Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we're opening
a file that I think, well, I think a lot of you
are going to feel like you already know. We've
all seen the documentaries. We've seen the headlines.
We definitely know the nickname. Right. But when
you actually sit down with the source material,
and I'm talking about the court transcripts,
the FBI profiles, the survivor testimonies, you
realize that the headline version of this story.
It doesn't just miss the point. It actually hides
the scariest part. It really does. We are talking
about John Wayne Gacy. It's a name that has become
a sort of cultural shorthand for monster, hasn't
it? It really has. You hear Gacy, you immediately
think of the clown suit, you think of the crawl
space. It's almost become a caricature of evil.
But you're absolutely right. If we stop there
at the caricature, if we just look at the killer
clown. Yeah. We miss the much more disturbing
mechanics of how this man actually operated.
We miss the story of how a predator didn't just
hide in the shadows, but actually thrived in
the blazing sunlight of a polite suburban community.
That is exactly it. That's what kept hitting
me as I was reading through this stacky. It's
the paradox. The duality. We aren't looking at
some guy who lived in a creepy shack in the woods.
We are looking at a man who, by day, was this
gregarious community leader. He was a precinct
captain for the Democratic Party. He was the
guy you called when your streetlights went out.
The guy who threw the best parties on the block.
Exactly. The best parties. And then, by night,
well, he was something entirely different. That
duality is the absolute core of this case. And
there is one specific image from the research
that I think perfectly, just perfectly encapsulates
this entire deep dive. I know exactly the one
you mean. It honestly gave me chills when I saw
the date on it. Yeah, the date is everything.
Paint the picture for the listener because this
visual is just crucial. Okay, so it's May 1978.
We are at the Polish Constitution Day Parade
in Chicago, which is, you know, a huge event.
Massive. And in the photo, you have John Wayne
Gacy. He's looking sharp. wearing a suit, big
friendly smile, and he is shaking hands with
First Lady Rosalind Carter. The wife of the President
of the United States. Right. Surrounded by Secret
Service agents. And if you look really, really
closely at Gacy's lapel, he's wearing this little
pin with an S on it. Which stands for special.
It meant he had received special security clearance
from the Secret Service to be in that secure
zone with the First Lady. That is just mind -blowing
to me. The Secret Service, I mean, the most elite
protection agency on the planet. They vetted
this guy and said, yeah, he's safe. He's fine.
But here is the kicker, and this is why that
date is so important. This is May 1978. Based
on the timelines we have from the investigation,
what was the situation at his house at that exact
moment? By May 1978, the crawlspace underneath
his house at 8213 West Somerdale Avenue was,
it was effectively at capacity. He'd already
murdered nearly 30 young men and boys. 30. So
just think about that spatial reality. He is
shaking the hand of the first lady during the
day, wearing a secret service pin, and then he
is going home to a house where he is literally
walking on top of a mass grave he created. It's
the ultimate thesis statement for who this man
was. It is. It shows us that his mask wasn't
the clown makeup. I think people get so hung
up on the clown thing. Right. But the real mask
was the suit. The real mask was the civic virtue.
He constructed a persona of such aggressive normalcy,
such hyper competence as a citizen that it blinded
everyone, his neighbors, the police, even the
federal government. It blinded them to the rot
that was right underneath their feet. And that
is our mission today. We are going to unpack
exactly how he built that mask. We need to understand
the architecture of that lie. Yeah. And inevitably.
We need to see how it slipped. And how it all
came crashing down. But before we get into the
psychology, the childhood, we need to set the
scale here. Because even all these years later,
the numbers, they're just hard to process. They
are grim. We're talking about 33 confirmed murders
between 1972 and 1978. And confirmed is a heavy
word there, which I think we will get to later.
It is, yeah. But even just sticking to the official
count, for a long time, this was the highest
murder count attributed to a single individual
in United States legal history. And again, the
context is everything. This wasn't happening
in some transient, lawless area. This was Norwood
Park Township. A quiet, respectable suburb of
Chicago, the house on Somerdale Avenue was a
standard brick ranch house. It's the kind of
place people move to specifically to get away
from crime. I think that is why this story sticks
in the American psyche so deeply. It's the violation
of the sanctuary. You expect the danger to be
out there. Right. You don't expect the monster
to be the guy plowing your driveway for free
in the winter. Precisely. This isn't just a true
crime story. It's a case study in sociopathy.
Yes, of course. But it is also a case study in
the failure of systems. Yes. As we go through
this timeline, we are going to see again and
again these moments where Gacy could have been
stopped, moments where the mask slipped. And
yet the system, whether it was his father, the
courts in Iowa or the community in Chicago. It
shows to look the other way. So let's go back
to the beginning, because with a case like this,
we always want to know why was he born this way?
Was he made this way? The source material gives
us a lot of detail on his childhood in Chicago.
Born in March 1942, working class Polish and
Danish Catholic family. And looming over everything
in those early years is the father figure, John
Stanley Gacy. You cannot understand the son without
dissecting the father. John Stanley Gacy was
a World War I veteran, an auto repair machinist,
and by all accounts in the biographies and the
family interviews, he was a deeply troubled man,
an alcoholic, and a domestic tyrant. Tyrant really
seems to be the right word. The stories are just
brutal. There's one incident when Gacy was just
four years old. Four. A toddler. He was messing
around with some car engine components in the
garage, just being a curious kid, and his father
beats him for it. And it wasn't just the physical
abuse, though that was severe and constant. It
was the psychological conditioning. John Stanley
had a very specific, very rigid idea of what
a man was supposed to be. And he decided very
early on that his son just didn't measure up
to that standard. He was constantly belittling
him. Constantly. He used slurs. He called him
a sissy, my mama's boy. Dumb, stupid. He would
compare him unfavorably to his sisters. It was
relentless. That has to do something to a kid's
wiring. That has to fundamentally change you.
Absolutely. Gacy grew up in an environment where
the person whose approval he needed the most,
the patriarch, the god figure of the house, was
the source of his greatest terror and his deepest
shame. So he's trapped. Completely. He was in
a constant state of trying to win affection from
a man who was incapable of giving it and who
actively despised him. And on top of all that,
Gacy wasn't a big athletic kid. He had health
issues that I imagine just made him an even easier
target for a guy like his dad. He did. He was
born with a heart condition, a congenital defect
that kept him out of organized sports. In the
1940s and 50s, not playing sports was a major
strike against a boy's social standing, especially
in his father's eyes. Sure. But even more significant
were the blackouts. Starting around the fourth
grade, he began experiencing these seizure -like
episodes. And these weren't just minor things.
The records show they were serious. No, not at
all. Between the ages of 14 and 18, he spent
nearly a year in the hospital undergoing tests
and treatment. A year. Okay, now imagine a normal
parent's reaction to their teenage son being
hospitalized for a year. Yeah. You'd expect concern,
worry, sympathy. Of course. But John Stanley
Gacy. His reaction was accusation. He accused
his son of faking it. He thought Gacy was malingering,
just acting sick to get attention or to get out
of doing chores or work. That is heartbreaking,
but it's also terrifying. It's a critical developmental
moment. Imagine the isolation. You are a sick
child terrified of your own body failing you,
and your father is standing over your hospital
bed calling you a liar. Right. That breeds a
very specific kind of resentment, but it also
teaches a lesson. It teaches you that the truth
is irrelevant. It teaches you that vulnerability
is dangerous. And crucially, it teaches you that
you can't rely on authority figures to understand
you. You have to manipulate them. Bingo. He internalized
that lesson completely. If the truth doesn't
get you love, maybe a better story will. If I
can't be the son you want, I'll invent a version
of myself that you can't ignore. And that explains
so much of his later life, this desperate need
for validation that we see again and again. He
is always chasing the Outstanding Vice President
Award, always chasing the photo op. He's trying
to fill that void his father left. Now fast forward
a bit. He leaves home. He runs away to Las Vegas
when he's about 20 years old. And there is a
really disturbing incident here that feels like
the first major neon flashing red flag of what
was to come. He gets a job at a mortuary. This
is known as the mortuary incident. He was working
as an attendant, basically a janitor and a night
watchman. He slept on a cot behind the embalming
room. Okay. And he later confessed that one night
he climbed into a coffin with the corpse of a
teenage male and embraced it. Okay. That just
stops you in your tracks. That isn't just acting
out or teenage rebellion. That is something else
entirely. It is the first concrete sign of what
we call necrophilic tendencies. And we have to
analyze why that would appeal to him. With a
corpse, the partner has no agency. Right. They
cannot reject him. They cannot judge him. They
cannot leave. They cannot call him stupid or
sissy. It is a relationship of total control.
It's the ultimate safe relationship for him.
Exactly. That desire for a partner who is essentially
an object becomes the defining characteristic
of his crimes later on. He didn't want a relationship.
He wanted possession. It's terrifying to see
it manifest that early. But he leaves Vegas.
Comes back to the Midwest, and this is where
we enter a chapter of his life that I think gets
glossed over way too often. I call it the practice
run. He moves to Waterloo, Iowa. Yes. And if
you didn't know how this story ended, you'd look
at his life in Iowa and think, wow, this guy
is a massive success story. On paper, he was
winning at life. He marries Marlon Myers, whose
father is a wealthy businessman. His father -in
-law sets him up to manage three KFC franchises.
Three of them. And Gacy throws himself into this
role with a manic, almost frantic energy. He
insisted on people calling him the Colonel. The
Colonel. I mean, the ego required to demand that
title while you're managing a fried chicken franchise.
Yeah. It's just staggering. It's pure narcissism.
But here's the thing. It worked. People bought
into it. He joined the Jaycees, the Junior Chamber
of Commerce, which was a very influential organization
for young men at the time. And he wasn't just
a member who showed up for the free lunch. I
don't know. He was the vice president. He was
named outstanding vice president. He was working
12 to 14 hour days at the chicken places and
then volunteering all night for the Jaycees.
This is that pattern emerging again. He's building
the facade of the perfect citizen. If you're
the guy bringing the fried chicken to the meeting
and you're the guy raising the most money for
charity. Nobody looks too closely at what you're
doing in your basement. And the basement is exactly
where the mask comes off. He built a club in
his home for his employees. He hired a lot of
teenagers to work at the KFCs. He'd bring them
down there for drinking, playing pool, just hanging
out. And this is where the predatory behavior
starts to really ramp up. He's not killing yet,
but he's grooming. He's testing. He's testing
boundaries. He's running experiments. He would
get these boys drunk and then he would make sexual
advances. But and this is the key manipulation.
If they rejected him, he would spin it. He'd
say it was just a test of their psychological
toughness or a joke or some kind of experiment.
He was gaslighting them. He was seeing who was
vulnerable, who was submissive and who would
keep a secret. But then he crosses a major line
with Donald Voorhees. This is 1967. Voorhees
is 15 years old and he's the son of a fellow
Jaycee member. Which is so brazen. Jaycee assaults
him. And when the kid talks, Gacy doesn't just
panic or deny it. He escalates in a way that
proves this wasn't just an impulse. This escalation
is crucial because it shows his criminal sophistication
even at this early stage. He didn't just call
the kid a liar. He hired another employee to
beat Voorhees up to stop him from testifying.
He tried to intimidate a witness. He was trying
to act like a mob boss. He thought he could use
violence and intimidation to silence the truth.
Thankfully, it didn't work. He gets caught. He
gets convicted of sodomy. And as part of that
legal process, he is evaluated by psychiatrists
at the University of Iowa. Yes. Reading their
report now, all these years later, it's chilling
how accurate they were. They nailed it completely.
They diagnosed him with antisocial personality
disorder. They explicitly stated he was a sociopath.
And most crucially, they deemed him untreatable.
Untreatable. They warned the court in writing
that he would come into repeated conflict with
society. They essentially said, this man is dangerous
and he isn't going to change. So, OK, you have
the diagnosis. You have the conviction for a
violent sex crime against a minor. You have the
attempt to hire a hitman to silence a witness.
He gets sentenced to 10 years in the Iowa State
Reformatory. This should be the end of the story.
It absolutely should have been. Society has identified
the threat and locked it away. It should have
been. But this is the critical failure point.
He served only 18 months. 18 months. For sodomy
and hiring a hitman, how does that even happen?
He was a model prisoner. And this is what high
-functioning sociopaths do. They assess the environment,
they learn the rules of the game, and they play
them better than anyone else. So he just manipulated
the prison system. Completely. He didn't sit
in his cell and rock. He became the head cook
in the prison. He revamped the prison JC's chapter.
He made himself indispensable to the wardens.
He didn't use prison to reform. He used it to
verify his theory that he could manipulate authority
figures. He realized that if he just acted like
a good guy, the system would bend over backward
to believe him. Exactly. He learned that the
appearance of virtue is more powerful than the
reality of virtue. He walked out of there in
18 months with a blueprint for how to get away
with anything. So he gets out. His record is
sealed in Iowa, which is another systemic failure
we could spend an hour on. A huge one. He moves
back to Chicago in 1971. And he effectively hits
the reset button. He reinvents himself as John
Wayne Gacy, this successful contractor. He buys
the ranch house at 8213 West Somerdale Avenue.
He starts PDM Contractors. And again, that Manning
energy returns. By 1978, his business is pulling
in over $200 ,000 a year. That is a lot of money
in the 70s. A huge amount. He is wealthy, he
is established, and he is employing a lot of
young men. And he goes right back to the Civic
Pillar playbook. He's the director of the Polish
Constitution Day Parade. That's how he met Rosalind
Carter. He's a lighting commissioner for the
township. He throws these massive parties at
his house. The famous Somerdale Luau. We're talking...
400 people, neighbors, local politicians, police
officers, all drinking and eating in his backyard.
It provided him with perfect cover. It's the
halo effect, right? Who suspects the lighting
commissioner? Who suspects the guy who just bought
you a beer and is laughing with the precinct
captain? He was buying social capital. Every
favor he did for a neighbor was an insurance
policy against suspicion. And then we have to
talk about the clowning. It's the image everyone
knows. But I feel like people just think, oh,
he was a clown without understanding the nuance
of it. Right. It wasn't just a hobby. He joined
the Jolly Joker Clown Club. He actually created
his own characters. There was Pogo, who was the
happy clown, and Patches, who was the serious,
sad clown. Which just feels a little too on the
nose for a guy living a double life. It is. But
look at what Gacy said about it. He admitted
that clowning let him regress into childhood,
but he also said something very, very telling
to detectives later, something that I think reveals
his true mindset. He said, Clowns can get away
with murder. He actually said that explicitly.
He did. He viewed the clown persona as the ultimate
disguise. When you are in the grease paint, your
identity is erased. You aren't John Gacy. You're
Pogo. You can enter personal spaces. You can
touch people. You can put your armor on a child.
And the normal social barriers are lowered because
you are a character. It was a hunting blind.
It was perfect hunting blind. So while he's playing
the clown and the politician, the killings begin
in earnest in Chicago. Let's look at the methodology,
because it was horrifyingly consistent. He was
targeting young men and boys, usually ages 14
to 21. Where was he finding them? He was an opportunist
with a system. A significant number were his
own employees at PDM Contractors. He would lure
them with the promise of high wages. Five dollars
an hour was great pay for a teen in the 70s.
Others were hitchhikers or runaways he'd pick
up at Greyhound bus stations. He specifically
targeted the vulnerable boys who were transient
or estranged from their families. He was banking
on the fact that they wouldn't be missed right
away. And once he got them to the house or into
his car, he had these tricks. The handcuff trick
comes up over and over again in the files. This
was his primary way of gaining control without
a violent struggle. He would spin a story about
being a magician. He'd have a pair of handcuffs,
and he'd demonstrate how he could escape from
them. He actually could. He'd practiced it. Oh,
wow. Then he'd challenge the victim. I bet you
can't do it. Let me see if you're strong enough.
He'd click the cuffs on the victim's wrists,
often behind their back. It sounds so innocent
in a way. A bar bet? A magic trick? That's the
horror of it. It relied on trust. But the moment
those cuffs clicked shut, the game was over.
The mask dropped instantly. The nice guy vanished
and the predator took over. The victim was helpless
before they even realized they were in danger.
And then the torture. We don't need to get graphic
for the sake of it, but we do need to understand
the sadism here. He had something he called the
rope trick. He called it the last trick. It was
a tourniquet strangulation using a rope and a
wooden hammer handle. He could tighten it to
cut off air and then loosen it to let them breathe
again. He could prolong the dying process for
hours. He wanted to control the moment of death
itself. Completely. He was drowning victims in
his bathtub, reviving them and doing it again.
He wanted absolute power over that threshold.
There's a specific example in the notes, Timothy
McCoy. He was the first victim in Chicago, January
1972. Gacy later described realizing that death
was the ultimate thrill. McCoy was just a kid
at a bus station. He had his whole life ahead
of him. Gacy stabbed him during a struggle. And
that description Gacy gave, comparing the moment
of the kill to an ultimate thrill, literally
an orgasm, that tells us that for Gacy, the power
over life and death was the drug. It wasn't just
sexual in a traditional sense. No, it was about
absolute dominance. He wanted to be God in that
room. And then you have John Buckovich in 1975.
This one feels different because Butkovich wasn't
a random pickup. He was an employee. This shows
Gacy's growing arrogance. He killed Butkovich
because the kids stood up to him about unpaid
wages. They had an argument about money. That's
it. An argument over a paycheck. That's it. Gacy
killed him essentially because he was annoyed.
He buried him under the concrete in his garage.
This wasn't a crime of passion. It was a crime
of convenience. He viewed human beings like disposable
objects. If an appliance breaks, you throw it
out. If an employee becomes a problem, you put
them under the floor. And speaking of under the
floor, the crawl space, 26 bodies. Just think
about that number. 26 human beings buried in
a defined grid system under a suburban ranch
house. The logistics of that are just... They're
terrifying. A crawlspace isn't a basement. It's
dirt. It's low. It's damp. He was using quicklime
to speed up decomposition. And trying to manage
the smell. But what's even more disturbing is
that he forced his other employees, young boys
who were still alive, to dig the trenches. Wait,
he made them dig the graves? He told them they
were digging drainage trenches for plumbing issues.
Oh, my God. Boys like Michael Rossi and David
Cram, they were down there digging in the mud,
sometimes complaining about the terrible smell,
not knowing they were digging. graves for future
victims or digging right next to existing ones
that is psychological torment on another level
it's almost like he was mocking them dig this
hole you might end up in it exactly it reinforced
his feeling of superiority he knew what was really
happening and they didn't it was a private joke
for him so eventually the crawlspace just it
fills up it's 1978 he runs out of room He does.
And that's when he started using the Des Plaines
River. He would drive to the I -55 bridge and
throw bodies into the water. He claimed he disposed
of five victims this way. And that's a big shift
in his MO. It is. And this shift in disposal
method actually marks the beginning of his unraveling.
He was getting sloppy. He was overwhelmed by
the sheer volume of his own violence. The stress
of managing the secret was starting to crack
the facade. And that sloppiness leads us directly
to December 11, 1978. The beginning of the end.
The disappearance. of Robert Piest. This was
the mistake that brought the entire house of
cards down. Robert Piest was a 15 -year -old
boy working at Noosan Pharmacy. He was a local
kid, well -loved, stable family. He wasn't a
runaway. He wasn't a hitchhiker. He was the quintessential
good kid from the neighborhood. Which meant he
was going to be missed immediately. And Gacy
was there that day at the pharmacy. He was there
to discuss a remodeling contract with the owner.
Robert told his mom, I'm just going to go talk
to the contractor about a job. I'll be right
back. And he never came back. This is where the
police work finally shifts. Detective Joseph
Kozenczak gets the case. And he deserves a lot
of credit here because he didn't treat this as
a runaway case, which was the standard procedure
at the time. Kozenczak followed his gut. He realized
pretty quickly that Piest had no reason to run.
He found out the contractor was Gacy. He ran
the background check. And unlike in the past,
where Gacy had stated by or records were missed,
Kozenczak found the Iowa record, that sodomy
conviction. That was the loose thread. That was
the loose thread Kozenczak pulled and the whole
thing started to unravel. But Gacy. The sheer
arrogance of this man. He didn't go into hiding.
He didn't run. He played games with the police.
It was a cat and mouse game, but the mouse thought
he was the cat. The police started 24 -hour surveillance
on him, and Gacy loved it. He loved it. Oh, yeah.
He would invite the detectives to breakfast.
He'd buy them dinner. He'd drive slow, then fast,
leading them on these pointless chases. He even
filed a civil suit against the police for harassment.
He sued the police while he had bodies under
his floorboards. That is the level of his narcissism.
He truly believed he was smarter than them. He
believed his community pillar mask was impenetrable.
There's a detail where he showed up at the police
station at 3 a .m., covered in mud, claiming
his car got stuck in a ditch. And where had he
actually been? He had just been burying Robert
Piest. He walked into the police station, literally
dirty from the grave he just dug, and looked
the cops in the eye. It was a taunt. He was daring
them to figure it out. But the evidence was mounting.
They get a search warrant. And they find things
in the trash that he just carelessly threw away.
They find a high school class ring belonging
to another missing boy, John Syke. They find
handcuffs, badges, and, cruefully, a photo receipt
from the Neeson Pharmacy. That receipt proved
Gacy was there and linked him directly to Piest.
It destroyed his alibi. And then there's the
second search warrant. And the smell. It was
December. The heat was on in the house. An officer
standing near a heating duct caught a whiff of
something rancid. Gacy had tried everything to
mask it. He used lime. He blocked vents with
concrete. But the smell of biological decomposition
is distinct. It was the smell of death rising
up into the living space. The house itself was
giving him up. And damn breaks. December 20th,
1978. Gacy is drinking with his lawyers. And
he just confesses. He gets drunk. He starts rambling.
And he says this phrase, which has become infamous.
I've been the judge, jury and executioner of
many, many people. He admitted to 30 plus murders.
He told his lawyers about the crawl space. Imagine
being those lawyers. Yeah. Sitting there drinking
whiskey with a client thinking you're defending
a guy on a missing persons charge. And you realize
you are sitting across from one of the most prolific
serial killers in history. It must have been
surreal. The police got the information. They
went back to the house. And on December 21st,
they found the first bone, a human arm bone in
the crawl space. And that was it? That was it.
One of the excavators told the police, I think
this place is full of kids. And it was. They
had to take the house apart piece by piece to
get them all out. It became an archaeological
dig of horror. So we get to the trial in February
1980. The evidence is overwhelming. He's confessed.
The bodies are found. Yeah. So the defense goes
for the only thing they have left. Right. They
argued not guilty by reason of insanity. They
claimed he had multiple personality disorder,
what we now call dissociative identity disorder.
And they introduced this alter ego. Yes. Jack
Hanley or Bad Jack. The defense claimed Bad Jack
was the one who hated homosexuals and did the
killing, while John Gacy was the innocent, upstanding
citizen. Did anyone buy that for a second? The
jury certainly didn't. The prosecution dismantled
it perfectly. They pointed to the premeditation.
Right. You don't dig a grave in advance if you're
insane. You don't buy quicklime to hide the smell
if you don't know what you're doing is wrong.
You don't draw maps of where you buried people
so you can fit more in if you are legally insane.
Those are the actions of a rational calculator.
Exactly. And the verdict was guilty on all 33
counts. Sentenced to death. A historic verdict
at the time. He spent 14 years on death row.
And he didn't exactly go quietly. He started
painting. The artwork. This is another glimpse
into his narcissism. He painted clowns, mostly
Pogo. He painted the seven dwarfs. He painted
Elvis. And these paintings became these controversial
collector's items. It was this macabre industry
that sprung up around him. He was still seeking
attention. Still desperate to be the center of
the narrative right to the end. And finally,
May 10th, 1994, execution day. Even his last
meal was a callback. KFC, fried chicken, shrimp.
Strawberries. A callback to his colonel days
in Iowa. He was clinging to that persona until
the very end. And the execution itself. Yeah.
It didn't go smoothly, did it? No, it was botched.
The chemicals in the lethal injection solidified
and clogged the IV tube. It took 18 minutes.
It was a messy end to a very messy life. And
his final words. Kiss my ass. Wow. Defiant to
the end. No remorse. None. A psychopath to the
last breath. Now, after he's gone, there's this
lingering question of legacy. Obviously, the
trauma for the families is immeasurable. But
there were some actual changes to the law that
came out of this whole nightmare. This is a fascinating
twist. Gacy's defense attorney, Sam Amirante,
the guy Gacy confessed to, was deeply affected
by the case. He later authored the Illinois Missing
Child Recovery Act of 1984. What did that do?
Before this, police often had a 72 -hour waiting
period before they would look for a missing child,
just assuming they were runaways. Right. This
act eliminated that. But wait, it evolved into
what we now know as the modern Amber Alert system.
That's incredible. So the system that helped
save kids today was born directly out of the
failures to catch Gacy sooner. Exactly. A positive
outcome from an absolute tragedy. And the story
isn't fully over, is it? Because for a long time,
there were unidentified victims. Buddy 5, Buddy
10. That's right. In 2011, Sheriff Tom Dart reopened
the files. They used modern DNA technology to
try and name the nameless. And they've had successes.
I saw that. William Bundy, identified in 2011.
James Hawkinson, 2017. Francis Wayne Alexander,
identified just recently in 2021. It's amazing
that science can give those families some kind
of closure, even 40 years later. It really is.
But there's one loose thread that really bothers
me, the accomplice theory. Gacy hinted at it.
He talked about... My associates. It's the biggest
unanswered question of the entire case. Gacy
wasn't in town for some of the disappearance
dates. Witnesses, like a survivor named Jeffrey
Rignell, insisted there was a second person in
the room during the torture. FBI profiler Robert
Ressler always suspected others were involved.
But Gacy took those secrets to the grave. We
may never know the full extent of who helped
him or if he was just lying to confuse the police
one last time. It's chilling to think someone
else might have walked away free. It is. The
story may not be completely finished. So let's
bring this home. What does this all mean? We've
walked through the trauma, the mask, the murders,
the trial. When you look at the totality of John
Wayne Gacy. What are we left with? I think we
are left with the terrifying reality that evil
is banal. It's boring, almost. It doesn't look
like a monster. It looks like a guy in a suit
shaking hands with the First Lady. It looks like
a helpful neighbor. Gacy proved that if you act
like you belong, if you act like a good guy,
society will let you get away with almost anything.
It's a harsh lesson in trust. It is. And here's
a final thought to leave you with. After Gacy
was executed, His brain was removed. It was given
to science. It sits in a jar owned by a psychiatrist,
Dr. Helen Morrison. They wanted to find the biological
root of his evil. A tumor, a defect, something.
And did they find anything? Nothing conclusive.
Just a brain. And I think that's the point. We
want to find a biological reason, something in
the hardware that explains the colonel and the
clown, but maybe we're looking in the wrong place.
What do you mean? Maybe the power wasn't in his
brain. Maybe the power was in our willingness
to trust the man in the suit. The mask worked
because we wanted it to work, and that says a
lot more about us than it does about him. That
is a heavy thought to end on, but a necessary
one. Thank you for listening to this deep dive
into the darkness. Stay curious, stay skeptical,
and we'll see you next time.