Criminal Profile: John Wayne Gacy

By Gary C. King
Edited by Kevin P. Allen

Donning a colorful costume, face paint and a wig for local parades and fundraisers, John Wayne Gacy fancied himself a clown. While most clowns spend their time perfecting handkerchief tricks and making balloon animals, Gacy mastered the "rope trick," a brutal method by which the "Killer Clown" murdered scores of young men, unbeknownst to the community in which he was known as a businessman and civic leader.

Early Years

The killings began as Gacy neared his 30th birthday. In Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders, authors Terry Sullivan and Peter Maiken explain that by this time Gacy had already spent 21 months in an Iowa jail for sexually assaulting two teenage boys, an offense for which his first wife divorced him. After his release, Gacy moved to Northwood, Ill., a Chicago suburb where, according to Sullivan and Maiken, he began a successful construction business and became active in the local community often appearing at various events as "Pogo the Clown."

In January 1972, as the Baltimore Sun later reported, Gacy picked up Timothy Jack McCoy, a teenager from Iowa returning home from a Christmas trip, at a Greyhound station. Gacy showed the boy around town before taking him to Gacy's home, where he paid McCoy for sex, according to the Chicago Tribune. In the morning, Gacy stabbed the boy to death and buried him in a crawlspace beneath the house, the Tribune wrote.

The Businessman Becomes a Serial Killer

Following three relatively quiet years brought on by a second marriage, Gacy returned to murder, this time favoring a rope. According to Sullivan and Maiken, Gacy strangled a 17-year old employee with whom he'd argued over wages in July 1975 and went on to kill 10 young men over the course of the following year. He strangled most of them — often after consensual or forced sex, the authors write — using what Gacy called the "rope trick." As described by Sullivan and Maiken, the amateur clown handcuffed his victim and slipped a rope with three knots in it around the victim's head. He'd then insert a stick between two of the knots and with a few quick twists strangle the life out of the victim. Each, including teenager Gregory Godzik whom Gacy paid to dig the ditch where he later dumped Godzik's corpse, was buried beneath Gacy's home.

Following his 1976 divorce, Gacy continued to murder at will. Fourteen more young men died by Gacy's hand in 1977 and 1978 by Sullivan and Maiken's count. One of them was John Szyc, whose car Gacy sold to one of his employees after showing Szyc the rope trick. While police eventually tracked the missing car back to Gacy, author Clifford Linedecker writes in The Man Who Killed Boys: The John Wayne Gacy, Jr. Story that they believed the successful businessman's story that Szyc had sold him the car to make enough money to leave town.

Send in the Clowns

The authorities weren't so relenting when they returned to Gacy's home investigating the disappearance of Robert Piest in late 1978. The 15-year-old Iowa boy, according to The New York Times, disappeared shortly after being seen talking with Gacy about a job with his construction business. Despite the lead, Gacy was so sure that he wouldn't be caught that he invited detectives into his home for dinner, the Times reported. It was during one of these visits that they noticed a foul smell — the odor of decaying bodies — coming from the heating vents. By the time police were finished digging up the floors, they'd found the remains of 29 victims. Gacy was convicted for the killing of these victims, as well as four whose bodies he dumped in the Des Plaines River, according to the Times. He spent 14 years on death row — days the Times reported that Gacy filled by painting macabre clown renderings that he sold for up to $20,000 a piece — before being executed in 1994.