Blood on the Coast: Secrets Buried from the Pacific Shore to the Heartland

The Perfect Wife

There is a moment, early in the morning of November 5th, 1989, that a neighbor on Cypress Avenue in La Jolla, California will later describe as a sound she couldn't quite place — sharp, brief, gone before she was certain she had heard it at all. She turned over and went back to sleep. Inside the house behind the tall stucco wall, Daniel Broderick the Third and his new wife, Linda, would never wake up again.

What had brought Betty Broderick to that bedroom, on that night, with a .38-caliber revolver in her hand, was not a single moment of madness. It was years. Years of a marriage that had glittered from the outside and corroded from within. Years of courtroom filings and telephone messages and a rage that had been building, by the time it finally broke, into something the courts would spend the better part of two years carefully, methodically, sorting into the language of the law. What the jury found, in the end, was not a woman undone by grief. What they found was something colder than that, and more deliberate. But to understand the ending — and there is always an ending in these stories — you have to understand the beginning.

Elisabeth Anne Bisceglia grew up in Eastchester, New York, the daughter of a strict Catholic family with six children and an old-world sense of what a woman's life was supposed to look like. She was, by most accounts, bright and vivacious — someone who lit up a room, who laughed easily, who wanted, deeply and genuinely, a life that meant something. She met Daniel Broderick in 1965 when they were both students, and from the start there was a sense of purpose to the match. He was handsome and ambitious. She was devoted and capable. They married in 1969, and what followed was, for a time, the kind of story that gets told at dinner parties as evidence that hard work and love can build something real.

It was Betty who worked as a teacher and as a nurse's aide while Dan completed not just medical school but then, improbably, law school as well — a dual degree from Cornell and Harvard that would eventually make him one of the most prominent medical malpractice attorneys in San Diego. It was Betty who managed four children, who hosted the parties, who organized the household that served as the engine of his social and professional ascent. Friends from that era have described her in interviews and court testimony as someone who understood herself to be a partner in an enterprise, not merely a wife in a house. The Brodericks were, by the early 1980s, wealthy, connected, and visible. They lived in a large home in Coral Reef, drove fine cars, and took the kinds of vacations that their neighbors noticed.

What Betty did not know, or perhaps what she sensed before she knew, was that by 1983 her husband had begun an intimate relationship with his legal assistant, a young woman named Linda Kolkena. She was twenty-one years old when she came to work for Dan Broderick. He was in his late thirties. Betty has said, and said publicly and repeatedly over the years, that she confronted Dan about Linda early on, that she was told she was imagining things, that the gaslighting — as she would come to describe it — was part of what fractured her long before the marriage formally ended. Dan denied the affair's existence for years. He and Betty separated in 1985. Their divorce, filed that same year, would become one of the most protracted and acrimonious legal proceedings in San Diego County's memory.

It was during those years — between the separation in 1985 and the final divorce decree in 1989 — that the pattern prosecutors would later lay before a jury began to take shape. Betty left profane, threatening messages on Dan's answering machine, messages she knew were being recorded and which were played in open court. She drove her car through the front door of Dan's house in 1985. She set fire to his clothing. She sent her children back to him on one occasion without warning, and then disputed custody arrangements in ways that resulted in her being jailed briefly for contempt of court. She spray-painted his walls. She called his home repeatedly, day and night. A judge, at one point, imposed fines of one thousand dollars for each obscene phone call — a sanction that Betty, by some accounts, treated as the cost of doing business.

What is important to understand, and what prosecutors were careful to establish during the trial, is that this was not the behavior of someone who had simply snapped. This was a sustained campaign, documented across years, adjudicated in multiple court proceedings, witnessed by the Brodericks' own children. The divorce was finalized in January of 1989. Dan married Linda Kolkena in April of that same year. Betty received a settlement that her attorneys and Dan's attorneys disputed furiously — she would later argue it was inadequate given her contributions to his career; courts found otherwise. Whatever the merits of her financial grievances, what happened next removed those grievances from any context in which they might have generated sympathy.

In the months after Dan and Linda's wedding, by the account of people close to Betty at the time, she grew increasingly fixated. She had a key — or at least, she would later claim she knew where one was kept — to Dan's house on Cypress Avenue in La Jolla, the house he had shared with Linda since their marriage. Whether that key had been given to her for the children's access or obtained some other way was one of the smaller mysteries the trial left unresolved. What is not disputed is that Betty had been inside that house before. What is not disputed is that she owned a firearm.

In the early morning hours of November 5th, 1989, Betty Broderick drove to Cypress Avenue. She entered the house. She walked to the master bedroom. Dan Broderick was shot twice. Linda Broderick was shot twice. Linda died in the bed. Dan made it to the phone, began to dial — the evidence suggests he managed to press a single digit — and died on the floor. Betty Broderick drove away. She called her daughter that morning and said, according to later testimony, that she had done it, that it was over. Within hours, through the intercession of her children, she was in contact with law enforcement. She surrendered to a sheriff's deputy later that day in the parking lot of a condominium complex, and was placed under arrest for the murders of Daniel T. Broderick III and Linda Broderick.

The investigation itself, in the forensic sense, was not complicated. Betty had told her daughter what she had done. Ballistic evidence tied her weapon to the scene. There was no question of identity, no alibi to unravel, no secondary suspect lurking in the background of the case. What the investigation had to establish — and what would determine whether this was first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or something else entirely — was the architecture of intent. Prosecutors from the San Diego District Attorney's office spent the months between Betty's arrest and her trial assembling that architecture piece by piece: the phone messages, the court records, the restraining orders, the prior incidents, the testimony of witnesses who had watched the Broderick divorce turn the couple into opposing forces in a private war.

Betty's defense, led by attorney Jack Earley, did not dispute the central facts. What it argued, instead, was that years of emotional abuse, manipulation, and legal persecution had left Betty in a mental state that mitigated her responsibility. The defense presented testimony about the psychological toll of what Betty experienced during the divorce — the loss of identity, the public humiliation, the sense that a system her husband knew how to manipulate was being used against her at every turn. Earley argued that on the night of November 5th, Betty was not acting out of calculated malice but out of a psychological rupture, a woman finally broken by years of torment.

The first trial, in 1990, ended in a hung jury. It was a result that stunned observers and gave Betty's supporters — and there were many, people who had followed the case and seen in it something larger than one marriage's destruction, a story about what happens to women who give everything and receive betrayal in return — reason to believe that a second jury might go further in her direction. It did not.

The second trial began in late 1991, with prosecutor Kerry Wells presenting, methodically and with considerable force, the same documented record of premeditation that had failed to persuade twelve people unanimously the first time. Wells argued that Betty's actions on the night of November 5th were not the product of a shattered mind but of a deliberate choice — that she had driven to that house, entered it in the dark, found the bedroom, and fired with the specific purpose of ending two lives. The defense again argued diminished capacity and emotional devastation. The jury deliberated for several days.

On December 7th, 1991, Betty Broderick was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder. The verdict meant the jury found she had not premeditated the killings in the specific way required for first-degree murder — there was no finding of the kind of advance planning that would have elevated the charges — but that she had acted with malice aforethought, that she had intended to kill, and that she had done so without legal justification or excuse. She was sentenced to thirty-two years to life in prison by Judge William Mudd. She would not be eligible for parole consideration for many years.

The years since the verdict have included, as is common in cases of this magnitude, a trail of legal proceedings that has continued to shape the story. Betty Broderick appealed her conviction, and in 1998 a California appellate court upheld both the conviction and the sentence. The court found no reversible error in the conduct of the trial and rejected the arguments her attorneys had advanced on her behalf. She remained at the California Institution for Women in Chino.

Parole hearings have come and gone at the intervals the law requires. In 2010, a parole board recommended her release, a recommendation that was subsequently reversed by the governor's office. In 2017, a parole board again denied her release, citing concerns about her continued failure to take what the board characterized as sufficient responsibility for the killings. In 2020, another parole hearing resulted in another denial, with board members noting that Betty's statements — her continued framing of the events of November 5th, 1989 in ways that distributed responsibility outward, toward Dan's behavior, toward the legal system, toward the circumstances that had brought her to that house — suggested to them that the risk of granting her release could not be justified. As of the time of this telling, Betty Broderick remains incarcerated, in her mid-seventies, still filing, still appealing, still arguing — in her way — that the story is more complicated than the verdict allows.

Perhaps it is. These things often are. The Broderick divorce was, by any honest accounting, a brutal proceeding that left Betty financially and emotionally diminished in ways that a family court system of a different era might have addressed differently. That is not a fringe view; legal scholars and women's advocates have written seriously about what the case reveals about how divorce law in the 1980s sometimes failed women who had sacrificed professional identity for a husband's career. And the question of what years of betrayal and humiliation do to a human mind is not a question that admits easy answers. People who loved Betty Broderick — and people still do — have spent decades arguing that the system failed her long before the night she failed herself and, fatally, two other people.

But Dan Broderick was forty-four years old when he died. Linda Broderick was twenty-eight. She was pregnant. That fact — documented, confirmed, part of the medical record — settles over the story like something that cannot be argued away, cannot be contextualized into irrelevance. Linda Kolkena Broderick, whatever role she played in the collapse of a marriage, had not yet lived half her life. She died in her bed, in the dark, in what should have been the first year of a marriage, in a house that someone entered with a gun while she slept.

The arc of this case has always bent in two directions at once, and that is, in a way, what has made it endure — in documentaries, in television movies, in true-crime podcasts, in the continuing public conversation about what we owe each other in the dissolution of a life built together. Betty Broderick has become, for some, a symbol of what happens when grief and rage are left with no legitimate outlet. For others, she is simply a woman who made a choice that ended two lives and very nearly ended four, if you count the children who lost both parents on a Sunday morning in November and have been navigating that loss, quietly and largely outside the public eye, ever since.

What the law found — what twelve people found, twice reviewed by appellate courts and confirmed — is that on the morning of November 5th, 1989, Betty Broderick committed two acts of murder. That is the adjudicated fact at the center of this story, and it is the fact around which everything else arranges itself: the sympathy and the outrage and the long argument about what drove her there and whether the system that sentenced her had ever really understood what the years before that night had done to a woman who had once, genuinely, believed she was building something that would last.

Somewhere in a correctional facility in California, a woman in her mid-seventies is still telling her version of that story. Two people on Cypress Avenue in La Jolla cannot tell theirs. That asymmetry is, finally, the only place where the case comes to rest.

The Drifter at Depot Bay

There is a photograph — and the existence of that photograph is, in its own terrible way, the thing that ends the story before the story even begins.

It sits in an evidence file, clinical and damning, taken by the man who committed the act it records. Investigators who saw it in the spring of 1969 would later say that nothing in their careers had quite prepared them for it. What it showed was not simply the fact of violence, but the careful, methodical documentation of it — the work of someone who wanted to remember, who wanted to keep. That photograph, and the others like it, would walk a jury through a darkness that no amount of legal language could fully soften. But to understand how anyone arrived at that moment, in a cluttered garage on Center Street in Salem, Oregon, you have to go back to the beginning. To the women. To the lives that mattered before anything else.

Linda Slawson was nineteen years old in January of 1968, and she was working hard at the particular American project of making something of herself. She sold encyclopedias door to door, a job that required a certain fearlessness — you had to knock on strangers' doors, walk into strangers' homes, pitch the value of knowledge to people who might not be in any mood to hear it. She was cheerful about it, by all accounts. She came from a family in Aloha, Oregon, who loved her, and she had the kind of practical optimism that made her good at the work. On the evening of January 26th, 1968, Linda knocked on a door in Salem. She was never seen alive again.

Karen Sprinker was a college student at Oregon State University, eighteen years old, with her whole academic life stretching out in front of her. In March of 1969, she went to meet her mother at a department store in Salem — a routine errand, the kind of thing you do without thinking twice — and somewhere between the parking garage and the store entrance, she vanished. Jan Whitney, twenty-three, had been driving home from Eugene in November of 1968 when her car broke down along Interstate 5. She was a student, thoughtful and capable, and she had simply had the bad luck of a mechanical failure on the wrong stretch of road on the wrong night. Gloria Jane Smith was a Portland State University student, also nineteen, who disappeared in April of 1969. Four young women, each of them a fully realized human being with families who searched for them, with friends who waited, with futures that were simply erased.

The Pacific Northwest in those years had a particular quality — vast, green, threaded with rivers and highways and long stretches of coast where a person could disappear and the geography itself seemed to swallow the evidence. Oregon's Long Tom River, a tributary that wound through the Willamette Valley before emptying into the Willamette itself, was cold and deep in the right places. It would become, investigators would eventually learn, a disposal site. But that knowledge came slowly, and in the beginning, the cases were not even clearly connected.

The early investigations were fragmented, handled by different jurisdictions, and the disappearances, spaced as they were over more than a year, did not immediately cohere into a pattern that any single agency could see whole. Linda Slawson's case was treated as a missing persons matter. Jan Whitney's abandoned car on I-5 suggested an accident or a runaway, perhaps. Each case had its own explanations that weren't quite explanations — the kind of open-ended ambiguity that allows denial to persist. Families waited. Police pursued individual leads that went nowhere.

It was the disappearances in the spring of 1969 that began to shift the picture. Karen Sprinker vanished from a public place in Salem in March, and the visibility of the circumstances — a shopping center, a meeting with her mother, broad daylight — made it harder to construct a benign narrative. When Gloria Jane Smith disappeared in April, a pattern that investigators had been reluctant to name began to demand a name. Someone was taking young women in the Salem and greater Willamette Valley area. Someone was doing it repeatedly.

Oregon State Police intensified their efforts and began coordinating across jurisdictions. They established that the cases likely shared a common offender. They worked tips. They interviewed witnesses. They began to compile descriptions of vehicles spotted near the disappearances. And then, in May of 1969, the Long Tom River began to give back what it had been holding.

A group of college students near Corvallis found a body in the river, weighted down. The method of disposal, grim and deliberate, suggested careful planning. Further searches of the river recovered additional remains. The confirmation that these were homicides, the physical evidence of how the victims had been treated, focused the investigation with terrible urgency. The question became: who?

There is a version of investigative work that looks, in retrospect, almost inevitable — where each step leads cleanly to the next, where the evidence accumulates in a logical progression toward an obvious conclusion. The reality is usually messier. The break in the Brudos case came through a combination of painstaking witness interviews and a piece of information that arrived, as crucial information so often does, almost sideways. Investigators working the Sprinker disappearance had been canvassing broadly, and they developed information about a man who had been seen in contact with some of the missing women — a man who had also, in separate contexts, come to the attention of police for concerning behavior involving women.

Jerome Henry Brudos was thirty years old in 1969, a married electrician living in Salem with his wife and children in a house on Center Street. He was, by outward appearance, ordinary in the way that retrospectively seems almost pointed — the neighbors who knew him would use the word "quiet," the word "normal," the word "regular." He had grown up in Oregon and California, had served in the Army, had a working knowledge of electrical systems and machinery. He was the kind of man who fixed things, who was handy. His garage was his private domain.

What investigators would allege, and what the evidence would ultimately show, was that Jerome Brudos had harbored a fetishistic obsession with women's shoes and clothing since childhood — a compulsion that had deepened and darkened over decades into something that consumed him. Court records and subsequent forensic and psychological analysis documented an escalating pattern of behavior that had begun with theft and escalated, as prosecutors argued, toward violence. There had been earlier contacts with law enforcement, including an arrest in 1956 involving a threat against a young woman, that had resulted in a psychiatric evaluation and eventual release. But the earlier episodes had not foreclosed what came after.

When detectives began to focus on Brudos, they moved carefully. They had witness information placing him in proximity to some of the victims. They had physical evidence from the river recoveries. And then there was the garage — the garage that his wife was reportedly not allowed to enter, that was kept locked, that was his alone. A search warrant was obtained, and what investigators found inside that garage became the evidentiary foundation of the prosecution's case.

Photographs. Jerome Brudos had photographed his victims, both before and after their deaths. He had kept images — carefully taken, deliberately preserved — that documented what he had done and what had been done to them. Court records from the subsequent proceedings confirm that photographic evidence was central to the prosecution's case, both in establishing what had occurred and in placing Brudos himself at the scene of the crimes. Investigators also recovered other physical evidence from the garage consistent with the victims and with the manner of their deaths, including ropes and a hook mounted in the ceiling. Forensic analysis connected the evidence in the garage to the remains recovered from the Long Tom River.

There was also, in the evidence, a quality that prosecutors and investigators found particularly chilling and that would be referenced throughout the legal proceedings: the organization of it. The deliberateness. This was not evidence of chaos or impulse alone. It was evidence of someone who planned, who returned to what he had done, who curated the record of his crimes for his own purposes. That quality of calculated intent would matter enormously in the proceedings that followed.

Jerome Brudos was arrested in May of 1969. He was charged with multiple counts of first-degree murder — specifically with the murders of Jan Whitney, Karen Sprinker, and Linda Slawson. The case of Gloria Jane Smith was also investigated in connection with Brudos, and though some evidence connected him to her disappearance as well, the formal charges proceeded on three counts.

The legal proceedings that followed moved with relatively unusual directness, given the weight of the evidence against him. Brudos, represented by counsel, ultimately pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. He did not contest the charges at a full jury trial in the way that some capital cases of that era unfolded. Under Oregon law at the time, a guilty plea to first-degree murder carried a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. He was sentenced accordingly — three concurrent life sentences — in June of 1969.

The guilty pleas, while sparing certain procedural elements of a full adversarial trial, did not prevent the evidence from entering the public record. The photographic evidence, the forensic findings, the witness accounts that had built the case — all of it became part of the documented record of State of Oregon v. Jerome Henry Brudos. That documentation would be examined and re-examined in subsequent years, both by true-crime researchers and by legal scholars interested in the emerging understanding of sexually motivated serial homicide. Brudos became, in the decades that followed, one of the early case studies in the FBI's behavioral science work on that category of offender — his case analyzed alongside others as investigators and researchers worked to build frameworks for understanding how such crimes were committed and by whom.

There were no successful appeals of the convictions. The guilty pleas, entered with counsel and on the record, held. Brudos remained at the Oregon State Penitentiary. He became, over the years, a subject of continuing research interest, and investigators and academics conducted interviews with him at various points, though the veracity and completeness of his own accounts of his crimes were always treated with appropriate skepticism. He told different versions of different things at different times, in the way that people who commit acts of terrible gravity sometimes do — parsing and parceling information, controlling even from confinement what they do and don't reveal.

He lived for nearly four decades after his conviction. Jerome Henry Brudos died in the Oregon State Penitentiary on March 28, 2006, of liver cancer. He was sixty-seven years old. He had served thirty-seven years of his life sentences.

The question of what happened to Linda Slawson's complete remains was never definitively resolved through the legal proceedings. The Long Tom River and its surroundings were searched repeatedly over the years, and some evidence was recovered, but the full accounting that families needed was not always possible to provide. That gap — between the legal resolution and the complete human resolution — is one of the persistent, painful realities of cases like this one.

And it is worth pausing here, at the end, to sit with that for a moment. Because the temptation in cases like this one — the gravitational pull of the story — is always toward the person who committed the crimes. The pathology, the psychology, the darkness. The garage and what was in it. The photographs. The mechanics of how something like this happens, and why, and how a man can live in an ordinary house on an ordinary street and be, inside the walls of his private life, something so incomprehensible.

But the story that matters is not really his.

It is Linda Slawson at nineteen, with her encyclopedias and her practical courage, knocking on doors because she was building something. It is Jan Whitney on the interstate, late at night, the way anyone's car can fail anyone on any night, the way you trust that someone stopping to help means to help. It is Karen Sprinker going to meet her mother at a department store — the absolute ordinariness of that errand, the way it was the kind of thing she had done and would have kept on doing for decades, the way it was simply Tuesday. It is Gloria Jane Smith, a college student at nineteen, who presumably had plans for the week after the week she disappeared.

Four women whose names are in the court records not because of anything they did, but because of where they happened to be when a man who had long ago decided that other people's lives were less real than his own desires happened to intersect with them.

The families of these women carried the weight of not knowing for a period before answers arrived, and then carried the different, heavier weight of knowing. That is a burden that does not lift when a case is closed, when sentences are handed down, when a man dies in a prison hospital bed. The legal process does what it can — it establishes facts, assigns accountability, removes danger from the community. What it cannot do is undo the January evening when Linda Slawson knocked on the wrong door, or restore the Tuesday afternoon when Karen Sprinker walked through a parking garage.

What we can do, and what perhaps is the least inadequate response available to us, is to keep their names in front of us rather than his. To say them clearly. Linda Slawson. Jan Whitney. Karen Sprinker. Gloria Jane Smith.

Not the drifter at Depot Bay. Not the headline, not the case number, not the exhibit in a behavioral science lecture. Four people who had lives that were worth living, who were taken from them before they had lived nearly enough of those lives, and who deserved — who deserve — to be remembered as more than the circumstances of how they died.

That, in the end, is the story. The rest is just the documentation of a wrong.

The Killer Next Door

There is a photograph that has become, in the years since, one of the most unsettling images in the history of American crime. In it, a heavyset man in a clown costume grins broadly at the camera, his face painted white, his eyes ringed in the exaggerated curves of theatrical joy. He performed at children's parties and neighborhood events. He shook hands with dignitaries. His neighbors described him as friendly, as generous, as a little loud, maybe, but the kind of man who showed up. The kind of man you were glad to have next door.

His name was John Wayne Gacy. And beneath the floor of his house, in the crawl space that ran under the entire foundation of his home at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park Township, just outside Chicago, the bodies of young men were waiting to be found.

It began with a boy named Robert Piest.

He was fifteen years old, a sophomore at Maine West High School in Des Plaines, Illinois. By all accounts from those who knew him, Robert was the kind of kid who made a room feel lighter. He was an athlete — gymnastics was his sport — and he was, according to his family, serious about it in the way only teenagers who have found their thing can be. He worked a part-time job at a pharmacy called Nisson Drugs, and on the evening of December 11, 1978, he told his mother something that any parent would understand. He said he needed to step outside for just a few minutes. There was a contractor who had done some remodeling work at the pharmacy, and that contractor had mentioned he was hiring. Robert wanted to talk to the man about a summer job. He said he'd be right back.

Elizabeth Piest waited. The minutes stretched into an hour, and the hour into something worse. Robert did not come back. He would never come back.

When Des Plaines police began asking questions at Nisson Drugs about who might have spoken with Robert that evening, the name that emerged was John Wayne Gacy. Gacy, then thirty-six years old, was by all external appearances a man of some standing in his community. He ran a successful contracting business, PDM Contractors, and was known in Norwood Park as a civic-minded neighbor who organized the local Democratic Party precinct and threw elaborate garden parties for his neighbors. He had, some years before, earned the name "Pogo the Clown" for his charity performances. He was, by every measure of suburban respectability, a success story.

He was also, Cook County investigators would come to learn, one of the most prolific killers in the recorded history of the United States.

Police brought Gacy in for questioning on the night of December 12th. He was cooperative in the way people are when they believe they can manage a situation, and he denied any meaningful contact with Robert Piest. But something about the encounter nagged at the investigators, and a background check turned up a detail that changed everything: in 1968, in Waterloo, Iowa, Gacy had been convicted of sodomy against a teenage boy and sentenced to ten years in prison. He had served less than two before being paroled and eventually returning to Illinois. The parole had expired. There was no legal flag on him. But there was history.

Detectives began surveillance on Gacy's home and obtained a search warrant. What they found during the initial searches was strange and deeply troubling — items that had no obvious explanation in the home of a bachelor contractor: a high school ring with the initials J.A.S. engraved inside, a receipt from Nisson Drugs, handcuffs, a length of rope, prescription medications that did not belong to Gacy, a single black shoe belonging to a young man, and — this would prove critical — a faint, pervasive odor that no one in the search party could quite identify, but that at least one investigator would later describe as something that lived in the back of the throat.

Gacy, meanwhile, was moving. Surveillance officers watched him drive for hours through the pre-dawn darkness, stopping at different locations, behaving in ways that were, detectives noted in their reports, consistent with a man trying to get ahead of something. He spoke with his attorney. He seemed, to the officers watching him, simultaneously agitated and almost theatrically calm.

On December 20th, 1978, Gacy invited the detectives who had been surveilling him to breakfast. It was a strange gesture, the kind of thing that still defies easy interpretation. But over the course of that morning, according to court records and the subsequent testimony of officers present, Gacy began to talk. He told them, among other things, that he had killed someone. That there had been an altercation in his home, and that he had acted in self-defense, and that he had buried the body beneath his house. He asked for his attorney. He was taken into custody.

What investigators found when they entered the crawl space at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue is not something that requires elaborate description to convey its weight. Twenty-six sets of human remains were recovered from the crawl space and the yard. Seven more victims had been disposed of in the Des Plaines River and other waterways — thrown from bridges, according to Gacy's own later statements, when the crawl space had, in his words, run out of room. The work of recovery took weeks, conducted in the dead of a Chicago winter, by investigators who were, by their own later accounts, permanently changed by what they found there.

The identification of the victims was painstaking and, for many families, agonizing. Some of the young men had been reported missing years earlier. Some had never been reported missing at all, because there was no one to report them — they were young men on the margins, runaways, drifters, gay teenagers in an era when such young people could vanish without anyone in authority feeling compelled to look very hard. Their names were Robert Piest, John Butkovich, Gregory Godzik, John Szyc, Michael Bonnin, William Carroll, Rick Johnston, Kenneth Parker, Michael Marino, David Talsma, William Bundy, Timothy O'Rourke, Frank Landingin, James Mazzara, Robert Gilroy, John Mowery, Russell Nelson, Robert Winch, Tommy Boling, David Carrol, William George Kindred, Timothy Jack McCoy, Randall Reffett, Sam Stapleton, Michael Rossi, Rick Dowd, Jon Prestidge, Matthew Bowman, Robert Gilroy, Kim Byers, Frank Wayne Landingin — young men between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, most of them, gathered from the streets and job sites and social margins of Chicagoland over the course of six years.

Prosecutors argued that Gacy had lured or recruited his victims with offers of work or money, that he had typically used alcohol and the promise of a demonstration involving handcuffs as part of his method of control, and that he had murdered each of them by strangulation or asphyxiation. The details that emerged during the investigation, drawn from Gacy's own recorded statements and from physical evidence recovered at the scene, painted a picture of methodical, systematic violence that prosecutors would describe in court as among the most deliberate series of killings ever documented in an American courtroom.

Gacy was charged with thirty-three counts of murder.

His trial began in February of 1980 in Cook County, presided over by Judge Louis Garippo. From the outset, Gacy's defense team — led by attorneys Sam Amirante and Robert Motta — mounted what the legal record shows was an insanity defense, arguing that their client suffered from multiple personality disorder and was not legally responsible for the crimes that had been committed. The defense called psychiatric experts who testified to Gacy's mental disturbances. The prosecution, led by State's Attorney William Kunkle, responded with its own experts, who testified that Gacy had been fully aware of the nature of his actions and had taken deliberate steps to conceal them over many years — a fact that, prosecutors argued, demonstrated clear legal sanity.

The prosecution's case was, by any measure, overwhelming. There was the physical evidence: the remains, the personal belongings of identified victims found in Gacy's home, the lime used in the crawl space, the tools. There was witness testimony from young men who had encountered Gacy and escaped — men who described, in harrowing terms, encounters that bore unmistakable similarities to what prosecutors alleged the victims had experienced. There was the testimony of investigators who had watched Gacy's behavior in the days between December 12th and his arrest. And there was Gacy's own recorded admissions — the statements made to officers on the morning of December 20th, the conversations that followed.

The jury deliberated for less than two hours.

On March 13, 1980, John Wayne Gacy was found guilty on all thirty-three counts of murder. During the penalty phase, the same jury sentenced him to death on twelve of those counts. He was transported to Menard Correctional Center to await execution.

What followed was fourteen years of appeals — a process that wound through the Illinois state courts and touched the federal system as well. Gacy's attorneys pursued every available avenue: challenges to the jury selection process, to the admissibility of certain evidence, to the constitutionality of his sentence. The Illinois Supreme Court reviewed the conviction and the sentence and upheld both. Federal courts considered and declined his habeas corpus petitions. In 1994, the United States Supreme Court declined to intervene.

On May 10, 1994, John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois. His last meal, by documented accounts, included a bucket of fried chicken. His last words, according to the witnesses present, were reported as an expression of contempt directed at the state of Illinois. He was fifty-two years old.

The legal case was, in every formal sense, concluded. The conviction stands. The sentence was carried out. And yet for the families of those thirty-three young men, and for the investigators who spent weeks in that crawl space, and for the neighbors of Norwood Park who had shared block parties and handshakes and borrowed sugar from the man at the end of the street — closure is a word that belongs to other stories.

Eight of Gacy's victims were never positively identified using the forensic tools available in 1979 and 1980. In the decades since, advances in DNA technology have given investigators and families renewed reason to hope. The Cook County Sheriff's Office has maintained an active effort to identify the remaining unknown victims, and as recently as 2021, investigators announced that two more of the unidentified men had been given their names back — James Haakenson, nineteen years old, from St. Paul, Minnesota, and another young man whose family had been looking for him for more than forty years. That work continues. As of this writing, approximately six of the victims from that crawl space remain formally unidentified, their families — if families they have — still unknowing.

There is something worth sitting with in all of this, something beyond the horror of the crime itself. The young men who were most vulnerable to John Wayne Gacy — the runaways, the drifters, the teenagers who had slipped through the cracks of whatever systems were supposed to catch them — were also the least likely to be searched for, the least likely to appear on anyone's list of missing persons, the least likely to have someone standing at a pharmacy counter on a December night, waiting for them to come back. Their invisibility, in life, became a form of posthumous injustice, one that the ongoing identification efforts are, piece by piece, trying to remedy.

Robert Piest, whose disappearance set everything in motion, was among the first victims identified. His family had not stopped looking for him. It was their insistence — Elizabeth Piest calling the Des Plaines police, pressing them to pursue the name of the contractor at Nisson Drugs — that began the chain of inquiry that led investigators to that house on West Summerdale Avenue. In a case full of terrible ironies, that may be the most pointed one: the boy whose mother refused to accept silence was the one whose disappearance finally forced the truth into the light for all the others.

The house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue was demolished in April of 1979, before the trial. A new house was built on the lot. The address was changed, a small bureaucratic gesture toward the idea that a place could be made new. The people who came to live there knew what the ground had held. The neighborhood knew. These things do not unknow themselves.

What remains, beyond the legal record and the documentary evidence and the decades of journalism and analysis, is this: thirty-three young men lived. They had names, and families, and in some cases no families at all, and favorite foods, and inside jokes, and futures they had no reason to believe they would not reach. Robert Piest wanted to talk about a summer job. He was fifteen. He had a gymnastics meet coming up.

That is the fact that survives every appeal, every analysis, every attempt to understand how a man becomes what John Wayne Gacy became. The victims were people first — fully formed, briefly here, taken before they could become whoever they were going to be. The case is closed. The sentence was carried out. The work of giving names to the nameless continues.

And somewhere in a box of old papers or a drawer that hasn't been opened in years, there may be a family who doesn't yet know that one of those names belongs to them.