"I'm Not the Monster": John Wayne Gacy's 1992 Interview with Robert Ressler

Name: "I'm Not the Monster": John Wayne Gacy's 1992 Interview with Robert Ressler
Uploaded: 2022-09-10
Duration: 31 min 53 s
Description: Two years before his execution, John Wayne Gacy told former FBI profiler Robert Ressler that he was wrongly convicted, that others used his crawl space, and that he had buried only one victim.

Two years before his execution, John Wayne Gacy told former FBI profiler Robert Ressler that he was wrongly convicted, that others used his crawl space, and that he had buried only one victim.

Subject: John Wayne Gacy
Recorded: about 1992
Runtime: 31:53

Content warning: Discusses the murders of 33 boys and young men, the disposal of bodies, and sexual abuse.

The Interview

In 1992 John Wayne Gacy, then on death row in Illinois, sat down in front of a video camera with Robert K. Ressler, the former FBI agent who had helped build the Bureau's study of serial offenders. The meeting was arranged by Craig Bowley, who had corresponded with Gacy for years. This 32-minute edit of the much longer tape shows Gacy denying the murders, blaming the police and the media for a "fantasy monster", and naming other men he claimed were responsible.

Historical Context

Gacy, a building contractor, Democratic precinct captain and part-time clown, lived on West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park Township, just outside Chicago. In 1968 he had been convicted in Waterloo, Iowa, of sodomy involving a teenage boy, and he was paroled in 1970. After 15-year-old Robert Piest disappeared from a Des Plaines pharmacy in December 1978, Des Plaines police put Gacy under surveillance and arrested him on December 21, 1978. The remains of 29 victims were found on his property and four more in the Des Plaines River. He was convicted of 33 murders in 1980 and sentenced to death on March 13, 1980.

Circumstances of the Interview

By 1992 Gacy had spent twelve years on death row and was pursuing appeals. Ressler had retired from the FBI in 1990 and was working as a consultant and author; he and Gacy had grown up in the same Chicago neighbourhood. Ressler later published his account of the conversation in *I Have Lived in the Monster* (1997). Ressler opens by saying this is the first time Gacy is speaking publicly about his case; that is the interview's framing, not a fact, as Gacy gave other interviews.

What the Interview Covers

Gacy describes his PDM contracting business, his clowning, his photograph with Rosalynn Carter, his father, his Iowa conviction (which he calls consensual), his time at a Las Vegas mortuary, and his childhood illnesses and injuries. He explains the lime in his crawl space as a remedy for the smell of clay and says he had a bad back and could not have dug there. He says he buried one victim, Tim McCoy, after killing him "in self-defense", and that he woke to find John Szyc dead on his floor. He names Michael Rossi, David Cram and Phillip Paske as among the people he says were involved, and talks about John Norman. He disputes that he ever confessed, criticises his defence lawyers' insanity plea and the Des Plaines investigation, and at the end presses Ressler on whether the case was properly investigated.

What Makes the Recording Significant

The tape is a long, on-camera account by Gacy, recorded about two years before his execution and put to him by one of the founders of FBI criminal profiling. Before 2021 only a few minutes of it had been shown publicly; NBC News Studios' 2021 docuseries was built around it. It sets out in his own words the version of events Gacy maintained to the end: that he was framed by sloppy police work and that his employees and their associates were the killers.

Archival Importance

Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. This recording preserves the denial he offered in his final years, alongside his admissions about McCoy and the crawl space, and shows Ressler's interviewing approach with one of the best known offenders he met.

Important Caveats

Gacy's denials and his accusations against others are his own claims; they were rejected at his trial and are contradicted by his own 1978 statements to police and the trial evidence. The men he names were never charged with the murders. His account of the Iowa case is his own; the boy involved is not named. The upload is an edit of a much longer tape and jumps between topics. Some of Gacy's dates differ from the record (he gives his arrest as December 22, 1978). No YouTube captions were available, so the transcript rests on a single machine pass and still needs a listening check.

Robert Ressler: My question would be to you right off the bat is, why, after so many years of silence, never having a media interview, and people have said that you have given them interviews in your house.

John Wayne Gacy: Well, that's hogwash. That's strictly hogwash.

Robert Ressler: So we're saying today.

John Wayne Gacy: I'm constantly told that I've [been] misquoted, constantly saying that I said this and I said that, and that's not happened.

Robert Ressler: So it's pretty well established on this. This is the first time you're speaking publicly about your case.

John Wayne Gacy: Right. I've always felt that my attorneys were handling it, and they said to keep a low profile and stay away from it. And in light of all that has been used against me in the media, they've created this fantasy monster. I mentioned it's been going on for the last 12 years, and I've ever had no comment, and I had no need to talk to the media, for the simple reason that they were looking for sensationalism and they were looking for the monster.

Robert Ressler: When you say fantasy monster, what are you referring to by that?

John Wayne Gacy: Well, the idea that I'm a homosexual thrill killer and all that garbage, and they painted this image of me like I strolled down the streets and stalked young boys and slaughtered them. Hell, if you could see my schedule, my work schedule, you know damn well that I was never out there.

Robert Ressler: Well, you were indicted, convicted and sentenced on 33 counts of homicide. Is that correct?

John Wayne Gacy: That's correct.

John Wayne Gacy: See, I was going to ask you, insofar as sound goes, if I'm down with my head, does that hurt your sound quality?

Off-Camera Voice: No, it's okay. Just try not to move around too much.

Off-Camera Voice: [unclear: "You're breaking the sign" / "You're breaking the silence"], give me a cue.

John Wayne Gacy: Now, I ain't going to break [unclear: "in any song" / "into song"].

Robert Ressler: We'll go into the lead-in as to, as you know, you were at 1978.

John Wayne Gacy: Yeah.

Robert Ressler: You were present.

John Wayne Gacy: Yeah.

Robert Ressler: Okay, that's the way I'd like to start, and I'd like to kind of... I'd just like to go through the generalities, maybe talk about the background of the thing, the original case.

Off-Camera Voice: [unclear: "I'm bleeping out the language"]

John Wayne Gacy: I will watch the language.

Off-Camera Voice: Yeah, he's going to try. John does tend to slip into a...

John Wayne Gacy: Well, I call it as I see it. Some people can't understand that. All right, so whenever the hell they're ready.

Robert Ressler: Now, give me kind of just an overview of the business that you eventually established, the construction work. Is this [unclear: "self-driving"], the construction and maintenance work?

John Wayne Gacy: I started doing painting, and then I started doing wallpapering and decorating, and inside of three years, PDM, which is painting, decorating and maintenance, was doing a million dollars a year. And that was... and I only had four employees.

Robert Ressler: And that was the business you were in at the time of the arrests?

John Wayne Gacy: That's correct. PDM in 1974 became a corporation, and then I owned PDM Contractors Corporation. I own PDM Plumbing, PDM Concrete and PDM Decorating. And then I branched off with another partner into [unclear: "Raftco"] Construction. And from there, we were doing strictly drug stores.

Robert Ressler: John? Now, they did not search the house at that time, or look through the house?

John Wayne Gacy: No. According [to them] afterwards, they're claiming that they came to the front door of the house and knocked on the door and that I hid from them.

Robert Ressler: Why didn't you let them in at that time, when they were knocking at the front door?

John Wayne Gacy: There was no way I could have heard them. I was way in the back of the house, in the rec room, on the telephone. When they finally walked around the side of the house, I could look out the picture window, see them there, because I was on the phone, and they could see me clearly too, sitting on the couch on the telephone, because I was talking to my sister in regards to a death in our family. So I told her that I would call her back, got up, went to the door, and he introduced himself as [unclear: "Coles and Zach and Pachel"], and they wanted to come in and talk to me about Robert Piest. And I told them that I had not had any conversation with him, but I said, if you want to talk to me, then come back there. And they wanted me to come down to the police station. Okay, well, I didn't have time, because I was doing work for the county and stuff like that.

John Wayne Gacy: Went into the police station finally on the next day. [unclear: "After this was at the cousin that I can pick out, we're at the house."] They had asked me to come in and give me an account of my whereabouts. The thing of it is, is that on that same day they held me there for nine hours. And while holding me there for nine hours, they executed a search warrant. The first search warrant was executed on December 13th. That is the search warrant where they claimed they went through the house looking for Robert Piest. It was written up to be looking for Robert Piest, and Robert Piest wasn't there.

Robert Ressler: The police had focused on you as being the suspect in the missing boy, and eventually...

John Wayne Gacy: Well, they were following me around.

Robert Ressler: Following you?

John Wayne Gacy: Yeah, constantly. On December 13th, I had made a statement to the police department, and from that date forward they had me under surveillance. The only trouble is, is that the Mickey Mouse way they were doing it, they had two cars following me day and night, and they had trouble keeping up with me, so I used to go out to the car in the morning and tell them where I was going, in case they got lost. Because at the time I was doing five construction jobs in five parts of the city. So in essence I was all over the place, but this was like Keystone Cops trying to follow me around.

Robert Ressler: There's that one photograph of you and Rosalynn Carter.

John Wayne Gacy: Yeah, Mrs. Rosalynn Carter. Well, the Secret Service tried to cover it up and said, well, we don't know how he got into the picture. Hell, I was in charge of the reception. I had to stand at the door and let them know which politicians were allowed in and which ones weren't. The thing of it is, but the Secret Service wanted to cover up and make it sound like that I had no business there. I was cleared, and I was with the Secret Service at the time, setting up the parade route and everything, because I used to set up the parades for the Polish Alliance. And then for three years in a row I had to set up the parades to run. And, you know, that's a big feat, getting 20,000 Polish people to go in one direction at one time.

John Wayne Gacy: The subdivision where the Summerdale house is located is built on a clay field. And when it rained, the rain would come down from both ends and it would flood from one house to the other. The crawl space would fill up with water. In 1976 I asked a landscaper, I said, what do you do for that sour odor of clay? And he said, spread white lime, just regular masonry lime, on the ground. He said, it'll sweeten up the clay and you won't have that odor. Sort of like what charcoal does in filtering things. That's why the lime was spread in the crawl space.

Robert Ressler: How much lime was spread down there, eventually?

John Wayne Gacy: I think seven or 800 pounds of it. The first search warrant was executed on December 13th. However, what is strange is you had 20 trained officers that came into the house, supposedly went down in the crawl space, crawled around. There was no mounds of dirt, there was no odor, there was no nothing. I never feared anybody going down the crawl space.

John Wayne Gacy: The clowning was relaxation for me. I enjoyed entertaining kids. Like some people are, you know, they unwind in different ways, either were going out drinking or that. I could put on clown makeup and I was relaxed. And I enjoyed doing it. I was, it was only twice a month that I did it.

Robert Ressler: This was not using [it] for a lure to draw kids to you?

John Wayne Gacy: No, we would visit different hospitals and entertain the children there. And we didn't entertain them with handcuffs or anything like that. All we used was balloon animals and small toys and stuff like that. But we also did parades. And in the summertime, like on 4th of July, I used to be in four parades in one day. I've always told people, when I got into clown makeup, I regressed into childhood. It was fun being a clown, because you could be yourself, or just let yourself go and act a fool. You could be slapstick and funny and have a good time. That's why I always enjoyed clowning. Clowning has taken a bad name because of what they've used in my case.

Robert Ressler: On a historical note, your Iowa conviction goes back to, what year was that?

John Wayne Gacy: 1968.

Robert Ressler: '68. And what was, just in a nutshell, you know, without getting in too deeply, what was the basis of the Iowa conviction?

John Wayne Gacy: The basis of it was a sodomy conviction. It's the only thing I ever was sentenced to, was a sodomy conviction. They're claiming that the state representative's son, who was on the other party, he claims that he was sexually abused by me, and in essence he was blackmailing me for it. Now, what it boiled down to was oral copulation, and it was consensual.

John Wayne Gacy: I moved to Waterloo, Iowa. I was honored as man of the year, because besides working full-time, I also, you know, I was a chaplain for the Jaycees, and I also ran the membership campaign. And of course we used pornography. We had the stag shows, and that's how we increased the membership from 150 to 400 members in that Jaycee chapter. We were dealing with porno films, and we had a girl set up in a room in that. So it was, you know, the thing to do. We were boosting membership from it, so nobody said a word about it. At the time, this young individual made the charge at me. He was blackmailing me. He wanted more and more money. He said, look, I gave you a blowjob, now you got to pay for this. I said, go see your father. He wasn't getting along with his father, but they came down heavy on me.

Robert Ressler: How about your dad, John? You had mentioned that you could never really please him, that he had [unclear: "talked to a viewer"].

John Wayne Gacy: And I didn't hate my dad either.

Robert Ressler: But you did have a hard upbringing with him, did you not?

John Wayne Gacy: My dad came from the old country, limited education, but he was a good provider, and with strong will and strong views. He was also an alcoholic, sorry to say.

Robert Ressler: Was he abusive? Did he strike out at you?

John Wayne Gacy: When he drank, he was almost like a different person. My dad struck all of his children all the time.

Robert Ressler: Yeah. When you paroled out, where did you set up, establish your residency?

John Wayne Gacy: I was under the interstate compact. I was paroled back to Illinois.

Robert Ressler: And you went to Springfield first, did you not?

John Wayne Gacy: No. Directly to Chicago, because I had a job working at Bruno's restaurant. That was the requirement of interstate compact transfer: you had to have a job and a place to stay. I moved in with my mother, and [unclear: "the kind of many of"] my dad had just passed away. So I lived with my mother and worked at Bruno's as a chef. When I first got out on parole, for the next two years I stayed with Bruno's restaurant and I worked for them. But on the side, I used to work from... I used to go in at four in the morning and get off at two o'clock in the afternoon, and to me that was too short of a day, not enough work. So I started doing odd jobs, painting. And I found that on the weekends, the afternoons and the weekends, I was making more money than I was as a chef, even though I was getting 12 something an hour.

John Wayne Gacy: I borrowed $600 from my mother, and through odd jobs I left the chef business. I owned PDM Contractors. PDM was able to work 52 weeks out of the year, while most construction companies shut down for the winter. I never had time to shut down, because I had them on the waiting list. Our business was growing at that rapid rate. That Summerdale house was rented to PDM Contractors. And like, the living room was the front office. The dining room of that house was like a board room, because it was an eight by 10 foot table with [unclear: "big caps and shares"]. Because we use it as a board room for meetings.

Robert Ressler: John, the media has called you a homosexual killer. What is your position on homosexuality?

John Wayne Gacy: I have nothing against it. I'm an outspoken liberal. I don't care for the labeling. I don't care for any labeling, for that fact.

Robert Ressler: You claim homosexuality?

John Wayne Gacy: No, I would definitely not be homosexual. I have nothing against what they do, and I don't deny that I've engaged in sex with males, but that I'm bisexual.

Robert Ressler: You're bisexual?

John Wayne Gacy: Right. My preference is women, and I've been married enough times and have children, and I see nothing wrong with it. My dad had conservative values. If you're out after midnight, you're up to no good. My dad did not believe it. If you're out after dark and you didn't leave a phone number, you're up to no good. So I think that's why I tended to go that way more, just to be the opposite of him. I was married twice, and just because I didn't get along in the marriages... my marriages went down the drain only because I was a workaholic, working seven days a week in there.

John Wayne Gacy: There was 12 keys out to the house.

Robert Ressler: 12 sets of keys?

John Wayne Gacy: 12 sets of keys. Anybody working for PDM Contractors had a set of keys for the house, so you could come and go when you wanted. And of course my neighbors would keep me informed. They would inform me, God, while you were out of town, they must have been partying all night there.

Robert Ressler: Who was Rossi?

John Wayne Gacy: Michael Rossi was an employee of PDM.

Robert Ressler: And how old was he at the time? Who was he?

John Wayne Gacy: He was 20 years old. Insofar as being bisexual, if I wanted to engage in sex, Rossi and Cram were willing to go down on me any time I wanted to, providing they were given stuff.

Robert Ressler: Now, when the search warrants were effected in your case, they did find an awful lot in the crawl space of your home, did they not?

John Wayne Gacy: Well, yeah. I had to offer to sell them the house, because I thought there was nothing down in the crawl space. I had never had any qualms about them going down in the crawl space.

Robert Ressler: Well, how many bodies were actually located on the property, and where?

John Wayne Gacy: To my understanding, there was a total of 29 bodies, or 28 bodies were found on the property, 26, 27 of them under the house.

Robert Ressler: And the rest?

John Wayne Gacy: One was under the driveway, one was under the garage. So that makes a total of 29.

Robert Ressler: Okay. Now, from the standpoint of the arrest, when you were arrested in this matter, this was...

John Wayne Gacy: It snowballed.

Robert Ressler: It snowballed. Okay. What was the date of that arrest? Do you recall?

John Wayne Gacy: December 22, 1978, is when I was arrested.

John Wayne Gacy: The rope trick is not... the way I've described the rope trick is, it's nothing more than a tourniquet.

Robert Ressler: Mm-hmm.

John Wayne Gacy: And I had explained it to them. I even demonstrated it to them. It would cut off the air.

Robert Ressler: Mm-hmm.

John Wayne Gacy: So if you're going to kill somebody, you just put it on their neck and twist it three times or four times or whatever, tell the person to stop moving.

Robert Ressler: And you took it where?

John Wayne Gacy: Out on the I-55 bridge.

Robert Ressler: And that's where... how was he then taken from the car and placed into the river?

John Wayne Gacy: Just opened up the trunk and [unclear: "opened up my head"].

Robert Ressler: Okay.

John Wayne Gacy: There was no big special deal out there.

Robert Ressler: Yeah.

John Wayne Gacy: I couldn't get down in the crawl space that easy, and then I had a bum back to begin with. You got to crawl on your belly to move around in the crawl space. There was no way that I could have done any of the digging down there. I had enough trouble just getting down there.

John Wayne Gacy: Gregory Godzik, let's see, number four. Gregory Godzik had come to work for me in 19... according to this, 1976. He came to us through Taft High School, through a program. He had worked for a [unclear: "Republican" / "Republic"] lumber company, and then he came to work for us.

John Wayne Gacy: I'm not the monster image that's been portrayed of me. And the only way you can make a monster image is to make it look like I stalked the streets and picked up altar boys off the street. You know, they want to make them look like innocent babes in the woods, and I was swatting them like flies. My encounters were always by happenchance. If you pull up at the stoplight and there's somebody standing there waiting for a bus, if you give them a ride, and if you ask them whether, you know, do you get in [to] anything, or you want drugs or something like that? That's how it happened. Always happenchance encounter.

Robert Ressler: A number of, what, three or four psychiatrists, psychologists interviewed [you]?

John Wayne Gacy: I had 13 of them. There was six for the defense and seven for the state.

Robert Ressler: Yeah. What was the position of the defense psychiatrists? What did they feel your problem was? What did they come up with, from the standpoint of...?

John Wayne Gacy: Border... what the hell is it? God, I can't remember offhand. Borderline personality, antisocial behavior. I don't see how anybody can be antisocial when we were involved with the public as much as I was.

Robert Ressler: How about the multiple personality issue?

John Wayne Gacy: Oh, the multiple personality came out of Dr. Reifman and Hartman, these two clowns from the Cook County there. They came to see me the first time. I said, do you want to talk to John Wayne Gacy the politician, the clown, the family man or the businessman? The next day I see it in the newspaper: Gacy has four personalities.

John Wayne Gacy: I think one of the headlines said that was a homosexual mass murder, confessed mass murder. There is no confession. And we offered, I offered as much as $10,000 if you can produce a confession where I confess to a crime. The time that I was interrogated by the police officers, there was no stenographer, there was no tape recording, there was no videotaping. Nothing was ever taken down yet. Everywhere you'll see there's five confessions by John Wayne Gacy. Now, if I confessed to something, then why wasn't it videotaped? Why wasn't it recorded? Why wasn't the stenographer brought in, had it written up and had me sign it? There is no confessions in this case.

John Wayne Gacy: What I did not know about this insanity defense is that in the state of Illinois, when you plead not guilty by reason of insanity, you're saying that you committed the crime, but that you were insane at the time. So it's not a question of innocence or guilt anymore. What they're trying to do is, your whole trial now becomes an insanity trial, where you're to decide whether a person is sane or insane.

Robert Ressler: John, how about Tim McCoy, the last one of the five that you say you had personal knowledge of?

John Wayne Gacy: Tim McCoy, even though he's the last one, he's the first one. He's the first one, actually.

Robert Ressler: Right. The first of the 33.

John Wayne Gacy: Tim McCoy was the first one. And Tim McCoy's name wasn't put on him until 1988. Prior to that, he was known as unknown number nine. And he was buried by me in the crawl space. That's the only knowledge that I have of it.

Robert Ressler: What was the circumstances of that?

John Wayne Gacy: He was killed in the house in self-defense.

Robert Ressler: And who killed him, then?

John Wayne Gacy: I stabbed him. And it was an issue with self-defense.

Robert Ressler: Was he in the process of assaulting you, or what?

John Wayne Gacy: He was coming at me with a knife. I just took the knife away and twisted it in his hand, and that's what killed him.

Robert Ressler: So at that point you yourself did bury him, then, in the crawl space?

John Wayne Gacy: Right. And if you notice, he's under concrete.

Robert Ressler: Did you bury any of the others in the crawl space?

John Wayne Gacy: No, I had nothing... I had no knowledge of them.

Robert Ressler: Yeah. Well, why is it that your first one is there, and then 20-some others are buried down there as well? Did somebody know that you had done this with the first one, that [gave] them an idea?

John Wayne Gacy: More than likely, when drinking and getting high with the others, yeah. Admitting it to them.

Robert Ressler: So you feel others then followed your suit in using this as a burial ground?

John Wayne Gacy: Without a doubt.

Robert Ressler: Just want to highlight on John Szyc.

John Wayne Gacy: You know, they want to make such an issue over John Szyc and [unclear: "it's disappeared" / "his disappearance"]. I think he was killed for his car, personally.

Robert Ressler: And your personal knowledge of this, of the Szyc case, then, is...

John Wayne Gacy: My personal knowledge of the Szyc case is, is that I had come home, and Szyc and Rossi were at the house. I had a few drinks. I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, Rossi was sleeping on the couch and Szyc was dead on the floor. I went about my own business, and he was gone later on.

Robert Ressler: And where did he go? Where did he end up?

John Wayne Gacy: I assumed he ended up in the crawl space.

Robert Ressler: Did you see him being transported down there?

John Wayne Gacy: No. Wasn't present. Didn't do the transporting.

Robert Ressler: But when he was dead, he was dead on the floor?

John Wayne Gacy: He was dead on the floor, yes.

Robert Ressler: Did you have a conversation with anybody about that?

John Wayne Gacy: No. In other words, I just kept my mouth shut, because I didn't want to get involved. My idea was just, just stay out of it.

Robert Ressler: [unclear: "Ken" / "Okay"], let's step back to your childhood. What was your state of health as a child?

John Wayne Gacy: At the age of 10, I was told I had an [unclear: "enlarged bottleneck heart"].

Robert Ressler: Okay.

John Wayne Gacy: And so I had a tendency to pass out a lot.

Robert Ressler: How about childhood illnesses? Did you have any, I mean, accidents, rather, any sort of injuries or accidents?

John Wayne Gacy: When I went to the other vocational school, when I first went to the vocational school, I got hit with a park swing in the side of the head, caused a [unclear: "master ache"].

Robert Ressler: At what age was that, approximately?

John Wayne Gacy: 14, I believe.

Robert Ressler: Got hit with a swing? Were you unconscious?

John Wayne Gacy: Yeah, I was taken to a medical clinic. That was at the time, that's when I started seeing that I had epilepsy.

Robert Ressler: Did you have any episodes of, you know, seizures?

John Wayne Gacy: Yeah, seizures were... according to the doctor, they claimed that when I have an epilepsy seizure I had 800 times my own strength, or 800 pounds of strength.

Robert Ressler: Had you ever been sexually abused by anybody?

John Wayne Gacy: At the age of nine, there was a contractor building a house next door, and he used to pick me up and take me for rides, and always wanted to show me wrestling holds, with always pinning my head in between his legs. But at the time I did not look at it as sexual. He was showing me wrestling holds where my head was always constantly pinned between his legs or under his legs.

John Wayne Gacy: I was 19 when I ran away, and that was in '80... not '80, '61. I went to Las Vegas for three months. Took off, took my car and left. I worked for Palm Mortuary, being the night man, picking up bodies at the hospitals and stuff for them. I worked as a night man only. I did... they have nothing to do with the bodies. All this talk that I slept with the dead ones or had sex with dead bodies, there is no truth to any of that.

Robert Ressler: [unclear: "He didn't" / "You didn't"] live in the mortuary?

John Wayne Gacy: I lived in the mortuary, yes, but not in the embalming room. I mean, they make it sound like, you know, I slept in the crypts with them, and I never climbed into a coffin or anything like that. That is so damn ridiculous. You know, it's the same thing. The contention is that I slept all night with Robert Piest. If you want to say I slept in the same house with a dead body, okay, fine, I'll buy that. But in the same room, no. And besides, the dead won't bother you. It's the living you got to worry about.

John Wayne Gacy: I felt things were going to work out, because I knew that I didn't do the killing, and I thought it would come out in the trial. But Amirante with this insanity defense, and again, you can call it my ignorance of the law. It's like I explained in a letter to Chief Justice William Clark, the [unclear: "evidence based"] is on the theory that the more sensational the case is, the more crazier it sounds, the insanity defense would work. And I still think it was stupid. I think they did a disservice to me, and they did a disservice to the victims. And you know what people don't understand is, I feel I was wrongfully convicted for 33 murders. And it was only because of sensationalism and ego. The Des Plaines police did a sloppy investigation. This is, I mean, it may not be the correct way of wording it, but the thing of it is, is that they had other suspects, and they had tunnel vision, to say, let's... it's Gacy's house, it's easier to put everything on Gacy.

Robert Ressler: Hey, your paintings have improved over the years. I think we've seen some.

John Wayne Gacy: I think I've learned from each one of them. Hey, I guess it's the same reason why I relate to Michelangelo, because he was a workaholic, and Leonardo da Vinci. You know, people always ask me who my favorite artists are and why. And I did not know that Michelangelo was homosexual. It doesn't make no difference to [me]. He was a workaholic, he was a sculptor, he was a painter, and did a lot of other things. Da Vinci was an inventor and that. And of course in my life I've done painting, decorating, wallpapering, I've done mural work, you name it.

John Wayne Gacy: As you know, I'm a bug about record keeping. All of my business records confirmed where I was, who I was with, what hotel I stayed at, what meals I ate. Everything was in the files, and all of those files, on December 29th of 1978, were confiscated by the Des Plaines Police Department. And those files there alone could have proven that I wasn't in Illinois when 16 of these murders, when they finally set the dates as to when these murders occurred.

Robert Ressler: You did say that you never painted yourself as the innocent babe in the woods, that...

John Wayne Gacy: We're going over the same thing.

Robert Ressler: Yeah, basically. No, but I mean, the point is, is if you feel that you're not covering up your part of the crimes, but at the same time you open up the thought that others were involved, would you be willing to cooperate with law enforcement people today, to avail, say, the materials that you have amassed, and to more or less pursue, if in fact there are others that are on the streets that have been involved in these murders? Would you be willing to cooperate and to assist, to pursue that to the ends of bringing others to justice? Would you be willing to do that?

John Wayne Gacy: I [unclear: "get no crimes about that" / "got no qualms about that"], but what I don't understand is why wasn't it done to begin with, that, say, you... The thing of it is, they want you to believe that I and I alone committed these murders. And I had nothing to do with the murders of anyone.

Robert Ressler: If anybody was involved, then how many people are we talking about beside yourself?

John Wayne Gacy: We believe there was four people involved. And that would be Michael Rossi, David Cram, Phillip Paske. Here we've got a Phillip Paske who had a newsletter going out of the Cook County jail. And here he is involved with a guy named John Norman. And John Norman was running boys for hire. They were making snuff films with young boys. To me, they were pimping them off. They were selling them. There was a crossover, when we checked into John Norman's background, that he goes all the way back to the early '70s, involved in... He ran the Norman Foundation. He ran Epic International and the Odyssey Foundation out of Dallas, Texas. And these were organizations where wealthy men could hire young boys for sexual weekends. Male prostitutes.

Robert Ressler: Have you ever met Norman? Have you had any contact with Norman?

John Wayne Gacy: I have yet to see a current picture of him, and therefore I'd have to say no. Phillip Paske may have been with him at one time or another, because, again, I came home from out of town at times, and Phillip Paske would be at the house drinking beer or something like that. David Cram is the one that brought Phillip Paske. And he [unclear: "kisses Cram"] when he didn't want to do nothing. He got ahold of this guy. He said, well, this guy can get you somebody for sex.

John Wayne Gacy: I have a lot of things that I've forgotten, that I can't remember. For instance, I can go back to my childhood and stuff and still remember that, but yet I can go into the '70s and there are a lot of things I can't remember. The same thing with the victims. I've looked at all of... I don't know if you notice here, we've got pictures of every one of the victims here. And believe it or not, for the last 12 years, I've studied these photos of the victims. And there is no... we have a shot of all of the victims together here. And when you look over at the photos, I have no recollection of any of them. Never met them. And we've gone over this more than once. They're just names and faces.

John Wayne Gacy: And when you look at them, the thing of it is, we took it a step further. We went into their backgrounds. I wanted to know where they were at, what schools they attended, who they hung out with, and what kind of activities they were into. And that's what we dug up on each one of the victims. But still, there is no association. None of them never worked for me. None of them, they never went to any places that I ever hung around, because I didn't hang around that many places, unless you were involved in politics. Or if you were involved in clowning, then I might have ran into you. But there's no way I could have run into any of them. They've got all that [unclear: "jury" / "jewelry"] that doesn't belong to the victims. They've got the two clown suits that don't belong to the victim. Just like I consider myself the 34th victim, I consider the families victims as well, because they did not get justice, from the shoddy investigation all the way down through.

John Wayne Gacy: As I told you, when the FBI first came in to check on me, you said that you were kept out of the case back in 1978. And that was only because of egos. They did not want a professional coming in and doing an investigation. So they did their sloppy investigation and let it slide that way. You see, everybody was so excited about the large, massive case, and everybody was looking with their egos as to how they could close this thing up. And you know the only one that they really hurt? You've had the victims' families vent all their hostility towards me, and they think I'm the monster that killed their son, or took out their son and stuff like that, when in fact most of them don't even have the remains of their own sons.

John Wayne Gacy: And you know, that's another thing everybody misses from this, is that the victims' families are not aware that in a lot of the cases they don't even have the remains of their own sons. Because Dr. Stein never turned over the whole body. And they took the heads off of each one of the victims. So when you turn over the remains to a loved one's family, they don't have the whole body.

John Wayne Gacy: Do you actually feel that my investigation, that my case, has been thoroughly investigated?

Robert Ressler: I think, John, in a case like this, and I find this in many, many major cases, that things are, at the time of the case, are done rather hastily, because of the fact that, you know, there's pressure on everybody.

John Wayne Gacy: But that's a political answer. I know... I don't want a political answer from you. I want a basic answer. Do you actually think that the investigation of my case has been done right?

Robert Ressler: I believe in your case that there needs to be, there should have been more focus on others, as it should have been, others checked out a little more thoroughly. That's the belief I've developed over these years.

Robert Ressler: Yeah, I just think that we're kind of wrapping it up here. We, I think we accomplished something. Certainly we put something down on tape that has not been said. My feeling as a career law enforcement officer is that if John Wayne Gacy is guilty, then he should be punished. If John Wayne Gacy has others involved, then they should be brought in, they should be punished. Basically, I believe in total investigation and total justice, and that's really what I've been looking for all along. ---