John Gacy

John Gacy

Biography
It was St. Patrick’s Day when Marion Gacy and John Wayne Gacy, Sr. welcomed their first son into the world at the Edgewater Hospital in 1942. John Wayne, Jr. was the second of three children. His older sister Joanne was born two years before him and his younger sister Karen was born two years after him. All of the Gacy children were raised as Catholics and they all went to Catholic schools. They lived on the northern side of Chicago. Gacy busied himself after school with a series of part time positions and Boy Scouts activities. He was a popular kid in school, and all of his teachers liked him along with all the boys in his Boy Scout troop. When he was eleven he got hit by a swing set and had a blood clot in his brain, but his blood clot wasn’t discovered until he was sixteen. At the age of seventeen he was diagnosed with a non-specific heart ailment and he was never properly treated. They couldn’t find the exact cause for the pain he was suffering. John Wayne Gacy, Sr. was an abusive alcoholic who physically abused his wife and verbally assaulted his children. John Gacy, Jr. loved his father and wanted desperately to gain his devotion and attention. He was never able to get very close to his father before he died. This was something that he regretted his entire life. He married Marlynn Myers in 1964. Gacy and his wife moved to Waterloo, Iowa, because Marlynn’s father gave Gacy a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. They had two children; a boy and a girl.

Murder
There were rumors going around town that Gacy was homosexual. In 1968, he was indicated for committing sodomy to a minor named Mark Miller. A few months later, he was charged with hiring a man named Dwight Andersson to beat up Mark Miller. Gacy paid Andersson three hundred dollars to get Miller into his car and drive him out of town and spray mace in his eyes and then beat him up. Miller managed to get away from Andersson to safety. Police arrested Andersson but Andersson told the police that Gacy had hired him. Gacy was found to be antisocial, but competent to go to trial, pleading guilty to the sodomy charges. Gacy was given ten years at the Iowa State Reformatory. On June 18, 1970, he was released and he moved back to his hometown of Chicago, since his wife had divorced him. Gacy was remarried to a woman named Carole Hoff in 1972. In 1976, Carole and Gacy got a divorce because Gacy told her that he liked boys more than women. He took a job as “Pogo the Clown” to entertain little boys. Gacy began to cause more problems when boys that worked for him at his business started disappearing. On December 13, 1978, the police found plenty of incriminating evidence such as child pornography, handcuffs, and ropes in his apartment. The police questioned Gacy, who admitted that he had killed someone in self-defense and buried them beneath his garage. The police found nearly thirty bodies on Gacy’s property, as well as several others in nearby areas, such as the river. The police thought that Gacy beat them because a lot of their bones were broken or cracked. When the police were done they found thirty-three bodies. Gacy was found guilty after a short trial and sentenced to death by lethal injection. On May 10, 1994, he was executed, ending a criminal legacy that horrified the nation.

-page author: Marissa
-left photo courtesy of http://student.fortlewis.edu/
-right photo courtesy of http://www.prairieghosts.com/gacy.html