John Wayne Gacy

What the record shows

John Wayne Gacy was a Chicago-area building contractor who murdered boys and young men at his home in Norwood Park Township, Cook County, Illinois, between 1972 and 1978. According to the Illinois Supreme Court's 1984 opinion in People v. Gacy, a Cook County jury convicted him of 33 counts of murder, one count of deviate sexual assault and one count of indecent liberties with a child, and sentenced him to death on 12 murder counts and to natural life on the rest. Illinois executed him on May 10, 1994. The opinion recites that his confession put the number at about 30; police recovered 33 bodies. Three of the eight victims buried unidentified have been named since the Cook County Sheriff's Office reopened the identification effort in 2011, and five remain unidentified.

The first known victim, Timothy McCoy, was killed on January 3, 1972, according to the victim list in the Wikipedia article. Over the next six years Gacy brought young men to the house, many of them employees or job applicants at his remodelling company, runaways or hitchhikers. NBC Chicago, in a 40th-anniversary report, described a handcuff and rope trick used to restrain and then strangle the victims, who ranged in age from 14 to 21. Twenty-six bodies were buried in the crawl space under the house, three elsewhere on the property, and four were thrown into the Des Plaines River.

The case broke on December 11, 1978, when 15-year-old Robert Piest left the Des Plaines pharmacy where he worked to talk to a contractor about a summer job and never returned. The Illinois Supreme Court opinion records that Gacy had been at the pharmacy that evening, that his truck was seen outside, and that police learned of his Iowa conviction for assaulting a teenage boy. Investigators obtained a search warrant for his home and vehicles on December 13, kept him under surveillance, and arrested him on December 21, 1978. Early on December 22 he confessed, saying bodies were buried under the house and five had been thrown into the river. Excavation recovered 29 bodies from the property; four more were pulled from the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers.

The trial opened on February 6, 1980, before Judge Louis Garippo with a jury drawn from Rockford. The defence argued insanity; the State's experts said Gacy had a personality disorder and was legally responsible. On March 12, 1980, after under two hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of all 33 murders. At sentencing the jury returned death sentences for the 12 murders committed after Illinois's 1977 death penalty statute took effect, and the court imposed natural life for the other 21.

The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences on June 6, 1984, rejecting challenges to the search warrants, jury selection and the insanity verdict, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in 1985. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of a post-conviction petition on September 29, 1988, and the Seventh Circuit, in Gacy v. Welborn on April 12, 1993, affirmed the denial of federal habeas relief. After 14 years on death row at Menard, Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center shortly after midnight on May 10, 1994.

Eight victims were buried without names. In 2011 Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart had the remains exhumed and asked families of young men who vanished in the Chicago area in the 1970s to submit DNA. William Bundy, 19, was identified in November 2011. James Byron Haakenson, a 16-year-old runaway from Minnesota, was identified through a sister's DNA in July 2017, CBS Minnesota reported. On October 25, 2021, the sheriff's office announced that Victim No. 5 was Francis Wayne Alexander, a North Carolina native killed between early 1976 and early 1977 and identified through genetic genealogy with the DNA Doe Project, according to CBS News and ABC7. Five victims remain unidentified.

Gacy was born in Chicago on March 17, 1942. In 1968 he was convicted in Waterloo, Iowa, of sodomy involving a teenage boy; paroled on June 18, 1970, he returned to the Chicago area, ran a contracting business, was active in local Democratic politics and performed at events as a clown called Pogo.