What did John Wayne Gacy do?
John Wayne Gacy killed at least 33 young men and boys in and around Chicago, Illinois, in the 1970s. He lived in a big ranch-style house and would lure all of his victims back there and trick them into putting handcuffs on. He would then rape and torture his victims before proceeding to murder them by strangling them with a garrote.
Twenty-six of his victims were buried in the crawl space of his house, and three were buried elsewhere on his vast property. The remaining four were dumped in the Des Plaines River. The police were aware of Gacy prior to the discovery of these bodies. He was convicted in 1968 for sexually assaulting a teenage boy in Iowa and sentenced to 10 years for the crime, but he only spent 18 months behind bars. This gave him the opportunity to go on and escalate his crimes to murder.
The media named him the Killer Clown, as he was known for his public appearances as a clown before he was arrested in 1978 and revealed to be a serial killer.
What was John Wayne Gacy’s childhood like?
John Wayne Gacy was born in 1942. Of Polish and Danish descent, he was the second of three children. At age 4, it is believed that he was beaten by his father with a belt and faced many other instances of abuse from his alcoholic father. Gacy also had a heart condition and was told to avoid sports, and he was a very overweight child growing up.
In 1949, Gacy’s father hit him with a razor strop after he caught him and another boy fondling a young girl. During the same year, a family friend began molesting Gacy, all of these instances perhaps leading to his eventual foray into criminal activity in his adult years. Psychologists point to the childhoods of serial killers as an indication of why they commit such horrible atrocities. Having said that, it’s impossible to know the true cause of Gacy’s descent into crime.
Where is John Wayne Gacy now?
After Gacy’s conviction for 33 murders, he was sentenced to death on March 13, 1980. He was sent to Menard Correctional Center and put in an isolated cell upon his sentencing. The convicted murderer began to paint to pass the time. His paintings have been displayed at many exhibitions and even sold at auctions to people with an obsession with murder memorabilia.
In 1983, Gacy was stabbed in the arm with a sharpened wire by fellow death row inmate Henry Brisbon, who was also known as the I-57 killer.
John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10th, 1994.
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