Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (36 page)

John Gacy was born in Chicago in 1942. His mother was Danish and his father was Polish. The father was a heavy drinker and beat Gacy mercilessly. Gacy also claims that at age five he was molested by a teenage girl and by a male construction contractor at age eight. When Gacy was eleven he was struck in the head by a swing, causing a blot clot in his brain that needed treatment. As a juvenile Gacy committed numerous petty thefts and apparently engaged in homosexual sex.

Gacy was relatively intelligent and graduated from business college. He began working as a shoe salesman and in 1964 married his first wife, whose father owned several Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant franchises. Gacy became a manager in one of his father-in-law’s restaurants. Gacy had two children, a son and a daughter, and became well known in the community in Iowa. The marriage ended in 1968 when at age twenty-six, Gacy was suddenly arrested for handcuffing one of his juvenile employees and sodomizing him. Gacy received a sentence of ten years but was such a model prisoner that he was released after eighteen months. In the meantime, his wife divorced him.

Upon his release in 1970, Gacy left Iowa and returned to Chicago, where he went into the contracting business. He was charged that year in another sexual assault on a youth, but the charges were dropped. After his 1978 arrest, Gacy confessed that he had committed his first murder in 1972, when he brought a man to his house from the bus station for sex. Gacy said that they argued and the man attacked him with a knife. Gacy claimed that he killed him in self-defense and buried him in a crawl space under the house.

Later that year, Gacy married for a second time. His wife, her three children, and her mother all moved in with Gacy. When his wife was not home, Gacy lured youths to his house, raped them, murdered them, and buried their bodies under the house. His wife and mother-in-law lived with Gacy for about four years and constantly complained of bad odors in the house. Gacy explained that the smells must have been coming from “dead rats.” When his wife was not home, he poured concrete over the corpses in an attempt to cover the odors. Gacy also told authorities that he learned to stuff rags into the corpses’ mouths to prevent reeking body fluids from escaping.

When Gacy’s wife asked about wallets and clothing she was finding belonging to young men, Gacy shouted at her to mind her own business. He progressively became impotent with his wife and abusive. She finally moved out in February 1976 and subsequently divorced him. Gacy must have been relieved to see her go, because by then he was heavily addicted to killing.

From the testimony of several youths who had encountered Gacy, police learned that he cruised the streets looking for gay prostitutes or runaway kids or offered youths work with his construction business. Several youths testified that they went to his house for “job interviews,” during which Gacy showed them pictures of him with the president’s wife and offered to demonstrate to them his “handcuff trick.” It appears that only those youths who refused to participate in the trick survived to tell their stories.

Gacy very gradually ensnared his victims. He plied them with marijuana and alcohol and began by showing them heterosexual porn movies. He then shifted to gay porn. If the guest did not object, Gacy then did his “handcuff trick.” Once he had his victims imprisoned, he sodomized them. Gacy developed an elaborate ritual of torture in which he submerged his victims in a bathtub full of water with a plastic bag over their head and revived them before they died. Eventually they either died from the treatment or Gacy strangled them with his “rope trick.” He looped a cord around the victim’s throat, attached it to a stick, and slowly twisted the stick, tightening the noose. Gacy confessed that as he killed his victims, he recited aloud the Twenty-Third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd . . . Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .”

Curiously, the more Gacy killed, the higher a profile he kept in the community. His Pogo the Clown period was during the height of his killing. He threw an annual block party for all the neighbors and plowed all the sidewalks in the neighborhood free of snow without being asked. A local Democratic Party official recalled, “He was always available for any chore, washing windows, setting up chairs for meetings—even fixing someone’s leaky faucet. I don’t know anyone who didn’t like him.”

At one point after his arrest, Gacy claimed that there existed within him an “Other Guy tilt” who committed the murders. Tim Cahill writes:

Maybe drugs and alcohol set loose the Other Guy tilt to his personality . . . There was, John told the docs, a lot of the Old Man in the Other Guy tilt. Now, take the Other Guy tilt during a blackout and apply it to some greedy little hustler. You would get an angry, punishing father, an irrational alcoholic father who had to strike out . . . The corpse would be found in the morning with the dawning of sobriety, and it would be hidden in a father’s hiding place, in the basement, to be covered over and forgotten, like a father’s hapless drunken ravings.
¹¹⁹

Five bodies, including Robert Piest’s, were never recovered. Gacy said he dumped them in the river. Because so many of Gacy’s victims were runaway youths from different cities, police and forensic anthropologists spent several years attempting to identify the twenty-nine bodies recovered from Gacy’s house. The police managed to link names with some of the victims, but eight remain unidentified to this day.

FBI profiler Robert Ressler, who interviewed Gacy after his conviction, states that Gacy told him that his victims were “worthless little queers and punks.” Ressler challenged him on that—was he not a homosexual himself? Gacy responded that his victims were runaways while he was a successful businessman. Moreover, Gacy explained that he was too busy to wine and dine and romance women—he had to settle for quick sex with males.

Gacy said, “Everything they’ve got on me is circumstantial. Do you realize that there’s not one person can put me with one of the victims before, during or after the crime . . . If you want to say I slept in the same house with a dead body, OK, fine, I’ll buy that—but in the same room, no! And besides, the dead won’t bother you—it’s the living you’ve got to worry about.”

Gacy lived on for another fifteen years, often granting interviews and receiving visitors. He became a jailhouse artist and several galleries exhibited his primitive paintings, many of Pogo the Clown. Gacy eventually set up a 900 number that people could call and hear a message he recorded proclaiming his innocence. He nearly married for a third time in 1986, one of the many women who wrote and visited him. John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994, after all his appeals were exhausted.

Recent Revisions in Serial Killer Categories

The problem with all the classifications described so far is that the FBI system of organized/disorganized/mixed is proving to be too vague, with “mixed” being frequently a meaningless category. The visionary/missionary/hedonist/power-control categories are helpful in assessing motive, but do not contribute much to elements relating to the offender’s identity. None of these categories, including those in the FBI-authored
Crime Classification Manual,
are actually used to classify crimes by any major North American homicide computerized tracking system such as the FBI’s own VICAP; the Homicide Investigation Tracking System (HITS) in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho; or the Canadian Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS).
¹²⁰

The most recently proposed new classification system comes from renowned criminologist Dr. Robert Keppel, a veteran of fifty serial murder investigations including those of Ted Bundy, the Atlanta child murders, and the Green River killings.
¹²¹
His system is focused on classifying sexual “signature” murderers, both single and serial, and is based on categories first developed in the 1980s by Roy Hazelwood and Ann Burgess for the FBI’s classification of rapists. For investigative purposes, Keppel proposes the following classification of sexual serial killers divided into four categories: power-assertive, power-reassurance, anger-retaliatory, and anger-excitation.

POWER-ASSERTIVE KILLERS

Power-assertive killers commit crimes where a rape is planned but the murder is not, and the victim might be male or female. The killing occurs as a result of increasing aggression for the purpose of controlling the victim. The central motive to the crime is the assertion of a masculine power over a female or male victim. (Remember, sex and desire are actually low priorities in many rapes, which are mostly about aggression and control.)

These types of killers have a learning curve in which they evolve and improve their methods based on their previous experiences. The selection of victims is focused toward strangers who are taken by surprise when opportunity allows. Either the victims are found in the street or the perpetrator seeks them out in their homes or places of employment. If the victim is abducted on the street, the body is usually dumped elsewhere from where the victim was killed. If the victim is killed in his or her home, then the body is usually left there undisturbed by posing or postmortem mutilation. Clothing is torn off the victim and he or she may show signs of beating and pummeling. A weapon is brought to the crime scene, often a knife or rope, and is an important part of the masculine identity the offender forms for himself.

The degree of violence unleashed on the victim is governed by what the offender believes is short of perverse or deviant—therefore, mutilation of the victim is rare. Traces of ejaculate are commonly found at a power-assertive crime scene, with the perpetrator sometimes committing multiple rapes prior to killing the victim. After the murder, the offender maintains no links to the victim and leaves behind an organized crime scene carefully cleaned of forensic evidence. The killer feels that his self-image is beyond suspicion in a crime of this type and he emotionally detaches himself from it, allowing him to quickly repeat it. At the same time his need for power and recognition requires that he somehow be “credited” or suspected of the crime. He may reveal or hint at his role in the crime to friends, co-workers, cellmates, or even police.

Power-assertive killers are usually in their early twenties. They are obsessed with projecting a masculine image in a primitive kind of manner, while internally they are highly insecure in their masculinity. They often are body-builders, display tattoos, drive powerful well-maintained vehicles, carry weapons, participate in martial arts, and maintain a confident body posture and form. They are aggressive, arrogant, and condescending to others and function on the borderline of being loners. They are not perceived as “team players” by others. They may have a history of failed marriages and relationships and might be remembered by their former spouses as “control freaks.”

They are typically high school dropouts with a limited sense of masculinity, which means that their taste in pornography is unimaginative—usually limited to traditional “soft” erotica of the type found in
Playboy
or
Penthouse.
They may have a military record but it will be poor and frequently terminated early because of a lack of “team” social skills. Their criminal record may show power-demonstrative crimes such as robbery, theft, and burglary.

POWER-REASSURANCE KILLERS

With power-reassurance killers, the rape is again planned while the murder is not. The main motivation of these types of killers is the realization of a seduction and conquest fantasy. The offender seeks from the victim reassurance that he is “pleasing” them or is “better” than other lovers. The murder occurs when the victim’s behavior contradicts or interrupts the fantasy. The offender either becomes enraged or coldly kills the victim and then reintroduces the fantasy into the encounter. Postmortem mutilation and necrophilia sometimes result as the offender insists on realizing his fantasy. The murder occurs when a rape fails.

The power-reassurance killer selects and stalks his victims carefully, and sometimes they are a casual acquaintance or a neighbor. The victim is frequently ten or fifteen years younger or older than the offender. A same-age victim might be chosen if he or she has some type of mental or physical handicap. Central in the offender’s mind is his fantasy and victim vulnerability and not a victim “type.” He will custom-fit his fantasy to whatever victim he selects.

The offender uses threats and intimidation to gain control of the victim. He has a weapon learning curve—often bringing none to the first offense; a gun that he will not discharge to the second; and a knife to the third, which he may use to actually kill the victim. During the initiation of the rape, the offender might be described as polite and gentlemanly, asking if the victim is comfortable and enjoying himself or herself—the so-called “gentleman rapist.” He is seeking reassurance of his sexual competency, and if he does not get it, he becomes violent and lethal.

Once the victim is killed, the offender may attempt to prolong the fantasy through necrophilia, mutilation, and ritualistic acts. Ejaculate is usually not found at the crime scene because the rape was unsuccessful and the fantasy interrupted. Again, as the killer finds some satisfaction in the postmortem acts and rituals, he is reinforced to repeat his crimes and increase his lethality in subsequent acts. He may take souvenirs and collect newspaper clippings in an attempt to maintain his fantasy relationship with the victim.

The offender is frequently in his mid twenties and has a fantasy life so intense and contradictory to reality that he may appear emotionally disturbed or unintelligent. Feeding on fantasy, he lives alone in isolation with no male or female friends and is perceived as a weird loner. He is incapable of the social interaction required to develop a sexual relationship or romantic partnership. He deeply fears rejection and prefers to focus his sexual energy through fantasy and substitute solitary sexual acts such as window peeping, fondling of clothing, pyromania, or kleptomania. He may have an extensive police record relating to these activities. His fantasies often emerge at a very young age and are buttressed by other environmental challenges and difficulties in his childhood.