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John Wayne Gacy Jr., born in Chicago in 1942, was beaten and called a "sissy" by his alcoholic father; and suffered a childhood head injury that caused him to have periodic blackouts for years. He was a restaurant manager in Iowa in 1968, when his arrest for sodomizing a young male employee and paying to have a witness beaten for testifying against him led to the breakup of his first marriage. Remarried, he settled in a Chicago suburb and kept his homosexuality secret, narrowly avoiding a 1971 sodomy rape charge when the victim failed to show in court. Gacy was a community activist, a successful independent contractor, a leader in the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and Jaycee-elected 'Man of the Year." He entertained hospitalized children as Pogo the Clown. Gacy began to torture and kill in 1972. His victims, all male, ranged in age from nine to 27. Many were lured by promises of construction jobs, offered liquor and, once drunk, were tied to a chair and chloroformed. Each was violated, and those Gacy killed were usually buried in the crawlspace beneath his home. In 1978 Gacy's wife left him, in 1977 one victim survived and reported Gacy to police, but they were slow to act and only charged him with a misdemeanor. In late 1978, the mother of a missing man told police her son had phoned to tell her he'd been offered a job by Gacy. investigators found 28 bodies in the crawlspace and five more corpses in a local river. Survivors then came forth to identify Gacy. In 1988, Gacy was sentenced to 21 life imprisonments and 12 death sentences. Alternately denying his guilt and attributing his crimes to childhood atrocities, he painted clown portraits in jail, but was put to death in May 1994.

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