The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (20 page)

John Wayne Gacy

John Wayne Gacy; from
Murderers!
trading card set

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

John Wayne Gacy was a man of many masks. There was the mask of masculinity. To live up to the two-fisted name bestowed by his tyrannical father, Gacy cultivated a gruff, swaggering air. There was the mask of middle-class respectability, symbolized by his tidy ranch-style house in a Chicago suburb.
He even wore a literal mask, making himself up as a grinning clown called Pogo to entertain hospitalized children.

But Gacy was one of the most monstrously divided sociopaths in the annals of crime, and his masks concealed a hideous reality. Beneath his “man’s man” persona, he was a tormented, self-loathing homosexual who preyed on young males. Beneath the smiling face, he was a leering, implacable sadist. Beneath the crawl space of his suburban house, more than two dozen corpses moldered in the slime.

Raised by an abusive, alcoholic father—who spent much of his time deriding his son as a sissy—Gacy grew up to be a pudgy hypochondriac whose homosexual drives were a source of profound self-hatred. He also possessed a terrifyingly antisocial personality.

For a long time, however, he managed to conceal his real character beneath the veneer of an ambitious Middle American businessman. By the time he was twenty-two, he was a married man and father, a highly respected member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the successful manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Waterloo, Iowa. But he was also leading a secret life as a seducer and molester of young males. In 1968, after being arrested on a sodomy charge, he was hit with a ten-year sentence, though he proved to be such a model prisoner that he was paroled after only eighteen months.

Gacy—whose first wife had divorced him on the day of his sentencing—relocated to Chicago, where he soon reestablished himself as an apparent pillar of the community, remarrying, starting a thriving contracting business, becoming active in local politics (on one occasion, he was photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter). Before long, however, his darkest impulses reasserted themselves—this time in an even ghastlier form. He became a human predator who tortured and murdered his young male pickups for his own depraved pleasure.

Cruising the streets for hustlers, drifters, and runaways, Gacy (who sometimes coerced them into his car by posing as a plainclothes cop) would bring them back to his house. There he would handcuff them and then subject them to hours of rape and torture before strangling them slowly. Their bodies would end up in the crawl space of his house.

In 1978, police finally set their sights on the civic-minded contractor when a teenage boy dropped out of sight after telling friends that he was on his way to see Gacy about a job. Digging into Gacy’s past, police uncovered records of his previous sex offenses. In the fetid muck of his crawl space, they exhumed the decomposing remains of twenty-seven victims.
Gacy had buried two more elsewhere on his property and dumped another four corpses in a nearby river, bringing the number of his victims to thirty-three.

At first, Gacy maintained that he was the victim of multiple personality disorder, and that his atrocities were actually the work of an evil alter ego named Jack. But the ploy didn’t work. He was given the death sentence in 1980. After fourteen years on death row, the “Killer Clown” was finally executed by lethal injection.

Edward Gein

Ed Gein

(AP/Wide World Photos)

If a serial killer is defined as someone who murders at least three victims over an extended period of time, then—strictly speaking—Edward Gein was not a serial killer, since he appears to have murdered no more than two women. And yet his crimes were so grotesque and appalling that they have haunted America for almost forty years.

Gein was raised by a fanatical, domineering mother who ranted incessantly
about the sinful nature of her own sex. When she died in 1945, her son was a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor, still emotionally enslaved to the woman who had tyrannized his life. Boarding up her room, he preserved it as though it were a shrine. The rest of the house, however, soon degenerated into a madman’s shambles.

When Gein wasn’t earning his meager living doing odd jobs for neighbors, he passed his lonely hours poring over lurid magazine pieces about sex-change operations, South Seas headhunters, and Nazi atrocities. His own atrocities began a few years after his mother’s death. Driven by his desperate loneliness—and burgeoning psychosis—he started making nocturnal raids on local graveyards, digging up the bodies of middle-aged women and bringing them back to his remote farmhouse. In 1954, he augmented his necrophiliac activities with murder, shooting a local tavern keeper named Mary Hogan and absconding with her two-hundred-pound corpse. Three years later—on the first day of hunting season, 1957—he killed another local woman, a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother who owned the village hardware store.

Ed Gein exhuming a corpse; art by Chris Pelletiere

Suspicion immediately lighted on Gein, who had been hanging around the store in recent days. Breaking into his summer kitchen, police discovered the victim’s headless and gutted corpse suspended upside-down from a rafter like a dressed-out game animal. Inside the house itself, the
stunned searchers uncovered a large assortment of unspeakable artifacts—chairs upholstered with human skin, soup bowls fashioned from skulls, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted like hunting trophies on the walls, and a “mammary vest” flayed from the torso of a woman. Gein later confessed that he enjoyed dressing himself in this and other human-skin garments and pretending he was his own mother.

The discovery of these Gothic horrors sent shock waves throughout Eisenhower-era America. In Wisconsin itself, Gein quickly entered local folklore. Within weeks of his arrest, macabre
Jokes
called “Geiners” became a statewide craze. The country as a whole learned about Gein in December 1957, when both
Life
and
Time
magazines ran features on his “house of horrors.”