WHO WAS JOHN WAYNE GACY?
The model citizen whose business skills were admired by his peers?
The hospital volunteer whose sweet-faced clowning lightened the patients' days?
The member of the Jaycees who was a civic-minded friend of the community?
The depraved maniac who sodomized, tortured, and killed thirty-three young men and boys?
Shortly before Christmas of 1978, a teenage boy disappeared from the drugstore where he worked. He would be the final victim of John Wayne Gacy's horrifying compulsion.
Then, ten days after the boy's disappearance, detectives, finding a human bone in the crawl space of Gacy's house, dug into the lime-covered ground. With mounting horror, they pulled bone after bone from Gacy's suburban home until finally they had gathered the remains of twenty-eight more youths who had fallen prey to the killer clown.
I had read this book many years ago. I was a pre-teen when this all went down. I remember the newscasts from the scene and my mother sending me out of the room quickly whenever Gacy's name was mentioned or photo shown.
Recently, I had occasion to watch GACY: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0330181/ and the distorted facts of the case the movie presented made me want to find the book and read how it really went down.
The author, Terry Sullivan, was the district attorney and involved in the case almost from the get-go when Rob Piest was reported missing in December 1978. He presents what seems like a very accurate account of the surveillance and what led to Gacy's arrest as well as what led Gacy to the murderous path he chose.
The very idea that this man could have gotten away with an insanity defense and been out on the street again one day makes me shudder. Mr. Sullivan and the rest of the prosecution team proved their case as the last of the book shows.
Gacy was executed May 10, 1994, eight of his thirty-three victims were never named. And whether thirty-three was the total number in his murder spree is not known for sure.
©Susan Falk and phantomroses.com
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