10 Horrific Details Surrounding John Wayne Gacy, The “Killer Clown”

6 /10 Greyhound Bus Boy

The first credible murder Gacy committed happened in January of 1972. McCoy was a regular 16-year-old boy traveling through Chicago to Nebraska.

Gacy offered to take him sightseeing and gave him a place to rest until he could catch a bus ride. According to Gacy, he awoke to see McCoy standing in the hallway with a knife.

After a confrontation and fight, Gacy wrestled the knife away and killed McCoy, who had just finished setting a breakfast table for them to share, and forgot to put the knife away before waking his host.

5 /10 The Show Must Go On

Gacy buried McCoy in the crawl space under the house and covered it up with concrete. He described the sensation he got from watching him die as a sexual thrill that he never felt before and sought to repeat.

He killed again in 1974 and refined his techniques after the incident to keep his activities hidden. In 1975, he killed one of his employees, John Butkovich, over a pay discrepancy for his work.

4 /10 The Traveling Circus Of Death

Gacy took his unhealthy habits on the road in what he referred to as “cruising.” Between 1976 and ’78, he committed the bulk of his murders, abducting and luring strangers from nearby cities and states.

He would also sexually abuse them as a preamble to the deaths. All this happened after his second divorce.

His business continued to lure in unsuspecting boys looking for work who wound up dead under Gacy’s home one way or another.

3 /10 Grand Finale

The last victim, whose disappearance eventually led to Gacy’s arrest, was Robert Piest. The 15-year-old overheard Gacy talking, deliberately, about how he paid more than his job at the pharmacy, which lured the boy to Gacy’s clutches.

Just an hour later, at 10:00 pm, Robert was killed in Gacy’s home after promising his mother he would return right after.

The Piest family kicked off the investigations, and the father of one of Robert’s friends, a police Lieutenant, pushed the case through.

2 /10 Down The River

The police approached Gacy with search warrants, which led to extended surveillance missions that put tremendous strain on Gacy’s behaviors.

Eventually, they found evidence showing back to Robert Piest, whom Gacy swore he had no connection to.

They also collected testimony from Michael Rossi, an employee of Gacy’s who helped him with clown performances as a sidekick character, who admitted to spreading lime in the crawlspace for his employer as a favor.

His testimony revealed Gacy’s instructions for digging the trenches in the crawlspace.

Despite not knowing what he did, Rossi had both helped and sold out his employer just as Gacy gave up on the space beneath his floors and began dumping bodies in the Des Plaines River instead.

Four more bodies were discovered following Gacy’s arrest and confirmed as his doing.

1 /10 That's All, Folks

John Wayne Gacy was brought to trial in February of 1980 and charged with 33 murders. The most murders a single man had been charged within history, considering the short period.

He was denied alternative punishment on insanity grounds and sentenced to death. However, through appeals and other procedures, his death was delayed by 14 years.

He led a double life as a business-owning clown-for-hire and one of America’s most prolific and sadistic serial killers.