John Wayne Gacy Research Paper

John Wayne Gacy was one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Born and raised in Chicago, Gacy would go on to kill thirty-three boys within the Des Plaines area of Chicago, Illinois. He would rape, torture, then finally suffocate every single one of his thirty-three victims within the very walls of his own home. Having killed that many people, he became the serial killer with the most amount of confirmed kills in the United States at the time. He would be caught in early 1978 and sentenced to twenty-one life sentences, twelve death sentences, and to be executed by lethal injection, which would not happen until over a decade later in the middle of 1994. Within his six-year killing period, Gacy became one of the most infamous and feared

Gacy did not tell his father for fear that he would beat Gacy. This is likely the reason why he would go on to rape numerous boys during the 70s. Unhealthy and overweight, Gacy was not very active as a teenager (BE2). He believed that he had a malfunctioning heart. Because of this and other things, Gacy believed that his father thought of him as a disappointment. At the age of twenty, Gacy made the decision to run away from home, in hopes of going to Las Vegas. He found a job there at a funeral home. This would be the beginning of his obsession with dead bodies. After being gone for several months, Gacy went back to his home in Chicago where he attended the local business college and started working as a shoe salesman (Wilkinson).

Upon the discovery of his fine talent for being a salesman, he was later transferred to Springfield, Illinois to manage a store where he lived with his aunt and uncle. Not too long after being a manager at the shoe store, he moved to Waterloo, Iowa where he met the first of his two wives, Marlynn Myers. Her father was a successful businessman who owned several Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. Not long after their marriage, Gacy was appointed to be the manager of one of the KFC restaurants while also working for a painting job

Knowing they had little chance of winning the case, Gacy’s lawyers made an insanity plea. This was hastily overturned because the jury found it highly unlikely that someone could be insane on thirty-three different occasions. A little more than a month later, on March 12, 1980, John Wayne Gacy was convicted of killing thirty-three boys in the Chicago area, of which only twenty-four were identified at the moment Gacy was on trial (Wilkinson).

Gacy received a sentence of twenty-one life sentences, twelve death sentences, and execution via lethal injection. Gacy would go on to spend the next fourteen years of his life in the Menard Correctional Center in Illinois. While in prison, he made numerous phone calls and interviews with different media sources while attempting to backtrack on what he admitted previously in court in an effort to try to claim his innocence. He ultimately failed and was executed in the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois on May 10, 1994