The John Wayne Gacy case is the story of a Chicago-area contractor who murdered at least 33 boys and young men between 1972 and 1978, was arrested in December 1978 after police traced a missing teenager to his door, was convicted on all 33 counts of murder in 1980, and was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994. Investigators pulled 29 bodies from beneath his house. He confessed to dumping four more in the Des Plaines River. Fourteen years of appeals changed nothing about the verdict or the sentence.
Who Gacy Was Before the Murders
Gacy had a sex-crime conviction on his record long before Illinois police ever looked at him. In 1968, living in Waterloo, Iowa, he pleaded guilty to sodomy involving a teenage boy and drew a 10-year prison sentence. He was paroled after roughly 18 months.
He moved to the Chicago suburbs, started a remodeling business called PDM Contractors, got involved in local Democratic politics, and performed at children’s events as “Pogo the Clown.” That public life gave him cover. The construction business also gave him something more practical: a steady supply of young men looking for work who wouldn’t be missed right away if they disappeared.
How He Was Caught
The case broke on December 11, 1978, when 15-year-old Robert Piest vanished from the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois, where he worked. Piest had told his mother he was going out to talk to a contractor about a $5-an-hour job. That contractor was Gacy, whose company had recently remodeled the pharmacy.
Des Plaines police focused on Gacy almost immediately. A background check turned up the 1968 Iowa conviction, and officers obtained a search warrant for his home on December 13. That first search turned up a class ring belonging to another missing teenager and a photo receipt from the pharmacy where Piest worked. Gacy’s explanations kept shifting.
A second warrant followed. On December 21, 1978, investigators entered the crawl space beneath the house, immediately noticed the smell of decomposition, and within minutes of digging found human remains. Gacy was arrested that day.
The Victims
Excavation of the property went on for weeks. Investigators recovered 29 sets of remains, most from the crawl space. Gacy admitted disposing of four other victims in the Des Plaines River, including Piest, for a confirmed total of 33.
The victims were boys and young men, many of them teenagers. Several had been drawn in by the promise of construction work with PDM. John Butkovich was a Gacy employee who went to the house in 1975 to collect unpaid wages and never came back. Jon Prestidge reportedly took work with a Chicago contractor before he disappeared.
The Trial and Verdict
A Cook County grand jury indicted Gacy on 33 counts of murder, one count of deviate sexual assault, one count of indecent liberties with a child, and one count of aggravated kidnapping. The kidnapping charge was dropped during trial.1Justia Case Law. People v. Gacy
Guilt was not really in dispute. Gacy had confessed and there were 29 bodies under his house. The trial turned on whether he was legally insane when he killed.
Prosecutors argued the killings showed planning: luring victims under false pretenses, killing them, and burying them in organized fashion. They also called men who had survived encounters with Gacy. Jeffrey Rignall described being chloroformed, restrained, and sexually assaulted. Robert Donnelly testified that Gacy handcuffed him, tortured him, repeatedly held his head underwater, and staged a mock execution with a gun loaded with a blank. Michel Ried testified that Gacy struck him with a hammer in an unlit garage and said he felt like killing him.1Justia Case Law. People v. Gacy
The defense argued Gacy had a severe personality disorder and could not control his behavior during the killings. Defense psychiatrists described him as projecting self-hatred onto his victims. Prosecution psychiatrists said he knew exactly what he was doing and took calculated steps to avoid getting caught.
On March 12, 1980, the jury convicted Gacy on all 33 murder counts and on the deviate sexual assault and indecent liberties charges. At sentencing, jurors imposed death for the 12 murders committed after Illinois reenacted its death penalty in 1977. For the other 21, Gacy received natural life.1Justia Case Law. People v. Gacy Illinois abolished capital punishment in 2011.
Appeals
Gacy spent 14 years on death row. His attorneys challenged the search warrants, the effectiveness of trial counsel, and the jury instructions. In 1984, the Illinois Supreme Court held that the warrants were supported by probable cause: a 15-year-old had told his mother he was going to see Gacy, left work, and never returned, and Gacy had a prior sodomy conviction. The court also rejected a challenge based on an officer’s 40-hour delay in reporting the smell of decomposition inside Gacy’s home, calling that a credibility question rather than a basis to suppress the evidence.1Justia Case Law. People v. Gacy No later court disturbed the conviction or the sentence.
Execution
Gacy was executed by lethal injection at the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, on May 10, 1994, at age 52. He requested fried shrimp, a bucket of KFC chicken, french fries, and a pound of strawberries for his last meal. Asked for final words, he reportedly said, “Kiss my ass.”
The Victims Who Still Have No Names
Not every victim was identified at the time. In 2011, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office reopened the identification work using modern DNA technology. In 2021, the victim known as “Victim Five” was identified as Francis Wayne Alexander through investigative genetic genealogy conducted with the DNA Doe Project. As of the Sheriff’s Office’s most recent update, five of Gacy’s victims remain unidentified. DNA profiles suitable for comparison have been developed for all five, and the office continues looking for living relatives who could help close those cases.2Cook County Sheriff’s Office. Unidentified Victims John Wayne Gacy