John Wayne Gacy, a notorious American serial killer, was born in 1942 in a working-class neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. His father, John Stanley Gacy, was an abusive and often violent individual, which led to John Wayne's identity crisis and self-doubt about his masculinity.
As a child, Gacy suffered a blow to the head from a swing at the age of 11, resulting in frequent blackouts and a clot in his brain that was later removed with medication. This experience, combined with his father's abuse, may have contributed to his later psychological issues.
Gacy graduated from business college and began working as a shoe salesman. He married a co-worker and started working at a KFC in Waterloo, Iowa, where he became involved with the local Jaycees. However, his life took a dark turn when he was arrested for sexual misconduct with a young male employee in May 1968.
Gacy's troubles continued, and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sodomy. He served only 18 months before being paroled in 1970. After his release, he moved to Chicago and began working as a building constructor, where he became popular with his neighbors and colleagues.
Despite his new life, Gacy's dark past continued to haunt him. He was arrested again in 1971 for sexual misconduct, but the charges were dropped due to the witness failing to appear in court. He finished his parole in 1971 and went on to commit his first murder in 1972.
Gacy's modus operandi was to target young male runaways, ex-jailbirds, or male prostitutes, often posing as a police officer or using a fake badge. He would befriend his victims, show them tricks with "magic handcuffs," and then torture, sodomize, and garrote them. He would then bury their bodies in a crawl space beneath his house, which eventually became overcrowded, leading him to dump bodies in nearby rivers.
As his killings escalated, Gacy's life became increasingly isolated, and he eventually divorced his second wife in 1976. He continued to kill, committing a double homicide in 1976 and even allowing one of his victims to leave after he had "finished" with him.
Gacy's final victim was 15-year-old Robert Piest, who told someone he was going to see his "contractor" about a job and was never seen again. The police investigation into Piest's disappearance led them to Gacy's house, where they discovered the smell of decomposing corpses and obtained a search warrant. A total of 29 bodies were extracted from the crawl space, and five more from the nearby river, with nine remains unidentified.
Gacy was judged sane by court psychiatrists and was charged with 21 counts of life imprisonment for murders committed before June 21, 1977, when Illinois reinstated the death sentence. He received the death sentence for the 12 murders committed after that date.
