excavation and thought that their son who was missing might have crossed paths with Gacy. The nine boys who were unidentified were buried in various cemeteries under headstones with the inscription “We Are Remembered.
“While I never did understand what we were doing that was so wrong at the time, it left a profound feeling on me in my thinking about taking off clothes in front of others, even my sisters, thinking that I was going to get hit for doing it. As at the time I was told that what we were doing was dirty and wrong. I think now all it was was curiosity, me not knowing, and her for her age, even being retarded.”“In the late spring of 1950, we lived at 3536 North Opal, in Chicago, Ill.
“I’m the first man to arrive on death row at Menard. I opened the place up. There was nobody else here. Now there’s sixty-one of us, twelve on my cell block—three black and nine white. At the time, there was nineteen men on death row in Stateville, the other prison in Illinois where they have executions. The State decided that the first guy who got the death penalty after the beginning of the year in 1980 they were going to send here, and that was me.
“Prison life has been the doldrums, same goddam thing day after day. You can have a cell six and a half by seven and a half, which has a window, so you can see the barges going up and down the river, but you only get let out an hour a day, or you can have a cell eight by nine, with no window, and you are let out only three days a week but three hours at a time. I have one of the larger cells, so no window. I don’t know if it’s night or day. I can’t tell you if it’s raining.
“Down in the Pit, the main part of the prison, you’re on tiers, and, even though you’re assigned a cell and don’t come out, it’s gang territory. They’ll take everything you got, and when you’re out of everything they’ll say you got to pay them rent. They know you have money, because they know what you have on account at the commissary.
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