John Wayne Gacy: The Killer Clown

1. Episode 01 — “The Boy His Father Hated”

1 min. 24 sec.

March 17, 1942. Chicago. John Wayne Gacy Jr. is born — the only son between two daughters — to a violent alcoholic father named for the actor he worshipped. John Stanley Gacy Sr. beat his wife and his son, calling the boy soft, effeminate, and a disappointment from the moment he learned to walk. When John was eight, a male family friend molested him in the garage. He told no one. When he was eleven, a playground swing struck his head and caused a blood clot on his brain — triggering years of blackouts that came whenever he was angry or overwhelmed. His mother loved him. His father did not. Inside that exact gap, something began to grow that John would spend the rest of his life trying to feed.

2. Episode 02 — “The Mortuary Boy”

1 min. 26 sec.

1962. Las Vegas. The 20-year-old Gacy takes a job as a mortuary assistant, hauling bodies from ambulances, preparing them for viewing, and sleeping alone on a cot in the back room every night. He later told prosecutors he became 'curious' about the bodies during those months — spending significant time alone with male corpses and stopping just short of describing what that meant in his admissions. He stays only a few months before homesickness drives him back to Chicago, where he enrols in business college, graduates in 1963, meets Marlynn Myers in 1964, and marries her that September. Her father owns three KFC franchises in Waterloo, Iowa, and offers Gacy the manager's job. For a brief, shining stretch, John Wayne Gacy becomes the man his father always demanded he be.

3. Episode 03 — “The Jaycee in Iowa”

1 min. 19 sec.

Waterloo, Iowa, 1966 to 1968. Gacy runs three KFC restaurants, has two children, earns his community's respect as Vice President of the Waterloo Jaycees chapter, and volunteers for every event in town. His father — who once called him soft — finally tells him he is proud. And every weekend, in the finished basement of his house, Gacy is hosting parties for teenage boys he has hired at the KFC, plying them with alcohol, showing them pornography, and paying some of them fifty dollars for what he calls 'science experiments.' In May 1968, fifteen-year-old Donald Voorhees tells his father — also a Jaycee — what Gacy has been doing. The father goes straight to police. Gacy is charged with sodomy. In a move that tells you everything: he hires another teenage boy to beat up Voorhees so he won't testify. The boy confesses. Gacy is sentenced to ten years at Anamosa State Penitentiary. His wife files for divorce the same day. He never sees his children again.

4. Episode 04 — “Eighteen Months”

1 min. 21 sec.

December 1968. Anamosa State Penitentiary. Gacy becomes the model prisoner — earning his high-school diploma, running the prison kitchen, joining the prison Jaycees. Two University of Iowa psychiatrists evaluate him and conclude he has severe antisocial personality disorder and is unlikely to benefit from treatment. The report is filed and sealed. Eighteen months into his ten-year sentence, the Iowa parole board grants him release. On June 18, 1970, he walks out a free man. His father has died in prison; his mother takes him in. Eight months after his release, he is arrested in Chicago for trying to force a teenage boy into sex. The boy does not appear to testify. The charges are dropped. Iowa's parole board is never informed. Shortly after, his Iowa conviction is sealed. On paper, John Wayne Gacy now has a clean record. The world has lost track of him. And he has found a new house.

5. Episode 05 — “8213 West Summerdale”

1 min. 17 sec.

Norwood Park Township, 1971. Gacy and his mother buy a modest brick ranch house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue — three bedrooms, a finished basement, an attached garage, and a four-foot-high dirt crawl space accessible through a wooden trapdoor in the master bedroom closet. He founds PDM Contractors, marries Carole Hoff in 1972, becomes a Democratic Party precinct captain, and volunteers at children's hospitals as Pogo the Clown. He looks, to everyone who meets him, like a community man rebuilding his life. On January 2, 1972 — six months after moving in — he picks up sixteen-year-old runaway Timothy Jack McCoy at the Greyhound bus station. Tim McCoy never makes it home to Nebraska. He becomes the first body in the crawl space at 8213 West Summerdale. The thirty-two that follow all come through the same front door.

6. Episode 06 — “Pogo the Clown”

1 min. 33 sec.

Around 1975, Gacy creates the alter ego that will become inseparable from his name: Pogo the Clown. Royal blue and red satin costume. Oversized shoes. A red wig. And the makeup — pointed white face paint, pointed eyebrows, pointed corners of the mouth. Professional clowns are trained to soften every corner to avoid frightening children. Gacy deliberately uses sharp points. He performs at hospitals, birthday parties, local parades, and charity fundraisers. Photographs of him in costume circulate around Norwood Park as proof of his community spirit. He also wears the Pogo costume alone, in his own house, in private. Some of his victims are dead in the crawl space below him while he is upstairs in face paint. Every clown has a signature trick. Gacy's is a pair of real police handcuffs.

7. Episode 07 — “The Handcuff Trick”

1 min. 20 sec.

His routine inside 8213 West Summerdale never varies. First: drinks, poured strong, sometimes spiked. Second: conversation — politics, his connections, the photograph of himself shaking First Lady Rosalynn Carter's hand. Third: the trick. He produces real police handcuffs and demonstrates how to lock and unlock them. He lets his guest try them on. Then he locks the cuffs. Tight. In his own confession, he describes the moment: 'The trick is, you need the key.' Most victims understand at that exact moment that they are not getting out of the house. Then comes the rope — a short piece threaded through a wooden dowel cut from a hammer handle, looped around the victim's neck from behind. He calls it efficient. The medical term is garrote. Death comes in under two minutes.

8. Episode 08 — “The Rope Trick”

1 min. 20 sec.

Once a victim is restrained in the handcuffs, Gacy loops his garrote — a length of rope threaded through a wooden dowel — around the victim's neck from behind and twists. The technique kills in 90 seconds to two minutes. He uses it on at least 32 of his 33 known victims. Sometimes he keeps the rope loose enough to prolong the torture for hours — burning victims with cigars, forcing degrading positions, using foreign objects. Then, when he is finished, he tightens the rope and counts. He buries most of them in the crawl space directly below the bedroom where he has killed them. Some are still warm when he starts digging. Between 1972 and 1976 he kills roughly one young man every four months. His second wife Carole Hoff lives in the house the entire time. She thinks the persistent sweet-rotting smell from the floorboards is a sewer leak. He tells her it is. She believes him.

9. Episode 09 — “The Wife Who Lived Above It”

1 min. 14 sec.

1972 to 1976. Carole Hoff is a kind, religious woman who moves into 8213 West Summerdale believing she has married a stable, civic-minded man. She notices the smell from the floorboards within months. Gacy tells her it is sewer runoff. He spreads lime and concrete in the crawl space to mask it. She notices her husband disappearing at night and returning at 3 a.m. covered in dirt. She notices he no longer wants intimacy. By 1975 she notices him bringing young men into the basement at odd hours and confronts him. He tells her he is gay, apologises, and cries. She files for divorce in 1976 and moves out of the house, never asking again about the smell. After Carole leaves, Gacy has no one watching him. In the 32 months that follow — April 1976 to December 1978 — he kills twenty more young men.

10. Episode 10 — “Twenty in Thirty-Two Months”

1 min. 15 sec.

April 1976 through December 1978. Gacy lives alone at 8213 West Summerdale with no one upstairs to slow him down. He hires more young men at PDM Contractors. He volunteers at more hospitals in Pogo costume. He attends the Polish Constitution Day Parade and is photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter. And every few weeks — he kills another one. Greg Godzik. John Mowery. Russell Nelson. Robert Gilroy. John Szyc. Frank Landingin. He buries them in overlapping trenches, stacking bodies on older bodies when the crawl space fills. When the crawl space has no more room, he starts burying in the garage and on the patio. When those fill, he drives north and drops four bodies off the I-55 bridge into the Des Plaines River. Two of them the river returns. The other two are never found. All the while, complaints from survivors, missing persons reports, and police reports about Gacy are filed — and ignored.