When the digging under the house stopped, twenty-six bodies had come out of the crawl space, three more from elsewhere on the property and four from the rivers south of Chicago. Twenty-five of the thirty-three were identified. The other eight were buried as numbers.
Three of those eight have since been given their names back. Five have not, and the work is still going on.
John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago on March 17, 1942. He moved to Waterloo, Iowa in the mid-1960s, married, and managed a group of fried chicken restaurants belonging to his father-in-law. In 1968 he was convicted of sodomy with a teenage boy and sentenced to ten years. He was paroled after eighteen months.
Back in the Chicago area he built PDM Contractors into a real business, bought a ranch house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park Township, served as a Democratic precinct captain, threw block parties, and performed at children's charity events as Pogo the Clown, in a costume he had designed himself. He had photographs taken with Rosalynn Carter.
Between January 1972 and December 1978 he killed thirty-three young men and boys. Most were offered construction work or money, handcuffed by a trick he presented as a magic act, and strangled with a rope tourniquet twisted tight with a stick. The first, Timothy McCoy, was stabbed.
Twenty-six went into the crawl space, where his own employees had been asked to dig trenches they were told were for drainage. Three were buried elsewhere on the property. When the crawl space was full he started throwing bodies off the Interstate 55 bridge into the Des Plaines River.
The case broke on a fifteen-year-old. On December 11, 1978 Robert Piest finished a shift at a pharmacy in Des Plaines, told his mother he was going to speak to a contractor about better-paid work, and did not come home. Des Plaines police reached Gacy within two days. He denied knowing the boy.
A background check turned up the Iowa conviction and he was put under round-the-clock surveillance. A first search warrant produced handcuffs, lengths of rope, a class ring belonging to a young man who had been missing two years, and a pharmacy receipt that put Piest in Gacy's hands.
He was arrested on December 21, 1978 on an unrelated drugs charge, and a second warrant was executed at the house that night. Officers went into the crawl space with a shovel and were on bone within minutes. Gacy confessed, drew a map of where the bodies lay, and told detectives he had never known most of their names. The excavation ran for weeks in freezing weather with crowds at the tape. The house was demolished.
His trial opened in Cook County in February 1980. The defense argued insanity and multiple personality. The prosecution showed a man who had planned, concealed and lied with complete control for six years. The jury took under two hours. He was convicted of all thirty-three murders, one of the few killers in American history convicted on every count attributed to him, and sentenced to death in March 1980.
He spent fourteen years on death row at Menard, painting and giving interviews, and was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill shortly after midnight on May 10, 1994. His brain was removed afterwards and examined at a researcher's request. Nothing abnormal was found.
The part of the case that is still moving is the identification of the dead.
In October 2011 Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart reopened it, exhumed the remains of the eight unidentified victims, and asked anyone whose male relative had disappeared in the Chicago area in the 1970s to submit DNA.
Within weeks they had a name. William George Bundy was nineteen, a construction worker and a Senn High School dropout who had apparently worked for Gacy, and he disappeared on October 26, 1976, after telling his family he was going to a party; he was buried under Gacy's master bedroom. Shortly after the arrest his family had tried to get his dental records compared with the dead, but his dentist had retired and destroyed them. In July 2017 they identified James Byron Haakenson, sixteen, who had telephoned his mother in Minnesota to say he was in Chicago and was never heard from again. In October 2021, working with forensic genetic genealogy and the DNA Doe Project, they named Francis Wayne Alexander, who was twenty-one or twenty-two, had come to Chicago from North Carolina by way of New York, was divorced within a year of arriving, and was killed between early 1976 and early 1977. His family had never filed a missing person report. The last they heard from him was a postcard from California.
Five are still unnamed. Working from his confession, where each lay and the forensic evidence, investigators estimated when each was killed: Body 28, from the backyard, a teenager of fourteen to eighteen killed between January 1972 and July 1975; Body 26, a man of twenty-three to thirty, in the summer of 1976; Bodies 13 and 21, young men killed between August and October 1976; and Body 10, aged seventeen to twenty-one, in the spring or early summer of 1977. New facial reconstructions of three of them have been released. In 2012 Gacy's own DNA was entered into the national database with that of other executed Illinois prisoners, in case it matched anything else.
Something else came out of the appeal for DNA, and it is the reason the effort is cited well outside this case. Families who came forward looking for a son or a brother among Gacy's dead instead found answers somewhere else. The Sheriff's Office closed four unrelated cold case homicides, found five missing people alive, and established that two others had died without their families ever knowing. One man was located in Oregon, alive, with no idea anyone had been looking for him.
Dart put it plainly: he had walked into it hoping to identify one.
Some of the men Gacy killed had never been reported missing at all. They were estranged, or transient, or their families assumed they had simply gone. That is why eight of them could be buried without names, and it is the same fact that made them possible to take.