John Wayne Gacy

John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 17 1942. Gacy had an uneventful childhood up until the age of eleven. While out playing he had been struck on the head by a swing. Subsequently he suffered fainting fits for many years.

Gacy graduated from business school and went on to work as a shoe salesman for the Nunn Bush shoe company. Gacy met and then married work colleague Marilynn Myres in 1964.

The marriage ended when Gacy was imprisoned for ten years at a correctional institute in Waterloo, Iowa for various sex and violent crimes against young men. In 1971 Gacy was arrested again for trying to rape a teenage boy.

John Wayne Gacy was married for the second time in 1972 to Carol Hoff. He set up a business as a renovation contractor at this time. This marriage also ended partly because Carol was frightened of he husband's temper.

Despite all this Gacy worked very hard at trying to be liked. He was an enthusiastic member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce as "Pogo the Clown" a children's entertainer.

Gacy would use his contracting business to attract young men eager for work, many of whom were subjected to rape. Thirty-three of who lost their lives.

At nine o'clock on the evening of 11 December 1978, fifteen year old Robert Piest went to a chemist's shop in his home town of Des Plaines, Illinois. He was going to see a building contractor who was working in the shop about a holiday job.

Robert Piest was supposed to go straight home, where his family was holding a birthday party for his mother. When Robert had not arrived home by 11:30pm, his family contacted the police.

Police investigating the case learned that the contractor hired by the shop was in fact John Wayne Gacy a name not unfamiliar to them. Gacy had been reported earlier in the year by a 27-year-old man named Jeffery Rignall.

According to Mr. Rignall's story, a plump man with a flashy car had approached him. The man invited him to join him in the vehicle to smoke some marijuana. Once in the car the man pushed chloroform soaked handkerchief into Rignall's face and drove him, unconscious, to a house where he was beaten with whips and raped. Rignall regained consciousness then next morning where he had been dumped in Lincoln Park.

In lieu of the fact that Rignall could not give them much information, the Police were unable to be of much help. In fact even wh...

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...covered in the Illinois River. His body had supposedly been lodged somewhere along the river making it difficult to find his body. However, strong winds must have dislodged the corpse and carried it to the locks at Dresden Dam where it was eventually discovered. Autopsy reports on Piest determined that he had suffocated from paper towels being lodged down his throat. The family soon after filed a $85-million suit against Gacy for murder and the Iowa Board of Parole, the Department of Corrections and the Chicago Police Department for negligence.

Police investigators continued to match dental records and other clues to help identify the remaining victims who were found on Gacy’s property. All but nine of the victims were finally identified.

Gacy made three confessions, but declined to testify at his trial for murder. The Jury who tried him were told by a psychiatrist that Gacy was suffering from a personality disorder that did not amount to insanity. Seeing this, on the 13 March 1980, Gacy was sentenced to life imprisonment, but this was changed to a death sentence. Just after midnight on 10 May 1994 Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville prison in Joilet, Illinois.