John Wayne Gacy /// Part 1

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Let's talk some true crime.

This is True Crime Garage,

and this is the case of John Wayne Wayne Gacy.

In Des Plains, Illinois, near Chicago, A man who served time in prison for sex crimes was let out.

Today, they found the bodies of at least three young boys buried under his house.

He is charged with murder.

Here's Jim Cummings.

Police have been watching John Gacy's suburban Chicago home for the past 10 days.

They became suspicious when 15-year-old Robert Peast disappeared after he allegedly was last seen with Gacy.

This morning, police searched Gacy's home and found the decomposed remains of three bodies in a dirt crawl space under the house.

They suspect there are several more bodies buried here.

It's suspected because of the looks of the area down in the crawl space.

There are some other mounds and appears to be more there.

Gacy is a 36-year-old building contractor who reportedly dressed like a clown to entertain at children's parties.

Prosecutors say he once went to prison for a sex offense in Iowa.

This afternoon Gacy was charged with murdering Robert Peist.

And after hearing the remains of more bodies were found at Gacy's house, Judge Marvin Peters ordered him held without bond.

At the hearing, police said Gacy has confessed to the Peased murder.

He will be examined by a psychiatrist.

Meanwhile, investigators have started to dismantle Gacy's house and garage as they continue to search for other bodies in this quiet suburban neighborhood.

Chicago, Illinois, March 17, 1942, St.

Patrick's Day.

Mr.

John Gacy and Mrs.

Marianne Gacy welcomed their first son into the world at Edgewater Hospital.

They named him after his father.

Well, technically, they named him after the mother's favorite actor, John Wayne.

So John Wayne Gacy Jr.

His father was John Stanley Gacy, so technically not even a junior.

He was the second of three children.

His older sister, Joanne, was born two years before him, and two years after him was his little sister Karen.

All three attended Catholic schools, and they grew up on the northern side of Chicago.

John Wayne Gacy was not a particularly popular kid in school, although he got along well with his teachers and made friends at school.

He was part of the Boy Scouts, and he enjoyed the outdoor activities that came with being a part of the Boy Scouts.

Now, Gacy's father was pretty hard on the children, and Gacy felt that he he was abused mostly emotionally and verbally.

His father often told Gacy that he was a disappointment, that he was dumb, that he was stupid.

That he was a sissy.

Yeah.

And he would even call him some, let's say, slurs that we will not be using on today's episode.

Yeah, and it seems to me like Jon Stanley was very excited to have a boy,

to have John Gacy in the, you know, John Wayne Gacy into the family.

But instead of, you know, fishing and playing sports and stuff like that, he was into gardening.

He was into hanging out with his mother, hanging out with his sister.

And it sounds like John's father, John Sr., was a pretty difficult man to be around.

Now, I don't know if that, if John Gacy Sr.

was hard on the two daughters as much as he was on John Gacy Jr.

Yeah, he whooped them all with a razor belt.

But I'm guessing that John Wayne Gacy Jr.

probably got the worst of it, it, being treated a little bit differently by his crappy father simply because he was the only boy.

Now, in 1951, when John Wayne Gacy was nine years old, he was diagnosed with some kind of heart condition.

From my understanding, the diagnosis was a nonspecific heart ailment.

Yeah, and they detected this because

he was playing outside with some people, with some friends at school, and he passed out.

Well, and this could be part of a larger problem here because a couple years later, when John Gacy was 11 years old, now the story goes like this: he was playing near a swing set, and he was hit in the head by one of the swings.

Now, you would think that this would be a rather small accident.

However, this is believed to be the cause of a blood clot that formed in John Gacy's brain.

The blood clot was not discovered until Gacy was 16.

From the age of 11 to the age of 16, Gacy suffered severe headaches and he often blacked out.

This was caused, believed to be caused, by the blood clot because the blackout stopped after the clot was discovered and Gacy was given medication to dissolve the blockage in the brain.

This would be a pretty traumatic experience when you think about it, though.

You have this young boy who's trying to fit in with the other boys, and he goes through this period of, what, five years where he's got these weird blackouts that would happen from time to time.

John Wayne Gacy wasn't doing so well in school, which was another big disappointment to his father.

So he actually started taking on a trade.

This was pretty common back in the day.

So he started working with a printing press.

But because he kept on blacking out, they said, look, you cannot.

work on a printing press machine if you're going to keep blacking out.

Yeah, it's too dangerous.

Something horrible could happen to him.

Well, he was hospitalized several times over the years.

This for

the blood clot and for his heart condition.

He was having quite a bit of problems with this, this being in his late school years.

Gacy was a good student when he was much younger, but maybe because of these health problems,

it turned out that he ended up not being able to be a good student.

Despite the medical problems, Gacy was considered a hard worker.

He took on a part-time job, several part-time jobs after school.

He had newspaper routes, and and he also worked at a grocery store at one of those IGA stores as a bag boy and a stock clerk.

That was one of my favorite places to go as a kid.

We had one here in town, and you would always hope to get a couple bucks from mom and dad so you could buy some candy after school.

Although Gacy and his father had a lot of problems, as the captain said, John Gacy's relationship with his mother and his sisters were very strong.

He was extremely close with his mother and his sisters.

There is rumor and speculation that John Wayne Gacy Sr., that the father, was not only abusive, but also an alcoholic.

There is some suspicion that he physically abused his wife and verbally abused all three of the children as well.

Well, there's not a lot of suspicion that he was an alcoholic.

He was an alcoholic.

He ends up dying from cirrhosis of the liver.

Well, needless to say, the family had problems.

Several times, John's mother threatened to leave John's father.

And even though John Sr.

was an unpleasant individual, John Jr.

did seek out attention from his father, and he desperately wanted to gain his father's approval.

I mean, I think you see that with most boys.

You know, they want the, they always kind of seek the approval of the father more so than the mother, I would assume.

Well, and outside of these medical problems, there were some red flags regarding John Wayne Gacy's childhood.

And now, these are stories that were relayed from his mother and his sisters.

But when John was about five or six years old, he got in trouble within the family, and he had been stealing his mother's undergarments.

And these undergarments kept disappearing and disappearing.

Eventually, they found out that it was John that was taking them.

And he would eventually bury them underneath the house after he stole them from his mother.

Having been caught for this and scolded for it,

he didn't do this, you know, whatever bad habit this was, he fell out of it for quite a few years.

But when he was about 15 or 16, he started doing something similar, but it wasn't his mother's undergarments.

He would steal the undergarments of girls that lived in the neighborhood off of the clothing lines.

You know, they hang them out to dry, and he would steal them.

And it was discovered that he would bury these underneath the house as well.

The old panty snatcher.

Now, John attended several schools, uh, several high schools, and he never ended up graduating.

Um, his father did help him out after school, um, by helping him get his first car, but it was one of those situations where he helped him out by kicking his ass.

Well, it was one of those situations where you wonder if John Sr.

was actually trying to help the boy or not, because it was a situation where it's like, okay, dad goes and gets the car for John, and now John Gacy Jr.

has to pay payments to his father.

Well, what ends up happening in these situations, and I'm sure a lot of us have been there, but then dad ends up being in charge of the car.

You know, it's something that you always have to ask him if you can use your car to go here or there.

You know, and he can remind you, well, you're behind on your payments, or it's actually my car.

No, you can't take it to go here or there.

Right.

Which you have the right to if you bought the car.

Yeah.

And so this

ends up leading to a whole bunch of fights and arguments regarding the vehicle.

Well, John decides to run away from home, which is a strange thing to say when a person is 18 or 19 years old that they ran away from home, but that's how he describes it.

And he ran away and he went to Las Vegas.

Well, when he gets to Las Vegas, this was not a really well thought out plan by John Gacy Jr.

because he's in a strange town and he has no no money.

What happens while he's there?

He ends up going to the hospital.

Okay.

And he's unable to pay the hospital bill.

They wanted him to pay something small, you know, $36, which is quite a bit more money back then.

But he didn't have any money to pay this bill.

But this will give you an idea of what kind of personality John Wayne Gacy had was that over the course of discussing this bill and during his hospital visit, he ends up getting a job with the hospital.

You know, and that's the kind of personality he had.

He was the type that they say could talk to anybody.

And he ended up being...

He could talk your panties right off.

Or just take him off the clothesline.

But he ends up getting a job driving an ambulance.

Now, he's eventually fired from this job.

He doesn't have it for very long because they discovered that he has no high school diploma, which was, of course, a requirement for this type of job.

Now, he's in a strange town.

He doesn't have any friends.

He doesn't have any family there.

Remember, he's very close with his mother and his sisters.

And

he's very depressed while he's in Las Vegas.

So the whole time he's in Vegas, even though he ran away from home, he's starting to save back a little bit, a little bit of money so he can return to his family and return to his home.

I think anytime somebody moves away, you know, especially in this situation,

he wants to move away to get away from his his father, but he still wants to impress his father.

He still wants to do something that says, see, old man, I did something.

Yeah, and you'll see this when he returns from Las Vegas.

When he comes home, now this is the early 1960s.

He enrolled in a business college, and he eventually graduated from this business college.

So, how do you get into college with no high school diploma?

I think some of these schools, if you're willing to pay the bill,

they'll figure out a way to get you through.

So, while at business college, he perfected his talent as a salesman.

And he was a, he's what people describe as a natural born salesman.

He could talk his way in or out of almost anything.

And he put his talents to work when he was hired at his first real job, let's call it, after business school, when he goes to work for a shoe company.

Now, he excelled in his position as a management trainee.

And not too long after, he was transferred to manage a men's clothing outlet in Springfield, Illinois.

And at this time, he's going to actually find a girl that's going to put up with him and marry her.

Yes, this is September of 64.

Gacy met what would be his soon-to-be wife.

She was a co-worker.

Her name is Marilyn Myers.

Now, her parents owned a string of Kentucky Fried Chicken Fast Food Restaurant franchises in Waterloo, Iowa.

Fred Myers is her father, Gacy's new father-in-law.

He offered him a position with one of the franchises.

Soon after that, Gacy and his new wife.

Well, and a little quick point here is I think, like we talked about, this is a guy that felt like he was a failure and wanted to get ahead and wanted to be, you know,

some kind of status.

I mean, where maybe the status was actually more important than the actual money.

But also, now I met this girl and her family actually owns businesses.

Yeah, she has successful parents.

Right.

This could be a good step for my, you know, my career.

So the Gacy, the young Gacy family, well, Gacy and his wife anyway, are going to move to Iowa so he can take one of these positions working for his new father-in-law.

Now, people in the restaurant biz know this.

Restaurant managers work a lot of hours, and Gacy was often working 12, 14, 16-hour days.

But he was a workaholic.

Yes.

And the plan was that he would learn the business and then take over the franchise from his father-in-law someday.

Yeah.

When Gacy was not working, he was active in the Waterloo, Iowa JCs.

The JCs is a civic organization for people between the ages of 18 and 40.

It's a not-for-profit organization that

has great leadership training, business development, management skills, and community service is all involved with your work with the TCs.

It's basically a good way to network and to get ahead.

And he was really interested.

He actually started a committee, right?

And what was that committee?

I want you to say it.

I'm not going to say it.

What was the committee?

It was a

don't litter committee.

And it was, it was all about not littering.

He hated the litter bugs.

I'm sorry.

I just, when I read that, I just cracked up.

But so meanwhile, as he's doing this non-littering committee over at KFC,

he is demanding that people call him the colonel.

Yeah.

You can't make this stuff up, people.

Well, he,

like the captain's saying, he worked tirelessly performing volunteer work

with the community, through the JCs.

It was there that he had made most of his friends and he spent most of his free time working with the JCs.

Shortly after arriving in Iowa, Gacy and his wife, they had their first baby, a son, and they also had a daughter while they were living there.

Right.

And his family members would say, you know, this is kind of the first time that John Stanley Gacy is looking at John Wayne Gacy and saying, hey, that's my boy.

My boy settled down.

My boy has a job.

My boy is supporting his family.

He's married.

You know,

I think Jon Stanley Gacy was kind of worried about his son's sexuality.

And so now the fact that he's married and has kids, it's like, my boy is doing good.

And actually, it was kind of the first time that Jon Stanley was proud of his son.

Well, and I think regarding the mother's undergarments and maybe part of the reason why the father was so hard on him,

It was not outwardly stated by her, but the belief by the family was that he was wearing these undergarments.

And that might have led his father to believe certain things about his son.

But like you said, now he's out on his own.

He's working for his father-in-law and his successful father-in-law.

And he's working to build a family.

The Gacy's, John and his wife, they had every reason to be happy during their first few years there in Iowa.

They had a nice house in the suburbs.

The kids were healthy.

Marilyn, his wife, enjoyed staying at home and taking care of the children.

And John had a good job and he was busy with the JCs.

He was even working on a campaign for presidency of the local JC chapter there.

Everything seemed almost too good to be true.

And in fact, we end up learning that it indeed was.

Everything seemed to be looking good for John Wayne Gacy Jr., yet his lucky streak would not last too much longer.

Well, and I don't know if it was just a luck streak as much as I think he had these desires or thoughts inside of him that he was now becoming not able to control.

Yeah, and there were some thoughts that John Wayne Gacy might be homosexual.

This is kind of stemming from...

from some of the young guys working at the KFC restaurant.

They say that he is making passes at them during work hours and while working with Gacy at the fast food chain.

Yet people close to him

refuse to believe the gossip.

Right.

Well, here's a married man with two kids.

And at the same time that you have this going on at the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, you also have rumors spreading around town amongst the JC members regarding Gacy's sexual preference.

And, you know, there always seemed to be young boys,

young men were always in Gacy's presence.

Right, but there's a couple odd things that are happening here.

Okay, so John Wayne Gacy is in charge of recruiting people, and he would stop at nothing to recruit these people for the JC.

And like we said, it's this community organization, and it's supposed to be about networking and helping the community.

And John Wayne Gacy decides, well, I'll rent a hotel and I'll start showing these recruits illegal pornography tapes.

Or stag films, yeah.

Right.

So that then turns into not only are we going to watch these tapes, but we're going to hire prostitutes and have orgies.

So that's going on the whole time.

People of this town

of power

are having these orgy parties.

And he's also starting at this point to swing with with his wife as well.

So you got a lot of weird stuff going on.

So, but then the rumors about, you know, the JC starts saying, hey, well, we know he's doing some of this stuff, but we're doing it too.

The odd stuff is that he's hanging around a lot of young boys.

Well, and with a lot of these organizations, the way that you can rise to the top very, very quickly is by recruiting numbers.

And if you can recruit more members than anybody else then you become very popular and a person of power with inside that organization and on top of that if you recruited that person and then you have also this information to hang over their head oh you know you might i might not want to you know rub me the wrong way because you don't want me telling your wife about this well and gacy was getting large numbers of recruits like unalmost unheard of numbers of recruits and it's believed that because he threw these wild crazy parties, that a lot of these people were signing up just to be part of these parties, not so much to be really truly involved with the organization itself.

Now, in the spring of 1968,

Gacy ends up being indicted on charges of sodomy.

Now, in most jurisdictions, sodomy is a pretty broad, vague charge.

The precise sexual acts meant by the term sodomy are rarely spelled out in law, but are understood by courts to include any sexual act deemed to be unnatural or immoral.

Now,

there's two sides to this particular sodomy charge that go down here.

Do you want to give...

Yeah, so basically the victims' accounts of the story is they're hanging out with John Wayne Gacy, hanging out at John's house.

John shows him a stag film, then gives him some alcohol.

This would lead to some sexual advances.

You know, we know the victim's name, but we're not going to to say it out of respect to them.

So obviously there's this very inappropriate exchange between an adult male and basically a teenage boy.

That teenage boy just kind of lives with it and doesn't tell anybody.

And Gacy actually pays him, I think, 50 bucks and also tells him, hey, by the way, I have connections with the mob.

So if

you want to talk about this, you're going to be in for some trouble, right?

So

the boy starts acting strange and eventually breaks down to his parents.

The problem with this is his father

is high up with the JCs, but just high up as a public figure.

Well, and some of those things align with the version of the story that I'm going to tell.

Now, this is according to John Wayne Gacy, by the way.

We'll throw that out there, and that's primarily why we're not going to use this young man's name.

But according to Gacy, the young man was a homosexual young man who didn't didn't mind having sex with men for money or sexual favors with men for money.

Now, Gacy says that the two of them were involved, that they would get together often,

and for some reason, the two ended up in a dispute about money and that the young man went to law enforcement and said that Gacy had forced him into some kind of sexual act.

Gacy is picked up for this.

He denies all of the charges against him.

Later, Gacy was charged with with an additional charge with hiring another boy to beat up his accuser.

Gacy offered some money to another young man so that the young man could pay off his car loan.

And in exchange, he was going to beat up this kid.

And the way that this story goes down is that the hired young man, he gets the kid into his car, he drives him to a wooded area where he sprays him in the face and eyes with mace, and then he tries to beat him up.

However, the boy, he fights back and he ends up breaking the boy's nose and he manages to get away.

He then calls police and lets them know that he was attacked by this other boy.

So when this boy is picked up and taken into police custody, he then in exchange gives them John Wayne Gacy's name again, explaining that, you know, I was hired to attack this kid.

Ultimately, the judge in this situation sentenced John Wayne Gacy to 10 years in Iowa State Reformatory for Men, the maximum time that you are allowed to give for this such offense.

John Wayne Gacy was 26 years old at this time.

Now, shortly after Gacy entered prison, his wife divorced him on the grounds that he had violated their marriage vows.

Now, while in prison,

he was considered a model prisoner.

He remained nonviolent and well-behaved, and he hoped for an early.

Well, he was a plus-size model prisoner.

And he hoped for an early early parole and after 18 months later well john wayne gacy his parole is approved we'll get right back to the sick and twisted mind of john wayne gacy after this quick beer break

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And so John Wayne Gacy was living in Iowa.

He sentenced to 10 years in prison for sodomy charges.

And after only 18 months in prison, well, they let John Wayne Gacy go.

In June of 1970, John Wayne Gacy left prison and he wanted to return to, well, just like Robert Johnson first said and later the Blues Brothers, he returned to Sweet Home, Chicago.

Now, John Wayne Gacy never ended up having the type of relationship that he desired with his father.

And he never got a chance to rectify that situation after getting out of prison because John's father passed away during his time in prison.

This affected John big time.

I think maybe because when John's dad dies, well, John is in prison and for sodomy charges, too.

So, in a sense, isn't John the homosexual, stupid loser that his father always told him that he would be and that he was?

I think John wanted to do something with his life to prove to his father that he wasn't stupid, that he wasn't a loser, and maybe win his father's approval and affection at some point in his life.

And he had that for a small period with the family and everything, but now that's all wiped away.

So John Wayne Gacy moved home.

He moved in with his mother and obtained work as a chef in a Chicago restaurant, a job that he seemed to enjoy, and he worked at it with quite a bit of enthusiasm.

And after a few months of living with his mother, Gacy decided he wanted to buy a house, and his mother had been impressed with how he had adjusted to life outside of the prison, and she decided to help him get a house.

Now, this would be located just outside of Chicago's city limits.

And all of his family claimed that after John Wayne Gacy got out of prison, he had this insatiable drive to be something and become something.

Yeah, and it was in 1971 when John Wayne Gacy met Carol Huff.

She was newly divorced.

Mother's 22.

Oh, hold on, not to correct correct you, but that's not when they met.

They were friends from childhood, basically.

School friends.

Well, they became engaged at some point, and I believe this took place at some point in 1971.

They weren't married until the following year, but Carol Huff was a newly divorced mother of two.

She had two daughters.

You know,

after the fact, people say that Gacy probably romanced this woman who was in a state of emotional vulnerability

and that that she felt for him.

She says that she was attracted to Gacy's charm and his generosity.

Well, he's a hard worker.

And she believed he would be a good provider for her and her children.

She was aware of Gacy's prison experience, yet she trusted that he had changed his life around for the better.

And Carol and her daughters quickly settled into their new home with John Wayne Gacy.

Well, and she also knew about what he claimed to be

him being bisexual.

It was around this same time that John Wayne Gacy decided he wanted to go into business for himself.

And he was going to strike it out on his own.

He began a contracting business named PDM Inc., which stood for Painting, Decorating, and Maintenance Incorporated.

He hired young teenage boys to work for him.

He told his friends that he hired such young men to keep the cost low,

which is true.

He could hire and pay guys that were 15 to 18 years old and pay them $5 an hour, which was almost double what kids could make at other jobs at that time.

He could pay them well, and at the same time, he would be paying them quite a bit less than he would have to pay an adult with a good amount of experience.

However, that might not have been Gacy's only reason for hiring.

these teenage boys.

Well, I mean, and we've kind of gone back and forth on this

because a lot of these documentaries, when they talk about Casey, they never bring up the idea of pedophilia, really.

You know, it's always just talks about, you know, that he was attracted to teenage boys.

Or young men.

Most of the time they say young men.

Yeah.

And I think, one, at the time of all this stuff going around, this is not a commonly used term.

Pedophilia did not become a commonly used.

commonly used term until the 80s

and probably the late 80s.

Well, and we talked about that when we covered the Johnny Gosh case.

You know, the investigators were using the word pedophilia or pedophile, and parents were saying they didn't know what that term meant.

They had not heard that term before, and this was taking place in the early 80s.

And this was different times.

I mean, there was a lot of people that there was a lot of people that did not even finish high school.

They just go straight to work.

So we were kind of talking earlier about how maybe they don't use the term pedophilia because

back then, you know, 17, 18-year-old boy is back then was a man.

Could have been looked at in the public's eye as a man because, you know, it seems to me like you have this, you have this mindset that maybe, of course, 18 is the separation.

You know, 18 is the legal divider between a child and an adult.

However, but in the public's eye, in the, you know, the general

consensus I got was that a man and a boy were more separated by a high school diploma rather than being 18.

Because, like you said, a lot of times people would get that high school diploma and they would go work for their father in their father's business or they would go off on a trade.

They would start their own business.

They would go into some form of work that could end up being their career, their adult life.

Yeah, I think you see this a lot like with movies like Days and Confused and stuff like that.

You graduated high school.

It is time you're entering the real world.

It's time to become a man.

Well, the Gacy's threw a lot of parties.

And when it came to parties, well, John Wayne Gacy, he was the man.

He knew what to do.

He knew how to throw a great party.

He would often host block parties and yard parties.

A lot of them were themed parties.

You know, he did some things like...

I think he did like a Western-style party and a Southern Jubilee and a Hawaiian party.

So these big, extravagant parties that he would throw.

And anyway, at Gacy's parties, he always had a lot of booze, poker games, you know, maybe some pot.

And remember, we said that he was a member of the JCs.

Well, this is something that carried on once he moved back to Chicago.

He was a member of the JCs, but he was also a member of the Democratic Party as well.

Yeah, so

Ted Bundy was a Republican and John Wayne Gacy was a Democrat.

So that's why I'm an Independent.

But Gacy was able to get more people to sign up for the JCs and more people to sign up for the Democratic Party than anyone else in the area.

And he was up to his old tactics.

He was even given some awards, you know, like man of the year awards and things like that.

And, you know, he did this for his work with the JCs,

but also with the Democratic Party, he was throwing these extravagant parties, but they were also those parties that we talked about before.

You know, where it was.

It was a lot stag films.

Yeah, it was a lot of booze, maybe some pot, some gambling, but it would end up with these stag films, maybe hire some strippers,

sometimes escorts and things like that.

Yeah, and just let's put this to perspective a little bit.

This is

people in the community getting together, people of power in the community getting together.

and being persuaded by stag films.

Yeah, and other foolishness.

Right.

I mean, it's, it's, that stuff exists.

Yeah.

That's, that's, to me, is creepy as hell.

It's weird.

And it, but again, for Gacy, it's ways to get his membership enrollment up.

Um, and, and to me, it also shows that some of these newcomers, these newbies, seem to be there, in my opinion, more for these crazy parties rather than to actually be involved in the community itself.

Yeah, these animals are probably littering everywhere.

Well, it's around this same time that John Wayne Gacy unleashed his new creation, Pogo the Clown.

He becomes a clown, and I know at different parts during his little clown

experiment or whatever he was doing, that he did go under different names.

But I believe Pogo the Clown is the most accepted one that he fancied himself.

Yeah, the most popular one.

But hey, Gacy, put on your cup, son.

Put on your cup.

Well,

he, like I said, he unleashed his new creation of Pogo the Clown.

John Wayne Gacy was a clown.

I'm going to unleash a punch to your nuts.

He entertained children at parties and even volunteered at local hospitals, you know, to try to cheer up the kids.

And maybe it's just because what we know now about John Wayne Gacy, but looking at those pictures, I mean, other than him being fat, you know, other than him being a pudgy guy, plus size

prison model.

He's still a creepy-looking clown to me.

I don't know if it's, again, I don't know if it's because we know about him or if he's.

Well, one of the things that I noticed was, you know, the mouth, the way he painted the mouth, that most clowns paint circular mouths.

And his head points.

Yeah, he had points at the end.

Yeah, you'd think, but, you know, and look,

you'd think, you know, weight aside, you'd think that maybe, you know, Santa Claus is jolly, right?

So that maybe it would be a jolly clown.

But I think because of the points on the mouth is really kind of what gave it away.

And also, you know, John Wayne had these

pointy eyebrows, you know, just that he inherited.

So I think those

two elements is kind of what makes Pogo

a little creepo.

Well, and before we get too far down on another road, let's go ahead and go through this portion of John Wayne Gacy's life.

Him and his wife start having marital problems, and it's believed that some of this stemmed from her picking up on Gacy's homosexual desires.

Now, we had said earlier that, you know, she was aware of his prison sentence.

Well,

she was aware of his bisexuality.

Yeah, and he's probably, she's probably aware of his version of his prison sentence and why he was guilty.

Right.

But yeah, she's aware that he

is bisexual.

But at the same time, you know, she's also finding magazines around the house with lots of naked men in them, books about gay fantasies.

And he's very casual, nonchalant about kind of leaving these all over the house and in almost every room of the house as well.

Well, and I don't think that matters if it's, you know, homosexual thoughts or just heterosexual thoughts.

I think if you're with somebody, there's a lot of times that you'd be offended.

You know, like if you're just, you know, there's Plague Boy magazines everywhere.

I think at some point your wife might go, Hey, can you just pick this up?

Yeah.

You know, you got to throw it in my face like this.

Well, you have to show respect for your spouse as well as there's the children that are in the house as well.

You know, you can't just, you shouldn't just be having these things laying around.

But at the same time, he's also becoming a little more violent.

His personality is changing as far as she is concerned.

And at this point, he's yelling a lot.

He's even throwing furniture at times when he gets upset.

He's becoming his father.

Yes.

This sort of thing is what's going on.

And eventually, Carol would file for divorce.

The couple's divorce became final in 1976.

So, yeah, drinking is getting...

heavier.

He's becoming more violent.

He's having more sexual desires.

And this is all going to come to a big flame.

Yeah, and the two of them have basically no romance between the two of them for quite some time as well.

Now, I wanted to go down that road before we got to this because we're going to start.

You want to go down the romance road?

Yeah.

Okay.

I love you, Captain.

Now, we're going to start talking and

introducing some new people here, but these are certainly key persons to this story and to this case.

And the first one that I want to introduce is 17-year-old Johnny Butkovich.

I think he's been waiting all day to say that name.

Old Butkovich.

But anyway, Johnny worked for John Wayne Gacy.

That's my last name.

And in fact,

in fact, they worked a lot of hours together and they even hung out together off of the clock.

At one point, they are around each other so much and so often that people started referring to them as Big John and Little John.

And Johnny or Little John to some was like most young men.

He was into cars.

He took took great pride in his 68 Dodge.

Not only did he drive it and race it, but he was always working on the vehicle as well.

And having this job allowed him to, you know, work on this vehicle and spend some money on his car.

Johnny did remodeling work for Gacy at PDM Contractors, a position that he enjoyed, a position that paid him well.

And you also have your boss that's probably getting you booze, and you couldn't get booze at the time.

You know, so everybody knows, you know, when you're 19, 20, and you're trying to get some booze, everybody knows their 21 or 22-year-old friend that would get them booze.

Right.

Right.

You keep that contact close.

Right.

Even as close as they were, however, their working relation relationship ended abruptly when Gacy refused to pay Johnny for two weeks' worth of work.

Right.

Angered at Gacy and angered that he had withheld his pay, Johnny went over to his boss's house.

This was with two friends, to try to scare Gacy and to try to collect his money.

When Johnny confronted Gacy about the paycheck, Gacy refused to pay him.

And now, of course, we have a large argument.

Johnny threatened that he was going to tell the authorities that John Wayne Gacy was not deducting taxes from the earnings.

Gacy was enraged and he screamed at him, and we have this big fight going on.

But what ends up happening is Johnny and his friends basically realized that there wasn't a whole lot that they could do about this situation and they eventually you're kind of shit out of luck at this point yeah he's just not going to give you any money

and at the end of the day they end up leaving Gacy's house Johnny dropped off his friends at their homes and he drove away and then he's never seen alive again But later on, we'll have an odd explanation of this story coming from Gacy himself.

Yes.

The next person we want to talk about is Michael Bonin.

Now, he was about 17 years old as well, and he disappeared in June of 76.

This is a situation where he was supposed to catch a train.

He was going to meet his stepfather's brother at some location.

Authorities are not certain that Michael ever got on that train,

but they know that he never made it to meet his stepfather's brother.

He just simply disappeared.

He's not seen after that.

Right.

And now in the same area,

we have more boys going missing.

Yes.

The next boy is Billy Carroll Jr.

He's the kind of kid that was always getting into trouble at the age of

nine.

He was in a juvenile home for stealing a purse.

At the age of 11, he was caught with a gun and he got into more trouble.

Now, Billy, in and out of trouble his whole life, he spent most of his time on the streets in uptown Chicago.

Now, at the age of about 16, Billy was making money by arranging meetings between teenage boys and adult clientele for money.

That's definitely put him in a compromising position.

Yes, because I don't know if it was because of Billy's little business that he had, but he knew John Wayne Gacy.

And ultimately, just like Johnny and Michael that we just spoke of, Billy also disappeared suddenly.

This was on June 13th of 1976.

Billy left his home and he was never seen alive again.

Do we have any other boys that went missing?

We have Gregory Godzick.

He actually had a job with PDM Inc.

He worked for

John Wayne Gacy and he didn't mind the odd jobs that he was picking up or the work that he would do.

But on December 12th, 1976,

Gregory dropped his date off at her home.

A girl that he had had a crush on for some time and had been seeing her for a little bit.

And he drove drove off, she says, in the direction of his house.

But the following day, police found Gregory's car.

This was a 1966 Pontiac, but Gregory was nowhere to be found.

He was 17 years old at the time.

In January of 1977, 19-year-old John Seek also disappeared, much like the other young men before him.

He had driven off in his 1971 Plymouth satellite, and he was never seen alive again.

But interestingly enough, a short while after the young man vanished, another teenager was picked up by police in a 1971 Plymouth satellite while trying to leave a gas station without paying for the gasoline.

The young man was a one Michael Rossi and said that the man that he worked with could explain the situation, this being the situation with the vehicle.

The man that he worked with was John Wayne Gacy.

And when police met with Gacy, Gacy explained to the police that Zeke had sold him the car, sold John Wayne Gacy the car, and that John Zeke wanted to run away and he needed some money to take off and to get set up elsewhere.

So he sold John Wayne Gacy the car before he hitchhiked out of town.

Gacy then went on to explain that he gave the car to his employee, Michael Rossi, and trade for some labor.

So rather than paying him for a bunch of work that rossi did he ends up giving him the car well and i don't think a lot of this stuff would have happened if he was like on a sexual offender website you know yeah some kind of registry right because all the stuff that happened in iowa is not carrying over to chicago no so we don't really have that on his record and obviously cops are getting a little suspicious at this point.

Well, and the thing we've seen with Gacy, too, is, yeah, there might be be some people that are aware of this sodomy charge that he had in Iowa or aware that he spent some time in prison.

Because the thing with Gacy is he liked to, not only did he like to talk to people, but he also liked to lie and embellish stories about himself.

So I could see him possibly telling some of these 17, 18-year-old boys that, yeah, you know, you know what, I'm a real man.

I've been to prison before.

Oh, what were you?

But now you got to answer the question, well, what were you in prison for?

I'm a real man because I like real boys.

Yeah, but then you get the John Wayne Gacy version of why he was in prison, you know, embellishing and probably just lying about the situation.

We also have Robert Gilroy.

He was an avid outdoorsman, camper.

He loved horseback riding.

On September of 1977, he's 18 years old at this time.

Gilroy was supposed to catch a bus with some friends to go horseback riding but he never shows up for this event now Gilroy's father that's like the second one that was trying to catch a bus yeah Gilroy's father is a police sergeant a Chicago police sergeant at the time and he immediately began searching for his son and they unleashed a full-scale investigation with big-time searches uh you know Even though they did all this effort, nothing turned up.

And when the leads stopped coming in, Robert Gilroy was still missing.

Why this is all going on?

John Wayne Gacy has an employee by the name of David Cram.

Right.

Well, according to the documentary, the guy's name is David Cram.

Now, let's talk about this for a little bit.

Go ahead.

Because, you know, we both watched a bunch of docos on him.

And

there's just some facts that are just not lining up.

Right.

Some of the names.

Some of the stories are the same, but some of the names aren't the same.

Well, Well, you know what I wonder about that, Captain, is when you watch some of these documentaries, okay, first of all, a John Wayne Gacy documentary, there's a whole batch of them out there.

I mean, there's a ton of them out there, but they're typically, what, like 40 minutes to maybe one hour long?

This is a much longer and much necessary to be longer story to tell than 40 minutes or an hour long.

There's a whole lot more of a story here.

And the thing that I worry about with some of these documentaries, we've seen it in other ones, you know, that we see on Netflix and Amazon Prime and things like that.

Sometimes they lump some of these stories together.

Right.

And so names get missed, you know, they get mashed together.

Timelines get a little bit blurry.

So this story could be coming from David or it could be coming from.

It could be coming from, I used the name Michael Rossi earlier.

Now, the thing here is, Captain,

you know, the story with Gacy gets even more convoluted because he lived in Iowa for a while and then he lived in Chicago for a while.

And a lot of the stuff that he did, he did in both places, in both locations.

So that makes it more confusing.

But when you watch, there's one documentary in particular where they name this character David Cram.

Now, mind you, he is, it's one of those situations, you know, they put the light behind him.

He's sitting in a chair.

His face is kind of darkened out.

You can't see his face real well.

And then they just kind of, they flash this name, David Cram.

Well, his story goes like this.

So whether it's David or if it's this Rossi character.

Or some other name altogether.

Right.

The story is that the crawl space.

He is originally hired to dig trenches in this crawl space.

He doesn't know why.

Now, what can happen in like a half basement, if you have a crawl space, you can dig out that crawl space and then make your basement a full basement.

That's a very tough thing to do, but you can do that.

So he doesn't really know why he's digging these trenches in this crawl space, but he does.

There's actually, depending on who you talk to, there's a few different stories as to why Gacy wanted these trenches dug in this crawl space.

Right.

One of the stories being that they were going to insert some kind of pipes that were going to go down and they needed the trenches for pipes.

The other story being that there was a foul odor that was in the house and that Gacy was telling people that it was coming from this crawl space because it would typically get saturated with water and water would just kind of sit in there and it would just it would unleash this foul odor throughout the entire home and he was trying to rid the house of this of this structural problem that was going on right so this kid is you know he's like 16 years old 17 years old digging these trenches in the crawl space of John Wayne Gacy's house.

Eventually, he rents a room from him.

So he would come home and

he lived there for a short period of time working for John and doing, maybe probably working in the community for other people as well.

But one night he comes home, and this is just, I think, super creepy.

He comes home, and John is sitting there in his pogo outfit.

You know, dressed full clown get up,

and he's drinking.

And he's like, hey, join me.

Let's have some drinks let's smoke some pot and Gacy was a big by this point he's probably a pretty big drinker

you know I'd heard stories that he would drink full glasses of vodka and things like that right so he's he's pretty wasted already he's lit

and David is drinking with him

and he brings out these handcuffs And he's kind of showing him a trick, like how, here's how you put on the handcuffs and here's how you get out of it.

Like, remember how we talked about, like, when you're a kid, you have the fake handcuffs and that you have these little, like, little switch on them on the side.

So you can just push that little lever and it opens up.

So we kind of talked about that.

He probably had two sets of handcuffs and he probably had a trick handcuff.

Like, here, see, watch me.

I put on the handcuffs and look, I can get out of it.

You try them on.

So when he goes to try them on, he can't get out of it.

And he said, well, how do you get out of this thing?

He goes, Well,

you got to know the trick.

He goes, Well, what's the trick?

He said, Well, the trick is you got to have a key, right?

And he starts laughing.

So he's sitting there in his full clown get up, right?

Just laughing like a little kid, like, aha,

ha, ha, I got you.

I got you.

And now, at this point, he's poking him, poking him.

I got you, you can't get out.

Just acting like a kind of a crazy person.

So, this individual that is tied up, he then says,

you know, you got to let me out, you know, and he's still being nice at this point.

They're still kind of playful.

Yeah, John's being weird, dancing around with the poco outfit on.

But this guy eventually says, Hey, look, you got to let me out, or I'm going to kick your ass.

And

this sets Gacy into a rage,

right?

So now he is fighting basically for his life against Gacy,

but he's in handcuffs.

And he basically is able to, because Gacy is so intoxicated, he's able to knock Gacy over, grab the key, run to the room that he's renting, get himself out.

He leaves, and a couple of days later, moves out

of John Wayne Gacy's house.

The crazy thing to me is, could you imagine

a big,

you know, Gacy wasn't tall, but he was a bigger guy.

He was short and stocky.

Right.

But still a lot of mass.

And he's drunk and he goes into a rage.

And that's not the creepy part.

The creepy part is you're in handcuffs.

You know, I don't mind punching you in your face, John Wayne Gacy.

But if my hands are tied behind my back, I'm shit out of luck.

You know, good luck fighting that fight.

Yeah.

It's Every time I hear that story, I've heard it maybe three or four times, but every time I hear it, it's just always just

hands get a little sweaty.

Well, here's another creepy story for you here, Captain.

And this took place in May of 1977, 78, I'm sorry, Chicago, Illinois.

A man by the name of Jeff Ringall.

Now, he had recently returned from a vacation to Florida.

He decided to visit an area called Newtown.

It's a popular area of Chicago because he wanted to check out some of the many popular bars they had there as well as disco clubs in that area.

Now, while bar hopping and walking through the area, he sees a black Oldsmobile.

Now, inside the vehicle is a heavyset driver, and the driver leaned out from the window, and he's complimenting this young man on his unseasonably, you know, how unseasonably tan he is.

And this sparks up a conversation.

And they continued with some small talk.

And eventually, the driver then asked if Jeff wanted to smoke a joint and ride around in his car.

And they would just ride around town and smoke a couple joints.

Well, this sounded like a good idea to Jeff, so he hopped in the car.

This sounds like an awful idea.

They drive off.

They're talking, they're smoking, driving around, when all of a sudden, the heavyset driver attacks Jeff.

He grabbed him and quickly shoved a rag over his face.

Now, the rag was doused with chloroform.

Jeff lost consciousness.

Now, Jeff was kind of going in and out of consciousness for quite some time.

At one point, while he was awake, he could see street signs.

And, you know, the car is still moving.

And he's trying to see these street signs and try to figure out where the car is going, maybe where he's being taken to.

One, he doesn't know this area.

Right.

And, of course,

he would only be awake for a short period of time, for short little spurts of time before blacking out again.

On one of these times that he came to, the stranger again grabbed him and covered up his face with this chloroform-soaked rag, and he passed out again.

At some point, Jeff remembers being inside of a home, and the driver was there, and they both are naked.

At one point, Jeff remembered seeing on the floor

several dildos, and the stranger was threatening him and telling him how he was going to use them.

Jeff

was viciously raped and tortured for hours.

But thank God that he had been drugged and knocked out for most of it.

Now, the next morning, Jeff awoke from

these blackouts.

But when he wakes up, up, he's now fully clothed and he's propped up against the statue in Chicago's Lincoln Park.

He was in

a lot of pain, an amazing amount of pain.

And he went to the hospital where he ended up staying there for six days.

Jesus Christ.

Now, during this hospital stay, Jeff reported the abduction and the rape to police, but he could only provide the police with a little information regarding the attack because he was blacking out over and over again.

He could recall the vehicle, a black Oldsmobile.

He gave them a description of the heavyset man that was driving the vehicle, and he could tell them basically useless information about some of the details of the inside of the house, like the color of the carpeting or patterns on the carpeting.

You're in that city of Chicago.

Yeah, and here's the thing.

This is this, you know, you're in a whole lot of pain.

You're in the hospital for six days.

That should explain to most of us

how beaten up this guy was.

He's in the hospital for six days, and you're giving this report, and

you're probably mad at yourself because you can only remember little bits of information.

And the police basically, they outwardly tell Jeff.

that they were not hopeful that they would be able to find the guy that did this, let alone convict him of anything, because

really they didn't have any information or much to confirm who this abductor could be.

Jeff suffered several skin lacerations, burns, and he also suffered from permanent liver damage believed to be caused from the chloroform.

And of course, he suffered severe emotional trauma as well.

Obviously.

But

he was fortunate enough to be be alive because what Jeff didn't know was that the man who attacked and raped him, well, not many of the people escaped that man.

And very few victims of his ever survived.

Now,

here's one crazy thing, though.

After Jeff got out of the hospital and after he was able to kind of shake off some of this trauma and get over the fear of the whole thing that had just happened, he decided he was going to go back back to that same side of town because it was kind of like a party side of town.

It was a place where people, you know, smoke a little dope.

Maybe you pick up a girl or pick up a guy, whatever.

And he thought, you know what?

I'm going to go back to that side of town because

he had this black Oldsmobile vehicle that he got into.

He had the image of that thing tattooed on his brain.

He probably had

the vision of whoever attacked him.

If I can see this guy again, I can catch him.

Yeah.

And he ultimately went back to that side of town several times

until he ended up spotting the vehicle that he believed was the one that abducted him.

Right.

And he wrote down the license plate, and he was later able to provide that license plate number to the Chicago PD.

There's a lot more that we have to get to tomorrow.

The complete unraveling of this psychopath, John Wayne Gacy.

So join us back here tomorrow in the garage.

And for everything, true crime, go to truecrimegarage.com.

And until next time, be good, be kind, and don't litter.

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Initial approval will result in a hard inquiry, which may impact your credit scores.

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