A Killer Halloween /// Part 2 /// 881

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Speaker 1 Welcome to True Crime Garage, Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 I'm your host, Nick, and with me, as always, ladies and gentlemen, the lemonade and biscuits of True Crime. Here is the captain.
Yeah, it's good to be seeing. Good to see you.
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 Thanks for telling a friend.

Speaker 1 Today, we are still sipping on this fantastic double IPA graffiti highway by trogues. This one is sneaky, people, so watch your back.

Speaker 1 They mask the high alcohol content perfectly with a fruit forward IPA. Tastes too good to be 9.5% ABV.
So step lightly, friends. Garage grade 4 and a quarter bottle caps out of 5.

Speaker 1 And let's give some thanks and praise to our good garage friends. First up, a shout to Hannah.
from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

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Speaker 1 And last but certainly not least, also in Cali, we have Charlie from Benicia, California. Everyone we just mentioned, they went to TrueCrimeGarage.com and helped us out with this week's beer fund.

Speaker 1 And for that, we thank you. Yeah, B-W-E-R-R-U-N, beer run.

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Speaker 1 And Colonel, that's enough of the bsnas yeah check out the store page it'll scare the hell out of you all right everybody gather around grab a chair grab a beer let's talk some true crime

Speaker 1 As strange and just as out there as the Ed Gein story is, House of a Thousand Corps is weird.

Speaker 1 There is another guy from the same state, Wisconsin, down in Milwaukee, where after several police blunders, they eventually found a lot of similar trophy/slash necro hobby materials like they did at Ed Gein's House of Horrors.

Speaker 1 This is the Dahmer Apartment of Horrors. Located in Milwaukee.

Speaker 1 From Martin Fido's The Chronicle of Crime, the big headline in his book says, Jeffrey Dahmer, Milwaukee cannibal monster.

Speaker 1 And it goes on to say, gay cannibal monster caught in Milwaukee, parts of his 17 victims stored in his flat.

Speaker 1 And there's a picture of the journal newspaper out of Milwaukee with the headline that reads, body parts, litter Apartment. Yeah, every time I hear the name Jeffrey Dahmer, I think to myself,

Speaker 1 what was that smell? Yeah, Fido writes of

Speaker 1 what finally led to the discovery of Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment.

Speaker 1 And anybody that's familiar with the story, and a lot of our listeners are here because it's been told so many times, told in the garage. We've talked about it on Off the Record several times.

Speaker 1 But Fido writes here: despite the failure of Milwaukee's finest, Dahmer had only two months and four more victims to go. So this is after they basically returned a victim to Jeffrey Dahmer.

Speaker 1 Fido writes on July 23rd, Dahmer picked up 32-year-old Tracy Edwards, a heterosexual who was not willing to join in sex play or drink drink drugged coffee.

Speaker 1 But Dahmer got a handcuff on one of Edwards' wrists and used

Speaker 1 that and a knife to hold him prisoner for four terrifying hours. Edwards escaped when Dahmer's attention flagged.

Speaker 1 He stopped two policemen in a patrol car and asked them to release him from the handcuff. After hearing his story, they went back to Oxford apartments to investigate this strange homosexual kidnapper.

Speaker 1 Dahmer offered the sullen explanation: quote, I just lost my job and I wanted to drink some effing beer, end quote. He resisted their attempts to come into his flat.

Speaker 1 An attempt to arrest him resulted in a struggle, which ended with Dahmer screaming on the floor. A thorough inspection of the flat uncovered.

Speaker 1 You know, know, it's a fine Englishman when he's referring to the apartment constantly as a flat. Right.
Shout out to the late, great Martin Fido. I was a big fan of his work for many years.

Speaker 1 So, a thorough inspection of the flat uncovered the following: a human head in the fridge, three heads. Well, that's where you keep a severed head in the floor freezer.

Speaker 1 Well, apparently, he keeps them in multiple spots.

Speaker 1 As long as they're the freezer, a human heart in the fridge freezer compartment, a blue barrel jammed with body parts and bones, two skulls in a computer packaging box, three skulls and some bones in a filing cabinet, two skulls in a kettle, a penis and some hands in another kettle.

Speaker 1 Well, this was such a blunder by law enforcement because it wasn't just that they

Speaker 1 released a victim back into the custody of Dahmer. But like I said,

Speaker 1 this neighbor, she called law enforcement multiple times and she called the landlord multiple times because there was a funky smell coming. Yeah, funky's probably pretty

Speaker 1 plunderstatement, right? Yeah. Fido goes on to write: the Milwaukee cannibals' career was over, and Dahmer was dragged away in custody, howling like a mad dog.
He has a little

Speaker 1 small caption in here. So, what's cool about this book is,

Speaker 1 and it's completely at Fido's discretion here,

Speaker 1 but some of the larger cases, you know, when you come across them, when you turn the page and it takes up two full pages, because this is one of those large coffee table style books, Dahmer takes up two full pages.

Speaker 1 Some of these other crimes, I will say to Fido, it's a little surprising that they only took up a portion, but again, he's covering two full centuries of true crimes,

Speaker 1 of true crime in this book. And the caption here that I wanted to get to, Captain, this discusses Dahmer and race.

Speaker 1 And Fido writes: While Milwaukee's policemen's regrettable failure to take the complaints of black witnesses seriously may justify the race protest demonstrators led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson in the wake of the murders, the secondary suggestion that Dahmer himself was racially motivated seems ill-founded.

Speaker 1 Dahmer's victims break down into the following categories: one American Indian, one half Jewish Puerto Rican, one Hispanic, one Asian, two Caucasian, eleven Black or African American.

Speaker 1 This mix is very close to the demographic population of the poor districts of Milwaukee and Chicago, where Dahmer made his pickups.

Speaker 1 So it seems certain that he took his victims opportunistically at random.

Speaker 1 With all his faults, Jeff Dahmer is no racist, although he found the worst possible way of demonstrating his freedom from prejudice.

Speaker 1 So, in fact, what we kind of learn about Dahmer over the years was quite the opposite, wasn't it? He had an attraction to

Speaker 1 African-American men. He was sexually attracted to African-American men.
That was kind of his preference, it appears.

Speaker 1 And very much less has to do with some of these killers trying to target a certain race because they don't like them for whatever reason. Not here with this one.

Speaker 1 It appears his crimes were all sexually motivated, as disturbing and as bizarre as they were, all sexually motivated.

Speaker 1 And it appears to me he was attempting to get men that he was physically attracted to, and in some weird ways, wouldn't you say, kind of emotionally attracted to them in Dahmer's weird way as well, back to his apartment to ultimately become his possession,

Speaker 1 not his companion, but

Speaker 1 his possession. He seemed to want to keep them forever.
Yeah, he almost wanted

Speaker 1 playthings.

Speaker 1 Live live sex dummy and then or a live sex doll that he could control but i think the the lack of seriousness that the law enforcement took in this case was more so uh because they didn't want to deal with the homosexual community as opposed to well

Speaker 1 we're not taking this serious because they're coming from minorities. I think it was more like, well, we don't want to get involved.
This is a a

Speaker 1 homosexual spat.

Speaker 1 Well, right, incorrect. In a way, homosexual would be minority as well.
But I get what I totally get what you're saying. And

Speaker 1 you're absolutely right. It was a different kind of prejudice as far as the Milwaukee police go.

Speaker 1 As you're saying, not so much against African Americans, more of.

Speaker 1 I'm a beat cop. This appears to be some kind of

Speaker 1 gay spat that

Speaker 1 I don't understand, don't really want to get involved with. And that's, look,

Speaker 1 when you don't take the time to attempt to understand a situation, regardless of who's involved in it, you're not doing your job as a police officer.

Speaker 1 And in fact, horrifically so, in one of these cases, we know that

Speaker 1 the police sent the victim right back into the clutches of the killer.

Speaker 1 Now, I would argue that anybody in that apartment complex that was calling law enforcement or calling anybody to, hey, something's going on here. Somebody needs to look into this.

Speaker 1 I mean, all I would have took was one call being answered by the landlord and doing a house inspection to go,

Speaker 1 oh, shit. We need to call.
We need to call law enforcement. We need to call a lot of people, right?

Speaker 1 This guy has a lot of freezers in here. Who are you going to call?

Speaker 1 Because it seems like there would be everybody that you want to call.

Speaker 1 So, you know, we had talked about Dahmer wanting to control his victims, keep them, make them his sex slaves or playthings in Johnny's book, The Serial Killer Travel Guide Across America,

Speaker 1 there's a lot of dark, very dark humor in the book.

Speaker 1 And he refers to this as

Speaker 1 bang zombies, which is, you know, pretty grotesque term, but really does kind of sum up probably what Dahmer had, at least in his mind, right, of what he was attempting to do.

Speaker 1 And then from that book, The Serial Killer Travel Guide Across America, there's a stop. Just like we're stopping here in Milwaukee today, there's a stop there in Milwaukee,

Speaker 1 Wisconsin. And they write: Jeffrey Dahmer, aka the Milwaukee Monster, kill 17 span of activity from June 1978 to July 1991,

Speaker 1 stating, fun fact, Dahmer's favorite movies were The Exorcist, The Exorcist Part 2, and The Exorcist Part 3.

Speaker 1 Diverse. Yeah, he was really into that franchise.
Yeah. Johnny goes on to write, Milwaukee is also home to the apartment building where Dahmer committed his atrocities.

Speaker 1 While the building where Dahmer committed his horrific murders was torn down in 1992, the lot still sits empty today.

Speaker 1 They say if you listen closely on a moonless night, you can hear the distant cries of those who suffered within its walls.

Speaker 1 Johnny goes on to write, Dahmer took his first life in the summer of 1978, a few weeks after he graduated high school.

Speaker 1 He picked up a hitchhiker named Stephen Hicks and brought him back to his house, ostensibly to drink beer, but the goal was to have sex. Hicks wasn't into that.

Speaker 1 When he tried to leave, Dahmer killed him by hitting him in the head with a 10-pound dumbbell. Sorry to go into the graphic nature of this, but we would later learn

Speaker 1 because Jeffrey Dahmer later stated, and he spoke at length about some of his crimes with law enforcement, with documentarians, and his father.

Speaker 1 But Jeffrey Dahmer later stated regarding the Hicks murder that he struck Hicks twice from behind with a dumbbell as Hicks sat in a chair.

Speaker 1 When Stephen Hicks fell unconscious, Dahmer strangled him to death with the bar of the dumbbell, then stripped the clothes from Stephen's body.

Speaker 1 He says before exploring his chest with his hands and then masturbating as he stood over the corpse. Hours later, Jeffrey Dahmer dragged the lifeless body down to the basement.

Speaker 1 The following day, Dahmer dissected Hicks' body in that basement. He later buried the remains in a shallow grave in his backyard.

Speaker 1 Several weeks later, he unearthed the remains and paired the flesh from the bones. So paired, you know, basically very

Speaker 1 intricately taking the flesh, removing it from the bones. He dissolved the flesh in acid before flushing the solution down the toilet.

Speaker 1 He crushed the bones with a sledgehammer and scattered them in the woodland behind the family home. Remember, he's still living at his parents' home at this time.

Speaker 1 His parents are completely on the outs at this time. He says that he threw Stephen Hicks' necklace and the knife that he used to dismember him from the Bathroad Bridge into the Cuyahoga River.

Speaker 1 Do we have a better understanding of the dismemberment? Because a lot of times the killer will dismember the victim to dispose of them, but it doesn't seem like that was necessary in this case. Well,

Speaker 1 to me, it feels like

Speaker 1 Dahmer had the privacy and a lot of time to put in the efforts to making sure that the victim was never found. Right.

Speaker 1 So in 1978, back then, there's not a lot of convictions without a body, there's not a lot of even

Speaker 1 murder charges when you have a no body case, right?

Speaker 1 And unfortunately,

Speaker 1 with everything that we just went through, I mean, there's no body, he pretty much obliterated the entire body, and he had the time to do so.

Speaker 1 Keep in mind, too, one thing about Dahmer is he had some level of understandment

Speaker 1 with things like taxidermy and and roadkill and dead animals. Right.

Speaker 1 So maybe it was just a continuum, maybe it was just a continuation of what he was doing with those animals.

Speaker 1 Well, and I think that he had a level of know-how too that the first-time killer probably would not have had. So

Speaker 1 example here would be he buries the body in a shallow grave in the backyard. And then several weeks later, he unearthed the remains to then remove the flesh, muscle, tissue from the bones.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And then he's going to completely destroy the flesh, muscle tissue in one manner, and then use a different method to destroy the bones. You can look at this in a couple different ways.

Speaker 1 Very likely, two things are happening here.

Speaker 1 He is probably haunted by the body in the backyard, in the shallow grave, haunted in a sense of it could be easily found, right? The ground may appear to be disturbed.

Speaker 1 And we talked about this with several serial killers that we have covered in the past, where they, some of them

Speaker 1 say that, you know, right after I killed this person, I just immediately expected to hear police sirens, that everybody knew what I had done.

Speaker 1 And it was only a matter of time before they came to get me, before they came to collect the evidence and lock me up and throw away the key.

Speaker 1 So he may have been haunted by the body in the backyard by that sense.

Speaker 1 He also probably may have known going into this that it's going to be far easier to commit this act of removing the flesh from the bone if I simply wait, right? The decomp starts to set in.

Speaker 1 The breaking down of the tissues and the cells is going to make this less of

Speaker 1 a tedious effort on my part. It's going to go much quicker.
I hate to to say it, Captain, but he, he did an excellent job of completely destroying and obliterating this body and the evidence.

Speaker 1 I mean, with the exception of maybe the knife and the victim's personal belonging necklace could be found in the Cuyahoga River, but that's, you know, that's no small river. Right.

Speaker 1 And how far did it travel from his property? And time is the killer of evidence and water,

Speaker 1 a lot of times, killer of evidence. But it's also fascinating with these killers, how there's so many similarities.

Speaker 1 Like you were talking about the isolation that Dahmer had for a time period in his family home, in his childhood home. But there's nobody there.
They just left him alone.

Speaker 1 And you see those similarities in like Ed Gein, the isolation on the farm. Yes, and very likely

Speaker 1 some level of mental illness.

Speaker 1 I hate to use that term because I feel like these guys, you don't want to lump them in with people that are clearly non-violent people that don't have the, that have no desire to do any of the terrible stuff that we've just discussed today about mental illness.

Speaker 1 Mental illness is a spectrum, right? Right.

Speaker 1 It's an all-kind of encompassing term. But this to me is mental illness, be damned.
This is mental disturbancy. Like

Speaker 1 this is a whole nother level here.

Speaker 1 And, and to put it in its simplest of forms, Jeff Dahmer did that for us because later he says, it wasn't just that, you know, I desire to have sex with this man that I brought back to my home and we're having drinks and we're getting along, we're hanging out, we're paling around.

Speaker 1 It wasn't just that he, he wasn't into what I was into.

Speaker 1 Part of his psychosis, too, is as he put it to police, was,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 I killed killed Stephen Hicks because the guy wanted to leave, and I didn't want him to. Right.

Speaker 1 And so, in a way, he's keeping him. And then you have to wonder with the bang zombies or whatever, whoever wants to call it, whatever.

Speaker 1 We've reviewed plenty of serial killers that mention things like slaves for the afterlife, or my victims are forever my slaves or my property.

Speaker 1 And this seems and appears to be the first step, nay, giant leap toward

Speaker 1 that mindset. Well, and these

Speaker 1 individuals become monsters. We don't become monsters ourselves just because we show some sympathy to these killers that showed no sympathy to other humans and viewed humans as less than.

Speaker 1 And again, somebody could go, well, well, he was isolated, so he wanted to keep this individual there. But let's remember,

Speaker 1 this is an individual that didn't care about the life. It was more his wants and desires, and he's going to do anything to carry out those wants and desires.

Speaker 1 Well, and the other thing, too, is he turned away from any other type of companionship, relationship, human interaction that he could have that was available to him at the time.

Speaker 1 Now, his mom was a bit of a train wreck herself.

Speaker 1 His dad was a bit checked out. There was a lot of problems between mom and dad, but he had a sibling.

Speaker 1 He had a brother that he could have attempted to make an emotional connection and have a good, solid relationship with.

Speaker 1 He knew people at school. There were people in his high school.

Speaker 1 There were people in his neighborhood.

Speaker 1 He didn't go to great lengths and efforts to have real, meaningful meaningful relationships with other people.

Speaker 1 He went to great lengths and efforts to attack, possess, possess, sexually assault

Speaker 1 this poor young man, this victim. Yeah, and because there's so much information about Jeffrey Dahmer, you see individuals that tried to

Speaker 1 reach out to him, try to look after Jeffrey in high school, in the Army, after the Army, in college, even

Speaker 1 at that apartment complex there's individuals there that try to look after him try to invite him to gatherings or even try to set him up on on dates the woman that that alerted the police that something was going on the woman that that alerted the landlord that something was going on she

Speaker 1 tried to befriend him and seems like would been would have been an incredible an incredibly wonderful neighbor to have so yeah he he turned his back on on all that yeah he turned his back on so yeah let's not let's not feel an inch or an ounce of sadness for this man telling us later that he that he was very much alone well that's where i disagree i think we can view these people with some sadness or sympathy or and that doesn't make us monsters in turn that That shows that we have humanity.

Speaker 1 The court found Jeffrey Dahmer sane,

Speaker 1 surprisingly, guilty on 15 counts of murder and sentenced him to 15 life terms, totaling 957 years in prison. Jeffrey Dahmer was severely beaten by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver with a metal bar.

Speaker 1 Oddly enough, a metal bar very similar to how Dahmer killed his first known victim. A metal bar from the prison gym and then died while incarcerated.

Speaker 1 Scarver claimed, quote, God told him to do it, end quote.

Speaker 1 All right, Captain,

Speaker 1 trick or treat? I'll start with trick. I have a feeling you'll get this one for sure.
I know it, in fact.

Speaker 1 What kind of ship has two mates, but no captain? I know nothing about ships. A relationship.
All right. Treat.

Speaker 1 This is. These are not good.
Well, the relationship one's pretty fitting for all the stuff we discussed about Dahmer.

Speaker 1 From the serial killer travel guide, here comes your treat. They say, if in Milwaukee, which, which I say I will certainly go to someday.

Speaker 1 In fact, a while back, the boys from Generation Y were talking to us about setting up some kind of

Speaker 1 event with both podcasts involved. And I kept saying, let's do Milwaukee.
It's like

Speaker 1 the northern middle between Kansas City and Columbus. So I assume it's a great sports town, a great beer drinking town, of course.
Anyway, the travel guide says check out the Miller Brewery Tour.

Speaker 1 It's a 170-year-old factory with an awesome outdoor beer garden.

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Speaker 1 All right, we are back, you ghost and ghouls.

Speaker 1 Cheers, mates.

Speaker 1 Cheers to you, Captain. Now, this, for our next stop, our fourth stop, this is from another great Martin Fido book.
This time, he has paired up with Paul Begg,

Speaker 1 another fascinating gentleman. Paul Begg is acknowledged worldwide as one of the leading authorities on the Jack the Ripper mystery.
He has worked in newspapers, television, and publishing.

Speaker 1 He has written extensively. on Jack the Ripper.
This is from American Justice, Great Crimes and Trials.

Speaker 1 For you old school followers of true crime television, this is American Justice, the TV series in book form. Stop number four.

Speaker 1 Here we go, Captain. Norwood Park is neither part of the city of Chicago nor part of the city of De Plains.

Speaker 1 The city police departments are the two conurbations.

Speaker 1 have no jurisdiction over crimes committed here and have to leave them to the county sheriff's department.

Speaker 1 In December 1978, the citizens of Norwood were not a little surprised to find the De Plains police staking out 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, home of nice Mr.

Speaker 1 Gacy, the fat and friendly building contractor who had lived there for seven years.

Speaker 1 So heading out to Chicago. Old Gacy.

Speaker 1 Old Gacy.

Speaker 1 Both Gein and Gacy are,

Speaker 1 as we said, if true crime were a town, they would be the talk of the town right now with

Speaker 1 making headlines again, once again, both of them, with Netflix and Peacock exploring

Speaker 1 their lives and their crimes and some of the stories about them.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was a little disappointed in the Ed Gein monster series, so I'm looking forward to Peacock redeeming the true crime world with their bio pic, if you will, of John Wayne Gacy.

Speaker 1 And then we go back to the

Speaker 1 Chronicle of Crime, 1978. The headline here, killer clown stuffed boys under his house.

Speaker 1 And the picture that they chose to include, that Fido included in the book here, I'll read the caption to you.

Speaker 1 It says, First Lady Rosalind Carter unwittingly shakes hands with America's worst mass murderer, John Wayne Gacy.

Speaker 1 And of course, it's a picture of the first lady shaking hands with a serial killer, an infamous serial killer that we now know is responsible for 33 murders.

Speaker 1 From the serial killer travel guide across America, we have Norwood Park, Illinois, John Wayne Gacy, aka the killer clown kills 33 plus span of activity, January 1972 to December 1978.

Speaker 1 John Wayne Gacy, he was born on March 17th, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. His father was an alcoholic who physically and verbally abused his son.

Speaker 1 Gacy married into a wealthy family and relocated with his lucky bride to Waterloo, Iowa.

Speaker 1 Gacy took over management of the family's Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant and was well known in the community as a good family man.

Speaker 1 And it goes on to say at the time he was a member of the local JCs where he would provide fried chicken and insist on being called

Speaker 1 Colonel.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Thanks for including that. Well, it makes sense if

Speaker 1 he was running the Kentucky Fried Chicken, he would want to be called Colonel.

Speaker 1 Let the record reflect

Speaker 1 that I have never insisted that I be called Colonel. I just,

Speaker 1 they dubbed me that somehow. So when he's out in Waterloo, Iowa, right?

Speaker 1 John Wayne Gacy, he gets convicted in 1968 of a sodomy charge of a teenage boy in Waterloo, Iowa. He gets 10 years imprisonment for this.
He served 18 months. Let me read from the travel guide here.

Speaker 1 It says, after serving 18 months in prison, prison, Gacy was paroled in 1971 and moved back to the city of Chicago. That July, he remarried.
So he got divorced.

Speaker 1 He remarries, but things didn't work out all that well as Gacy was charged with the attempted rape of a young man. The charges were dropped when the victim failed to appear in court.

Speaker 1 The marriage didn't last. Who would have saw that coming? Didn't last.
Gacy's second wife divorced him due to her husband's moodiness and obsession with homosexual magazines yeah but also

Speaker 1 if your partner is accused of something that you probably think they did

Speaker 1 even though law enforcement can't prove it

Speaker 1 probably time to move on well yes and and look i think

Speaker 1 The travel guide there sort of only scratches the surface with what was going on. Right.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 we have more than just the pornography and things like that that he's bringing into the house. So

Speaker 1 he's pushing back on his wife and the relationship and saying, you know, I don't really care about this marriage. I don't really care about this relationship.
I'm going to come and go as I please.

Speaker 1 And his business is sort of taking, he's a contractor, but he owns his own businesses. And the businesses are taking off around this time.
So he is coming and going as he pleases.

Speaker 1 And he's staying out very late.

Speaker 1 He's drinking a lot and he's not much fun to be around and then this is from out of the mouths of serial killers by mary brett a bit of a caption here it says gacy opened what he called a club in the basement of his home where he allowed teenage workers

Speaker 1 of his to socialize play pool and drink Gacy was known to only socialize with the young males. Yeah, but again,

Speaker 1 when we talk about these similarities, you go, there's people in society that were trying to have relationships with these individuals, and they were choosing the relationship that they were going to have with their world.

Speaker 1 And I think some of it, if you really start dissecting the minds of these killers, their obsession and drive.

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 these sexual violent acts starts consuming their whole life. So every minute becomes about these obsessions.
And so

Speaker 1 some people can go, well, there was isolation with Dahmer. Yeah, but he was still going out to clubs to be

Speaker 1 around a certain individual. Bathhouses, which would have been his ideal type for a victim.
And so same way with Gacy. Well, I'm going to have this hangout club

Speaker 1 for my victim type.

Speaker 1 It's really fascinating shit. Yeah, exactly.
And then as far as, you know, see, Gacy's the exact opposite, though, right? Like, Gacy is gregarious.

Speaker 1 He's he's fun to hang out with, or at least puts on, puts on a show. Until he tries to kill you.
Well, and he's raising money for the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1 He's throwing parties at his house.

Speaker 1 He had bodies in the crawl space, and he's inviting like hundreds of people to these backyard summer parties, and hundreds of people are attending these parties. He's successful.

Speaker 1 There were people in this community that said, you know what? This is a guy that you should aspire to be like. This is a guy that is successful.
He's outgoing. He gives back to the community.

Speaker 1 He's offering jobs to many people. I mean, you want to talk, we talk about Cubism with BTK and how he was able to fool his family and his community and church and where he worked.

Speaker 1 Gacy is that times 10.

Speaker 1 And I mean, he managed to get married twice

Speaker 1 to smart and, in one case, well-to-do women. And

Speaker 1 I think what happened with him was once they got in a living situation, he could no longer keep up that image full-time. Right, the cubism.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But also, one of the things that all these

Speaker 1 serial killers that you've talked about so far have in common is smell. There's a lot of stench involved.
A lot of stink. Something stinks here.
So this says, remember, he served that 18 months.

Speaker 1 And then it says he murdered his first victim in 1972, had murdered twice more by the end of 1975, and then murdered at least 30 victims after his divorce from his second wife.

Speaker 1 That divorce took place in 1976. And the travel guide goes on to say, investigators obtained a warrant to search Gacy's house while searching his home.

Speaker 1 Investigators entered the crawl space and you said it. You said stink, you said stench.
A rancid odor was quickly noticed.

Speaker 1 And then during that search, they found what belonged to a teenager who had disappeared, a ring

Speaker 1 that had belonged to a teenager that had been missing for a year. And then, with that finding, investigators were able to obtain a second search warrant for Gacy's home because of this evidence.

Speaker 1 Ultimately, going off of memory here, Captain, it was the investigation into the disappearance of De Plain's teenager, Robert Peist, that led to Gacy's arrest that took place December 21st, 1978.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm sure they show this in the peacock dramatization of John Wayne Gacy, but many times law enforcement was in his house

Speaker 1 and then openly asking him, what's that smell? Yeah, so listen to this. We talked about the arrest on December 21st, 1978.

Speaker 1 And the travel guide says on December 22nd, 1978, so the next day, Gary, Gary, Gacy realizing that the police were going to find out what he had been up to, he confessed to some of the murders.

Speaker 1 Later, we learned that 28 of those victims were buried in shallow graves under his house.

Speaker 1 He later explained to police, quote, there are four Johns, John the contractor, John the Clown, and John the politician. The fourth John went by the name of Jack Hanley, who was the actual killer.

Speaker 1 I guess police decided to settle on arresting the John that was sitting in front of them.

Speaker 1 Well, I think a fascinating angle if you want to research somebody like John Wayne Gacy, is the angle because he was such a community-driven individual, or at least one of his personalities were.

Speaker 1 And I guess you could make an argument that

Speaker 1 was it a split personality or was it just a side that he was choosing to show?

Speaker 1 So many victims,

Speaker 1 were those victims just victims of his alone? Is it possible that some of the victims weren't just victims of Gacy, but Gacy and somebody else or multiple people?

Speaker 1 Because we do have that eyewitness that claims that got away. And it seems like, especially these serial killers that have a high body count, you go,

Speaker 1 there's normally somebody that got away, but I believe his eyewitness account was that there was more than one person there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think, thankfully, and luckily, I think that there were in Gacy's in the Gacy story, there may have been more than one that got away.

Speaker 1 There is a lot, you're right, there's a lot of suspicion on that there. And then we talked about in this book that was the inspiration for today's

Speaker 1 episode, a lot of sort of dark humor along the way.

Speaker 1 Here's some dark humor from the kernel world,

Speaker 1 not to to be mistaken with Chubby Gacy there. So

Speaker 1 Gacy gets busted in 1978, right? The authorities are very much busy digging up his house, crawl space, garden, garage, yard.

Speaker 1 He put some of the bodies in the river.

Speaker 1 He had said something sort of sly

Speaker 1 on the sly to a neighbor or someone that he was thinking about moving because he was running out of room. Meanwhile, he's living alone in this nice house.
Right, but anyway, isolation. He is,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 I don't know that I would say isolation with Casey. I mean, he stayed in

Speaker 1 this guy, it was the opposite, complete opposite of isolation. And with him and Bundy, it was weird that they kind of shared that very outgoing nature and trait, but both of them being

Speaker 1 politically involved as well,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 very much involved with their communities at times. And I had often wondered with Bundy and Gacy, was that all a part of the ruse?

Speaker 1 But I think it goes back to something you're talking about. Is it some form of split personality? And Gacy almost says that to the police, right?

Speaker 1 There's four Johns, the contractor, the clown, the politician, and the killer.

Speaker 1 I think I can agree with that. And I think you're right that it is some kind of split personality because I don't see Bundy

Speaker 1 using his involvement in his communities as a way to find and get victims or have access to victims.

Speaker 1 And I don't see that with the exception of John Gacy, the contractor, the businessman, he doesn't appear to be using those avenues to get victims either. So

Speaker 1 it must just be their outgoing nature. that they have.
Anyway, so back to the dark humor here from my world. So Gacy gets busted in 1978.

Speaker 1 The authorities busy digging up his home, figuring out what happened, what number of victims do we have here? Who are the victims? It was years before they had identified some of these victims.

Speaker 1 Some were very quick. Some took a long time.
So years back, Campton, I knew this older dude from Chicago. He lived there in the later 70s, early 80s.

Speaker 1 So these folks there were bombarded daily with Gacy news, right? Gacy news, serial killer clown news in their home city day after day, each and every day. What do you call someone from

Speaker 1 Chicago in?

Speaker 1 Chicago.

Speaker 1 I like,

Speaker 1 how about Chi-Towner? That sounds much cool. Or Windy City native.
All right, anyway. So all that's going on in 1978, and they're busy putting together the case against Gacy in 1979.

Speaker 1 Pink Floyd drops their now incredibly famous famous album in the middle of all of this. The song Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,

Speaker 1 is on the radio Friday, November 23rd, 1979, the day after Thanksgiving, 1979. The album is released a week later on November 30th, 1979.
And kind of a weird side fact here.

Speaker 1 Did you know they were still recording portions of that album earlier that

Speaker 1 very month?

Speaker 1 Anyway, I'll save that for the Boom Boxes and Bangers podcast.

Speaker 1 So, in some very perverse humor, the Chi-Towners, because of Gacy and all the news that was coming about and that song coming out all sort of at the same time, the Chi-Towners were singing, instead of another brick in the wall, another stiff in the crawl.

Speaker 1 On the morning of May 9th, 1994,

Speaker 1 John Wayne Gacy was transferred to Stateville Correctional Center to be executed. They are going to carry out his death sentence.
Amen.

Speaker 1 That afternoon, he was allowed a private picnic on the prison grounds with members of his family for his last meal.

Speaker 1 You know, all the killers that we've talked about, this is the only guy that made it to the execution. The other guys died of

Speaker 1 cancer. Gacy died of, sorry, Gein died of some kind of complications to cancer.
Groves died of hepatitis C and liver failure. Dahmer was killed by another inmate in prison.

Speaker 1 So Gacy makes it to his execution. For his last meal, he ordered,

Speaker 1 of course, a bucket of KFC, Kentucky fried chicken, french fries, a dozen fried shrimp, fresh strawberries, and washed it all down with a Diet Coke.

Speaker 1 That evening, he received the last rites from a Catholic priest before being escorted to the execution chamber. John Wayne Gacy was executed on May 10th, 1994.

Speaker 1 His final statement to his lawyer before his execution was that killing him would not compensate for the loss of others and that the state was murdering him.

Speaker 1 His final spoken words were reported to be, kiss my ass.

Speaker 1 Although prosecutor William Kunkel later stated, this just recently in 2020, that these words were spoken to a prison official and were not part of any official statement prior to Gacy's execution.

Speaker 1 John Wayne Gacy was 52 years old when he was executed by the state of Illinois.

Speaker 1 Well, Chicago always reminds me of one of my favorite characters, Julius Pepperwood, ex-cop, ex-marine, and one of the best quotes: I'm from Chicago. Thin Crust Pizza? No, thank you.
I'm from Chicago.

Speaker 1 Julius Pepperwood. So

Speaker 1 speaking of quotes, this from the book Out of the Mouths of Serial Killers. This is John Wayne Gacy, a John Wayne Gacy quote.

Speaker 1 This says, if Jeffrey Dahmer doesn't meet the requirements for insanity, then I'd hate like hell to run into the guy that does. Very good point.

Speaker 1 Well, the guy that did was Ed Gein from the same state, right? Wisconsin's like, nope, Ed Gein, unfit to stand trial.

Speaker 1 Dahmer, sure, sure. All right.
Last one for the week. Happy Halloween, everybody.
Trick-or-treat, Captain.

Speaker 1 Let's do trick or treat.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's do trick first.

Speaker 1 This is a nice Halloween-themed riddle for you. I have got none of these right so far.
Well, in all fairness, you didn't know you were going to be peppered with riddles

Speaker 1 during today's garage appointment. All right, here's the riddle.
I have a name, but it isn't mine. You don't think about me while in your prime.
People cry when I'm in their sight.

Speaker 1 Others lie with me all day and night.

Speaker 1 What am I? I don't know. Ed Gein would tell you, that's a tombstone, baby.
That's a tombstone.

Speaker 1 All right, treat.

Speaker 1 Anybody in Chicago knows this. Anybody that's been to Chicago more than once, I would think, would have to know this.
Treat,

Speaker 1 if and when in Chicago, you must, must, must go to the Super Dog Drive-In. They have been there since 1948, serving up the best super burgers and shakes, and of course, hot dogs.

Speaker 1 So go and get you a Chicago dog. And just like my old high school mascot nickname, that's D-A-W-G

Speaker 1 Dog.

Speaker 1 I want to thank everybody for joining us here in the garage. Hope we kept you company during the spooky season.
Hope we kept you company.

Speaker 1 If you're running around with your kids doing trick-or-treat, Colonel, do we have any recommended reading for the beautiful listeners?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and if you want to terrify the neighbors, just go out there and you could bark at the moon, like Ozzie Osborne says, or dance in the moonlight. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Of course, this week, Captain, recommending the Serial Killer Travel Guide Across America, your coast-to-coast tour of terror by Johnny Trevisani with Brian Whitney.

Speaker 1 This isn't your typical road trip companion. This was the inspiration for this week's episode.
So thank you to Johnny and Brian.

Speaker 1 The Serial Killer Travel Guide Across America is a darkly fascinating guide and unconventional look that takes readers on a darkly humorous journey through the United States, exploring notorious locations linked to infamous serial killers.

Speaker 1 And this one, we're going to go two books. Let's do two.
And this one works well in tandem with the Serial Killer Travel Guide.

Speaker 1 It's titled Serial Killer Quote of the Day: 365 Days of Serial Killer Uncut and in Their Own Words, also by Johnny Trevisani.

Speaker 1 You can find those great titles and many more wonderful recommendations on our recommended page at our website truecrimegarage.com. If you'd like to treat yourself and support the garage

Speaker 1 at the same time, go to truecrimegarage.com, click on the store page, 2025

Speaker 1 Halloween merch. It's only here once.
We're not going to sell it next year. It's done very soon.

Speaker 1 So treat yourself.

Speaker 1 Don't trick yourself. Just treat yourself.
And until next week, be good, be kind, and don't worry.

Speaker 4 Hey there, it's Katie Nolan, host of Casuals, the sports podcast where we don't care how much you know about sports, we're just happy that you're here.

Speaker 4 Every week, I hang out with some of my good friends to discuss the biggest stories across sports and entertainment, but in a way that's like fun and not boring.

Speaker 4 Want to know Sue Bird's favorite Diana Taurasi story, or how heavy the Larry O'Brien trophy is, or even what baseball team is right for you based on your moon sign? We got you.

Speaker 4 Listen to casuals every Tuesday and Thursday on the SiriusXM app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 Bye!