Serial killers are a prominent part of everyday life in the United States for most people, as a result of having so many prominent ones in the country’s history. However, one man has kept his title as one of the most horrific killers in American history, decades after his crimes: John Wayne Gacy.
Gacy’s childhood was no more extraordinary than any other at the time. As Sid Smith from the Chicago Tribune summed up, “Gacy was born into a blue-collar family and seems to have had a fairly ordinary childhood.” (1) He was born in 1942, and grew up in the northern side of Chicago. His parents, Marion Gacy and John Wayne Gacy, Sr, were married, and he had one older sister, Joanne, and one younger sister, Karen. All three siblings attended a Catholic school, where the young Gacy was well-liked by his peers. When he was eleven, a swing hit him in the head, resulting in a blood clot that wasn’t
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His staff consisted of young male teenagers. When asked by friends why he only hired young men, he explained it was to ‘keep the costs low’. But his true reason was much more sinister. In 1975, he made advances on a sixteen-year-old named Tony Antonucci. After Antonucci managed to get Gacy’s promise he would never try something again, Gacy left him alone. Another teenager, Johnny Butkovich, wasn’t as lucky. After confronting Gacy about withholding pay with a couple of friends, “… Johnny dropped off his friends at their house and drove away, never to be seen alive again.” (2). Several more young boys would vanish without a trace before one victim's mother informed the police of the name of the contractor that had offered her fifteen-year-old son a job- John Wayne Gacy, Jr. When they obtained a search warrant to investigate Gacy’s house, they made a gruesome discovery; “... police discovered the bodies of 29 boys and young men in a crawl space beneath Gacy’s house.”