John Wayne Gacy
American serial killer (1942-1994) · United States · Died at 52
John Wayne Gacy is read about 13,373 times a day, in 44 languages.
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Something wrong?Between 1972 and 1978, John Wayne Gacy murdered at least thirty-three young men and boys in suburban Chicago, burying twenty-six of them in the crawl space beneath his ranch house. The "Killer Clown" moniker came from his community performances in costume before the crimes surfaced.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 11
Gacy (second left), pictured with his first wife (far left) at the 1967 Waterloo Jaycees Christmas party
The site of Gacy's former house on West Summerdale Avenue
Gacy as Pogo the Clown
Gacy with First Lady Rosalynn Carter on May 6, 1978, six years after his first murder and seven months before his final arrest
Timothy McCoy
John Butkovich
Michael BonninIn their own words 10
, The dead won't bother you, it's the living you got to to worry about
If they want to be convinced or [are] brainwashed into what they believe, then fine, then go ahead and kill me.
When they paint the image that I was this monster who picked up these alter boys along the street and swatted them like flies I said "this is ludicrous".
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Correct this familyAbout this person
Born March 17, 1942, Gacy was convicted in 1968 for the sodomy of a teenage boy in Waterloo, Iowa, serving eighteen months of a ten-year sentence. He killed his first victim in 1972. By the end of 1975 he had murdered twice more; after his second divorce in 1976, the pace accelerated to at least thirty victims. His method was consistent: lure them to his Norwood Park Township home, trick them into handcuffs under the pretence of a magic demonstration, then rape, torture, and kill by asphyxiation or garrote. Three victims were buried on his property, four dumped in the Des Plaines River. The December 1978 disappearance of teenager Robert Piest led police to Gacy's door. Arrested December 21, he was convicted of thirty-three murders - then the highest count by one person in U.S. legal history - and sentenced to death March 13, 1980. He was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.
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