Moran has also traced some of Gacy’s travels across the country, looking for missing men and boys along the way. I thought this book was for me. I wanted to get some insight into what would cause a man to kill 33 teenagers. Instead I had to listen to the authors long winded essay for an English 101 course (make that English 98 course). Moran said identifying the remaining victims is difficult because of the likelihood that they were people with weak family bonds, possibly runaways or wards of the state, whose disappearances wouldn’t have raised alarms at a time when a million teenagers a year ran away from home, according to a published report from that time. The police ended up looking kind of foolish,” in the wake of the Gacy case, a University of Louisville criminologist told the Tribune in 1994 after Gacy’s execution. The criminologist, Robert C. Crouse, called Gacy “the No. 1 event” that changed how police departments operate. Gacy’s psychosexual history began between the ages of 6 and 10, when a teenage daughter of one of his mother’s friends reportedly undressed and played with him, according to Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders by Terry Sullivan. Gacy was molested at a young age by a family friend and contractor, and between ages 10 and 12, Gacy and a friend were accused of sexually fondling a young girl, according to Sullivan.

Retired sheriff’s investigator Phil Bettiker, one of the first officers to hear Gacy’s confession, has grim memories of the early days of the case, particularly when he and other sheriff’s officers began excavating bodies from underneath the home. Inside the muddy pit, days seemed to stretch on endlessly as reporters and others gathered outside waiting for the nightly body count. He remembered officers running over to a local McDonald’s to get fry baskets to sift the soil. And he recalled with a smile how a supervisor gave him and other officers the OK to help themselves to a case of Gacy’s beer after digging up his home for more than 12 hours. I really enjoyed the legal sides of the arguments and how it affected Amarante's family being Gacy's lawyer. Both lawyers had independent psychological profiles done claiming opposing viewpoints. It definitely makes you wonder if Gacy was truly evil or desperately unwell. But gone are the lines of gawking bystanders, desperate families of missing young men and carloads of curiosity-seekers who choked the streets in the days before that long-ago Christmas, trying to catch a glimpse of the murder house. Gacy, for a man of the ’70s, was a traveler. He would travel all over the country for business and pleasure, and how did he turn it off in other places?” Moran said, referring to his urges to kill. Personally, I wanted a bit more of the crime(s) in my true crime book rather than the law and the trial, you know?

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Bettiker recalls being given the responsibility of going over an endless number of missing persons reports from agencies across the state. He ONLY does this to "show how wrong an original perception could be" after making sure you know he "wasn't interested in embarrassing this poor little woman, or man, or whatever". This chapter closes with Donita Gannon leaving the courtroom and him writing "That woman had stood there at the outset of her testimony with her hand on a bible and sworn to god that she would tell the truth, when, in fact, she was living a lie".

Gacy had everybody fooled, and people don’t like it — they don’t like that they were friends with an evildoer,” Moran said. In the years since Gacy’s arrest, there have been lingering concerns that Gacy might have been responsible for the deaths of other people whose bodies have yet to be found. And when police uncovered human remains in Gacy’s house in 1978, eight bodies couldn’t be identified. In July 2017, Cook County authorities used DNA evidence to identify one of these unidentified victims as 16-year-old James “Jimmie” Byron Haakenson, who had been reported missing since 1976. In October 2021, DNA testing identified another of Gacy’s victims as 21-year-old Francis Wayne Alexander, who also disappeared in 1976. Movie about John Wayne Gacy We believe that there is more to Gacy's appearance in the show. As mentioned, it seems to be an introduction, not just to the coincidence overlap of their timelines and how that plays into Dahmer's story. Still, it may also allude to a second season of Monsterwith John Wayne Gacy as the subject. His is an equally disturbing story to that of Jeffrey Dahmer, with nearly double the amount of victims. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy poses for his Des Plaines Police Department mug shot in December 1978. Getty Images Netflix released Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes on April 20, 2022. Featuring interviews with people involved with the case and archival audio footage from Gacy’s incarceration, it is the second entry in Netflix's Conversations with a Killer documentary series, the fi rst of which focused on serial killer Ted Bundy. QuotesSo began Sam Amirante's first "real" case. At first he was convinced Gacy was innocent. A 15-year-old boy named Robert Piest had disappeared after never coming home from his job at a pharmacy, and evidence pointed to Gacy being the last person to see him alive. As the police dug up Gacy's record, including a previous conviction for sodomy and sexual assault, they became convinced Gacy had done something to the kid. These victims were primarily born in the 1950s and their parents were born in the 1920s and ’30s,” Moran said. “That generation, the parents of these victims, was not ready to accept homosexuality, and because the media constantly brought up the gay aspect of this case, Sheriff (Dart) and I thought it may be what kept people from coming forward.”

On December 11, 1978, 15-year-old Robert Piest went missing after telling his mother he was going to meet Gacy to discuss a potential construction job. Piest’s family filed a missing person report with the police, which led to a search of Gacy’s house in Norwood Park. Authorities discovered several suspicious items there, including police badges, a pistol, hypodermic needles, pornographic films, and items that they later learned belonged to some of Gacy’s victims. There are also some very disturbing remarks made by the lead attorney to the Reader. For instance, one witness at the trial turns heads as she enters the room and testifies. The attorney states, though, that “Donita” is actually “Don,” a transgender person. Therefore, it was the attorney’s duty to challenge the veracity of Donita’s remarks since Donita was obviously living a lie. It naturally followed that much of her testimony was also a lie. That observation made me very, very uncomfortable.

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He looked at his victims like he was taking out the trash. He had no feelings about them,” Amirante said, sitting in a private office at his Barrington home nearly 40 years after hearing the famous confession. “He could talk about a child who's dying of cancer and cry like a baby about this child he didn't even know or never met and feel authentically sad about this child. Then he'd talk about another child that he murdered and have no feelings whatsoever.”

I cannot answer that question just relief there was no question on whether this guy was indeed guilty, that made it easier knowing he wouldn't walk away from the carnage he left behind. Why would he ask such personal, demeaning questions about the state of a witness’s genitals, which had NO bearing whatsoever to the case? Why, for FUN, of course! He writes about how it childishly pleased him to be the one to make everyone in the courtroom realize (and I quote) "the beautiful woman that everyone in the room had been openly ogling… was a man! A he-she!". John Wayne Gacy covers his face as he is led to a courtroom on December 22, 1978. Bettmann // Getty Images It comes off being a self important missive by a braggart about his first case, which oddly enough, is the same way he referred to Gacy. Funny don't you think?He and others who worked during Gacy’s time said the case also tapped a well of homophobia that may have scared off some families from seeking information on their missing loved ones due to the social stigma. Gacy was imprisoned at the Menard Correctional Center in Chester for 14 years, appealing the sentence and offering contradictory statements on the murders in interviews. Although he had previously confessed, Gacy later denied being guilty of the charges and had a 900 telephone number set up with a 12-minute recorded statement declaring his innocence. Amirante said he believed a killer with Gacy’s personal demons would be less likely to exist today. He’s been able to identify two Gacy victims, William George Bundy and Minnesota native Jimmy Haakenson, and clear four suspected victims who died at the hands of other killers or of other causes. Six unidentified victims remain. He didn't have much to work with, because his client was an idiot. As the police were closing in with a warrant, Gacy demanded Amirante and his business lawyer both show up one late evening to tell them something. Gacy was apparently a very needy and demanding client, so Amirante was about fed up with him.