John Wayne Gacy

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 21st of December 1978, an evidence technician named Daniel Genty crawled into a space measuring 28 by 38 feet beneath a ranch-style house outside Chicago. He worked his way to the southwest corner and began to dig. Within minutes he had uncovered decayed flesh and a human arm bone. Genty called out to the investigators above that they could now charge the owner with murder. Then he added a sentence that would define the case: "I think this place is full of kids." The house belonged to John Wayne Gacy, a building contractor who was a familiar face at neighborhood gatherings and charity events. At many of those events he appeared in clown makeup. He would become known as the Killer Clown. How does a man with a thriving business, political friends and a reputation for helping his neighbors hide something like this? Why did the people who raised alarms fail to stop him? And what finally sent the police to his door?

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• 2. A Father's Verdict

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  One of John Gacy's earliest memories was a beating at the age of four. His father delivered it because the boy had accidentally disarranged the parts of a car engine. John Stanley Gacy was an auto repair machinist and a veteran of World War I. He was also an alcoholic who abused his wife and children, verbally and physically.

  John Wayne Gacy was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago on the 17th of March 1942. He was the second of three children and the only son. His mother, Marion Elaine Robison, was a homemaker, and he was close to her and to his two sisters.

  The father called his son "dumb and stupid" and held up the sisters as the better children. When Marion tried to shield the boy, the father mocked him as a "sissy" and a "mama's boy" who would "probably grow up queer". Even so, Gacy loved his father. He later said he felt he was "never good enough" in the older man's eyes.

  In 1949 a family friend began to molest the boy. Gacy never told his father, afraid he would be the one blamed.

  A medical puzzle shadowed his childhood. He was overweight and unathletic, and a heart condition meant he was told to avoid sports. In the fourth grade he began to suffer blackouts. A burst appendix in 1957 added to his hospital stays. Gacy later estimated that between the ages of 14 and 18 he had spent almost a year in hospital, and he blamed those absences for his falling grades. No doctor ever settled on a diagnosis. His father suspected malingering and once accused him of faking while he lay in a hospital bed.

  In 1960, at 18, Gacy took work as an assistant precinct captain for a local Democratic Party candidate. His father called him a "patsy". The same year the father bought him a car but kept the title in his own name. It took Gacy several years to pay it off, and the keys were confiscated whenever he disobeyed.

  In April 1962 Gacy bought a spare set of keys. His father answered by removing the distributor cap and holding it for three days. Hours after the cap was replaced, Gacy drove to Las Vegas with $136, hoping to stay with a cousin.

  In Las Vegas he worked first for an ambulance service and then as an attendant at Palm Mortuary. For three months he watched morticians embalm bodies, sometimes serving as a pallbearer, and slept on a cot behind the embalming room. He later confessed that one night, alone, he climbed into the coffin of a teenage boy and embraced the body before being struck by a sense of shock. The episode sent him home to Illinois.

  Back in Chicago he enrolled at Northwestern Business College, though he had never finished high school. He graduated in 1963, and the Nunn-Bush Shoe Company took him on as a management trainee. In 1964 the company transferred him to Springfield, Illinois.

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• 3. The Colonel of Waterloo

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  By 1965 Gacy had risen to vice-president of the Springfield Jaycees, and he was named the third-most outstanding Jaycee in Illinois. He had joined the chapter during his courtship of Marlynn Myers, a co-worker at the shoe company. They became engaged in March 1964 and married that September.

  Marlynn's father then bought three Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa. The young couple moved there so that Gacy could manage them. The offer paid $15,000 a year plus a share of the profits, and the couple were to live in her parents' former home.

  In his Waterloo basement Gacy opened a "club" where employees could drink and play pool. He hired teenagers of both sexes but socialized only with the boys. He often gave them alcohol before making sexual advances. If a boy refused, Gacy passed the advance off as a joke or a test of morals.

  A son was born in February 1966 and a daughter in March 1967. Gacy later called this period of his life "perfect". In July 1966 his parents visited, and his father privately apologized for the old abuse. Shaking his son's hand, he said, "Son, I was wrong about you."

  Gacy threw himself into the Waterloo Jaycees on top of twelve- and fourteen-hour days at the restaurants. At meetings he handed out fried chicken and insisted that people call him "Colonel". Some of the Waterloo Jaycees, Gacy among them, were involved in drug abuse, pornography, prostitution and wife swapping. Still, his fundraising earned respect. In 1967 he was named outstanding vice-president of the chapter and sat on its board of directors.

  In August 1967 Gacy lured 15-year-old Donald Voorhees Jr. to his house with the promise of stag films. Voorhees was the son of Donald Edwin Voorhees, a local politician and fellow Jaycee. Gacy gave the boy alcohol and sexually assaulted him. Over the following months he abused several other youths. He also convinced some teenagers that he was commissioned to run homosexual experiments for scientific research, paying them up to $50 each.

  In March 1968 the younger Voorhees told his father, who went straight to the police. Gacy was arrested on a sodomy charge and a charge of attempting to assault 16-year-old Edward Lynch. He denied everything and demanded a polygraph test. The results were "indicative of deception". Gacy claimed the charges were political revenge, because the elder Voorhees had opposed his nomination as president of the Iowa Jaycees. Several fellow members believed him and rallied to his side.

  On the 10th of May 1968 Gacy was indicted. On the 30th of August he offered 18-year-old employee Russell Schroeder $300 to attack Voorhees and scare him out of testifying. Schroeder lured the boy to an isolated park, sprayed Mace in his eyes and beat him. Voorhees escaped and reported it. Schroeder confessed the next day and named Gacy as the man who had asked him to do it.

  On the 12th of September 1968 Gacy was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation at the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Iowa. Two doctors diagnosed an antisocial personality disorder. They judged that he was unlikely to benefit from treatment and that his behavior would keep bringing him into conflict with society. They also found him competent to stand trial.

  On the 7th of November 1968 Gacy pleaded guilty to one count of sodomy involving Voorhees. He said the boy had offered himself and that he had acted from curiosity. Nobody believed him. He was convicted on the 3rd of December and sentenced to ten years at Anamosa State Penitentiary.

  That same day his wife petitioned for divorce, asking for the house, sole custody of their children and alimony. The court gave her what she asked, and the divorce was finalized on the 18th of September 1969. Gacy never saw his first wife or his children again.

  In prison he quickly won a name as a model inmate. Within months he was head cook. He joined the inmate Jaycee chapter and raised its membership from 50 to 650 men in under eighteen months. He won higher daily pay for inmates in the mess hall and oversaw improvements that included a miniature golf course. In February 1970 he received a distinguished service award.

  Parole was denied in June 1969. To prepare for his next hearing, Gacy completed sixteen high school courses and received his diploma in November. On Christmas Day 1969 his father died of cirrhosis. Gacy collapsed on the floor, sobbing, when he heard. His request to attend the funeral under supervision was refused.

  He was paroled on the 18th of June 1970, having served eighteen months of his ten-year sentence. The conditions included a nightly curfew and a move to Chicago to live with his mother.

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• 4. Neighborhood Man

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  Clarence Lane, a fellow Jaycee who never doubted Gacy's innocence, collected him from prison in June 1970. Gacy told Lane he would "never go back to jail" and planned to rebuild his life in Waterloo. Within twenty-four hours he was in Chicago instead. He arrived by bus on the 19th of June and soon found work as a short-order cook.

  On the 12th of February 1971 he was charged with sexually assaulting a teenage boy who said Gacy had lured him from Chicago's Greyhound terminal. The court dismissed the case when the boy did not appear. On the 22nd of June he was arrested again, on charges of aggravated sexual battery and reckless conduct. A youth claimed Gacy had flashed a sheriff's badge, lured him into a car and forced him to perform a sex act. Those charges were dropped after the complainant tried to blackmail Gacy. The Iowa Board of Parole never heard about either case. His parole ended on the 18th of October 1971, and a month later his Iowa convictions were sealed.

  With financial help from his mother, Gacy bought a ranch-style house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in unincorporated Norwood Park Township, part of metropolitan Chicago. He lived there until his arrest in December 1978. Neighbors saw a helpful man who lent out his construction tools and plowed snow from the sidewalks for nothing. From 1974 to 1978 he threw themed summer parties, and as many as 400 people came, including neighbors, politicians and business associates.

  In August 1971, shortly after moving in, Gacy became engaged to Carole Hoff, a woman he had briefly dated in high school. She moved in with her two young daughters from an earlier marriage. Gacy's mother left the house shortly before the wedding on the 1st of July 1972.

  The marriage was failing by 1975. Gacy told his wife he was bisexual, and after they had sex on Mother's Day that year he told her it would be "the last time". He started spending his evenings away and coming home in the early morning, blaming late meetings. Carole saw him bringing teenage boys into the garage in the small hours. She also found gay pornography and men's wallets and identification in the house. When she asked about them, he told her angrily that it was none of her business.

  In October 1975, after a bitter argument, Carole asked for a divorce, and Gacy agreed. She stayed in the house until February 1976. The divorce was finalized on the 2nd of March 1976 on a false claim that Gacy had been unfaithful with women.

  The business that paid for all this began small. In 1971 Gacy founded PDM Contractors, the letters standing for Painting, Decorating, and Maintenance. His probation officer approved the arrangement, and Gacy worked evenings on contracts while cooking by day. The jobs grew from minor repairs into interior design, remodeling and landscaping. In mid-1973 he quit cooking to run PDM full time. By 1975 he was working up to sixteen hours a day. In March 1977 he also became a supervisor at PE Systems, a firm that remodeled drugstores. He often ran four projects at once and traveled to other states. By 1978 PDM took in more than $200,000 a year.

  A Moose Club membership introduced Gacy to a "Jolly Joker" clown club, whose members performed at fundraisers and parades and entertained hospitalized children. In late 1975 he joined and invented two characters of his own. Pogo was the "happy clown" and Patches the "more serious" one. He designed his own makeup and costumes. He rarely took payment, and he said clowning let him "regress into childhood". He performed at parties, political events, charity functions and children's hospitals.

  Politics opened more doors. Gacy offered his employees to clean the local Democratic Party headquarters for free. In return he got a seat on the Norwood Park Township street lighting committee and later the title of precinct captain. In 1975 he was made director of Chicago's annual Polish Constitution Day Parade, a job he kept until 1978.

  Through the parade he met First Lady Rosalynn Carter and was photographed with her wearing an "S" pin, a sign of special clearance. The photograph later embarrassed the United States Secret Service.

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• 5. The Handcuff Trick

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  On the 22nd of August 1976, David Cram celebrated his 19th birthday with drinks at Gacy's house while Gacy sat among them dressed as Pogo. Gacy then tricked Cram into putting on handcuffs and swung him around by the chain. Gacy announced that he planned to rape him. Cram kicked him in the face and got free. A month later Gacy appeared at Cram's bedroom door with the same intention. Cram resisted, and Gacy left, saying, "You ain't no fun."

  Cram was not the first to fight off the trick. In July 1975 Gacy had cuffed 15-year-old employee Anthony Antonucci, but one cuff was loose and the boy freed an arm. Antonucci was a high school wrestler. He grappled with Gacy, took the key and cuffed Gacy's own hands behind his back. Gacy calmed down and promised to leave if he was freed, and he did. Both young men survived because they were able to fight back. Gacy's many other targets were not so lucky.

  By the end, Gacy had murdered at least thirty-three young men and boys between 1972 and 1978. His victims were sometimes people he knew and sometimes strangers. Some were found at Chicago's Greyhound bus station or at Bughouse Square. Others were picked up on the street with the offer of a job at PDM, or alcohol, drugs or money for sex. Some he grabbed by force. Others believed he was a policeman, because he often carried a sheriff's badge and had red spotlights fitted to his black Oldsmobile.

  Inside the house, Gacy typically gained a young man's trust with drink or drugs. Then he produced handcuffs for what he called "the handcuff trick", sometimes as part of a clown routine. He would cuff his own hands behind his back and secretly slip free with a hidden key. Then he offered to show the trick to his guest. Once the victim was restrained, the assault began. Gacy killed most of his victims with a rope tightened around the neck, telling them, "This is the last trick." Except for his last two victims, all were killed between 3:00 and 6:00 a.m.

  His first known murder took place on the 3rd of January 1972. Gacy said he had driven to Chicago's Civic Center to see a display of ice sculptures. There he picked up 16-year-old Timothy Jack McCoy at the Greyhound terminal. McCoy was on his way to his father's home in Omaha, Nebraska, and had hours to wait for his bus. Gacy offered him a bed and a ride back in time. Before McCoy was identified, he was known as the "Greyhound Bus Boy". Gacy buried him in the crawl space and later poured a layer of concrete over the grave.

  His second murder came around January 1974. That victim has never been identified. The mess he left on the carpet convinced Gacy to stuff cloth deep into the mouths of later victims.

  On the 31st of July 1975-18-year-old PDM employee John Butkovich disappeared. A day earlier he and two friends had confronted Gacy over two weeks of back pay. Gacy later admitted killing him. Because his wife and stepdaughters came home earlier than expected, he buried the body under the concrete floor of the garage's tool room extension rather than in the crawl space.

  Gacy himself said 1975 was the year he began to go "cruising" for young males far more often. Most of the murders came between 1976 and 1978, after his divorce left him living alone. Some nights he killed twice. He called these evenings "doubles". On the 14th of May 1976-15-year-old Randall Reffett and 14-year-old Samuel Stapleton vanished within hours of each other. They were friends, and investigators believe they were killed the same evening and buried together.

  The victims included teenagers, young workers, two United States Marines and college students. Some had worked for Gacy. Some had only mentioned to someone that a contractor had offered them a job. Eighteen-year-old Robert Gilroy was the son of a Chicago police sergeant and lived four blocks away. Gacy was in Pittsburgh when Gilroy was last seen, and the date is cited as support for Gacy's claim that he had help with some killings.

  By mid-1978 the crawl space had no room left. Gacy said he considered the attic but feared "leakage". He chose the Des Plaines River instead and dropped bodies from the I-55 bridge. He said he threw five victims into the river in 1978. One, he believed, landed on a passing barge, and only four were ever found. Timothy O'Rourke was the first known victim sent into the river, in mid-June. Frank Landingin was killed on the 4th of November, and two duck hunters found his body on the 12th.

  In the end, twenty-six victims were buried in the crawl space and three elsewhere on the property. Four were found in the river.

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• 6. Warnings Unheeded

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  John Butkovich's parents telephoned the police more than 100 times over three years, pleading with them to look harder at Gacy. Gacy had met their search for their son with an offer to help. He said he was sorry that Butkovich had "run away". Police questioned him once and accepted his story of a compromise over the unpaid wages.

  In December 1976 17-year-old Gregory Godzik vanished after working for PDM for under three weeks. He had told his family that Gacy had him dig trenches for drain tile in the crawl space. His car was later found abandoned. Godzik's parents and older sister called Gacy, who said the boy wanted to run away from home. He claimed to have received a message from Godzik on his answering machine, then said he had erased it.

  A neighbor kept hearing noise from the house next door. For years, she and her son were woken in the early morning by muffled, high-pitched screaming, shouting and crying coming from West Summerdale Avenue.

  In August 1977 Michael Rossi was arrested for stealing gasoline while driving a car once owned by John Szyc. A gas station attendant noted the license plate, and police traced the car to Gacy's house. Gacy said Szyc had sold it to him in February because he needed money to leave town. A VIN check confirmed the car had been Szyc's. Police did not pursue the matter further, though they did tell Szyc's mother that her son had sold his car.

  On the 30th of December 1977 Gacy seized 19-year-old college student Robert Donnelly at a Chicago bus stop, at gunpoint. Donnelly endured hours of abuse at Gacy's house. Then Gacy drove him to his workplace and let him go, warning him that police would not believe him. Donnelly reported it anyway. Police questioned Gacy on the 6th of January 1978. He admitted a "slave-sex" relationship but said it was consensual and that he "didn't pay the kid" the money he had promised. The police believed him and filed no charges.

  On the 21st of March 1978, Gacy lured 26-year-old Jeffrey Rignall into his car, drugged him with chloroform and took him to his house. After a prolonged assault, Gacy dumped him, unconscious but alive, in Chicago's Lincoln Park. Rignall reported the attack, but police did not look at Gacy.

  Rignall did the detective work himself. He remembered the Oldsmobile, the Kennedy Expressway and some side streets. With two friends he staked out the Cumberland exit of the expressway. In April he saw the car and followed it to 8213 West Summerdale.

  Gacy was arrested for the attack on the 15th of July 1978. He was released on bail pending investigation and trial. When the next murder case reached him, he was still facing the Rignall charges.

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• 7. The Pharmacy Receipt

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  At 9:00 p.m. on the 11th of December 1978-15-year-old Robert Piest told his mother to wait a moment at the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines. She had come to drive him home so the family could celebrate her birthday. Piest said "some contractor wants to talk to me about a job". That afternoon Gacy had visited the pharmacy to discuss a remodeling deal with owner Phil Torf. Within earshot of Piest, he mentioned that his firm hired teenagers at $5 an hour, almost double Piest's pay. Piest left the store and did not come back. According to Gacy, Piest was killed at his house shortly after 10:00 p.m.

  The Piest family reported the boy missing, and Torf named Gacy as the contractor Piest most likely went to see. Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak of the Des Plaines police took the case. His own son attended Maine West High School, like Piest. A background check showed an outstanding battery charge in Chicago and the Iowa sodomy conviction.

  Kozenczak and two officers visited Gacy the next evening. Gacy denied offering Piest a job. He said he had gone back to the pharmacy because he left his appointment book there. He told the officers he could not come to the station right away because his uncle had just died. When pressed, he snapped, "You guys are very rude. Don't you have any respect for the dead?" He arrived at the station at 3:20 a.m. covered in mud and claimed he had been in a car accident.

  On the 13th of December police searched his house. They found police badges, handcuffs, a starting pistol, a syringe, a two-by-four with holes drilled in each end, several driver's licenses and a class ring engraved with the initials J.A.S. In a trash can they found a Nisson Pharmacy photo receipt next to a length of nylon rope.

  The ring was traced to John Alan Szyc. The receipt led to 17-year-old Kimberly Byers, a pharmacy colleague of Piest. She had put it in the pocket of Piest's parka after borrowing the coat, then handed it back as he left the store.

  Police confiscated Gacy's Oldsmobile and his work vehicles, and four officers kept him under surveillance. They were Mike Albrecht, David Hachmeister, Ronald Robinson and Robert Schultz. By the 16th of December Gacy was treating them as guests, inviting them to restaurant meals and to drinks. He taunted them by breaking traffic laws and lost them more than once. Over breakfast on the 18th, he remarked to Albrecht and Hachmeister, "You know... clowns can get away with murder."

  Two days earlier Rossi had phoned investigators about Godzik's disappearance and about another PDM employee, Charles Hattula, who had been found drowned in an Illinois river earlier that year. Cram told police Gacy had once given him a watch he said came "from a dead person". Rossi said that in the summer of 1977, at Gacy's order, he had spread ten bags of lime in the crawl space. Cram described trenches Gacy had made him dig there, 6 feet long and 2 feet deep. He said they were the size of graves. A search dog lay down on the passenger seat of the Oldsmobile in what its handler called a "death reaction".

  Gacy was visibly fraying. He was unshaven, tired and drinking heavily. On the 18th of December he went to his lawyers to prepare a $750,000 civil suit against the Des Plaines police, asking them to end the surveillance. The hearing was set for the 22nd. On the 19th, Schultz noticed a rancid smell coming from a heating duct while using the toilet. The earlier searchers had missed it because the house was cold.

  On the evening of the 20th of December Gacy arrived at his lawyers' office in Park Ridge looking disheveled and asked for a drink. Attorney Sam Amirante poured two cupfuls of whiskey, put a newspaper on the desk and demanded the important news. Gacy pointed to the front-page story on Piest and said, "This boy is dead. He's dead. He's in a river."

  His rambling confession ran into the early hours. He called himself "judge... jury and executioner of many, many people" and said he had killed at least thirty. Most, he said, were buried in his crawl space and five others had been thrown into the Des Plaines River. He fell asleep halfway through. When Amirante told him next morning what he had said, he replied, "Well, I can't think about this right now. I've got things to do."

  Gacy spent his last free day in a haze. He gave a gas station attendant a small bag of cannabis, which the attendant promptly handed to the surveillance officers. He told the attendant, "The end is coming (for me)." He hugged his friend, contractor Ronald Rhode, burst into tears and said, "I've been a bad boy. I killed thirty people, give or take a few." Surveillance officers saw him driving along the expressway with a rosary held to his chin. He had Cram drive him to Maryhill Cemetery, where his father was buried.

  Police feared he might kill himself, so they arrested him on a cannabis charge to hold him while the second search warrant was prepared. It was granted at 4:30 p.m. on the 21st of December. Gacy had unplugged his sump pump and flooded the crawl space, so the police replaced the plug and waited for the water to drain. What the digging revealed was more than they feared. A second skull lay beside the first body, then a third beneath it, and a fourth victim's rib cage nearby.

  In the early hours of the 22nd of December, with his lawyers present, Gacy gave a formal statement confessing to about thirty murders. He said he had dug only five of the graves himself and had his employees dig the rest, Godzik among them. He had planned to cover the whole crawl space with concrete in January 1979. On Piest, he confessed that he had strangled him on the 11th of December and slept beside the body that night. He had dropped it into the river on the 13th.

  On the 23rd of December he was driven to the I-55 bridge to point out where he had thrown Piest and four others. At his house he sprayed orange paint on the garage floor to mark the grave of John Butkovich. He also drew a rough diagram of the basement to show where the bodies lay. Over the next week twenty-six bodies came out of the crawl space and three more elsewhere on the property.

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• 8. Trial and Sentence

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  On the 6th of February 1980 John Wayne Gacy went on trial in the Cook County Criminal Court Building, charged with thirty-three murders. Judge Louis Garippo presided. The jury was chosen from Rockford because of the heavy press coverage in Cook County.

  In the year before the trial, Gacy spent over three hundred hours with doctors at the Menard Correctional Center in Chester. They were testing whether he was mentally fit to stand trial. He tried to persuade them he had multiple personality disorder. He described four selves: the hard-working contractor, the clown, the politician and a policeman called Jack Hanley, whom he called "Bad Jack". When he confessed to police, he claimed he was recounting the crimes of Jack. According to Gacy, Jack despised homosexuality and saw male prostitutes as "weak, stupid and degraded scum".

  His lawyers entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Defense attorney Robert Motta told the jury the defense was valid and that it was the only one available. He argued that if Gacy was normal, "then our concept of normality is totally distorted." The defense called psychiatric experts, and three testified that Gacy was a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personalities.

  Prosecutors argued that he was sane and in full control of his actions. Their witnesses spoke of his premeditation and the lengths he went to in order to avoid detection. Doctors for the state rejected the claims of multiple personalities and insanity. Cram and Rossi described the drainage trenches and the bags of lime. Both said Gacy had checked on them regularly to be sure they and other workers did not stray from the places he had marked.

  On the 18th of February, Robert Stein testified about the autopsies he performed. The remains were badly decomposed, putrefied or skeletal. Thirteen victims had died of asphyxiation, six of ligature strangulation and one of multiple stab wounds to the chest. Ten deaths were of undetermined cause. The defense suggested all thirty-three deaths might have been accidental erotic asphyxia. Stein called that highly improbable.

  The survivors took the stand. Jeffrey Rignall wept repeatedly on the 21st of February while describing his torture in March 1978. During cross-examination he vomited and was excused. Donald Voorhees took the stand on the 29th of February to describe his ordeal at Gacy's hands and the assault Gacy had arranged. He managed only a short time before he was asked to step down. The next week, Robert Donnelly recounted his night in December 1977 and was visibly distressed.

  In the fifth week Gacy wrote to Judge Garippo asking for a mistrial. He said he had not approved of his lawyers' insanity plea and had wanted to testify. He also complained that the defense had called too few medical witnesses. He further claimed that the police were lying about statements he had made after his arrest. The judge replied that the defense had neither been denied the chance nor the funds to call experts. He added that the choice of whether to testify was Gacy's own and that he was free to tell the court so.

  Closing arguments began on the 11th of March. Prosecutor Terry Sullivan reviewed Gacy's history of abusing youths and his efforts to evade detection. He called the surviving victims, Voorhees and Donnelly, the "living dead". He described Gacy as the "worst of all murderers" and said, "I tremble when thinking about just how close he came to getting away with it all."

  After the state's four-hour opening, Sam Amirante spoke for the defense. He accused Sullivan of barely mentioning the evidence and of stirring up hatred. Gacy, he argued, was "driven by compulsions he was unable to control", and the state had failed to prove his sanity beyond a reasonable doubt. He asked the jury to set aside prejudice and said that studying Gacy's mind would benefit science.

  On the 12th of March, William Kunkle finished for the prosecution. He called the insanity claim "a sham" and said the facts showed a man who could think logically and control his actions. He also cited one of the doctors who examined Gacy in 1968 and found an antisocial personality. Had that doctor's advice been followed, Kunkle said, Gacy would never have been released.

  Gacy was convicted of thirty-three murders, the most homicides by one person ever covered by a conviction in United States legal history. On the 13th of March 1980 he was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on the 10th of May 1994.

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