BONUS: John Wayne Gacy (Mark of a Serial Killer)
We are bringing you a special bonus episode featuring a case from Oxygen's hit series, “Mark of a Serial Killer.” Watch Mark of a Serial Killer on Sundays at 7/6c on Oxygen!
A rash of young men goes missing around Chicago during the 1970s; when bodies start washing up in the river, a pattern emerges; a small piece of evidence leads police to the home of a model citizen, where his furnace puts the suspect in the hot seat.
Season 2, Episode 5
Originally aired: May 7, 2020
Watch full episodes of Mark of a Serial Killer live or OnDemand for FREE on the Oxygen app: https://oxygentv.app.link/MOASKPodcast
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Listen and follow along
Transcript
Let's go!
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I don't like it.
And they're taking things to the next level.
You know, some people just get on your nerves.
You questioned every single thing I have.
You're supposed to be my sister.
I am your sister.
No, you're not.
We have to be honest about this.
I'm afraid.
You should pay those lawsuits off.
No one sues the bottom.
They all go for the top.
Can I have the crazy pillow, y'all?
Apparently, you're already taking it.
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, September 16th, on Bravo.
And streaming on Peacock.
Streaming now on Peacock.
We sell toilet tissue and local newspapers.
That is in order of quality.
From the crew that brought you the office, my name is Ned Sampson.
I am your new editor-in-chief.
Comes a new comedy series.
Have you read this paper?
Uh-huh.
It sucks.
But we are going to make it better.
Meet the underdog journalists.
I hope it's not too disruptive to have me shake everything up.
Don't be so self-defecating.
With major issues.
Oscar.
Oh, God.
Not again.
The paper.
Only on Peacock.
Streaming now.
Hi, Snap listeners.
We're bringing you a special bonus episode today from Oxygen's Hit Series, Mark of his Serial Killer.
Returning this Sunday, October 17th at 7.6 Central with all new episodes.
You can also watch full episodes live or on demand on the free Oxygen app by clicking the link in our description.
Enjoy.
We had a homicide.
When you have somebody in the water, that crime scene is limited to the body.
There was underwear that had been stuffed in the body's throat.
Why is someone putting it there?
It could be I'll shut you up.
They're finding more bodies in the river.
Hey, we got a problem.
30-something young men had gone missing.
Is one person responsible for the disappearances of these young men?
Rob told me he was going to talk to that contractor.
He never came back.
They needed to find out more about that contractor.
We started on a surveillance.
You're hoping somehow you're going to find this kid alive.
Out of all the people I've known in this world, I would have never thought that my friend would turn out to be the worst serial killer of all time.
It's the summer of 1978
and Chicago is mired in poverty and crime.
Chicago had the crime you'd expect in a big city in the mid-70s.
Lots of it and with all varieties.
As Chicago street gangs are battling it out for territory, organized crime controls the city.
All this while police have to contend with a rash of missing and runaway teenagers.
The police force was highly taxed at this time in terms of not having all the resources available.
They were spread quite thin.
It's a quiet evening along the banks of the Illinois River.
an hour southwest of Chicago.
This is basically a rural area where the Illinois River and the Kankakee kind of come together.
A lot of barge traffic that comes down there.
And a barge captain who's sitting there waiting for the gates to open
looks out and discovered a body floating in the river.
And he called our department and we went there.
get that body out of the water.
There was some decomposition,
but it looked like it was a young individual.
When you have somebody in the water, the one thing you know is that that crime scene is limited to the body because the crime is never committed right there.
The body is the crime scene.
The remains are taken to the coroner's lab to begin the investigation.
It's not uncommon for police to find bodies in the river.
To be honest with you, in those times, just another body.
It's like, okay, do we have a homicide victim?
Is it going to be one of my usual,
where it's an organized crime figure or somebody like that or a drowning victim?
The first thing I asked the pathologist was, initially, do you have a cause of death?
And at that time, they didn't.
The victim was decomposed.
It was very difficult to tell how they had died.
However, the medical examiner recognizes this person has something lodged in his throat.
There was underwear of some sort in this kid's mouth and down into his throat.
It looks like it was forcibly pushed down into the throat area.
At that point in my career, and I never saw anything quite like that.
At that time, we knew that we had a homicide.
Immediately ruling out suicide, detectives have to identify the victim, but that proves difficult.
At that time of the year, during the summer months, decomposition really takes place and it's really tough to identify the body.
At that point, they weren't able to garner fingerprints from the body.
It was too advanced in decomposition because they had been in the river much too long.
The coroner does find one identifying mark.
He did have a tattoo
of the name Tim Lee.
Investigators check the missing persons reports, and no one by that name has been reported missing.
They turn to the press in hopes of helping them identify their John Doe.
And almost immediately, police get a call.
Someone, a friend came forward in Chicago simply by recognizing the tattoo and said that this young man was actually Timothy O'Rourke.
He was a huge fan of martial artist Bruce Lee.
He got the tattoo.
in honor of him.
Some of his friends saw him a few weeks before we found the body.
Timothy was a gay young man.
He was just 20 years old, and he would frequent bars downtown in Chicago.
So investigators went to Newtown, which is a gay district within Chicago, to find out more information about Timothy O'Rourke.
We went to bars and restaurants and stuff like that.
No one really knew him that well.
In the past three years, there have been several dozen young men who have gone missing from the streets in the area.
Many of the missing identified as gay.
Timothy O'Rourke seems to fit this same profile.
We're talking a time
when homosexuality wasn't talked about at all.
Usually the families back in those days had nothing to do with homosexuals, especially young kids.
They were out on their own.
They were vulnerable.
Around 30 young men had gone missing in that area.
Kids were running away at an unbelievable pace in the 70s.
It wasn't so unusual to have a missing person.
Investigators interviewed Timothy O'Rourke's friends to see see who might have wanted to hurt him, but come up empty.
When you had an unsolved missing persons, there were no computers.
There were no eight or 12-page forms to fill out to send a Quantico to be published nationally with earmarks that it could be criminally involved.
Those kinds of things just didn't exist.
So police investigators really worked hard.
They were pretty diligent.
However, they did run out of leads.
The case rancolled.
Then, five months later, just three miles upriver from where the body of Timothy O'Rourke was found.
There was a lot of hunting at that time of the year.
Some duck hunters that were hunting out there
ran across the body.
I met a couple other detectives on the scene.
We were able to determine that we had a young male that was nude.
Relative for these kind of bodies, it was in pretty good shape.
A lot of times they're tore up from barge traffic that's on that river.
Again, when you have somebody in the water, this body is the crime scene.
There's nothing around there that's going to help us out.
So whatever is on that body is extremely important.
So at that time, you want to get that body over to the pathologist.
When the body arrives at the coroner, investigators discover something eerily familiar.
There was the pair of bikini underwear that had been stuffed in the body's throat.
One of the detectives that was with me, we both looked at each other and said, hey, we got a problem.
His last words to me were, I'll be right back.
He just vanished.
The person that Rob Peeste went out to talk to, you're hoping that, all right, maybe he's got Rob Peist in his house.
When he showed up, he was dirty.
He was all full of mud.
We knew right away he was hiding something.
In the river south of Chicago, homicide detectives have just discovered a second body.
Again, with the same strange mark, fabric stuffed down the victim's throat.
whether the underwear was stuffed post-mortem or was it prior we did not know that
there wasn't anything at that time that we were able to determine cause of death
they were sure that there was two bodies and that they had this material lodged in their throat and they had never seen anything like it before
So they were able to identify his fingerprints.
The victim is 19-year-old Frank Landigan.
Frank Landigan was a papetic crop.
He was involved in the drug scene.
He was living on the streets,
was known to be
by some people as a street hustler.
No other evidence is discovered on the body, so detectives interview Frank's friends and family, trying to establish a timeline of his last hours.
Most of the people that we talked to were super cooperative.
At that time, they were just happy somebody cared about the victim
because apparently they felt that nobody cared about any of these people, and we did care.
Detectives learned that Frank was last seen on the street the night of November 4th, eight days before his body is discovered.
But no one knows what he was doing the night he went missing.
We were downtown and I was talking to some of the kids that hung around down there.
A lot of them were prostitutes.
When you have somebody that's working the corners of the street, you have no missing persons on them, it's tough.
And
we were never really able to nail down a crime scene nor any suspects.
The detectives turned to the mark.
The underwear deliberately shoved down the victim's throat.
that they've now seen for a second time.
We got something highly unusual, and we got two cases of it.
Investigators were concerned because so many young men were missing in the area.
What they did know is that they had those two young men that had been found with material savagely lodged down their throats.
Is one person responsible?
We thought, hey, maybe somebody out there was killing street kids.
We just didn't know who he was.
the question is why why is that foreign material in the throat
why is someone putting it there
that's a very unusual activity it could be i'll shut you up
or you're never going to say anything again or i've got control about what you can say and what you can't say
Then, one month later, in the quiet Chicago suburb of Des Plains, Illinois, local couple Harold and Elizabeth Peast arrive at the police station.
They say their son Robert has gone missing.
Robert Peast is a store clerk at a local Nissan pharmacy.
He was only 15 years old.
He couldn't drive.
So his mother went there to pick him up after work.
She's waiting to take him home at the end of his shift
so they could have a family birthday celebration for her at home.
I mean, the cake was there, the candles were ready to light.
And he runs out.
Rob tells his mother that a contractor building some shelves at the store had offered him a job.
And he was going back inside for a minute to talk it over with him.
And his mother was waiting for a long time
and
he never came back.
Mrs.
Peace was alarmed.
He just vanished.
In the late 70s, it's not unheard of for a teenager to run off.
But the Peast family tells police that Rob just wasn't that kind of teenager.
Rob was a good kid and
not someone that anyone would expect to run away or just disappear.
We know something's not right with this.
It's an all-American kid doing well in school, athletic, had a good job, good family life, girlfriend, the whole bit, and he's not the type that you would think would run away.
I was good friends with Rob Peeste.
Rob was a couple years younger than me and he came to work at the pharmacy after I had worked there for a while.
And I worked the cash register at the pharmacy.
That night, Rob told me he was going to talk to that contractor.
He said he was going outside to talk to him about some work over the holidays.
He took his coat,
and
his last words to me before he left to talk to that contractor were,
I'll be right back.
I had
worried that night subconsciously because I had a bad dream about him that night.
And you know, I might cry here, you guys.
So
I had a really bad dream about him that he was stuck in a trunk.
I got this diary out and I wrote notes that next day.
So, sorry.
Police now need to locate the contractor who may have been the last person to see Robert Peeste alive.
The contractor was
a middle-aged man, not very attractive, not very fit, but was
muddling around, just kind of doing his measuring without interacting or an awareness of anybody else.
Police ask the owner of the pharmacy if he knows the contractor's name.
They talked to one of the owners of the pharmacy and were able to put a name on that contractor.
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How hard is it to kill a planet?
Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.
When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.
Are we really safe?
Is our water safe?
You destroyed our top.
And crimes like that, they don't just happen.
We call things accidents.
There is no accident.
This was 100%
preventable.
They're the result of choices by people.
Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.
These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.
Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it.
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As Grundy and Will Will County authorities investigate two young men found in the river with clothing stuffed down their throats, 50 miles north, Desplains police looking into the disappearance of 15-year-old Rob Peist have a name for the last person to see him alive.
The person that Rob Peast went out to talk to was John Wayne Gacy.
So investigators went to the home of the contractor.
They wanted to learn what this gentleman might know of the disappearance of Robert Peast.
He blew him off, said his ant bag,
and he couldn't talk to him.
So they said, well, come to the station tonight when you're done with your arrangements for the funeral.
Didn't they left?
While detectives wait to talk to Gacy, they take a routine look at his background.
They learned that he was an outstanding member of the community.
He threw these big summer parties for the neighborhood.
It all came to his house, backyard parties, barbecues, and everybody liked him.
Johnny always wanted to be in the limelight.
Johnny was a politician.
Johnny was a big shot.
Johnny held the St.
Patrick's Parade.
He was very well liked, very successful in business, very active politically.
In fact, he had a picture taken with Rosalind Carter.
He was a precinct committeeman for the Democrat Party.
He was a nice guy,
the kind of guy you would probably want to have a beer with.
He would dress up in a clown costume.
He would do charity events as Pogo the Clown.
A couple of people told us that he had these clown outfits and he would go entertain kids at the hospital because he enjoyed entertaining the kids.
Later that night, John Gacy finally shows up for his interview.
When he showed up, it was like three o'clock in the morning.
We asked him specifically about Robert Peast.
He didn't remember talking to the kid.
He didn't remember seeing the kid, nothing.
He had nothing to do with it.
But we knew right away there was something wrong.
He was hiding something.
He was dirty.
He was all full of mud.
His pants and shoes
was all full of mud.
He said he got stuck somewhere in his car.
So I asked him, Where'd you get stuck?
He said, near his house.
Realized right off the bat he was lying.
I didn't believe him.
I just did not believe him.
But then we had to let him go.
We couldn't hold him.
We had nothing.
So we let him go.
And I thought about him where he said he got stuck.
And I went there the next day.
There was no mark of anybody
stuck.
We knew Eli about that.
Police decide to dig deeper into Gacy's background.
It turns out this pillar of the local community has a rap sheet.
John Gacy had a sodomy conviction in Iowa a few years back and was sent to prison
for sexual relations with a juvenile boy.
And so that piqued their interest.
I mean, so many young men were missing in the area
and two were found dead in the river.
Now, you have this man Gacy,
who had actually been in prison for having sexually assaulted a teenage boy.
who was last seen with Rob Peace.
So to investigators, it seemed as if the pieces of the puzzle were actually coming together.
Police immediately put John Wayne Gacy under 24-hour surveillance.
You're hoping that, all right, maybe he's got Rob Peist in his house kidnapping or holding without,
you know, letting him go.
You're hoping that somehow you're going to find this kid alive.
It soon becomes clear this will be no ordinary surveillance operation.
We're obviously in plain cars, but he knows who we are.
So during the surveillance, many nights we would have gone up at a restaurant and John sat at one table and he says,
guys, come on and sit with me.
We'll talk.
And so we moved over and talked to him.
We had very good conversations with him for hours on end at the middle of the night.
He was
likable.
I didn't hate him, and I felt very bad about him.
You could see how he made friends that influenced people.
The investigation continued on with interviews of associates and background.
As part of their background check, detectives cross-referenced Gacy's name with reports in other precincts and come across a bombshell clue.
Gacy's name was mentioned in a few Chicago police reports.
The police discovered that two young men who were employed by John Wayne Gacy
had gone missing as well.
Two teenagers, John Butkovich and Gregory Godzig, have been on the list of missing boys for two years.
They come from different suburbs of Chicago, but have one significant connection,
John Wayne Gacy.
Investigators discover the two young men worked for him
and they just vanished.
You recognize the smell of decomposition of human flesh.
I knew we had to get hospital.
My feelings were almost numb.
It was just beyond anything I could have ever comprehended up until that point.
Police have been conducting surveillance on a contractor named John Gacy in connection with the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Peist.
We couldn't charge him with anything.
We had no body.
We had nothing.
Authorities have just discovered a link between John Gacy and two other missing boys.
Gacy's name was mentioned in a few Chicago police reports of missing kids that had never been found.
At the time, the police didn't make a connection between Lutkovich and Godzik.
Well, the reason is they were from different police areas, and there was no way of communication.
With Gacy now connected to the disappearance of these two boys, police wonder whether he might also be a suspect in the long list of missing Chicago-area teenagers.
Gacy is involved in politics, very well liked, very well respected in the community.
People will speak up for him.
The people that we interviewed, that he had connections with, other contractors, and so on, everybody liked them.
All his neighbors liked them.
All the people that he associated with liked them.
It was real hard, you know what I'm saying, to
talk to these people and get them to give us information when they thought he was a great guy.
But they didn't know what we knew.
Detectives continue to follow Gacy full time as they look into his background, hoping he'll slip up.
And then one day, Gacy hands the investigators the break they've been waiting for.
Gacy was arrogant.
He'd see the policeman sitting in front of his house.
He'd invite him in to use the restroom.
So one of the officers goes in the bathroom.
When the heat kicked on while he was in there, the air coming out of that vent practically hit him in the face.
And he recognized the smell of decomposition of human flesh.
He'd been to the morgue before, he knew what it was.
I go,
could it be?
You know, you start, is it possible that there's a body buried there?
I said, Well, I think you guys may now have probable cause.
So we drafted a search warrant for his whole house.
So they execute the search warrant.
Desplains Police Department performed a search warrant on the Gacy home.
During their search,
they found a bond slip.
Now, a bond slip states you're going to show up for a court date.
The investigators realized that they had a bond slip from Frank Lanigan.
Frank Lanigan, who had been found in the river south of Chicago and had material stuffed down his throat.
Investigators realized, aha,
we've got a link.
Well, bingo.
The bond slip definitively connects victim Frank Landigan to John Wayne Gacy,
confirming to investigators they are onto something beyond a single disappearance.
The smell, it was coming up through the vent.
One of the investigators questioned: where was the heating unit?
It was down in the crawl space under his house.
We went down into the crawl space.
Lime had been spread around.
Everything looked like it hadn't been touched in months.
But it raised a lot of suspicion about what was down there.
It was earthen, uneven.
It had some uneven mounds.
And that area is a very
lot of groundwater, it's very damp.
There was some
indentations in the in the crawl space.
Sheriff's people go in opposite corners in the crawl space and start digging with trowels and searchlight and so forth.
And they looked at it, immediately found bones
and knew they were human bones.
Well, stop everything.
My phone rings.
And it was another assistant state's attorney.
And he said, Finder,
get your ass over to the police station.
We found some human bones.
I said, oh my God.
More than one body?
He said,
not sure.
Authorities begin excavating Gacy's house.
They didn't have to go down but a few inches, and they're discovering bones in opposite locations.
It's a graveyard.
Over the course of the next week, more and more bodies are unearthed from under Gacy's home.
Pathologists begin looking at the remains for any forensic evidence, and they see a familiar mark over and over again.
There were underwear, socks, rags, t-shirts, pieces of cloth cloth in their mouths.
And
as they were tearing out the interior walls,
lo and behold, they found Robbie Peast's blew-down jacket
was stuffed in the rafters in the crawl space.
That was the strongest link that put Peast in Gacy's house.
Investigators found pieces of key evidence linking not only Gacy to someone who has disappeared,
but also someone that was found dead.
And it was clear that there is increasingly more bodies that they might find.
Now, the question is: how many?
29 bodies were recovered from the property,
26 from the crawl space.
One from underneath the dining room floor, which didn't have crawl space under it.
One from the backyard.
And one
in the addition
buried under the concrete.
My feelings were almost numb.
I had never seen anything like this.
It was just beyond anything I could have ever comprehended up until that point.
After discovering 29 bodies buried on his property and two bodies in the river, authorities immediately arrest 36-year-old John Wayne Gacy for murder.
Brought Casey back into the station.
Then he asked me, he said,
Mike, were you guys in a crawl space?
I says, yeah, John, why do you ask that?
And he said, well, that's what the line was for.
I said, what do you mean?
He said, the line was to cover the smell, to cover the smell in the crawl space.
After meticulously removing each body over the course of nearly two weeks, authorities must identify all the decomposed bodies.
We just didn't know who they were, and they were in such bad shape.
It was really making it hard to identify.
As authorities struggled to identify remains, they continued to find what appears to be Gacy's mark.
The existence of those materials that was stuffed in the orifices in both the river bodies and the other bodies recovered from the home
tied it absolutely to him.
That was a nail in the coffin.
As detectives are painstakingly removing remains from John Wayne Gacy's crawl space, a tugboat captain on the Desk Plains River calls police.
A body was found.
It was highly decomposed, was nude,
and it was later determined that he was probably strangled.
But he did have
underwear type of material that was in his throat.
Ephistic ACMO to a T.
We were all anticipating it was Robert Peist.
We went and took a look at him.
We realized he was far too short to be Robert Peist.
The victim is identified through fingerprints as 20-year-old James Mazzora, who has been missing for a month.
Another street kid,
Mojo, was a nickname that they had for him.
And he was from Elmwood Park and living on the streets of the city of Chicago.
How many more are we going to have pop up here?
And how many did he do?
My goodness.
Thank God that somebody stopped this guy.
The public is notified that this revered community figure is the serial killer that has been kidnapping and killing boys for years.
I do believe if evil had not come and knocked at his door and he had opened it up, Johnny would have been the governor of the state of Illinois.
Investigators delve into Gacy's history to learn what might have led him to kill at least 32 people with his sadistic mark.
Gacy had a alcoholic father who was physically and verbally abusive to his mother.
He was also abusive to Gacy.
Johnny used to get hit all the time.
Every time Mr.
Gacy either came from the basement drunk or sober, Mr.
Gacy would whop him with a fist in the face.
He would make homosexual references stating that Gacy was a pansy, gay.
And of course, this didn't lend itself to Gacy having a very high self-esteem as as a youth.
All through his life, he begged for his father to accept him.
Gacy aspired to be something that his father would be proud of.
Clearly, his father would not have been proud of his son who's having sex with other men.
He tried to elevate what he thought was sort of the good Gacy, which was the community leader, the heterosexual male.
Everybody liked him.
He had his alter ego, Pogo the Clown.
But there was that part of Gacy that was always there.
The part that enjoyed the killing and the torture and having sex with young boys.
The question is, why is that clothing in the throat?
Why is Gacy putting it there?
There's probably some ritualized aspect that he enjoyed doing it.
The community reeled in disbelief.
They gathered around the house, you know, anxiously awaiting to hear if any more bodies had been identified by the medical examiner.
made it public that we were looking for
dental records and other materials that might identify missing young men and boys during the relevant years.
Authorities have found 29 Gacy victims on his property and three more victims in the river.
A total of 32 bodies.
We never had seen that degree of evil and it was unsettling and made people
feel unsafe.
but at the same time, I thought maybe we would have some peace and find Rob.
We're quite sure that Rob Peest was not underneath the crawl space because they're all skeletal remains and Rob Peeste has only been missing for not even two weeks.
As authorities struggle to identify the victims and locate Robert Peeste and any other unknown victims, they decide to approach Casey directly to see if he'll help the investigation.
He has a lawyer and
I figured no way that they're going to get a confession.
I said to him, John, do you
have any remorse for what happened to Rob or any other young man?
And it's like the temperature in that room dropped 20 degrees.
His whole persona changed.
He just looked at me and he says, what do you mean, remorse?
In January of 1979, authorities attempt to get the suspected serial killer, John Wayne Gacy, to confess to his crimes and help find Robert Peist.
And I knew I was in trouble, man.
I thought he'd clam up.
And I said, well,
do you have any remorse?
He said, oh, you mean that I got caught?
I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I mean.
He said, oh, sure.
From that point, Gacy was very forthcoming.
He didn't listen to his lawyers.
He went ahead and gave these oral statements.
Gacy's own words were that he was running out of room in the crawl space and therefore decided to start throwing victims in the river.
You find young men that would go to his house, drinks, have drugs, maybe sex, or just a job.
He always blamed his victims for what happened to him, for being killed even.
It was their fault, not his.
He didn't change his emotion at all when he was telling me about what he did to these kids.
He would tell the kids, okay, I'm going to put the handcuffs on you.
Then he would tell them, I'm going to show you the rope trick.
He would put a rope around their neck, put a very loose knot, then a stick about 10 to 12 inches, then another loose knot, and he would start twisting it, bracing it between the shoulder and the back of the head.
And he would twist it and twist it.
Investigators believe that his mark evolved from this brutality.
He was torturing these kids.
And to keep them from screaming, he gagged them.
So kids start screaming in the bedroom or whatever, his neighbors are going to hear it.
Now, did he admit it?
No, he would never admit that.
He thought he was going to get away with it forever.
That's the way his life was.
Gacy is formally charged with 33 counts of murder.
32 bodies have been located, and Robert Peest has not been found.
While Gacy is still awaiting trial, another body is spotted by a hiker on the riverbank.
The body was found near a dam.
The body was not that well preserved.
We found paper towels stuffing the throat,
which we know is the mark of John Wayne Gacy.
With Robert Peast
still being missing, I thought that might be Jim.
Investigators immediately bring the body to the coroner's office to attempt identification.
Then, within four or five days, a positive identification has been made on Rob Peest by dental records.
When Rob's body was recovered,
I felt very bad that the family knew that this was final for their son.
There was no chance that he had run away or
Orsik was still alive.
When they found the body, my whole world stopped at that time.
Rob was dead.
Part of myself felt guilty in the early days.
Sorry.
I think to Rob, I would just say, I'm sorry.
Sorry, I didn't run out.
Sorry I didn't stop it.
Yacy stands trial for 33 counts of murder.
The victims, some of whom have not been identified, are all young men and boys, ranging in age from 14 to 21.
At trial, he was Mr.
Businessman.
Sat there like he was running a a committee meeting.
Mr.
Affable.
It took a long time for the jury to come back,
but they did come back
with 33 guilties,
12 of which
he qualified for the death penalty.
Finally, Judge Garuppo starts reading,
for the murder of so-and-so and so-and-so, I sentenced you to death.
For the murder of so-and-so and so-and-so, I sentenced you to death death 12 times.
And Gacy, we could see his face.
I can't imagine standing there and having somebody sentence me to death 12 times.
I'm looking him in the eye.
He didn't even blink.
He didn't even bat an eye.
You talk about a scary guy.
That's a scary guy.
Out of all the people I've known in this world, in my wildest dreams,
my wildest dreams, No,
I would have never thought that my friend that I grew up with
would turn out to be the worst serial killer of all time.
No, I did not know that.
14 years later, surrounded by family members of the victims, John Wayne Gacy
was executed by lethal injection.
I remember the day when he finally got his lethal injection.
I just remember just being so relieved that finally it's over.
To date, six of John Wayne Gacy's victims remain unidentified.
It's all a light-hearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid.
We're your hosts, I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.
And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy.
The stories we cover are well researched.
Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.
With a touch of humor.
Shout out to her.
Shout out to all my therapists out there.
There's been like eight of them.
A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing.
That motherfucker is not real.
And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the Way Back Machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast, Morbid.
Follow Morbid on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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