Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  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.

  In 1964, Gacy married Marlyn Myers, a woman he’d met through work, 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 crashing down 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.

  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 – whom he had always been close to – stood by him and helped him 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. Gacy would give big parties with fancy dress themes – often Western or Hawaiian – and was active in local Democratic politics.

  Bodies buried under house

  Carole Hoff was aware of Gacy’s past but under the impression he had put all that behind him. This was far from the truth. In fact, just before they married Gacy had been charged with sexually assaulting a minor, but the case had collapsed when his accuser failed to attend court. However, rumours soon began to get around about Gacy’s conduct with the teenage boys he liked to employ in his business. By 1975, his marriage was definitely deteriorating. Carole was disturbed to find homosexual pornography around the house. Gacy refused to apologise and even told her he preferred men to women.

  The couple divorced in 1976. It later emerged that throughout their marriage Gacy had been picking up strangers in Chicago gay bars and had already carried out several murders, burying the bodies under the house. The neighbours had even complained about the terrible smell.

  Now that his marriage was over, Gacy gave full vent to his lust for killing. He developed a modus operandi. Victims, either picked up on the streets or chosen from his workforce, would be lured back to the house and given drink and marijuana. Then the apparently jovial Gacy would offer to show them a magic trick. The victim would be asked to put on a pair of handcuffs and would then find out that this was no trick – the handcuffs were all too real and they were now in Gacy’s power. He would proceed to torture his victims before finally killing them by strangling them while raping them.

  The ‘killer clown’

  Time and again, Gacy got away with it. His neighbours suspected nothing, although they persistently complained about the smells coming from his house. He carried on giving parties and started dressing up as Pogo the Clown to visit sick children in hospitals. He became such a valued member of the local Democratic Party that he had his photo taken shaking hands with the then First Lady, Rosalyn Carter.

  Finally, in 1978, his secret life began to catch up with him. In February of that year he abducted a young man called Jeffrey Rignall, knocked him out with chloroform, raped and tortured him and then, oddly, dumped him in a park rather than killing him. Rignall went to the police who showed little interest, but, acting alone, he managed to track down his abductor and made an official complaint which the police started to take seriously late that summer.

  Gacy had still not been charged with anything when, on October 16, a fifteen-year-old boy called Robert Piest went missing from a Chicago drugstore. His parents discovered that he’d been going to meet John Wayne Gacy about a job. Gacy pleaded ignorance but the investigating officer discovered Gacy’s previous conviction for sodomy and decided to press ahead with a search of the house. They discovered an array of suspicious objects, such as handcuffs, pornography, drugs and so forth. They also noted the terrible smell. Gacy was confronted with this evidence and eventually confessed to having carried out a single murder. The police returned to the house and began to dig. Soon they realised there was not just one victim but many more. In all, twenty-eight bodies were found around the house; the five most recent victims had been dumped in nearby rivers, as Gacy had run out of burial space.

  Charged with thirty-three counts of murder, Gacy entered a plea of insanity, attempting to use the defence of having a multiple personality, which was a fashionable theory at the time. However, the jury found it hard to believe that a man who dug graves for his victims in advance was suddenly the victim of uncontrollable violent impulses, so he was duly sentenced to death. While in prison he became a grotesque celebrity, giving frequent interviews and showing admirers his paintings – almost always of sinister clowns. In all, he spent some fourteen years on death row. Towards the end of his time there, he began to claim that he had not killed after all, but had been the victim of a mysterious conspiracy. Credulous admirers were able to call a premium rate number to hear his refutation of the charges against him. All to no avail, however. On May 10, 1994, he was put to death by lethal injection.

  Wayne Williams

  The case of Wayne Williams, the Atlanta child murderer, has attracted a great deal of controversy over the years. During the period in which Atlanta suffered a series of child murders, all of black children, there was intense pressure on the police to solve the mystery of who the culprit was. Thus it was that in January 1982 Williams was brought to trial, but no initial connection could be found between him and the children, so he was found guilty of murdering two adults, both men. After this conviction, the police force in Atlanta declared twenty-two of the child murders in the city to be solved (there were twenty-nine in all). Many were not persuaded by this, and the inference was that the police only accused Williams of the child murders because they wanted to clear the crimes off the record. However, after Williams’s imprisonment, the murders stopped, which seemed to indicate that he was perhaps behind them. Whatever the truth of the matter, it remains the case that Williams was convicted on a great deal of circumstantial evidence. Today, many people believe that although Williams was guilty to some degree, the complete facts are still not known, and many aspects of the case are subject to doubt.

  Tall stories

  Wayne Bertram Williams was born on May 27, 1958, the son of two teachers. He grew up in the area of Dixie Hills, Atlanta, which was the neighbourhood from where the child victims were taken. As a young man, Williams was known in the locality as a DJ who worked on a local amateur radio station, broadcasting from his parents’ house. He often walked the streets and frequented bars and sports centres in the neighbourhood looking for young musicians to play on his radio station. He was not always well liked by his neighbours because of his habit of telling tall stories about himself so as to impress them, and he was something of a joke in the area. Some believed him to be gay, which further increased his unpopularity among the more homophobic individuals in the community. However, it seemed that Williams was nothing more than a harmless, rather irritating local character. He had no record of criminal activity except that, in 1976, he was arrested for impersonating a police officer, but the case never came to court and the arrest was forgotten. That was his only brush with the law until March 1981, when he became a suspect in the child murder cases that had hit the headlines in the city and nationally.

  During the early eighties, Atlanta was in the grip of terror over a spate of child murders that were taking place in the city. The victims were black children, and for a long time police failed to solve the cases, prompting allegations of racism against the police force and the authorities, and fuelling the already tense race relations in many parts of the area. Given the tension of the situation, the police
were under a great deal of pressure to find the killer, and when Wayne Williams was seen loitering on a bridge in the middle of the night, close to where a murder had taken place, the police thought that they had found their man.

  Naked body in river

  Williams was picked up as he sat on the Jackson Parkway Bridge in a car belonging to his parents. He had turned the lights off, which police thought to be suspicious. Even more suspicious was the fact that police heard a loud splash in the water directly below the car. At the time, the police were staking out the area to discover any clues to the killings, so for once they were in the right place at the right time. Williams was detained by police and asked what his business was there. In response, he gave the name and number of a young singer he said he was going to visit, who lived out of town. However, when police checked the singer’s name and address, they found that the details had been invented – no such person existed.

  This was enough to arouse their suspicions, and these were confirmed when, only three days later, a naked body turned up in the river. It was that of Nathaniel Cater, a twenty-seven-year-old man who had been reported missing by his family. When the autopsy was performed, the examiner found that the man had probably died from asphyxia, but was unable to be definitive about the matter. He was also unable to determine whether the man had been strangled or not, but the police managed to construct a theory that Williams had thrown the body off the bridge and into the river shortly before they had encountered him sitting in his car there.

  Circumstantial evidence

  A series of investigations were carried out and evidence incriminating Williams came to light. Fibres and hair from Williams’s car and home, including dog hairs, were found on some of the child victims’ bodies. Witnesses also claimed that they had seen Williams walking about the streets covered in scratches and bruises, which could have been from the victims struggling to escape as he killed them. However, none of this evidence was overwhelmingly persuasive, and accordingly, Williams held a press conference outside his parents’ house, declaring himself to be innocent.

  The authorities were not persuaded by these protestations and on June 21, 1981, Williams was arrested for the murder of Nathanial Cater. He was also charged with the murder of another man, twenty-nine-year-old Jimmy Payne. He was taken into custody to await trial, amid a tremendous amount of press and public interest because of the link with the child killings. Throughout this ordeal, Williams continued to maintain his innocence and many believed him. However, what made his case seem less persuasive was that while he was out of circulation, the murders of young children that had so terrified the people of Atlanta ceased. Whether this was just coincidence or proof, Williams’s involvement is still a matter for conjecture.

  The trial begins

  On January 6, 1982, the trial of Wayne Williams began. The prosecution had been hard at work to amass a huge amount of circumstantial evidence, since they were lacking in any other kind. They had taken nineteen types of fibres from Williams’ household, including fibres from his bathroom, from his bed, from an unusual kind of carpet he had, from his clothing and from his dog. They claimed that these fibres had been found on several of the child victims, linking him to the murders. They also produced witnesses who said that Williams had been seen with some of the victims, and who alleged that he was a paedophile who preyed on young boys. In addition, they showed that the bloodstains from some of the victims’ bodies matched blood found in Williams’ car.

  During his trial, Williams himself did not help his case. He became aggressive towards the jury, which set many of them against him. Whether it was the frustration of being wrongly accused, or whether this was the behaviour of a man accustomed to violence and to getting his own way through threatening behaviour, is difficult to say. However, on February 27, after a long deliberation of ten hours, the jury found Williams guilty of murdering the two men, Cater and Payne. He was given a life sentence for each murder.

  The Atlanta child killer?

  Since that time, Williams has continued to protest his innocence, and four of the child victim cases have been reopened. Controversy erupted again when Charles T. Sanders, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was found to have suggested that the killings were a positive step. His actual words to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were that the killer had ‘wiped out a generation of niggers for good’. This meant that suspicion now fell on Sanders, so Williams’s defence responded by demanding a new trial for their client. In the weeks that followed, Sanders was cleared of involvement with the child murders, as was the Ku Klux Klan in general, and the case was closed once more.

  Today, the identity of the Atlanta child killer continues to remain a matter of controversy, but one positive development remains: since the incarceration of Wayne Williams the child killings have ceased, much to the relief of the people of Dixie Hills, Atlanta, and the rest of the citizens of the USA. Even so, the era in which black families were terrorised by the spectre of the Atlanta child killer remains a vivid memory, one that has been revisited by many film makers, novelists, musicians and other artists in the new millennium.

  Arthur Shawcross

  Arthur Shawcross, also known as the Genesee River Killer, was an American serial killer of children and women, who committed many of his crimes after being released on parole following the murder of two children early in his career. For this reason, the authorities were severely criticised when the facts of the case emerged. In addition, most of his adult female victims were prostitutes, and it appeared that, until he began to kill women who were not prostitutes, very little was done about the murders. During his trial, Shawcross attempted to plead insanity, but the jury rejected this and he was given several life sentences instead.

  Vietnam atrocities

  Shawcross was born in Kittery, Maine, on June 6, 1945, and soon afterwards the family moved to Watertown in New York State. Later, his parents and siblings claimed that he had had an ordinary childhood, but he maintained that he had a difficult relationship with his mother, whom he described as domineering, and as a result became a bedwetter. He also claimed that as a child he had been sexually molested by his aunt, and that at a young age he had been involved in sexual relations with his sister. He also said that he had had homosexual relations when he was under age, and even that, as a boy, he had indulged in bestiality. The truth of his claims was never known, as Shawcross was found to be an inveterate liar who tended to change his stories to fit whatever circumstances he found himself in.

  At school, Shawcross did not do well. He had a low IQ and was known as a bully. He was also suspected of arson attacks and burglaries in the area. His school work was so poor that he dropped out before ninth grade and then became involved in petty theft. He was put on probation in 1963 after smashing a shop window. The following year, he married his first wife and they went on to have a son. However, Shawcross’s repeated brushes with the law caused the breakdown of the marriage and he went into the army, serving in Vietnam in 1967. During this period, he married again but soon afterwards got divorced. Later, he claimed that while in Vietnam he murdered and ate two Vietnamese girls, also killing several Vietnamese children. He also boasted about the number of enemy soldiers he had killed there, but it was later found that this was a pack of lies and he had not killed anyone in the course of his duties.

  Child victims

  After he returned from Vietnam in 1968, he was imprisoned for an arson attack and served a five-year jail sentence. On his release, he married for the third time and had another child. It was around this time that he committed his first murder, that of ten-year-old Jack Black, who was a member of a neighbouring family. Shawcross had taken the boy out fishing and a few days later he disappeared. Shawcross denied any knowledge of what had happened but after a long hunt, the child’s body was found; he had been sexually assaulted and suffocated. It later transpired that the murder had taken place on April 7, 1972, and that Shawcross was the perpetrator of the crime.

  A few months la
ter, another child victim was found, an eight-year-old girl named Karen Ann Hill. Mud and leaves had been pushed into her throat and she had been raped before being killed. When she was dead, her body had been thrown under a bridge. Witnesses mentioned that shortly before she died, she had been seen with Shawcross, so suspicion immediately fell on him. On October 3, 1972, he was arrested. Once in custody, Shawcross confessed that he had killed both the children. However, he was only charged with Hill’s murder, because there was little concrete evidence – beyond his confession – linking him to Black’s. When Shawcross was brought to trial he was found guilty of the murder and given a sentence of twenty-five years.

  Prostitute killings

  However, after only fifteen years, Shawcross was let out on parole. While he was in prison, his wife had divorced him. When he went to live in Binghamton, New York State, the news that a child killer was in the area became public and he was forced to move on. By this time he had a new girlfriend, whom he later married but quickly separated from. Meanwhile, the authorities decided to keep his criminal record a secret, to prevent the kind of public outcry that had happened at Binghamton. They could not have made a worse mistake.