John Wayne Gacy is one of the most infamous serial killers in American history. During a seven year span of the 1970s, Gacy murdered 33 men. As is the case with many high profile murderers, to the average person, one would have to be insane to commit such acts, which is what Gacy’s defense claimed. The jury did not buy it though, and Gacy would be executed by lethal injection in 1994.
John Wayne Gacy was born on March 17, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. He married in 1964, and moved to Iowa. In Iowa, he was asked by his new father-in-law to take over the family’s chicken restaurant franchise. Everything seemed to be going well for Gacy, until he was arrested in 1968. Gacy was accused of coercing a boy who worked for him into homosexual acts. Gacy pled guilty, and was sentenced to the maximum time of 10 years at Iowa’s State Men’s Reformatory. Following the sentencing, his wife of only a few years, with whom he had two children, divorced him. It is said that Gacy was a model prisoner, and he made parole in 1971, after just 18 months. He moved back to Chicago, and remarried, but his issues were only just becoming apparent.
John Wayne Gacy was charged with attempted rape shortly afterward, but the charges would be dropped since the young victims never appeared in court. His second wife divorced him in 1978, saying he had unpredictable moods and an obsession with homosexual magazines. Gacy’ world began to crumble on December 12, 1978, when 15 year-old Robert Piest went missing. Piest at worked at a local pharmacy, and disappeared after his shift when he said he was going to talk to Gacy about a job with Gacy’s contracting business. Police obtained a search warrant for his house. During that search, police found class rings from other boys who had been reported missing in the previous years and other incriminating evidence. They also noted a strange smell throughout the house, but dismissed it thin king it was from broken sewage pipes under the house. Following the initial search though, they obtained a second search warrant, which would lead to much worse discoveries.
On December 22, 1978, Gacy confessed to the murders of 33 men and young boys over the past seven years. He also drew a map of 28 graves in the crawl space underneath his home and underneath his garage, and said there were five bodies in the Des Plaines River. Investigators uncovered the bodies on his properties, and also four of the bodies from the river. Then the last body was found, Robert Piest, the boy who had started the whole investigation. Gacy told investigators that there were four different Johns: John the Contractor, John the Clown, John the Politician, and Jack Hanley, who was the murderer and evil one.
The trial began on February 6, 1980, lasting for five weeks. The defense was claiming insanity, saying Gacy had schizophrenia, and called over 100 witnesses. The jury took only two hours to deliberate though, coming back with a guilty verdict. Gacy was sentenced to death on March 13, and sent to the Menard Correctional Center in Illinois. Fourteen years later, and after many appeals, he was executed by lethal injection at the Statesville Penitentiary on May 10, 1994. It is reported that his last words were “Kiss my ass”.
It is the job of criminologists to study why people commit crimes, and, to me, determining why serial killers do what they do would be very intriguing. Murder is completely against what most people would ever do, and against natural human instincts, yet these people murder multiple, sometimes even dozens of people. Though she is not a criminologist, Dr. Helen Morrison became interested in studying the brains of serial killers to see if here was an abnormalities. Gacy’s brain was the first one she was able to actually hold in her own hands and examine. Helen, a forensic psychiatrist, had interviewed Gacy multiple times, along with interviewing or studying more than 80 other serial killers. After the autopsy, it was found that Gacy’s brain was normal. Dr. Morrison has been able to find typical personality characteristics of serial killers, but is unable to say exactly what makes a serial killer a serial killer. (Cohen, 2004)
Criminologists will still try to find theories that explain criminal behavior, even if they are, at least so far, unable to find one theory that fits for every crime and criminal, and there are certainly criminological theories that could fit for John Wayne Gacy. According to Lohr’s article “Boy Killer: John Wayne Gacy”, Gacy’s father was an abusive alcoholic prone to physical and verbal abuse of his children (Lohr, 2009). A theory that could be a result from this type of childhood is the Self Fulfilling Prophecy Theory. This theory says that what a person is told, regardless of whether it is true or not, will shape them. So, if someone is labeled and treated like a criminal, they may become one, even if they were not previously disposed to criminal behavior. This could be the case for Gacy. If his father did abuse him, effects of that abuse may have had an impact on the choices that he would make later on in his life. When people are repeatedly told things about themselves, they tend to start believing them, although most of the time they are not true. Either way, though, there is no excuse for committing such horrible acts against your fellow human being.
A theory that came fit the majority of crimes is the Rational Choice Theory. This theory says that the criminal makes the decisions to commit the acts, it blames only the criminal. As human beings, we have the decision to act, or not to act. Of course, for some with mental disabilities, this is not the case, but for the majority it is, and it was determined that Gacy did not have a mental disability.