Late on the evening of December 11, 1978, a fifteen-year-old named Robert Piest was finishing his shift at the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines, a suburb northwest of Chicago. His mother, Elizabeth, had come to drive him home; it was her birthday, and the family was waiting to celebrate. Rob asked her to wait a few minutes. A contractor who had been in the store that evening, measuring for a remodeling job, had talked about a summer construction job that paid five dollars an hour, about double what Rob was earning. He told a coworker, Kim Byers, that "that contractor guy" wanted to talk to him, and he went outside. His mother waited, then went looking for him. He did not come back. The contractor's truck had been parked outside the store that evening. His name was John Wayne Gacy, and within ten days the police would be digging under his house.
By the time the work was done, twenty-nine bodies had been taken from the crawl space, the garage and the ground under the driveway at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, and four more had been recovered from the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers. A jury convicted him of thirty-three murders. Eight of the dead were buried without names. Three have since been identified. Five are still waiting.
Gacy was born in Chicago on March 17, 1942. Most of what is known about his childhood comes from the defense witnesses at his trial, called to support a plea of insanity, and the jury heard it that way. His mother, Marian Gacy, testified that he was an unhealthy baby who was not expected to live. She described his father as a man who drank, who talked to himself in two different tones of voice, and who once struck her in the face so hard that he knocked out her bridge. Gacy's sister described the father as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of personality, spoke of a locked basement, and testified that he told the boy he would turn out to be a fairy. As a teenager Gacy had fainting spells and seizures, and his mother testified that a doctor recommended he be sent to Cook County Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. She did not send him.
He left high school, went to business school, and took a job as a management trainee with a shoe company in Springfield, Illinois. In September 1964 he married a coworker, Marlynn Myers. Her father owned Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa, and he brought the couple there and put Gacy to work. In Waterloo Gacy managed several of the restaurants, joined the Jaycees and dressed up for local parades. David Dutton, then a Black Hawk County prosecutor, met him first as a witness: Gacy was the key prosecution witness after one of his restaurants was robbed. Dutton later recalled seeing him dressed as a clown in a parade and thinking he was "just a nice person to have around." He learned, he said, "that wasn't the case."
In May 1968 a Black Hawk County grand jury indicted Gacy for sodomy with a teenage boy who worked for him. That summer another youth, R. E. Schroeder, was arrested for an attack on the boy; at Gacy's murder trial twelve years later, Schroeder testified that Gacy had hired him to beat up the boy so that he would not testify. Two more Iowa men, Richard Westphal and Edward Lynch, later told the Chicago jury about sexual assaults and attempted attacks by Gacy during those years. Gacy pleaded guilty to sodomy and was sentenced to ten years. He was sent to the reformatory at Anamosa.
He was, by every account, a model prisoner. He became lead cook, ran a Jaycees chapter inside the walls and arranged for a miniature golf course to be built on the prison grounds. A Waterloo friend, Charles Hill, later testified that Gacy professed his innocence inside; another, Steve Pottinger, said his behavior did not seem to change after prison. His first wife divorced him while he was there, and he did not see her or their two children again. His father died while he was in prison. He was paroled on June 18, 1970, after about eighteen months, and went home to Illinois. Dutton said he was never given a satisfactory answer for the early release and was not consulted about it. He also said that the boy in the Iowa case suffered severe trauma and later took his own life.
Back in Chicago, Gacy lived with his mother for a few months. She then helped him buy a ranch house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in unincorporated Norwood Park Township, and kept a half interest in it. A charge that he had forced a young boy into sex acts was dropped when the boy did not come to court. On June 22, 1972, he was arrested in Northbrook for aggravated battery and reckless conduct, an arrest that would turn up in his record six years later. He had married again by then: on June 1, 1972, he wed Carole Hoff, who knew about the Iowa conviction.
He started a contracting and remodeling business, PDM Contractors, and hired teenagers and young men to work for it. He threw large summer parties for the neighborhood. He became a Democratic precinct captain. He performed at children's parties and charity events as a clown he called Pogo. In 1978 he met Rosalynn Carter at a private reception connected with Chicago's Polish Constitution Day parade, and a photograph of the First Lady shaking his hand was published after his arrest. A New Zealand newspaper, reporting a Chicago Sun-Times story in January 1979, noted that he was wearing a lapel pin suggesting Secret Service clearance in the photograph. Mrs. Carter's press secretary called the meeting an unusual coincidence.
Something else was happening in the same years, and he kept it close. Around 1975, before anyone suspected him of anything, a Chicago police officer named Bill Dorsch came upon Gacy at about three in the morning holding a shovel outside an apartment building at Elston and Miami avenues on the Northwest Side, where Gacy's mother lived and where he worked as caretaker. Asked what he was doing, Gacy answered that there were not enough hours in the day. Dorsch thought nothing of it until 1978.
His second wife testified that during their marriage she complained of a terrible smell in the house, and that he told her it was coming from dead rodents under the floor. Once, after she had been away for a few days, the smell was gone, and he told her he had poured concrete in the crawl space. She found silk bikini underwear around the house, stained at the front. One night she was watching television late when he came home, seemed startled to see her, said he had come back for something, and left again; through the window she watched a young boy with blond hair get into his car. In the garage she found a red light and a mirror on the wall. She told the court that he had a memory like an elephant. The marriage ended in divorce in March 1976.
After that the house belonged to Gacy and the young men who worked for him and sometimes lived there. One of them, David Cram, testified that Gacy had him dig trenches in the crawl space, explaining that they were for drainage, and that he spread lime throughout it. Gacy was particular about where the trenches went. Another employee, Michael Rossi, also dug there.
The young men who died at Summerdale Avenue were mostly from the city's North Side, many of them from Uptown, a crowded neighborhood of cheap rooms and transient lives in the 1970s. Some had jobs, girlfriends and plans. Some had run from difficult homes. Several worked for Gacy. Others were strangers he picked up, sometimes by offering a ride or a job, and sometimes, according to later reporting, by posing as a police officer. What follows draws on court records, the Cook County Sheriff's Office and the press; the ages and dates follow the list Oxygen published in 2018 unless noted, and other accounts differ by a year or a few days in several cases.
Gacy told investigators that he killed for the first time in January 1972. Timothy "Jack" McCoy had spent Christmas with an aunt and uncle in Michigan and set off for home just after New Year's, promising to call when he arrived. His bus had a layover at the Greyhound station in Chicago, and Gacy said he picked the boy up there. He was stabbed in the chest. His family waited fourteen years for the call; his remains were identified by dental records in May 1986. Oxygen gives his age as fifteen; A&E gives sixteen and his home as Glenwood, Iowa. The medical examiner told the jury that body number nine showed wounds consistent with stabbing.
No one else is known to have died until July 31, 1975, when John Butkovich, seventeen, one of Gacy's own employees, went to the house over a paycheck Gacy owed him and disappeared. Gacy later said Butkovich threatened him after being released from handcuffs. He was buried under the concrete floor of the garage. One of the five still unnamed, a teenager of fourteen to eighteen buried in the backyard, is believed to have been killed in this same early period, perhaps 1974.
That same month, July 1975, Gacy got handcuffs on fifteen-year-old Anthony Antonucci at the boy's home while the two were wrestling. Antonucci slipped one wrist free, waited, and turned the cuffs on Gacy, who then let him go. "You're the only one that not only got out of the handcuffs, but put them on me," Gacy told him.
From the spring of 1976, after the divorce, the killings came fast. Darrell Sampson, eighteen, disappeared on April 6 and was buried under the dining room. On May 14, two boys from Uptown went missing on the same day: Randall Reffett, fifteen, was walking home from school, and Samuel Stapleton, fourteen, was on his way home from his sister's apartment. They had grown up as rivals over neighborhood gangs and girls and become close friends, and they were buried together. Reffett's family had already been through violence in Kentucky, where both of his parents were shot in a domestic altercation and nearly died.
Michael Bonnin, seventeen, disappeared on June 3 and was found with a ligature still around his neck. William "Billy" Carroll, sixteen, another Uptown boy, went missing on June 13, the night of his older brother's birthday. His family had little left to lose and lost it anyway: that brother was killed in a street fight in Uptown a month after Gacy's trial, his father died a few years later, and his mother lived alone for some two decades. A man of twenty-three to thirty, missing his two upper front teeth and wearing a removable denture, died that summer and has never been named.
James "Jimmy" Haakenson, sixteen, had made good on angry vows to run away from his home in St. Paul, Minnesota. On August 5, 1976, he called his mother from Chicago to say he was fine and would be home soon. Rick Johnston, seventeen, went to a rock concert at the Aragon Ballroom on August 6 and was supposed to call his mother for a ride home; he never called. The two were found stacked in the same grave, Haakenson directly beneath Johnston and above another young man who has never been identified. Two further unnamed victims, one aged eighteen to twenty-two with bad teeth and one aged fifteen to twenty-four, are thought to have died between August and October 1976.
Kenneth Parker, sixteen, and his friend Michael Marino, fourteen, were last seen together on Chicago's North Side on October 25, 1976. Their parents reported them missing the next day. They were strangled and buried together. William George Bundy, who had turned nineteen four days earlier, disappeared on October 26. He had dropped out of Senn High School and was learning to be an electrician; he had done construction work, probably for Gacy's company. His sister remembered a good diver and gymnast whom all her girlfriends wanted to date. He left that night for a party, forgetting his wallet at home. Francis Wayne Alexander, a North Carolina native who had come to Chicago by way of New York, died sometime between early 1976 and early 1977, at about twenty-one. Gregory Godzik, seventeen, worked briefly for PDM Contractors and disappeared on December 12, 1976, after dropping off a girl from a date. Gacy later claimed that Godzik dug his own grave. His girlfriend, Judy Patterson, knew Gacy and did not like him.
In 1977 the pattern held. John Szyc, nineteen, disappeared on January 20; accounts differ on whether he worked for Gacy or met him over the sale of his car, but Gacy later sold that car to Michael Rossi and kept Szyc's Maine West High School class ring. Gacy said he killed Szyc after he asked for more money. An unnamed man of twenty-two to thirty-three, who carried a key fob with the name "Greg" on it, died that winter. Jon Prestidge, twenty, a Michigan man visiting friends in Chicago, disappeared on March 15. Another unnamed victim, seventeen to twenty-one, who had once broken his left collarbone, died in the spring or early summer. Matthew Bowman, nineteen, disappeared on July 5 and was found with the rope still around his neck.
Robert Gilroy, eighteen, the son of a Chicago police sergeant, lived four blocks from Gacy and disappeared in mid-September. John Mowery, nineteen, a Marine studying to become an accountant, disappeared on September 25; his family had already lost his sister to an unrelated murder in 1972. Russell Nelson, a University of Minnesota architecture student from Cloquet, Minnesota, came to Chicago that October with a friend to look at buildings. He was an honor student planning to marry. He called his mother, Norma, to wish her a happy birthday, and was last seen at a dance club. Robert Winch, sixteen, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, disappeared on November 10; Tommy Boling, twenty, a father of one, on November 18; and David Talsma, nineteen, a Marine, on December 9. Talsma's remains were identified on what would have been his twenty-first birthday.
William Kindred, nineteen, disappeared on February 16, 1978. His girlfriend, Mary Jo Paulus, had run into Gacy at a bar several times that year. He was the last of the dead to be buried in the crawl space. There was no more room. When Timothy O'Rourke, twenty, was killed around June 1978, Gacy drove his body to a bridge on Interstate 55 and threw it into the Des Plaines River. Frank Landingin, nineteen, an Uptown young man trying to escape a turbulent family, was killed on or about November 4 and found in the river; he had died of strangulation, not drowning. James Mazzara, twenty, disappeared on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, and was also found in the river. Then came Robert Piest.
The medical evidence was grim and partial. Six of the bodies still had ligatures around the neck. Thirteen had foreign material lodged in the back of the mouth and throat, and the medical examiner gave asphyxia as the cause of those deaths. Gacy's account to police was that the young men had come to the house voluntarily, that they had sold themselves, and that the killings were about money. Family after family told the jury otherwise: their sons had steady girlfriends or were planning to marry.
Some of the men he attacked survived, and their testimony was central to the trial. Jeffrey Rignall, who testified for the defense, said Gacy offered him a ride one night in 1978, held a cloth soaked in chloroform over his face, and took him to the house, where Rignall was strapped to a board hung from chains and assaulted while he drifted in and out of consciousness. He woke next to a statue in a park near his home in Chicago. The repeated doses of chloroform had damaged his liver. He went to the police, and later helped identify Gacy, but no case was brought in time to matter.
Robert Donnelly testified that Gacy took him into the house at gunpoint and handcuffed him, forced him to drink, assaulted him, held his head under water in the bathtub until he blacked out, choked him, and played Russian roulette with a pistol loaded with a blank. Afterward Gacy drove him to Marshall Field's, where Donnelly worked, and told him he would die later. Donnelly went to the police, and an officer arrested Gacy for kidnapping and deviate sexual assault. Gacy told them Donnelly had agreed to sex for money. Michel Ried also testified about an assault. A young man who lived and worked with Gacy testified that Gacy hit him with a hammer in the dark and stood ready to hit him again until he grabbed his arm; Gacy then put the hammer down and said he did not know what had come over him.
Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak, a Des Plaines detective with a military police background, took charge of the Piest search. The day after Rob vanished, officers went to Summerdale Avenue. Gacy said he had been at the pharmacy but did not recall talking to anyone named Rob. Kim Byers, seventeen, was sure he was lying: she had seen Gacy watching Rob in the store. Running Gacy's name, Kozenczak learned of the 1968 Waterloo conviction and the 1972 Northbrook arrest. On December 13 he swore out a complaint for a search warrant listing what Rob had been wearing, down to a light blue down jacket and brown suede shoes, along with three of Gacy's vehicles.
The search that day produced an inventory of fifty-seven items, among them handcuffs, a pistol, police badges, driver's licenses in other people's names and sex literature. Two of the items mattered most. One was a receipt numbered 36119 for film left for developing at the Nisson Pharmacy, found in a kitchen wastebasket. Kim Byers had borrowed Rob's parka that evening and was wearing it when she filled out the envelope; she put the stub in its pocket, and Rob took the jacket back before he went out to the contractor. The other was a high school class ring belonging to John Szyc, missing for nearly two years. The officers photographed a television that looked like one taken from Szyc's apartment. Gacy, it turned out, had sold Szyc's car to Michael Rossi.
The police then put Gacy under surveillance around the clock, with teams of Des Plaines officers following his car through the city and suburbs. He talked to them and told them that clowns can get away with murder. He told one detective, Michael Albrecht, that he would not spend a day in jail for this. On one cold day he invited two of the officers inside to warm up. Officer Robert Schultz used the bathroom, and when the furnace came on a smell came through the heating vent that Schultz, who had been around at least forty decomposing bodies in his career, recognized. Albrecht later recalled him saying it smelled like a morgue. Schultz waited about forty hours before reporting it to Kozenczak; the delay was argued over on appeal, but the smell became part of the second warrant. Meanwhile Gacy unplugged the sump pump in the crawl space, so that it would flood, and removed the ladder down into it.
The strain began to show. Two days before his arrest he asked an officer to contact his attorney. On the night of December 20 he went to his lawyers and told them he was responsible for some thirty-three deaths. The next day, according to Rossi, he was breaking into tears. He told Cram and Rossi what he had done. At a gas station he handed a bag of cigarettes to an attendant, and the owner, John Lucas, turned it over. He told a cement contractor named Ron Rhode, "Ron, I've been a bad boy. I killed 30 people, give or take a few." He said he had doctors on his side. Fearing he would kill himself, the police arrested him on December 21, 1978, on a marijuana charge, and Kozenczak's team served a second warrant on the house that evening, citing the receipt, the ring and the smell. Officers went down into the wet crawl space with a shovel and found human remains almost at once. When police asked David Cram to check the crawl space, he refused.
Gacy talked to the police that night and the next day, and to an assistant state's attorney, Lawrence Finder. He drew a diagram of the crawl space showing where the bodies lay. He said he was one of four Johns, and that one of them, Jack Hanley, did not like homosexuality and knew why Piest's body had gone into the river. He used a rosary to show officers what he called the rope trick: a loop around the neck, tightened by twisting. He said he had handcuffed Piest, and that while he was killing him the telephone rang, and he went to answer it. He said he had made two or three passes over a bridge before it was clear enough to drop the body into the river. He told an investigator named Bedoe that he stuffed socks into his victims' mouths and that he had graves dug in advance so that he would have them available. He was emphatic to Finder that there were no bodies under the driveway; a body was later found there. He told a detective he would not be in jail long.
The excavation went on through the winter, with crowds gathered at the police tape and the dead carried out one by one, numbered in the order they came out. Within eight days the size of what had happened was clear. Szyc, missing since January 1977 and assumed to have left town, was identified by dental records in 1979. Piest's body was found in the Illinois River on April 9, 1979. The house was torn down that same month before a crowd of onlookers. The lot was sold in 1984, and a new house went up there later in the decade.
The accounts of where the bodies lay do not agree in every detail. The Illinois Supreme Court wrote in 1984 that twenty-nine bodies came from under and around the house; the Associated Press in 1994 said twenty-seven came from the crawl space and two from elsewhere on the property; NPR, citing the Cook County Sheriff's Office in 2021, gave twenty-six in the crawl space and three elsewhere; CNN in 2018 gave twenty-seven in the crawl space, one under the garage and one in the backyard; and the federal appeals court in 1993 said twenty-eight lay in the crawl space and one under the driveway. Every account agrees on twenty-nine at the house and four in the rivers.
Gacy was indicted on thirty-three counts of murder, one of deviate sexual assault, one of indecent liberties with a child and one of aggravated kidnapping; the kidnapping count was dismissed during the trial. Publicity in Chicago was so heavy that the jury was chosen in Winnebago County, around Rockford, and brought to Chicago for the trial. The defense had asked for about $38,000 for a public opinion survey to help pick a county; the judge refused, and the Supreme Court later held that a defendant may not shop for a county favorable to his defense. The judge questioned prospective jurors one by one himself, taking questions suggested by the lawyers.
The trial opened on February 6, 1980, before Judge Louis Garippo. The prosecutors were William Kunkle, Robert Egan and Terry Sullivan; Gacy's lead defense lawyer was Sam Amirante. There was no real dispute that he had killed the young men found at his house. The question was his mind. "The defense of insanity is valid and it is the only defense that we could use here," his lawyer told the jury.
The state called about sixty witnesses over thirteen days. Parents and siblings took the stand to say who their sons and brothers had been; Norma Nelson came from Minnesota to testify about Russell. Cram described the trenches and the lime. Rossi described the last day. Antonucci described the handcuffs. Carole Hoff, testifying under a new married name, described the smell and the underwear. Ron Rhode repeated what Gacy had told him. A prison guard, Oscar Pernell, testified that after a letter-writing session in custody he found Gacy with a towel around his neck. Albrecht, Officer Phillip Bettiker and other officers described the surveillance and the statements.
The defense called the mother and sister, Jeffrey Rignall, and a row of experts. Dr. Thomas Eliseo, a psychologist, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, though he admitted on cross-examination that he had partly projected back from a single interview. Dr. Lawrence Freedman, a psychiatrist who had spent more than fifty hours with Gacy, called him a pseudo-neurotic paranoid schizophrenic but declined to give a legal opinion on sanity. Dr. Robert Traisman agreed on cross-examination that Gacy knew right from wrong. Dr. Richard Rappaport diagnosed a borderline personality with psychosexual disorders and conceded he had trouble explaining the river disposals. Dr. Helen Morrison diagnosed an atypical psychosis and said he was not legally responsible.
The state's experts answered them directly. Dr. Leonard Heston had diagnosed antisocial personality in 1968. Dr. Robert Reifman found an antisocial or narcissistic personality disorder, said Gacy was feigning symptoms, and testified that at no time that he knew of was Gacy out of touch with reality. Dr. James Cavanaugh described pervasive narcissism with obsessive-compulsive, antisocial and hypomanic features and ruled out schizophrenia. Dr. Jan Fawcett, in rebuttal, said the defense theories rested on inference rather than demonstrated cause and that there was no factual basis for a diagnosis of psychosis.
The jury deliberated for less than two hours before it found him guilty on all thirty-three murder counts and the other charges, in March 1980. Only twelve of the killings could be proved to have happened after Illinois brought back the death penalty, and on those twelve the same jury, after about two more hours, returned death sentences. The other twenty-one brought natural life. Great American Trials later described him as having been convicted of more murders than any other serial killer.
The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and death sentences on June 6, 1984, in a long opinion that went through the warrants, the change of venue, the jury selection, the psychiatric evidence and his statements to police. It found both warrants valid and ruled that, with so little conflict in the evidence, the jury had been entitled to reject insanity. Justice Seymour Simon agreed with the convictions but dissented on the death penalty. In 1988 the same court rejected his petition for post-conviction relief. He had argued, among some forty claims of his own, that his lawyers failed to present evidence in mitigation and that his attorney had been offered a book contract. The court found neither deficient performance nor prejudice. "The Strickland standard requires a reasonable probability of a different result, not merely a possibility," it wrote.
The federal courts followed. In April 1993 the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the denial of habeas relief in an opinion by Judge Frank Easterbrook that began: "John Wayne Gacy is a serial killer." Of more than a hundred arguments Gacy had raised over the years, the court addressed four and rejected them all. Easterbrook noted that delay had become its own kind of reprieve: "judge and jury cannot decide whether a murderer will die, but only how soon."
On death row at Menard Correctional Center, Gacy behaved as he had at Anamosa. In 1982 twenty inmates signed a petition complaining that he moved freely about the visiting room, carried a putty knife and had a color television in his cell; a corrections spokesman answered that his good conduct and building experience had earned him maintenance work and that "basically, he pushes a broom." He painted constantly: himself as Pogo, other clowns, Elvis Presley, Jesus, the Seven Dwarfs. The canvases sold for anywhere from about two hundred to twenty thousand dollars, and demand rose as the execution neared. He ran a 900 telephone line on which callers paid $23.88 to hear him profess his innocence for twelve minutes. Illinois sued over the profits from the paintings and the phone line, but the suit was dropped before his death. Two men, Joe Roth and Wally Knoebel, bought a batch of the paintings and burned them, letting relatives of his victims throw them into the fire.
He also changed his story. In a 1992 interview with the Chicago television anchor Walter Jacobson, he denied the murders and said a truth serum test showed he had "no knowledge of the crime whatsoever." CBS Chicago later noted that there was no evidence he had ever taken one. He called the picture the press had painted of him, a man who picked up altar boys off the street, "ludicrous." He offered a narrower confession instead: "If you want to charge me with anything, charge me with complicity in two of the murders." Elsewhere he blamed political conspiracies, and in the Jacobson interview he suggested that others had been involved. No court gave any of it weight.
His last appeals failed in the days before the execution. On his last day he was flown by helicopter from Menard to Stateville Correctional Center, near Joliet. A prison spokesman called him chatty; he talked about the Chicago Cubs, saw neighbors who had known him for years, and ate a last meal of fried chicken, fried shrimp, French fries and strawberries. Outside, supporters and opponents of the death penalty gathered in large groups, and some of the crowd sang "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye." William Kunkle, who had prosecuted him, sat in the front row of the witness room.
He was executed by lethal injection early on Tuesday, May 10. The procedure was delayed when the line carrying the chemicals clogged, and he was pronounced dead at 12:58 a.m., eighteen minutes after the two anonymous executioners began. According to the state's corrections director, Howard Peters, he said that taking his life would not make up for the loss of the others and that the state was murdering him. Other accounts give coarser last words; Kunkle said he heard nothing.
Nearly two dozen relatives of his victims were kept out of the execution chamber for security reasons and waited in an administration building until they heard. Tim Nieder, whose brother John Mowery was killed in 1977 at nineteen, said: "We were victims here, too." He added: "I feel like justice has finally been served, but it's been a long time in the making." Kunkle said: "He got a much easier death than any of his victims." The Will County coroner said his body would be cremated at the family's request. Karen Conti, one of his last lawyers, later said that he never expressed concern about his death, and that she lost clients and received threats for representing him.
His brain was removed at the autopsy and given to Dr. Helen Morrison, the psychiatrist who had testified for the defense and had spent more than six hundred hours interviewing him. Her tests found nothing abnormal. "Murder is just an action," she said years later. "It has no meaning. It has no motive. It has no underlying cause."
The part of the case that is still moving is the identification of the dead. The eight unnamed victims were buried in Chicago-area cemeteries under headstones reading "We Remembered." In October 2011 Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart and Detective Sergeant Jason Moran reopened the question, exhumed the eight, and asked families of young men who had gone missing in the Chicago area between 1972 and 1978 to give DNA.
Within weeks there was a name. The hotline had taken about 125 inquiries, and Bundy's was the only match: his sister, Laura O'Leary, and his brother, Robert, gave DNA, and the University of North Texas laboratory compared it with Victim No. 19. After Gacy's arrest the family had tried to have his dental records compared with the dead, but his dentist had retired and destroyed them. He had been the nineteenth body taken from the crawl space, buried as an unknown at Resurrection Cemetery, where his siblings had visited other relatives for years without knowing he lay there too. "Today's terribly sad, but it is also a day that provides closure," his sister said in November 2011.
In July 2017 the sheriff's office identified James Haakenson, Victim No. 24. His mother had come to Chicago in 1978 to ask whether he was among the dead, and had walked the streets looking for him with a family friend, but without dental records there was no answer; she died two decades later. Years later Haakenson's nephew found the sheriff's appeal online and persuaded his father and aunt to give samples. There was, Dart said, an immediate hit. His sister, Lorie Sisterman, said the family still wanted him back, and that resolution would never mean closure.
In October 2021, working with the DNA Doe Project and forensic genetic genealogy, investigators named the remains known as Victim 5. Francis Wayne Alexander was born in North Carolina and had moved to Chicago by way of New York. He was about twenty-one, divorced within a year of arriving, and was killed between early 1976 and early 1977. His family had never filed a missing person report.
Five remain unnamed. Investigators, working from Gacy's statements, where each body lay and the forensic evidence, estimated when each was killed: one, found in the backyard, a teenager of fourteen to eighteen killed between January 1972 and July 1975; one, a man of twenty-three to thirty, killed in the summer of 1976; two young men killed between August and October 1976; and one, aged seventeen to twenty-one, killed in the spring or early summer of 1977.
The DNA appeal had results well outside the Gacy case. Families who came forward looking for a son or brother among his victims found answers elsewhere. The sheriff's office solved four unrelated cold case homicides, found five missing people alive, and learned that two others had died without their families knowing. In 2015 a sample given by Willa Wertheimer, looking for her brother Andre Drath, a sixteen-year-old ward of the state last seen in Chicago around the end of 1978, matched an unidentified homicide victim in San Francisco. Sheriff Dart said they had gone in hoping to identify one victim.
There is one dispute inside the identifications. In the 1970s Kenneth Parker and Michael Marino were identified by dental records. Marino's mother, Sherry Marino, never accepted it, and in 2014 she had both bodies exhumed and said DNA tests showed the remains were not her son's. The sheriff's office and the medical examiner stood by the original identifications.
Some of the young men Gacy killed had never been reported missing. They were estranged from their families, or living rough, or their families believed they had simply left. That is why eight of them could be buried as numbers. It is also part of why he was able to take them.
Several theories about the case remain open and none has been proved; each remains a claim, not a finding.
More victims. Gacy at one point estimated he had killed about forty-five men, against the thirty-three found. Bill Dorsch, the former Chicago officer who had seen him with a shovel around 1975, came to believe that more were buried at the Elston and Miami apartment building. A former tenant, Lynn Troester, said she had seen Gacy digging trenches in the front yard. Chicago police dug in the backyard in 1998 and found nothing. Dorsch commissioned a radar scan that showed seventeen underground anomalies and argued that only two had been checked. In 2013 the sheriff's office, with a warrant approved by the state's attorney, returned with cadaver dogs flown in from Quantico, coring equipment and imaging. No victims were found. Dart said afterward that he had no plans to dig anywhere else. Gacy's blood sample had not been linked to any other crime as of that year.
Accomplices. In 2012 two Chicago defense lawyers, Robert Stephenson and Steven Becker, told the Chicago Sun-Times that Gacy's own records put him out of town on a trip to Pittsburgh from September 12 to 16, 1977, when Robert Gilroy disappeared, and that his work schedule left too little time to have taken John Mowery alone. Russell Nelson's mother said the friend who had been with her son in Chicago later told her a different story and offered two of Nelson's brothers jobs with Gacy. The lawyers said they would give the friend's name to the sheriff. No one else has been charged in any of the thirty-three deaths, and Gacy's own later talk of others being involved came from a man who also denied killing anyone at all.
The case has been retold many times. The more recent work has turned toward the dead. David Nelson's Boys Enter the House (Chicago Review Press, 2021) reconstructs the lives of several of them, among them Stapleton and Reffett, Landingin and Carroll, and Godzik and Szyc, from interviews with their families and friends. Kim Byers spoke publicly about the night at the pharmacy in Netflix's Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, and her daughter, Courtney Lund O'Neil, wrote Postmortem: What Survives the John Wayne Gacy Murders. Peacock made a scripted series, Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy. Joseph Kozenczak, honored by the International Association of Chiefs of Police for the investigation and later chief of the Des Plaines department, died in May 2015 at seventy-five.
March 17, 1942: John Wayne Gacy born in Chicago.
September 1964: Marries Marlynn Myers; moves to Waterloo, Iowa.
May 1968: Indicted in Black Hawk County, Iowa, for sodomy; pleads guilty and is sentenced to ten years.
June 18, 1970: Paroled from Anamosa after about eighteen months; returns to Chicago.
January 1972: Killing of Timothy McCoy, by Gacy's own account.
June 1, 1972: Marries Carole Hoff; living at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue.
July 31, 1975: John Butkovich disappears.
March 1976: Divorce from Carole Hoff is final.
April 1976 to February 1978: Twenty-six more young men killed and buried at the house.
June 1978 to November 1978: Three victims thrown into the Des Plaines River.
December 11, 1978: Robert Piest disappears from the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines.
December 13, 1978: First search warrant; the receipt and Szyc's ring are seized.
December 21, 1978: Gacy arrested; second warrant served; remains found in the crawl space.
April 9, 1979: Piest's body recovered from the Illinois River. The house is demolished that month.
February 6, 1980: Trial opens in Chicago before a jury from Winnebago County.
March 1980: Convicted of thirty-three murders; sentenced to death on twelve counts.
June 1984: Illinois Supreme Court affirms.
1988: Post-conviction petition rejected.
April 12, 1993: Seventh Circuit affirms denial of federal habeas relief.
May 10, 1994: Executed by lethal injection at Stateville; pronounced dead at 12:58 a.m.
October 2011: Sheriff Dart exhumes the eight unidentified victims; William Bundy named in November.
April 2013: Search at the Elston and Miami apartment building finds no remains.
July 2017: James Haakenson identified.
October 2021: Francis Wayne Alexander identified. Five victims remain unnamed.