Gacy attended a business college and started a moderately successful career as a shoe salesman in Springfield, Illinois. He married in 1964 and moved to Iowa, where he managed a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant belonging to his wife’s family. His wife gave birth to two children. However, his marriage fell apart after he was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for child molestation in 1968. He was a model prisoner and was paroled in 1970 after serving less than two years. After he was released, he moved back to Chicago, managing to conceal his criminal record.
His mother had been impressed with how her son had readjusted to life outside the prison walls and she helped him obtain a house of his own outside Chicago’s city limits. Gacy owned one half of his new house, located at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in the Norwood Park Township, and his mother and sisters owned the remaining half. Gacy was very happy with his new two-bedroom 1950s ranch-style house located in a nice, clean, family-oriented neighbourhood. He was quick to make friends, in particular with his new neighbours, Edward and Lillie Grexa, who had lived in the neighbourhood since it had first been built.
After only seven months, Gacy became involved in another scandal involving young boys. He was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. The charges stated that Gacy had forced a young boy, whom he had picked up at a bus terminal, to commit sexual acts on him. Gacy had been discharged from his parole for only a few months at this point. However, he slipped through the justice system when all charges against him were dropped, due to his young accuser failing to attend court.
On 1 June 1972, Gacy married Carole Hoff, a newly divorced mother of two daughters. Gacy had romanced the emotionally vulnerable woman, and she had immediately fallen for him. She was attracted to his charm and generosity and believed he would be a good provider for her and her children. She was aware of Gacy’s previous convictions and she believed that he was reformed. How wrong could she be?
In 1974, Gacy started his owned painting and decorating company, and hired male youths, with the ulterior motive of seducing and having sex with them. This put a strain on his marriage and his wife divorced him in 1976. It was then that young boys started to go missing in and around the Chicago suburbs. One such young man was Robert Piest. The investigation into his disappearance would lead not only to the discovery of his body but the bodies of 32 other young men who had suffered similar fates – rocking the foundations of Chicago and shocking all of America.
Robert Piest was only 15 when he disappeared from just outside the pharmacy where he had been working minutes earlier. His mother, who had come to pick him up from work, had been waiting inside the pharmacy for Robert, who had said he’d be right back after talking with a contractor who had offered him a job. Robert never returned. His mother began to worry as time passed. Eventually her worry turned to dread. She searched the pharmacy area outside and inside and still Robert was nowhere to be found. Three hours after Robert’s disappearance, the Des Plaines Police Department was notified. Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak led the investigation.
The police ascertained that the contractor who had offered the job to Piest was Gacy; an officer went to his house and asked about the missing boy. Gacy was asked to go with the officer to the police station for questioning; he went to the police station hours later and gave his statement to police. Gacy said he knew nothing about the boy’s disappearance and left the station after further questioning. The officer ran a background check on Gacy the next day and was surprised to find that Gacy had served time for committing buggery on a teenager years earlier, so he obtained a search warrant for Gacy’s house. It was there that he believed they would find Robert Piest.
On 13 December 1978, police entered Gacy’s house on West Summerdale Avenue. Gacy was not at home during the investigation. Police seized a number of items, including some valium and marijuana, but no real evidence of value at that time. However, they were aware of a rancid smell about the house. Gacy was made aware of the search and was then put under 24-hour surveillance. Police then decided to arrest him on the marijuana charge.
Finally, after intense investigation and scientific work on items confiscated by police from Gacy’s house, they came up with crucial evidence against Gacy. A ring found at Gacy’s house belonged to another teenager who had disappeared a year earlier, named John Szyc. They also discovered that three former employees of Gacy had also mysteriously disappeared. Further-more, the receipt for the roll of film that was found at Gacy’s home had belonged to a co-worker of Robert Piest who had given it to Robert on the day of his disappearance. With this new information, the investigators began to realise the enormity of the case that was unfolding.
It was not long before police were back searching Gacy’s house. Gacy had finally confessed to police that he did kill someone but said it had been in self-defence. He said that he had buried the body underneath his garage. Gacy told police where they could find the body and police marked the gravesite in the garage, though they did not immediately begin digging. They first wanted to search the crawl space under Gacy’s house. It was not long before they discovered a suspicious mound of earth. Minutes after digging into the suspicious mound, investigators found the remains of a body. Believing that there may be more bodies buried, they conducted a slow but thorough search of the underneath of the house. On the first day that the police began their digging, they found two bodies. One of the bodies was that of John Butkovich, who was buried under the garage. The other body was the one found in the crawl space. As the days passed, the body count grew higher. Some of the victims were found with their underwear still lodged deep in their throats. Other victims were buried so close together that police believed they were probably killed or buried at the same time.
On Friday, 22 December 1978, Gacy finally confessed to police that he had killed at least 30 people and had buried most of the remains beneath the crawl space of his house. Gacy said that his first killing had taken place in January 1972 and the second in January 1974, about a year and a half after his marriage. He further confessed that he would lure his victims into being handcuffed and then sexually assault them. To muffle their screams, he would stuff a sock or underwear into their mouths and kill them by pulling a rope or board against their throats, as he raped them. Gacy admitted to sometimes keeping the dead bodies under his bed or in the attic for several hours before eventually burying them in the crawl space. He also confirmed to police that he had on several occasions killed more than one person in a day. However, the reason he gave for them being buried so close together was that he was running out of room and needed to conserve space.
By 28 December, police had removed a total of 27 bodies from Gacy’s house. There was also another body found weeks earlier, but not in the crawl space. The naked corpse of Frank Wayne Landingin had been found in the Des Plaines River. At the time of the discovery, police were not yet aware of Gacy’s crimes and the case was still under investigation. However, investigators found Landingin’s driving licence in Gacy’s home and connected him to the young man’s murder. Landingin was not the only one of Gacy’s victims to be found in the river. Also on 28 December, police removed from Des Plaines River the body of James Mazzara, who still had his underwear lodged in his throat. The coroner said that the underwear stuffed down the victim’s throat had caused Mazzara to suffocate. Gacy told police that the reason he disposed of the bodies in the river was because he ran out of room in his crawl space and because he had been experiencing back problems from digging the graves. Mazzara was the 29th victim of Gacy’s to be found; he would not be the last.
Under the concrete patio at Gacy’s house, workmen found the body of a man still in good condition, preserved in the concrete. The man wore a pair of blue jeans, shorts and a wedding ring. Gacy’s victims no longer included only young boys or suspected homosexuals, but now also married men. The following week, another body was discovered. The 31st body linked to Gacy was in the Illinois River. Police were able to discover the identity of the young man by a ‘Tim L
ee’ tattoo on one of his arms. A friend of the victim’s father had recognised the Tim Lee tattoo while reading a newspaper story about the discovery of a body in the river. The victim’s name was Timothy O’Rourke. Still the body count rose. Yet another body was found on Gacy’s property around the time O’Rourke was discovered. The body was located beneath the recreation room of Gacy’s house. It was the last body to be found on Gacy’s property. Soon after the discovery, the house was destroyed and reduced to rubble. Unfortunately, among the 32 bodies that were discovered, Robert Piest was still unaccounted for. Finally, in April 1979, Piest’s remains were discovered in the Illinois River. His body had supposedly been lodged somewhere along the river making it difficult to find. However, strong winds must have dislodged the body and carried it to the locks at Dresden Dam where it was eventually discovered. A post-mortem report on Piest determined that he had suffocated from paper towels being lodged down his throat. 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. Although the search for the dead had finally come to an end, Gacy’s trial was just beginning.
On Wednesday, 6 February 1980, John Wayne Gacy’s murder trial began in the Cook County Criminal Courts Building in Chicago, Illinois. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyer made the claim that Gacy had had moments of temporary insanity at the time of each individual murder, but before and afterwards, somehow regained his sanity to properly lure and dispose of victims. However, this plea was rejected outright.
While on trial, Gacy joked that the only thing he was guilty of was ‘running a cemetery without a licence’. At one point in the trial, Gacy’s defence also tried to claim that all 33 murders were accidental deaths as part of erotic asphyxia, but the Cook County Coroner immediately provided evidence that this was impossible. Also, Gacy had made an earlier confession to police and was unable to have this evidence suppressed. He was found guilty on 13 March 1980 and sentenced to death.
Gacy remained on death row in Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois until his execution date was set for 10 May 1994. After finishing his last meal, consisting of shrimp, fried chicken, fresh strawberries and French fries, he was taken to the execution chamber to be executed by lethal injection.
Gacy’s execution proved problematic. As the execution began, the lethal chemicals unexpectedly solidified, clogging the IV tube that led into Gacy’s arm and preventing any further passage. Blinds covering the window through which witnesses observed the execution were drawn, and the execution team replaced the clogged tube with a new one. Ten minutes later, the blinds were then reopened and the execution process resumed. It took 27 minutes for him to die. This apparently led to the state of Illinois adopting a different method of lethal injection. Gacy never expressed any remorse for his crimes or to the families of his victims.
After his execution, Gacy’s brain was removed. It is currently in the possession of Dr Helen Morrison, who interviewed Gacy and other serial killers in an attempt to isolate common personality traits held by such people. However, an examination of Gacy’s brain after his execution revealed no abnormalities. Dr Morrison said, ‘Gacy did not fit into any psychological profile associated with serial killers, and the psychological reasons for his rampage will probably never be known.’ During Gacy’s trial, Dr Morrison herself appeared as a psychiatric witness and told the court that he had ‘the emotional make-up of an infant’.
DONALD HENRY ‘PEE WEE’ GASKINS
Born in Prospect, South Carolina, Donald Gaskins (b. 1931) spent most of his youth in and out of reform school and later prison. Gaskins was small and of slight build (he was only 5ft 4in tall, hence his nickname). He was clever with his hands, and a natural around machines and motors. He left school at 11 to work on cars at a local garage, teaming up with two friends named Danny and Marsh in his spare time to form a marauding gang dubbed the Trouble Trio. Starting off with thefts of petrol from service stations after closing time, they soon graduated to residential burglaries, counselled along the way by Danny’s ex-convict father. Buying an old car with the proceeds from their robberies, they ranged further afield, visiting prostitutes in Charleston and Columbia. Their sexual experiments also included younger boys, but the Trouble Trio made a critical mistake when they gang-raped Marsh’s younger sister. Threats and promises of cash failed to secure her silence and parental wrath descended on the boys in full force. Danny’s father defended him with a shotgun, but Gaskins and Marsh were strung up by their wrists in a barn and whipped bloody in relays by parents wielding a leather strap.
However, Gaskins still continued a life of crime, and one Saturday in 1946, he was prowling around a house when one of the tenants, a girl he knew, surprised him. She was armed with a hatchet, and slashed at Gaskins and chased him outside, where he disarmed her and struck back, gashing her arms and splitting her scalp. The girl survived to identify Gaskins, whereupon he was jailed for assault with a deadly weapon and intent to kill. The judge found him guilty as charged and consigned him to the South Carolina Industrial School for Boys until his 18th birthday.
Deemed sane and fit for normal custody, Gaskins was shipped back to the reformatory in 1950. Light duty soon gave way to threats of whipping in reprisal for his prior conduct, but he escaped and fled to Sumter, where he joined a travelling circus. He fell in love with a 13-year-old member of the crew and married her, the first of his six wives, on 22 January 1951. After one night together, for his bride’s sake, Gaskins surrendered to the authorities and spent the last three months of his sentence in solitary confinement.
When finally released, he did take on various jobs but on one of these his employer’s teenage daughter and a girlfriend cornered Gaskins in the barn, taunting him. Gaskins snapped, lashed out with a hammer and cracked the girl’s skull. Jailed for arson, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder, the prosecutor promised Gaskins 18 months’ confinement in return for a guilty plea, but Gaskins failed to get the deal in writing and Judge TB Greniker had other ideas. He pronounced a five-year sentence, and then added another year for contempt when Gaskins cursed him.
When Gaskins entered the South Carolina state prison in 1952, it struck him as ‘the dreariest looking place on Earth’. There were new faces and new rules to memorise, but the reality of prison life remained unchanged. In place of dorms, the state penitentiary had cellblocks and ‘Power Men’ who took what they wanted by force. Gaskins went in expecting another round of gang rapes, but instead he was ignored until the afternoon when an inmate approached him on the yard and told him, ‘You belong to Arthur.’
Over the next six months, while Gaskins was sharing his cell with a brutal rapist, he realised that the only way to save himself was to become a Power Man. To that end, knowing it meant murder: Gaskins started looking for the biggest, toughest inmate he could find. He chose Hazel Brazell, a convict so vicious that no one on either side of the bars dared call him by his despised first name. To ingratiate himself with Brazell, Gaskins used the same tactic he would employ with Rudolph Tyner almost 30 years later. He brought gifts of food from the kitchen, becoming a fixture around Brazell’s cellblock, accepted as part of the crowd. On his fifth visit, Gaskins found Brazell on the toilet, with only one guard stationed outside his cell. Striking swiftly, he cut Brazell’s throat with a stolen paring knife and warned the bodyguard to flee before the guards arrived. ‘I surprised myself at how calm I was,’ Gaskins later wrote in his autobiography, Final Truth. ‘I didn’t really feel nothing much at all.’
He admitted killing Brazell ‘in a fight’ and bargained a murder charge down to manslaughter, two-thirds of the nine-year sentence concurrent with his pre-existing term. ‘I figured that was a damn fair deal,’ Gaskins said, ‘considering I wouldn’t never again have to be afraid of anybody in prison no matter how long I was there.’ He spent six months in solitary and emerged a Power Man in his own right, the ‘Pee Wee’ nick
name now a label of respect.
Following his release he had many other brushes with the law, which resulted in further prison sentences, the last of which he was released from in 1968. Gaskins settled in Sumter, South Carolina, working in construction, stripping hot cars on weekends and cruising bars for sex. He raged and brooded over women who rejected him. He drove compulsively along the Carolina coast, later recalling, ‘It was like I was looking for something special on them coastal highways, only I didn’t know what.’
In September 1969, he found out. He came upon a young blonde female hitchhiker, bound for Charleston. Gaskins picked her up and propositioned her. When she laughed in his face, he beat her unconscious and drove to an old logging road. There, he raped and buggered his victim; he then tortured and mutilated her with a knife. She was still alive when he weighted her body and left her in a swamp to drown. Leaving the scene, Gaskins recalled, ‘I felt truly the best I ever remembered feeling in my whole life.’
Gaskins later called that first impulsive homicide ‘his miracle … a beam of light, like a vision’. From that day on, he made a habit of patrolling the coastal highways on weekends, seeking victims and exploring future disposal sites. By Christmas 1969, he had committed two more ‘coastal kills – ones where I didn’t know the victims or their names or nothing about them’. It was recreational murder, refined over time until he could keep his victims alive and screaming for hours on end, sometimes for days.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 22
