BONUS: John Wayne Gacy (Mark of a Serial Killer)

Speaker 1 Let's go!

Speaker 2 Bravos, the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City are back.

Speaker 3 Here we are, ladies. I don't like it.

Speaker 1 And they're taking things to the next level.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Apparently, you're already taking it.

Speaker 2 The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, September 16th, on Bravo.

Speaker 1 And streaming on Peacock.

Speaker 4 Streaming now on Peacock.

Speaker 5 We sell toilet tissue and local newspapers.

Speaker 6 That is in order of quality.

Speaker 8 From the crew that brought you the office, my name is Ned Sampson. I am your new editor-in-chief.

Speaker 7 Comes a new comedy series.

Speaker 9 Have you read this paper? Uh-huh. It sucks.

Speaker 10 But we are going to make it better.

Speaker 7 Meet the underdog journalists.

Speaker 8 I hope it's not too disruptive to have me shake everything up.

Speaker 3 Don't be so self-defecating.

Speaker 11 With major issues.

Speaker 9 Oscar. Oh, God.

Speaker 8 Not again. The paper.

Speaker 7 Only on Peacock.

Speaker 4 Streaming now.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You can also watch full episodes live or on demand on the free Oxygen app by clicking the link in our description. Enjoy.

Speaker 12 We had a homicide.

Speaker 12 When you have somebody in the water, that crime scene is limited to the body.

Speaker 11 There was underwear that had been stuffed in the body's throat.

Speaker 14 Why is someone putting it there? It could be I'll shut you up.

Speaker 15 They're finding more bodies in the river.

Speaker 10 Hey, we got a problem.

Speaker 15 30-something young men had gone missing. Is one person responsible for the disappearances of these young men?

Speaker 3 Rob told me he was going to talk to that contractor.

Speaker 11 He never came back.

Speaker 16 They needed to find out more about that contractor.

Speaker 6 We started on a surveillance. You're hoping somehow you're going to find this kid alive.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 3 It's the summer of 1978

Speaker 3 and Chicago is mired in poverty and crime.

Speaker 11 Chicago had the crime you'd expect in a big city in the mid-70s.

Speaker 9 Lots of it and with all varieties.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 15 The police force was highly taxed at this time in terms of not having all the resources available. They were spread quite thin.

Speaker 3 It's a quiet evening along the banks of the Illinois River. an hour southwest of Chicago.

Speaker 1 This is basically a rural area where the Illinois River and the Kankakee kind of come together.

Speaker 21 A lot of barge traffic that comes down there.

Speaker 12 And a barge captain who's sitting there waiting for the gates to open

Speaker 10 looks out and discovered a body floating in the river.

Speaker 12 And he called our department and we went there.

Speaker 22 get that body out of the water.

Speaker 20 There was some decomposition,

Speaker 20 but it looked like it was a young individual.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 22 The body is the crime scene.

Speaker 3 The remains are taken to the coroner's lab to begin the investigation.

Speaker 15 It's not uncommon for police to find bodies in the river.

Speaker 22 To be honest with you, in those times, just another body.

Speaker 12 It's like, okay, do we have a homicide victim?

Speaker 13 Is it going to be one of my usual,

Speaker 22 where it's an organized crime figure or somebody like that or a drowning victim?

Speaker 12 The first thing I asked the pathologist was, initially, do you have a cause of death?

Speaker 21 And at that time, they didn't.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 21 There was underwear of some sort in this kid's mouth and down into his throat.

Speaker 22 It looks like it was forcibly pushed down into the throat area.

Speaker 20 At that point in my career, and I never saw anything quite like that.

Speaker 12 At that time, we knew that we had a homicide.

Speaker 3 Immediately ruling out suicide, detectives have to identify the victim, but that proves difficult.

Speaker 22 At that time of the year, during the summer months, decomposition really takes place and it's really tough to identify the body.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 3 The coroner does find one identifying mark.

Speaker 26 He did have a tattoo

Speaker 26 of the name Tim Lee.

Speaker 3 Investigators check the missing persons reports, and no one by that name has been reported missing.

Speaker 3 They turn to the press in hopes of helping them identify their John Doe.

Speaker 3 And almost immediately, police get a call.

Speaker 15 Someone, a friend came forward in Chicago simply by recognizing the tattoo and said that this young man was actually Timothy O'Rourke.

Speaker 15 He was a huge fan of martial artist Bruce Lee.

Speaker 15 He got the tattoo.

Speaker 18 in honor of him.

Speaker 22 Some of his friends saw him a few weeks before we found the body.

Speaker 15 Timothy was a gay young man. He was just 20 years old, and he would frequent bars downtown in Chicago.

Speaker 15 So investigators went to Newtown, which is a gay district within Chicago, to find out more information about Timothy O'Rourke.

Speaker 13 We went to bars and restaurants and stuff like that.

Speaker 15 No one really knew him that well.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Timothy O'Rourke seems to fit this same profile.

Speaker 12 We're talking a time

Speaker 10 when homosexuality wasn't talked about at all.

Speaker 19 Usually the families back in those days had nothing to do with homosexuals, especially young kids.

Speaker 17 They were out on their own.

Speaker 11 They were vulnerable.

Speaker 15 Around 30 young men had gone missing in that area.

Speaker 6 Kids were running away at an unbelievable pace in the 70s. It wasn't so unusual to have a missing person.

Speaker 3 Investigators interviewed Timothy O'Rourke's friends to see see who might have wanted to hurt him, but come up empty.

Speaker 11 When you had an unsolved missing persons, there were no computers.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 15 So police investigators really worked hard. They were pretty diligent.

Speaker 9 However, they did run out of leads.

Speaker 15 The case rancolled.

Speaker 3 Then, five months later, just three miles upriver from where the body of Timothy O'Rourke was found.

Speaker 12 There was a lot of hunting at that time of the year.

Speaker 10 Some duck hunters that were hunting out there

Speaker 16 ran across the body.

Speaker 20 I met a couple other detectives on the scene.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 22 A lot of times they're tore up from barge traffic that's on that river.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 10 So whatever is on that body is extremely important.

Speaker 12 So at that time, you want to get that body over to the pathologist.

Speaker 3 When the body arrives at the coroner, investigators discover something eerily familiar.

Speaker 11 There was the pair of bikini underwear that had been stuffed in the body's throat.

Speaker 12 One of the detectives that was with me, we both looked at each other and said, hey, we got a problem.

Speaker 3 His last words to me were, I'll be right back.

Speaker 26 He just vanished.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 26 When he showed up, he was dirty.

Speaker 19 He was all full of mud.

Speaker 6 We knew right away he was hiding something.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 20 whether the underwear was stuffed post-mortem or was it prior we did not know that

Speaker 22 there wasn't anything at that time that we were able to determine cause of death

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 So they were able to identify his fingerprints.

Speaker 3 The victim is 19-year-old Frank Landigan.

Speaker 15 Frank Landigan was a papetic crop. He was involved in the drug scene.

Speaker 10 He was living on the streets,

Speaker 12 was known to be

Speaker 20 by some people as a street hustler.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 12 Most of the people that we talked to were super cooperative.

Speaker 12 At that time, they were just happy somebody cared about the victim

Speaker 24 because apparently they felt that nobody cared about any of these people, and we did care.

Speaker 3 Detectives learned that Frank was last seen on the street the night of November 4th, eight days before his body is discovered.

Speaker 3 But no one knows what he was doing the night he went missing.

Speaker 26 We were downtown and I was talking to some of the kids that hung around down there.

Speaker 17 A lot of them were prostitutes.

Speaker 10 When you have somebody that's working the corners of the street, you have no missing persons on them, it's tough.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 we were never really able to nail down a crime scene nor any suspects.

Speaker 3 The detectives turned to the mark. The underwear deliberately shoved down the victim's throat.
that they've now seen for a second time.

Speaker 20 We got something highly unusual, and we got two cases of it.

Speaker 15 Investigators were concerned because so many young men were missing in the area.

Speaker 15 What they did know is that they had those two young men that had been found with material savagely lodged down their throats.

Speaker 15 Is one person responsible?

Speaker 24 We thought, hey, maybe somebody out there was killing street kids.

Speaker 24 We just didn't know who he was.

Speaker 14 the question is why why is that foreign material in the throat

Speaker 14 why is someone putting it there

Speaker 14 that's a very unusual activity it could be i'll shut you up

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 6 Robert Peast is a store clerk at a local Nissan pharmacy.

Speaker 6 He was only 15 years old.

Speaker 26 He couldn't drive. So his mother went there to pick him up after work.

Speaker 11 She's waiting to take him home at the end of his shift

Speaker 11 so they could have a family birthday celebration for her at home.

Speaker 4 I mean, the cake was there, the candles were ready to light.

Speaker 9 And he runs out.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 6 And his mother was waiting for a long time

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 he never came back.

Speaker 15 Mrs. Peace was alarmed.

Speaker 26 He just vanished.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 16 Rob was a good kid and

Speaker 16 not someone that anyone would expect to run away or just disappear.

Speaker 6 We know something's not right with this.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 3 I was good friends with Rob Peeste.

Speaker 3 Rob was a couple years younger than me and he came to work at the pharmacy after I had worked there for a while.

Speaker 3 And I worked the cash register at the pharmacy. That night, Rob told me he was going to talk to that contractor.

Speaker 3 He said he was going outside to talk to him about some work over the holidays.

Speaker 3 He took his coat,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 his last words to me before he left to talk to that contractor were,

Speaker 3 I'll be right back.

Speaker 3 I had

Speaker 3 worried that night subconsciously because I had a bad dream about him that night.

Speaker 19 And you know, I might cry here, you guys.

Speaker 19 So

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 18 So, sorry.

Speaker 3 Police now need to locate the contractor who may have been the last person to see Robert Peeste alive. The contractor was

Speaker 3 a middle-aged man, not very attractive, not very fit, but was

Speaker 3 muddling around, just kind of doing his measuring without interacting or an awareness of anybody else.

Speaker 3 Police ask the owner of the pharmacy if he knows the contractor's name.

Speaker 11 They talked to one of the owners of the pharmacy and were able to put a name on that contractor.

Speaker 3 As much as I'd love to hold onto summer for as long as I can, I get excited for fall by thinking about my wardrobe. Cozy sweaters, layering my scarves.

Speaker 3 Quince nails it with luxury essentials that make your capsule closet effortless, easy, and always so stylish. Think chic cashmere wraps or cotton sweaters.
The best part?

Speaker 3 With Quince, everything is half the cost of similar brands. They work directly with top artisans and cut out the middleman to give you luxury without the markup.

Speaker 3 One classic I've been using every day since I got them is the Bally Polarized Sunglasses in green. They're great for road trips, pumpkin patches, or early mornings.

Speaker 3 I don't want to risk my eyesight for style, so I'm glad Quince offers polarized frames in a cute style. I've also been eyeing the Italian Italian leather laptop backpack for a while.

Speaker 3 I might just have to check out my cart right after this. Elevate your fall wardrobe essentials with Quince.
Go to quince.com slash snapped for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

Speaker 3 That's q-u-i-n-ce-e.com slash snapped to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com/slash snapped.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Speaker 3 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%

Speaker 3 preventable.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 8 You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wonder Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 6 The person that Rob Peast went out to talk to was John Wayne Gacy.

Speaker 15 So investigators went to the home of the contractor. They wanted to learn what this gentleman might know of the disappearance of Robert Peast.

Speaker 26 He blew him off, said his ant bag,

Speaker 26 and he couldn't talk to him.

Speaker 26 So they said, well, come to the station tonight when you're done with your arrangements for the funeral.

Speaker 26 Didn't they left?

Speaker 3 While detectives wait to talk to Gacy, they take a routine look at his background.

Speaker 15 They learned that he was an outstanding member of the community.

Speaker 26 He threw these big summer parties for the neighborhood. It all came to his house, backyard parties, barbecues, and everybody liked him.

Speaker 5 Johnny always wanted to be in the limelight. Johnny was a politician.
Johnny was a big shot. Johnny held the St.
Patrick's Parade.

Speaker 6 He was very well liked, very successful in business, very active politically. In fact, he had a picture taken with Rosalind Carter.

Speaker 16 He was a precinct committeeman for the Democrat Party. He was a nice guy,

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 3 Later that night, John Gacy finally shows up for his interview.

Speaker 26 When he showed up, it was like three o'clock in the morning. We asked him specifically about Robert Peast.

Speaker 26 He didn't remember talking to the kid. He didn't remember seeing the kid, nothing.
He had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 26 But we knew right away there was something wrong. He was hiding something.

Speaker 26 He was dirty. He was all full of mud.
His pants and shoes

Speaker 17 was all full of mud.

Speaker 26 He said he got stuck somewhere in his car.

Speaker 4 So I asked him, Where'd you get stuck?

Speaker 26 He said, near his house.

Speaker 26 Realized right off the bat he was lying.

Speaker 19 I didn't believe him.

Speaker 26 I just did not believe him. But then we had to let him go.
We couldn't hold him.

Speaker 25 We had nothing.

Speaker 17 So we let him go.

Speaker 26 And I thought about him where he said he got stuck.

Speaker 14 And I went there the next day.

Speaker 10 There was no mark of anybody

Speaker 19 stuck.

Speaker 26 We knew Eli about that.

Speaker 3 Police decide to dig deeper into Gacy's background.

Speaker 3 It turns out this pillar of the local community has a rap sheet.

Speaker 6 John Gacy had a sodomy conviction in Iowa a few years back and was sent to prison

Speaker 6 for sexual relations with a juvenile boy.

Speaker 6 And so that piqued their interest.

Speaker 15 I mean, so many young men were missing in the area

Speaker 15 and two were found dead in the river. Now, you have this man Gacy,

Speaker 15 who had actually been in prison for having sexually assaulted a teenage boy.

Speaker 11 who was last seen with Rob Peace.

Speaker 15 So to investigators, it seemed as if the pieces of the puzzle were actually coming together.

Speaker 3 Police immediately put John Wayne Gacy under 24-hour surveillance.

Speaker 6 You're hoping that, all right, maybe he's got Rob Peist in his house kidnapping or holding without,

Speaker 11 you know, letting him go.

Speaker 4 You're hoping that somehow you're going to find this kid alive.

Speaker 3 It soon becomes clear this will be no ordinary surveillance operation.

Speaker 6 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,

Speaker 11 guys, come on and sit with me.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 9 He was

Speaker 17 likable.

Speaker 6 I didn't hate him, and I felt very bad about him.

Speaker 11 You could see how he made friends that influenced people.

Speaker 6 The investigation continued on with interviews of associates and background.

Speaker 3 As part of their background check, detectives cross-referenced Gacy's name with reports in other precincts and come across a bombshell clue.

Speaker 25 Gacy's name was mentioned in a few Chicago police reports.

Speaker 15 The police discovered that two young men who were employed by John Wayne Gacy

Speaker 15 had gone missing as well.

Speaker 3 Two teenagers, John Butkovich and Gregory Godzig, have been on the list of missing boys for two years.

Speaker 3 They come from different suburbs of Chicago, but have one significant connection,

Speaker 3 John Wayne Gacy.

Speaker 16 Investigators discover the two young men worked for him

Speaker 26 and they just vanished.

Speaker 11 You recognize the smell of decomposition of human flesh.

Speaker 14 I knew we had to get hospital.

Speaker 16 My feelings were almost numb. It was just beyond anything I could have ever comprehended up until that point.

Speaker 3 Police have been conducting surveillance on a contractor named John Gacy in connection with the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Peist.

Speaker 26 We couldn't charge him with anything. We had no body.

Speaker 25 We had nothing.

Speaker 3 Authorities have just discovered a link between John Gacy and two other missing boys.

Speaker 25 Gacy's name was mentioned in a few Chicago police reports of missing kids that had never been found.

Speaker 11 At the time, the police didn't make a connection between Lutkovich and Godzik.

Speaker 11 Well, the reason is they were from different police areas, and there was no way of communication.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 6 Gacy is involved in politics, very well liked, very well respected in the community.

Speaker 17 People will speak up for him.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 26 It was real hard, you know what I'm saying, to

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 3 Detectives continue to follow Gacy full time as they look into his background, hoping he'll slip up.

Speaker 3 And then one day, Gacy hands the investigators the break they've been waiting for.

Speaker 16 Gacy was arrogant. He'd see the policeman sitting in front of his house.
He'd invite him in to use the restroom.

Speaker 11 So one of the officers goes in the bathroom.

Speaker 11 When the heat kicked on while he was in there, the air coming out of that vent practically hit him in the face.

Speaker 11 And he recognized the smell of decomposition of human flesh.

Speaker 11 He'd been to the morgue before, he knew what it was.

Speaker 11 I go,

Speaker 4 could it be?

Speaker 26 You know, you start, is it possible that there's a body buried there?

Speaker 16 I said, Well, I think you guys may now have probable cause.

Speaker 16 So we drafted a search warrant for his whole house.

Speaker 25 So they execute the search warrant.

Speaker 22 Desplains Police Department performed a search warrant on the Gacy home.

Speaker 1 During their search,

Speaker 10 they found a bond slip.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 15 Frank Lanigan, who had been found in the river south of Chicago and had material stuffed down his throat.

Speaker 15 Investigators realized, aha,

Speaker 15 we've got a link.

Speaker 22 Well, bingo.

Speaker 3 The bond slip definitively connects victim Frank Landigan to John Wayne Gacy,

Speaker 3 confirming to investigators they are onto something beyond a single disappearance.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 26 We went down into the crawl space.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 16 It was earthen, uneven. It had some uneven mounds.

Speaker 4 And that area is a very

Speaker 6 lot of groundwater, it's very damp.

Speaker 16 There was some

Speaker 6 indentations in the in the crawl space.

Speaker 11 Sheriff's people go in opposite corners in the crawl space and start digging with trowels and searchlight and so forth.

Speaker 6 And they looked at it, immediately found bones

Speaker 17 and knew they were human bones.

Speaker 26 Well, stop everything.

Speaker 16 My phone rings.

Speaker 16 And it was another assistant state's attorney. And he said, Finder,

Speaker 16 get your ass over to the police station.

Speaker 16 We found some human bones.

Speaker 11 I said, oh my God.

Speaker 16 More than one body? He said,

Speaker 22 not sure.

Speaker 3 Authorities begin excavating Gacy's house.

Speaker 11 They didn't have to go down but a few inches, and they're discovering bones in opposite locations.

Speaker 16 It's a graveyard.

Speaker 3 Over the course of the next week, more and more bodies are unearthed from under Gacy's home.

Speaker 3 Pathologists begin looking at the remains for any forensic evidence, and they see a familiar mark over and over again.

Speaker 26 There were underwear, socks, rags, t-shirts, pieces of cloth cloth in their mouths.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 as they were tearing out the interior walls,

Speaker 11 lo and behold, they found Robbie Peast's blew-down jacket

Speaker 26 was stuffed in the rafters in the crawl space.

Speaker 26 That was the strongest link that put Peast in Gacy's house.

Speaker 15 Investigators found pieces of key evidence linking not only Gacy to someone who has disappeared,

Speaker 15 but also someone that was found dead. And it was clear that there is increasingly more bodies that they might find.

Speaker 11 Now, the question is: how many?

Speaker 11 29 bodies were recovered from the property,

Speaker 11 26 from the crawl space.

Speaker 11 One from underneath the dining room floor, which didn't have crawl space under it.

Speaker 11 One from the backyard.

Speaker 10 And one

Speaker 11 in the addition

Speaker 11 buried under the concrete.

Speaker 16 My feelings were almost numb.

Speaker 16 I had never seen anything like this.

Speaker 16 It was just beyond anything I could have ever comprehended up until that point.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 25 Brought Casey back into the station.

Speaker 6 Then he asked me, he said,

Speaker 25 Mike, were you guys in a crawl space?

Speaker 25 I says, yeah, John, why do you ask that?

Speaker 6 And he said, well, that's what the line was for. I said, what do you mean?

Speaker 6 He said, the line was to cover the smell, to cover the smell in the crawl space.

Speaker 3 After meticulously removing each body over the course of nearly two weeks, authorities must identify all the decomposed bodies.

Speaker 26 We just didn't know who they were, and they were in such bad shape.

Speaker 16 It was really making it hard to identify.

Speaker 3 As authorities struggled to identify remains, they continued to find what appears to be Gacy's mark.

Speaker 11 The existence of those materials that was stuffed in the orifices in both the river bodies and the other bodies recovered from the home

Speaker 11 tied it absolutely to him.

Speaker 11 That was a nail in the coffin.

Speaker 3 As detectives are painstakingly removing remains from John Wayne Gacy's crawl space, a tugboat captain on the Desk Plains River calls police.

Speaker 10 A body was found.

Speaker 12 It was highly decomposed, was nude,

Speaker 21 and it was later determined that he was probably strangled.

Speaker 24 But he did have

Speaker 23 underwear type of material that was in his throat.

Speaker 26 Ephistic ACMO to a T.

Speaker 26 We were all anticipating it was Robert Peist.

Speaker 26 We went and took a look at him.

Speaker 21 We realized he was far too short to be Robert Peist.

Speaker 3 The victim is identified through fingerprints as 20-year-old James Mazzora, who has been missing for a month.

Speaker 10 Another street kid,

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 20 How many more are we going to have pop up here?

Speaker 12 And how many did he do?

Speaker 20 My goodness.

Speaker 21 Thank God that somebody stopped this guy.

Speaker 3 The public is notified that this revered community figure is the serial killer that has been kidnapping and killing boys for years.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 3 Investigators delve into Gacy's history to learn what might have led him to kill at least 32 people with his sadistic mark.

Speaker 15 Gacy had a alcoholic father who was physically and verbally abusive to his mother. He was also abusive to Gacy.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 15 He would make homosexual references stating that Gacy was a pansy, gay.

Speaker 15 And of course, this didn't lend itself to Gacy having a very high self-esteem as as a youth.

Speaker 5 All through his life, he begged for his father to accept him.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 He tried to elevate what he thought was sort of the good Gacy, which was the community leader, the heterosexual male. Everybody liked him.

Speaker 9 He had his alter ego, Pogo the Clown.

Speaker 14 But there was that part of Gacy that was always there.

Speaker 14 The part that enjoyed the killing and the torture and having sex with young boys.

Speaker 14 The question is, why is that clothing in the throat?

Speaker 14 Why is Gacy putting it there? There's probably some ritualized aspect that he enjoyed doing it.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 11 made it public that we were looking for

Speaker 11 dental records and other materials that might identify missing young men and boys during the relevant years.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 feel unsafe. but at the same time, I thought maybe we would have some peace and find Rob.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 16 He has a lawyer and

Speaker 16 I figured no way that they're going to get a confession.

Speaker 16 I said to him, John, do you

Speaker 16 have any remorse for what happened to Rob or any other young man?

Speaker 16 And it's like the temperature in that room dropped 20 degrees.

Speaker 16 His whole persona changed. He just looked at me and he says, what do you mean, remorse?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 16 And I knew I was in trouble, man.

Speaker 1 I thought he'd clam up.

Speaker 16 And I said, well,

Speaker 16 do you have any remorse? He said, oh, you mean that I got caught?

Speaker 16 I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I mean.

Speaker 5 He said, oh, sure.

Speaker 6 From that point, Gacy was very forthcoming.

Speaker 25 He didn't listen to his lawyers.

Speaker 11 He went ahead and gave these oral statements.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 16 You find young men that would go to his house, drinks, have drugs, maybe sex, or just a job.

Speaker 26 He always blamed his victims for what happened to him, for being killed even. It was their fault, not his.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Then he would tell them, I'm going to show you the rope trick.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And he would twist it and twist it.

Speaker 3 Investigators believe that his mark evolved from this brutality.

Speaker 26 He was torturing these kids.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 6 He thought he was going to get away with it forever.

Speaker 17 That's the way his life was.

Speaker 3 Gacy is formally charged with 33 counts of murder. 32 bodies have been located, and Robert Peest has not been found.

Speaker 3 While Gacy is still awaiting trial, another body is spotted by a hiker on the riverbank.

Speaker 16 The body was found near a dam. The body was not that well preserved.

Speaker 6 We found paper towels stuffing the throat,

Speaker 6 which we know is the mark of John Wayne Gacy.

Speaker 17 With Robert Peast

Speaker 17 still being missing, I thought that might be Jim.

Speaker 3 Investigators immediately bring the body to the coroner's office to attempt identification.

Speaker 6 Then, within four or five days, a positive identification has been made on Rob Peest by dental records.

Speaker 16 When Rob's body was recovered,

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 Orsik was still alive.

Speaker 9 When they found the body, my whole world stopped at that time.

Speaker 3 Rob was dead.

Speaker 3 Part of myself felt guilty in the early days.

Speaker 3 Sorry.

Speaker 3 I think to Rob, I would just say, I'm sorry. Sorry, I didn't run out.

Speaker 3 Sorry I didn't stop it.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 11 At trial, he was Mr. Businessman.

Speaker 11 Sat there like he was running a a committee meeting. Mr.
Affable.

Speaker 17 It took a long time for the jury to come back,

Speaker 26 but they did come back

Speaker 26 with 33 guilties,

Speaker 26 12 of which

Speaker 26 he qualified for the death penalty.

Speaker 26 Finally, Judge Garuppo starts reading,

Speaker 26 for the murder of so-and-so and so-and-so, I sentenced you to death.

Speaker 26 For the murder of so-and-so and so-and-so, I sentenced you to death death 12 times.

Speaker 26 And Gacy, we could see his face. I can't imagine standing there and having somebody sentence me to death 12 times.

Speaker 9 I'm looking him in the eye.

Speaker 11 He didn't even blink.

Speaker 26 He didn't even bat an eye.

Speaker 26 You talk about a scary guy. That's a scary guy.

Speaker 5 Out of all the people I've known in this world, in my wildest dreams,

Speaker 5 my wildest dreams, No,

Speaker 5 I would have never thought that my friend that I grew up with

Speaker 5 would turn out to be the worst serial killer of all time.

Speaker 26 No, I did not know that.

Speaker 15 14 years later, surrounded by family members of the victims, John Wayne Gacy

Speaker 15 was executed by lethal injection.

Speaker 3 I remember the day when he finally got his lethal injection. I just remember just being so relieved that finally it's over.

Speaker 3 To date, six of John Wayne Gacy's victims remain unidentified.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Follow Morbid on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to episodes early and ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.