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.