John Wayne Gacy

"The dead won't bother you, it's the living you have to worry about."

John Wayne Gacy, a.k.a. "The Killer Clown", was an American serial killer and rapist.

History
Gacy was raised by an abusive, alcoholic father, who referred to him as "sissy", and a passive mother. He was close to his sisters and his mother, who called him "Johnny". After attending four different high schools, Gacy dropped out before completing his senior year and cut off all contact with his family, heading west. After running out of money in Las Vegas, Nevada, Gacy lied about his age and applied for a job as an ambulance driver at the Palm Mortuary Memorial Park, for which the minimum age was 21. When the staff learned the truth, they terminated Gacy's employment as a driver but offered him an alternative post as a mortuary assistant, in which he would move corpses and material from the hospital to the funeral home. Because Gacy could not afford lodgings with his new pay, he was also allowed to sleep at night in the premises, a fact that would cause considerable speculation of necrophilia when his crimes were discovered, years later. Gacy was shown how the bodies were cleaned, treated, and embalmed; at night, when everyone else left, he would pull out the drawers and examine the bodies, talk to them, and undress them, neatly folding their clothes next to the caskets. This lasted until the director became suspicious and called the police one day. Though Gacy was not identified as the culprit, he began to save money for the return trip to Chicago and quit three months later.

Without returning to high school, he enrolled in and eventually graduated from Northwestern Business College in 1963. A management trainee position with the Nunn-Bush Shoe Company followed shortly after graduation, and in 1964, Gacy was transferred to Springfield, Illinois. There he met coworker Marlynn Myers, and they married in September of that year. He became active in local Springfield organizations, joining the Jaycees and rising to vice-president of the Springfield chapter by 1965. Gacy would later become involved in political activism, construction, and several other fields, all the while racking up minor criminal charges. In 1975, Gacy created the character "Pogo the Clown", which he used to support himself. His habit of wearing the costume at charity events and parties later led to him being nicknamed the "Killer Clown". During this time, his involvement in politics eventually landed him clearance by the U.S. Secret Service. Shortly thereafter, he would begin his murders. He started with a young juvenile named Tim McCoy, whom he allegedly killed in self defense. He soon murdered a co-worker name John Butkovich. After many years of murdering, Gacy was eventually apprehended in Des Plaines following the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Piest who was last seen with Gacy. The police obtained a search warrant for Gacy's home, where they discovered a powerful odor and numerous items belonging to other missing young men.

Authorities then suspected Gacy of murder and would soon obtain a second search warrant. The second search would target the crawlspace in which police ripped up the floorboards and began to dig into the earth of the crawlspace. During the search, police found human bones buried in the soil of the crawlspace and, at that point, they placed Gacy under arrest for murder. Gacy would admit to 25-30 murders in the 1970s. When police searched his home, the remains of at least 29 people were found buried in various places. The other remaining victims were found in the Des Plaines River. During his trial, and in order to lessen his sentence, Gacy began telling officials and prosecutors that he had an alter-ego personality named Jack, who was responsible for the murders. Psychiatric evaluation proved the claim to be false. Later on in an interview on Death Row shortly before his execution, Gacy claimed himself to be the 34th victim as he was innocent and had no involvement with the murders and subsequent burials. Gacy claimed that his employees set him up. This proved to be false as he had already claimed responsibility for the murders of the young men years prior. It is reported that Gacy killed 33 young men between 1972 and 1978. He is also known to have raped two males of the same age, one in 1968 and one in May, 1978, both of whom were left alive. The nine unidentified victims were all buried in individual graves with headstones reading "We Are Remembered". Gacy was later found guilty of his crimes and sentenced to execution by lethal injection at Stateville Prison in Crest Hill, IL on May 10, 1994. When asked whether he had any last words during his execution, he reportedly snarled, "Kiss my ass." He was then executed.

Modus Operandi
According to Gacy's confession to the police, he would pick up Caucasian male runaways or male prostitutes in their mid-teens to early twenties from the Chicago Greyhound Bus station or off the streets. Afterwards, he would take them back to his house by either promising them money for sex, offering them a job with his construction company, simply grabbing them by force or forcing them into his car at gunpoint. Once they got back to his house, he would handcuff them or tie them up in another way after intoxicating them with alcohol or knocking them out with chloroform. He would torture them in various ways (such as using a fire poker on them, dripping hot melted candle wax on their bodies, repeatedly drowning them in his bathtub, or by placing them in a homemade "rack"). As a show of dominance, he would urinate on his victms. Gacy would rape his victims both before and after killing them, keeping the bodies around for a day or so.

One of his most infamous ways of binding his victims was convincing them to allow him to handcuff them under the pretense that it was part of a magic trick. Gacy would often stick paper towels or clothing (such as a sock or even their own underwear) in their mouths to muffle their screams, causing them to fatally asphyxiate. He would also kill his victims by strangling them with a rope or a board as he sexually assaulted them with sex toys, then bury the bodies in his crawlspace. Periodically, Gacy would pour lime in the crawlspace to hasten the decomposition of the bodies. Three victims were disposed off the property by being dropped into the Des Plaines River. When he killed his first victim, Timothy McCoy, he stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife instead of asphyxiating him.

On Criminal Minds

 * Season One:
 * "Natural Born Killer" - In Gacy's first reference, Morgan states the current unsub has more than triple Gacy's confirmed body count.
 * Season Three:
 * "Damaged" - While Gacy wasn't mentioned in the episode, the team pursues a clown guilty of killing a young couple more than twenty years before. In one of the final scenes, behind Prentiss's head, a billboard section is shown, and the only letters visible are "GACY". The small detail is hard to catch, but subconsciously makes one think of the Gacy case.
 * Season Four:
 * "The Angel Maker" - Gacy's prison paintings are brought up by Garcia, who is combing through websites known for selling serial killer memorabilia and becomes disturbed by clown paintings Gacy made on death row.
 * "Conflicted" - While Gacy wasn't mentioned or referenced in the episode, he seems to have been the inspiration for Adam Jackson, the episode's unsub. Both were abused by their fathers and had the same victimology (teenage boys and young men), who they would lure, rape, and kill by asphyxiation. Also, the scenario of Adam's split personality committing his murders is an allusion to Gacy's claim that he had a split personality who was responsible for killing his victims.
 * Season Five:
 * "Outfoxed" - During a lecture that Reid is attending, neuroscientist James Fallon mentions Gacy was one of five violent sociopaths (the others being Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Charles Manson, and Dennis Rader) whose brain patterns he has studied.
 * Season Seven:
 * "Closing Time" - While Gacy wasn't mentioned or referenced in the episode, he may have inspired some elements of Michael Janeczco. Both were serial killers whose wives left them prior to their killings. Both also targeted men and incapacitated their victims by getting them drunk before killing them. While Michael wasn't homosexual, the BAU initially assumed he was, which is a reference to Gacy's own sexuality.
 * "Profiling 101" - Gacy's mugshot is among many mugshots featured in a montage shown by the BAU during a special guest-lecture to a Criminology class.
 * "Foundation" - While Gacy wasn't mentioned or referenced in the episode, J.B. Allen, the episode's unsub, appears to have been based on Gacy. Both were serial killers and rapists who owned construction companies, which they used in some way to entice their victims (Gacy offered his victims jobs at his, Allen would approach boys who watched the construction work at his), and both also buried their victims on some property they owned.
 * Season Eleven:
 * "Tribute" - Gacy was mentioned alongside Richard Speck as possible infamous Chicago killers whose M.O.s could be copied by Michael Peterson, as both shared the same prison as Michael's father.
 * Season Twelve:
 * "A Good Husband" - Gacy was mentioned in the episode by Lewis, who describes the episode's unsub, Mark Tolson, as a mixture of him and Dahmer. This seems to be true, as both were homosexual, psychopathic killers who were raised by alcoholic fathers, had spouses who left them prior to their killings, incapacitated their victims in some manner that involved alcohol (Gacy used alcohol he gave to his underage victims; Tolson used date-rape drugs he put in his victims' drinks), and killed their first victims by stabbing them.
 * Novels:
 * "Killer Profile" - Copycat Daniel Dryden partially mimicked Gacy for one is his murders, and disposed of the victim in Gacy's abandoned house, where an employee of the gas company discovered it.