Serial Killers by Charlotte Greig

Author:Charlotte Greig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arctutus Publishing
Published: 2012-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

John Wayne Gacy

Even by comparison with his fellow serial killers, John Wayne Gacy, ‘the killer clown’ has become something of an icon of pure evil. This is partly to do with the way he dressed up as a clown to entertain children at parties near his suburban Chicago home – what more sinister notion could there be than that beneath the clown’s make-up lies a sex killer? And partly it is because of the sheer enormity of his crime: thirty-three young men raped and murdered, almost all of them buried beneath his suburban house.

John Wayne Gacy was born on 17 March 1942, St Patrick’s Day, the second of three children born to Elaine Robinson Gacy and John Wayne Gacy Sr.

He grew up in a middle-class district of northern Chicago, and was raised as a Catholic. His childhood was largely uneventful. Look a little closer, though, and there were troubles. John Gacy Sr was a misanthropic man who frequently took out his anger on his son through physical beatings and verbal abuse. John Gacy Jr in turn became very close to his mother. Aged eleven, he sustained a nasty accident when he was struck on the head by a swing. It caused him to have regular blackouts during his teens. During his teenage years he also complained of heart problems, though this seems likely to be just a symptom of a lifelong tendency to hypochondria – whenever he was under pressure he would claim to be on the brink of a heart attack.

Gacy did poorly in high school, left without graduating and headed for Las Vegas in a bid to make his fortune. Instead, he ended up working in a mortuary, where he showed an unhealthy interest in the corpses. He then returned to Chicago and began attending business college. While there, he discovered his considerable ability as a salesman; he was able to talk people into anything.

Model Citizen

In 1964, Gacy married Marlyn Myers, a woman he had met through work and whose father had a string of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. Gacy decided to join the family business and became a restaurant manager. The couple had a child and Gacy became extremely active on the local charity and community group circuit around their new home in Waterloo, Iowa.

All this came to an end in May 1968, when Gacy was charged with raping a young employee named Mark Miller. Gacy was sentenced to ten years for sodomy and his wife promptly divorced him.

Good Behaviour

He was released from prison after just eighteen months, thanks to his good behaviour while inside. His father had died while he was in prison, but now his mother – to whom he had always been close – stood by him and helped him to set up in business again. He bought a new house in the Chicago suburbs and established himself as a building contractor. In June 1972 he remarried, this time to divorcee Carole Hoff. Carole and her two daughters moved into Gacy’s house and the family soon became popular in their neighbourhood.

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