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, returned to the Chicago area, and built PDM Contractors into a going concern. He bought a ranch house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park Township, worked as a Democratic precinct captain, threw large parties for the neighbourhood, and performed at children's charity events in a clown costume he had designed himself.
He killed thirty-three young men and boys between January 1972 and December 1978. Most were lured with the offer of construction work or money, handcuffed by a trick presented as a magic act, and strangled with a rope tourniquet twisted with a stick. His first victim, Timothy McCoy, was stabbed. Twenty-six bodies went into the crawl space under the house, where employees had been asked to dig trenches for what they were told was drainage. Three more were buried elsewhere on the property. When the crawl space was full he began throwing bodies from the I-55 bridge into the Des Plaines River.
The case broke on a fifteen-year-old. On December 11, 1978, Robert Piest finished his shift at a Des Plaines pharmacy, told his mother he was going to speak to a contractor about a better-paying job, and did not come back. Des Plaines police went to Gacy within two days. He denied knowing the boy. A background check turned up the Iowa sodomy 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 graduate who had been missing for two years, and a pharmacy receipt that placed Piest in his hands.
Gacy 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 standing at the tape, and ended with the house demolished. Four more bodies were recovered from the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers.
His trial opened in Cook County in February 1980. The defence argued insanity and multiple personality. The prosecution showed a man who had planned, hidden and lied with complete control, and the jury took under two hours. He was convicted of all thirty-three murders 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 the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill shortly after midnight on May 10, 1994. His brain was removed and examined afterwards at the request of a researcher. Nothing abnormal was found.
Several of his victims went unidentified for decades. In 2011 the Cook County Sheriff's Office reopened the case and asked families of young men who vanished in the 1970s to submit DNA. The work has since put names to several of the dead, and it continues.