Krissy Delahanty Crime Takes a Bite Professor Cheryl Paradis 12/6/14 The Clown Killer Between the years 1972 and 1978, thirty-three murders were committed with the victims mostly consisting of young teenage boys. On December 22nd, 1978, The Police arrested John Wayne Gacy and he later confessed to committing the murders. John Wayne Gacy was born on March 17th, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. Gacy had a fairly normal childhood except for a tense relationship with his father. His father was described as “unpleasant, abusive alcoholic prone to physically and verbally assaulting his children” (John Wayne Gacy, www.clarkprosector.org). Gacy was describes as “deeply loving his father and wanting desperately to gain his approval and attention, but failing …show more content…
Gacy pled guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was put on parol after 18 months and was arrested again for attempted rape of a young man in February 1971. On December 12th, 1978, the police were, once again, focusing on John Wayne Gacy. A young teenage boy, Robert Piest, who worked at a Des Plaines pharmacy was missing and he was last seen with John Wayne Gacy. The police did a background check and discovered Gacy’s criminal background which immediately placed him as the number one suspect. Gacy was able to lure teens into his home with the promise of a job, or because he ofter befriends teens by dressing up as Pogo the Clown. Detectives investigated his home and discovered a fowl smell, which they believed to be a sewage line, in his home’s crawl space. How they discovered that he most likely did it was that during the initial search, the police collected a ring that belonged to a different teenager who went missing a year before hand. 10 days after the initial search, the investigators returned to his house where he confessed to killing 33 teenage boys and buried 28 of them under his house and 5 others were thrown in the Des Plaines …show more content…
He was the 2nd murderer executed in Illinois since 1976 and his trial sparked the Missing Child Recovery Act of 1984. In 1984, Judge Sam Amirante, one of Gacy's two defense attorneys, felt that “there needed to be a change because at the time of the Gacy murders, there had been a 72-hours which police in Illinois had to allow to elapse before initiating a search for a missing child”(Amirante 395). The new Act removed the “72-hour wait and therefore, any missing child report received in Illinois immediately triggered a statewide police search”(Amirante 395). This in turn sparked the nation to create a similar system, now known as an Amber Alert. (Amirante 395). In addition, John Wayne Gacy received a psychological assessment and it was determined that he has Antisocial personalty disorder. The Mayo Clinic defines Antisocial Personalty Disorder as, “a type of chronic mental condition in which a person's ways of thinking, perceiving situations and relating to others are dysfunctional — and destructive. People with antisocial personality disorder typically have no regard for right and wrong and often disregard the rights, wishes and feelings of others” (Mayo Clinic). This discover helped lead the Court System to not allow Gacy’s defense to be not guilty for reasons of insanity because they new that no amount of hospital care was going to help and so he needed to be tried as such. John Wayne