[unsettling music plays]
-[indistinct chattering]
-[woman] Mike was my half brother.
My dad's, uh, youngest child.
He hung out on this block, uh,
on the northwest side of Chicago.
Mike used to go over
and play baseball in the neighborhood.
The last friend
Michael was hanging out with, Mike said,
"I'm gonna catch the bus and grab
something to eat before I go home."
And he was 17 years old
when he disappeared in June of 1976.
I was only four years old.
In my house, we didn't talk about it.
My dad blamed himself.
He would drink, um, and disappear.
He would leave for days,
and when he would come home,
he would tell my mom
about how he was gonna burn in hell
because he hadn't been
a better dad for Mike.
I think that he was really trying
to grapple with the fact
that he could not find his son.
My dad didn't believe
that he had run away,
and he did not believe
that Mike would just disappear
without telling anybody.
My dad would take me with him
to the police station.
I think it was his way
of trying to break the ice with them,
so that they would be
more won over by… by me,
that they would have sympathy for him.
[footsteps echoing]
[Vasquez] I remember
the sound my shoes would make
on the tiles of the police station,
and I remember sitting
in these big wooden chairs
and my legs dangling off the edge,
and that, you know, we'd show the picture.
He was getting so much
of the same answer from the police.
A lot of police officers
were telling parents, "They're runaways."
"Your kid will be back any day now."
You know, "Boys will be boys."
I mean, it was the '70s.
A lot of conversations would end
with "Good luck with that."
And my dad…
I could tell that he was getting scared
when he would talk to them
the more time passed.
My dad and my mom
were still holding out hope
he would come home.
We were in the space of uncertainty,
of being in limbo,
and it wasn't until later that I learned
that Michael might have gone to work
for John Wayne Gacy.
[theme music plays]
[garbled speech]
When Gacy talked to me
through that entire night in my office,
he talked about every victim individually.
It was… It was horrible.
I went home, took a shower,
didn't know where Gacy had gone.
In the shower,
I felt like the victim at the Bates Motel.
I felt like somebody was gonna come
through the… the shower curtain
and start stabbing me,
and… and I felt dirty.
It felt like all the sins of the world
on me that I couldn't…
I was trying to wash 'em off myself.
As an officer of the court, I couldn't
disclose attorney-client privilege.
All these things I heard
and couldn't say anything about it.
[Albrecht] Gacy came out
of Sam Amirante's office rather briskly,
got into his car,
didn't come to us at all.
Usually, he'd tell us a lot of times
where we were going next.
This was, like, 8:30 in the morning,
and we're following him.
And Gacy's popping Valium,
you'd think he was eating candy corn.
[Albrecht] It had snowed a little bit,
kind of slick out at that time,
and Gacy, uh,
driving through this neighborhood,
70 miles an hour.
[Gacy] These two Des Plaines coppers said
they were having trouble following me
because I was driving erratically
on snowy streets.
Well, sh**t, they didn't know
how to keep up with me anyhow.
No, for a little speeding,
we weren't arresting him
for reckless driving.
We had a good investigation going,
and traffic citations
could have been interpreted
as a form of harassment.
[Albrecht] But then we went
to a gas station
at Higgins and Washington.
So as this young kid
was walking to pump the gas,
Gacy handed him something.
[Gacy] I reached in my pocket.
I had marijuana. Three rolled joints.
I said, "I got people following me.
I can't be carrying it."
I slipped it into his pocket.
He gave the kid a bag of marijuana
while he's got two cops tailing him.
I think at that point
he was not, uh… thinking straight.
He was just kind of panicking now.
[Gacy] I don't know what's happening.
I'm scared to death
if something happens to me.
I left there, I went to drive out
to the cemetery, to my dad's grave.
So we asked, should we be taking this guy
into protective custody?
Should we bust him for the marijuana
so that we can control this guy?
Is he trying to commit suicide
or something with all the Valium?
[Sullivan] Possession of marijuana
was a crime at the time,
and so, I remember very clearly,
I just said, "Take him down."
[Gacy] As we were heading out into Niles
at Oakton and Milwaukee Avenue,
they all of a sudden pull up
alongside of both sides of the car,
and they come out with g*ns drawn.
I pulled open the door of Gacy's car,
put my g*n in his ear,
pulled him out of the car.
[Gacy] Handcuffed me,
threw me up against the car,
threw me in the backseat of the car.
[Robinson] What Gacy said to me was,
"Ron, what's wrong?
I thought we were friends."
Yeah, it was a bullshit arrest,
but I… we… we got our hands on him.
That was the main thing.
Got him under control.
[Robinson] And we got to find out,
who is this guy?
[somber music plays]
[Amirante] In Waterloo, Iowa,
when Gacy was convicted of sodomy,
he got sentenced to ten years
in the Anamosa State Penitentiary,
and he was able to get out
after about a year.
His marriage is gone.
He's gotta get out of Waterloo.
[Gacy] I come out
of the institution in 1970.
I was an ex-convict.
There's several paths
that I could have chosen.
I could have had the attitude
that society is against me
and feel sorry for myself.
"Everybody's picking on poor John."
Or I could come out of the institution
and have the attitude,
"f*ck that stigma."
I'll show them that you can still make
something out of yourself
if you have the determination or willpower
and the motivation to do so,
and don't let anything stand in your way.
And he was permitted
to serve his parole in Illinois,
so then he came to Chicago.
The, uh,
National Crime Information database
was in its nascent states back then.
It was tough getting access to records.
There was no communication
between the… the police stations,
not like there is today.
[Sullivan] And so, he had a clean start
at doing whatever he wanted to do.
[Gacy] I was divorced from Marlynn.
I really didn't miss Marlynn,
but I did miss the children.
I wanted to be John Gacy,
the married man, the family man,
the guy who wanted to have his own home.
And then, in August of '71,
I bought the house out at 8213 Summerdale.
[man 1] I actually lived three houses down
from John Wayne Gacy.
It was a great neighborhood. It was quiet.
You could just go out
in the street, play ball.
The streetlights came on,
you went back home.
You know, you had dinner.
"Hey, you know, can I go back outside?"
"Yeah. Stay close."
[man 2] The neighborhood John lived in
was lower middle-class, blue-collar.
The house had been built
probably in the late '40s or early '50s.
Small house, thousand square feet.
There was nothing special about it
one way or another.
It would be like
your grandmother's suburban house.
I was a fledgling photographer,
and I did John's personal photography,
and, um, that's how
I got to know Carole Hoff.
She was very quiet,
very pleasant, reserved,
divorcée with two little girls.
[Gacy] I had started seeing Carole
in October of '71.
She was so afraid of her divorcement,
but we started going out anyway.
We were trying to spend time together.
"Hey," I said, "why don't you just
move in with the kids?"
[Zielinski] My impression was
that she felt very alone
and very vulnerable,
and John was available,
and, uh, she went for it
and hoped for the best.
John and Carole seemed to be
a perfectly normal couple.
Carole seemed
a little bit quiet and submissive,
but other than that,
there was nothing unusual.
[Gacy] I liked her,
a-and I loved the children,
and long about in November of '71,
I told her I wanted to marry her.
What did she think of it?
But I… I felt, uh,
that getting married for the second time
that the only way to start off
was to be honest with her,
open and aboveboard,
upfront before we got married.
She knew that I had been incarcerated,
but I wanted to explain
that I was a bisexual,
that I engaged in different things.
But that I wasn't, you know,
g*y or anything like that.
She had no fear of that
because I didn't like them.
I was against 'em. I thought
they were sick and everything, and weak.
I openly told her all of this,
but it was almost as if
I was trying to tell her something,
that I needed her,
that I wanted help from her.
I think if she would have been stronger,
that this thing
would have never gotten loose.
[gentle lilting music plays]
[Zielinski] I photographed his wedding.
That would have been 1972.
It was a very nice wedding,
a little church on Harlem Avenue,
if I remember correctly.
I think there was just,
like, a luncheon buffet
in the church basement or something.
And I did photographs of the kids.
They were Carole's kids,
and as a family
for the family greeting cards.
Christmas card pictures.
John and Carole,
they were a suburban couple,
and just typical Chicago family.
[Gacy] We did a lot
of socializing together.
We would go out a lot.
We bowled together in a league,
and stuff like that.
[Zielinski] But I didn't feel
that he particularly loved Carole.
I never saw any affection from him.
I never saw any affection towards anyone.
He could either be nice
or he could be a total jerk.
Yeah, he could turn on a dime.
My impression was
that John only cared about John.
[cheering, whistling]
Gacy wanted to be a big shot.
He wanted to be famous.
[cheering, whistling]
[indistinct chanting]
[Sullivan] In Chicago,
politics was everywhere.
You had, uh, certainly high politicians
from the governor on down,
and you had, uh, what I would call
two-bit politicians from John Gacy on up.
[Amirante] Norwood Park
Democratic Organization.
Gacy was a low-level soldier.
Go out on the streets, and get votes,
and… and help people
in… in the neighborhood.
He was a hard worker.
He enjoyed helping people,
and people knew that.
That's what made him
a great precinct captain.
He had enough political clout.
He did know some influential people,
and he loved rubbing shoulders with them.
[Gacy] Politics is power.
The feeling of being important.
The feeling that they trust you.
I'm a power person.
I enjoy power.
But you gotta work your a*s off,
and that's what I did
with my customers and business.
About the middle of '73, I decided to go
into decorating and everything.
[investigator] What was your name
of your company?
[Gacy] PDM.
-[investigator] What does that stand for?
-[Gacy] Pretty damn messy.
Polish Daily Maintenance,
whatever you wanna call it.
[Zielinski] I started working
for John Gacy when I was 19 years old,
under the heading of PDM Contractors.
Painting, decorating, maintenance.
He says, "Look, I need help
on various construction jobs."
Basically grunt labor.
[man 3] So you got
all these young guys running around,
and a lot of his contractor friends
were always asking him,
"Why are you hiring all these young men
instead of getting some experienced people
that know what they're doing?"
[Gacy] I found a lot of good
in young people working.
It's just that they had to have somebody
that was understanding.
To a lot of them,
I was almost like a father to 'em.
His story always was that
he would break them into the business,
to do things right,
to do them the way he did it, and so on.
So, no one ever questioned it.
[Antonucci] I was introduced to John
through my parents.
I was 16.
John always made you feel
like you were kind of his friend.
You know, he did things
like go out of his way
to make sure
I could find extra hours to work.
It was 1975.
I remember that one of the tasks
that I did at John's house
was to dig for a barbecue pit
in preparation
for one of his big summer parties.
He threw these parties.
They've been called lavish.
They didn't strike me as lavish at all.
It wasn't like he had
bone china set out or anything.
They were large backyard barbecues.
He was always inviting everybody
to the parties,
especially important people.
Judges, aldermen,
rubbing shoulders with the bigwigs.
[Antonucci] And it would have a theme,
whether it be a cowboy theme,
or I remember the year before
I was there was a Hawaiian theme.
One of the parties, I remember,
was the Fourth of July ones
where he was doing the Paul Revere outfit.
For the barbecue pit,
I had dug about,
I don't know, eight or ten inches down,
uh, to pour a concrete slab,
and John's like,
"No, you… you have to dig deeper."
And he asked me
to keep digging deeper and deeper,
which I thought was overkill
for putting in this foundation
for, uh, a barbecue pit.
So, I did that.
And when I came back, the pit was,
uh, it was already filled with concrete.
That did strike me a little bit odd.
[Gacy] So the… there I am.
I have Carole
and the two kids in the house.
No, I was my own boss.
I was working hard, working long hours.
Having the big party at the house,
being involved
with the Democratic Party and everything.
I was running myself ragged.
John Gacy, he had a tremendous drive,
um… um, from when he was a… a child.
[tense music plays]
[Gacy] My dad said he created the drive.
This "incestual" need of having,
you've got to do better.
You've got to do better
than everybody else.
You've got to work harder
than anybody else.
I'd also think it was,
"I'll show you that I can do it,
even though you told me
that I can't do it,"
"But I'll show you I can do it."
He had to keep going all of the time.
This guy never slept.
He was active
in the various Polish associations, uh…
and the Polish, uh, Day Parade.
He was the parade director one year.
And you can see him
out there on Wacker Drive, uh,
by one of the bridges
in his tasteful red, uh, suit
with his red hard hat
directing the Polish parade.
[Gacy] There is a right way,
there's a wrong way, and there's my way.
You have to have organization.
You have to have leadership.
And you have to be able
to not demand respect, but command it.
And the same thing when Mrs. Carter came.
They were telling me how to do things.
I didn't give a damn who they were.
[Kunkle] He was the parade director,
and there are pictures of him
standing with, uh, Rosalynn Carter,
the president's wife,
with all the politicians
and bigwigs at Daley Plaza,
and, uh, with his Secret Service,
uh, clearance pin on his, uh, jacket.
You couldn't make it up, I swear.
[Gacy] I enjoyed the limelight
of being involved in something.
And consequently, I used to involve myself
with a lot of stuff.
Clowning and… and appearing
in at least 10-15 parades as a clown.
[jovial clown music plays]
[Zielinski] Pogo was John's own creation,
from the style of the makeup
to the way he acted.
It was all his doing.
He was very proud of Pogo the Clown.
[Gacy] I clowned for the Democratic Party,
and I used to be in a lot of parades.
I enjoyed it.
Yeah, I wasn't getting paid for it.
I just enjoyed it.
To go visit, like, older people
and old peoples' folks home,
or to see crippled children.
It's almost like the feeling you get
out of coming out of church
on Christmas Eve.
But if I was in a bad mood,
it was bad for me to be a clown.
Because some of those kids
can be little b*stards, you know?
You know, you want to grab 'em
by the cheek instead of just…
You want to whack the sh*t out of 'em.
[chuckles]
[indistinct message over radio]
[Albrecht] While we were doing
the surveillance,
Gacy told me how, as a clown,
you could sit on women's laps
and talk to 'em,
and basically do whatever you want.
You could feel 'em up, they'd say nothing
'cause you're a clown.
[Gacy] When you clowned,
you're hiding your image.
There are things that you could do
that you wouldn't do as a person.
Then he ended that conversation
by saying, "You know what, Mike?"
[Gacy] Clowns can get away with anything.
Clowns can get away with m*rder.
[Albrecht] After we arrested Gacy
for the delivery
and possession of marijuana,
we put him in the back of the car
and drove back to the station.
[indistinct message over radio]
[Sullivan] While we had Gacy
in the station,
we're still trying to find Rob Piest.
In the back of my mind, I still had hopes
that maybe he was being held
at Gacy's house somehow,
but we needed to get
back into that house to find that out.
[Amirante] When I went in to see Gacy
at the Des Plaines police station,
they wouldn't let me in at first.
I was getting upset. They were stalling.
[Finder] In the first search
of Gacy's house,
they recovered a photo receipt
from a young lady
who worked in the Nisson drugstore
where Rob was last seen,
and one officer smelled decaying flesh,
or decomposing flesh.
Terry Sullivan and Greg Bedoe
said they, uh, wanted to draw up
a second search warrant.
[Sullivan] And so,
we went up to the judge,
and he did give us permission
to go, uh, to Gacy's house and get in.
And his remark after he signed the warrant
was, "Now get that SOB."
[ominous music plays]
[man 4] When I went into that house,
our main goal was to find Robert Piest.
There aren't too many places
to hide a body in a house like that.
So, mainly, I wanted to go
into the crawl space
because that's where
you could bury somebody.
So I went down in,
and I crawled to the east
and then to the south.
I start looking around,
and there's three little puddles
in the mud down there.
As I shine my light there,
there's a whole bunch
of little, thin, red worms.
I've never seen anything else like that
before or after,
and when my light hit these worms,
they go… [gasps]
…and they sneak back into the muck.
And I think, "Worms, fresh dirt."
"What are these worms eating?"
So I take my entrenching tool,
I stuck it in the ground,
and I hit something that felt like
you're hitting a brick or a drain tile,
and I pried it up, and here, it's a…
a shoulder bone.
I think what went through my mind
was just,
"Gotcha!"
"We got you, you b*stard."
Myself and a number of other cops were
in… in the family room, the living room,
when Dan yelled up
that he had found bones.
And they go, "Is it Piest?"
I'm looking at this
and not understanding what I'm seeing.
Piest had been gone just a short while,
but this body was very decomposed.
And I go, "No,
this body's been here way too long."
It certainly wasn't Piest.
[creepy music plays]
So now we know
we got a major situation here.
This was an unknown homicide,
and that's when we started digging.
[Genty] We dug some more
in a different corner,
and we came up with
what we thought was a knee.
We then went over
into the southeast corner
and started digging there,
and we came up with two long leg bones.
So there's three bodies stacked
at that point.
I think that we're in shock.
I'll never forget that feeling.
Our minds were like, "Oh my God."
Just… [shudders]
…what horror.
Everything stopped.
-[phone rings]
-[Genty] And I called my sergeant.
And I said to him, "Don, I think we got
a basement full of kids here."
Gacy was in one of the security rooms.
I went back to talk to him.
When I walked into the room,
Gacy asked me
if we had been in the crawl space.
And I said, "Yes, John,
we were in the crawl space."
He looked up at me,
says, "You know, Mike."
"I'm never gonna spend
a day in jail for this."
[Amirante] Finally,
they let me in to see him.
I'm in there alone with Gacy,
and he kind of stood up straight
in the chair, and he said,
uh, "I want to talk to people
about what happened."
And so, I said, "No, you're gonna sit here
and, uh, you're gonna do
what I tell you to do."
"You won't talk to anybody else."
[Bedoe] His lawyers told him to keep
his mouth shut. He wouldn't listen.
He says, "They're my lawyers.
They're gonna do what I say."
[Amirante] He wanted to be in charge.
It was John Gacy.
He wanted to be in control,
and he wanted to do it his way.
[Albrecht] So, we went in there.
There's, like, eight or nine people
in the room.
I was sitting at a table,
and Gacy was sitting right across from me.
Amirante sat in a chair
directly next to him.
All of us had
a pretty good rapport going with John,
talking to him like, uh…
"John, you look like
you got a lot on your mind,
like you got something to say."
[tense music plays]
[Bedoe] Then he started talking.
And you know, we just listened.
The guy is gonna confess,
you let him confess, right?
Go. Talk. You know, spill your guts.
He told us his k*lling started in 1972.
[Gacy] What, do you want me
to rationalize it and explain it to you?
Okay, Greyhound bus boy is number one.
[unsettling music plays]
[Gacy] That New Year's Eve,
Carole and I went out to the house,
jumped into bed, got it on,
and we brought in the New Year's together.
[distant sounds of revelry]
[Gacy] Then I took her home.
I think I slept all that day.
At one o'clock in the morning,
I went down to the Greyhound bus depot.
[Albrecht] The drug culture was starting,
and a lot of young teenagers
did run away from home
and would end up
down at the Greyhound bus station.
In the 1970s, there was so much prejudice
that if a teenager
either came out to their family
or was discovered to be g*y,
you know, the family might reject them.
Runaways are sometimes really throwaways,
who don't have homes necessarily
to go back to.
[Gacy] I drove around the block
and pulled up by there.
That's when I picked him up.
So I asked him, "I'm not doing nothing.
Want to go riding around?"
"I'll show you the sights."
But a big city like Chicago,
these kids kind of stood out.
They get into a big city,
and they're amazed by the buildings,
and the people, all that kinda stuff.
[Gacy] He didn't have to leave
until noon the next day.
So we start riding around,
and we talked in general.
We also talked about sex.
I asked him
if he'd ever gotten into it with a guy.
Gacy told us
that he brought him back to his house.
[Gacy] We were drinking…
[clears throat] …talked further about sex.
We both got into oral sex, both ways.
I told him he could sleep there,
and we'll get up and I'll drive back down
to the bus depot before noon.
I went and laid down.
Something startled me.
I woke,
and when I looked in the doorway,
he had a knife in his hand,
and he was coming at me.
So I jumped up, and I wrestled with him.
We… we were struggling back and forth.
I believe I stabbed him a couple of times.
Four or five times in the chest.
I didn't know whether I should
call the police or… or what.
I was afraid that it would sound bad.
So, I opened up the crawl space
and I proceeded to dig a hole
and bury him right there.
[Bedoe] In his version,
he was totally clueless, without blame.
It wasn't his fault.
As far as I'm concerned, you know,
80-90% of it was bullshit,
or was… or was to benefit Gacy.
[Albrecht] After the first m*rder,
probably got a little nervous.
"Are the cops gonna come looking for me,
talking to me?" or whatever,
and nothing happens.
[Gacy] The next day after that,
I was with Carole,
and nothing ever happened anymore.
That was just, uh, a nicely kept secret.
[clears throat] I don't think that I had
another sexual relationship with a male
until 1974 or '75.
[eerie music plays]
[Zielinski] John and Carole, they were
a suburban family for a year or two.
They were just living there in the house,
and then, eventually,
I started noticing things like,
you know, John wasn't paying
much attention to Carole.
I guess it kind of soured.
[Bedoe] Carole said at the beginning
everything was fine.
Gacy was a caring father, a provider,
but eventually, it went downhill.
He wouldn't have much to do with me.
We hardly had any sex.
And he found it very difficult
to have anything to do with me.
[Gacy] Carole and I were fighting
over sex.
It was just that I was tired.
Working seven days a week, you're tired.
You just don't wanna do it.
[Bedoe] Meanwhile, he would come home
late at night with other men,
uh, or boys,
even the kids that worked for him,
and they would spend hours in the garage.
[Robinson] The garage was kind of set up
like a separate apartment.
John could bring people back to his house
and go into the garage,
and nobody would ever see
what he had done.
Carole was well aware that he was engaged
in h*m* activity with males.
I was aware of what he was doing.
He just felt he was going more
for the men and not for the women
'cause he could not function with a woman.
[Gacy] Then she was accusing me.
Why'd I have young boys
working for me and all this.
Was I doing something
with the boys? I said, "No."
I was being accused of it all the time,
so I just finally said, "f*ck it,
I'm accused of it so g*dd*mn much,
I might as well go out and do it,"
which I did.
[Antonucci] It was 1975.
We were doing some demolition work.
I got a nail, went through
the bottom of my shoe
and into my… into my foot,
so John took me to go get a tetanus shot.
One night, about midnight,
my parents had gone on vacation.
There was a knock on my…
our… my door, and John is there.
You know, "I wanted to check in with you.
Make sure you were okay."
And he had some wine.
[whistle blows]
[Antonucci] He knew I was
on the high school wrestling team.
A lot of times he would joke with me,
"Hey, big wrestler," and stuff like that.
So, uh, we started, uh, wrestling around,
and, all of a sudden,
he got my wrist behind me
and he put a handcuff on me.
Then he just… just swept my legs out
from underneath me and knocked me down.
He went out of the room then,
and, uh, he was gone.
[Gacy] Tony Antonucci.
I was horseplaying with him.
You know, just… just teasing him.
And he really got violent about it.
He got mad about it.
[Antonucci] When I'd been working for him,
John would kind of want to test you,
if you will, under a stressful situation.
I was under the impression
that this was some kind of test
or something.
I realized that I could probably
get out of the right cuff, and I did.
And, uh, a minute later,
he came back into the room,
and I hit him
with a beautiful double leg takedown
and dropped him right to the floor.
[whistle blows]
[Antonucci] You know,
in wrestling we always said,
"Where the head goes, the body goes."
So I kept his head
pretty well smashed into the carpeting,
and I handcuffed him.
After that, I mean,
he ju… just goes quiet.
And then he said this quote
which will always stick with me, he says,
"You're the only one
that not only got out of the handcuffs,
you got them on me."
I figured, "Well, that just means
he's done this test before,"
but I don't remember
any discussion about it afterwards.
I let him out of the handcuffs,
and he left.
[ominous music plays]
[Antonucci] It was about two weeks
after the incident
with me and the handcuffs
that John Butkovich went missing.
[Bedoe] There was a bunch of us
in the room listening to his story.
Sometime during the night,
two or three o'clock in the morning,
Gacy started talking about,
uh, Butkovich, one of the victims.
[Gacy] But, you know,
the strongest feelings
I had for any of 'em was Butkovich.
John Butkovich was a, uh, good kid.
You know, he… he was working for Gacy.
Uh, he was a laborer, uh,
like any other kid looking for a job.
[Antonucci] John Butkovich and I
worked together on projects for John.
As a matter of fact, we used to call
John Butkovich "Little John"
because, of course,
John Gacy was "Big John."
I really only buddied up
with John Butkovich.
[car engine revving]
[Antonucci] We had a bond
because we both had
similar hot rod type cars.
We were both Mopar men.
"You ain't got a Mopar,
you ain't got no car," we used to say.
[unsettling music plays]
[Gacy] John Butkovich came to work for me.
Very naive kid.
I treated him
on a father-son relationship.
Also got into a sexual relationship
with him.
Him blowing me, me blowing him.
[Bedoe] John Butkovich,
a teenager that used to work for Gacy,
he just up and disappeared.
John Butkovich's mom was very instrumental
in… in trying to put the heat
on the police to find her son.
We feel so bad
because police don't do nothing.
[siren wails]
[Amirante] The Chicago Police didn't care.
"Okay, your son's a runaway.
He's a wild kid."
You know, "He'll show up someday."
If a young person was missing,
or an old person, for that matter,
the police wouldn't do anything.
In the meantime, these people are missing,
which slipped through the cracks.
When John Butkovich went missing,
I asked John about it.
'Cause I said, "Am I gonna be working
with Little John on this project?"
And he's like,
"Eh… No Little John has… has quit."
Teenagers tend to just, you know,
without a lot of forethought…
just, "I quit."
I didn't really question it.
What I thought was unusual
was that John Butkovich just left his car.
You know, knowing how…
how important his car was to him.
[Gacy] It was one or two o'clock
in the morning.
We drove all the way out to my house.
We drank, we smoked a couple of joints,
then he started getting belligerent.
[Kunkle] Gacy said
Butkovich was arguing with Gacy
over pay that he believed was owed to him.
All he wanted to do was get his pay.
[Gacy] He was quitting,
and he was pissed off.
So the handcuffs were right there
at the bar.
I slapped the handcuffs on one arm,
then I grabbed his other arm.
I handcuffed it.
As I get the handcuffs on, I said, "Now
I see you're not gonna fight with nobody."
According to Gacy's statements,
he had strangled,
uh, John Butkovich to death.
[Gacy] The next thing I remember
is I woke up in… in bed.
I walked in there and the first thing
I come found was his feet.
He still had the rope on his neck.
He was dead.
I didn't know what the hell to do.
I went out to the garage.
I… I dug the hole as big as I could.
I pushed him in it,
and then I cemented it over.
[Kunkle] Gacy, he was just beginning.
He was just learning
how much he enjoyed it,
and how he could get away with it,
and how he had a pattern that worked.
[Gacy] After I got away with the first,
I just kept getting away with them.
That's why I didn't stop.
[unsettling music plays]
[Gacy] After Butkovich,
there was a change in the marriage
from that point forward.
Carole asked for a divorce in '75.
She got the divorce in February of '76
and moved out.
It was an unhealthy situation
because people in the neighborhood
were… were making remarks about me.
I would go out drinking, and I know
I was cruising down at the park.
[Albrecht] As Gacy just continued talking,
he told us it started
down in Bughouse Square
at the Greyhound station.
[Fourt] Bughouse Square was one
of a number of different places
where g*y men often met sexual partners.
You have to remember,
there weren't a lot of alternatives,
especially for people
who really had to be closeted,
which was most of us at the time.
[Bedoe] He goes one way,
all the way around,
and you keep going around the circle,
looking for whoever you're looking for,
and that's where Gacy patrolled.
[Gacy] Generally, I looked
for young, clean-cut, virile looking.
I felt that I would probably have
the upper hand
or the fatherly image over 'em.
In other words, the innocent ones.
Those were the ones I'd pick up.
[Albrecht] At the start, he talked about,
he was able to get these kids to his car.
He could entice them with drugs, or pay
for a new job, or something like that.
[Fourt] I certainly imagine
that if you're a teenager
and you're trying to survive
on the streets,
you're going to do things
that, to an outsider,
might look like crazy or risk taking,
but you didn't really have a choice.
And Gacy got to be pretty good
at picking these kids up,
uh, and bringing 'em back to his house.
[Gacy] When you're busier than hell,
you want to satisfy yourself more.
Could it be that
through seeking out
different people for sex,
that I developed a hatred for 'em?
You bought 'em for an hour,
you bought 'em for two hours,
you bought their body
to do what you want with it.
They're, to me… they're not a human being.
It's like you going to the store.
If you buy something, you bring it home,
and you decide you don't like it
and want to break it,
it's yours to break
'cause you paid for it.
[ominous music plays]
[indistinct message over radio]
[Albrecht] When we were getting
statements from Gacy,
you know,
we didn't have time to react a lot.
You were going from one thing to the next
a lot, and he just continued talking.
[Bedoe] Until six o'clock in the morning.
It was hours of… of him rambling.
Now, in all these years experience I had,
I think I might have been stronger
as a lawyer now keeping his mouth shut.
But he thought
he could manipulate the police.
Gacy opening his mouth and confessing,
he figured if… if he was helpful to them,
then he'd probably get away
with this thing.
That was his plan.
[ominous music plays]
[Sullivan] At the same time that we were
in the Des Plaines Police Department
talking to Gacy,
the police officers were at the house.
That's really when
all the fireworks started.
[Genty] It was early in the morning.
Whatever was there, we had to find it.
So we took down the wall,
we started pulling up the floor.
We were writing the book, so to speak.
[indistinct chatter on tape]
[Tovar] This was 1978.
Nobody knew about PPEs.
We had no overalls. We had no face masks.
I wore jeans, and I had a couple
of rugby shirts that I wore
because they were… they were warm.
[Genty] No one had ever had to handle
anything like this before.
[distant chiseling]
[Genty] And at the time, I didn't know
what the totality of this thing
was gonna be.
[videographer] We're looking, uh, east
towards the open, uh, floor
in the office area.
Now we're going to be walking along.
we'll pan along.
All right, now we're looking… west
towards that bedroom.
Now we're gonna pan down
along the floor, turn around,
come up into the kitchen area.
Quick pan across the top of the kitchen,
then we'll pan down
through the hole in the floor.
[eerie music plays]
And they just kept coming
one after another.
[Genty] We're basically in graves
with dead bodies.
And these weren't bodies
in the sense that we understand them.
These were mostly skeletons,
but, in some cases,
the body was quite intact,
uh, but still very decomposed.
[Tovar] They were
in all directions, you know,
face up, face down,
two bodies side by side,
a number of ways.
One body was recovered
near the barbecue grill
that was behind the house
along the driveway.
Butkovich's body was
in the back by the garage
buried underneath the cement slab
in the… in the back of the shed.
Back when John Butkovich went missing,
I was in the garage,
and the floor was all new concrete,
and I was thinking back,
there was no reason to patch that floor.
Sure enough,
that's where John Butkovich was.
The enormity of it all
was… was mind-boggling.
[Gacy] Same thing of the corpses
and storing them in the basement.
It was a hiding place.
It was a secret place.
-Those are my bodies.
-[investigator] Mm-hm.
[Gacy] That's where I wanted to keep them.
They had no right to touch 'em.
[excavator 1] We got a couple more.
-We're gonna need a body bag down here.
-[man 5] Down here. Want it down there?
[Genty] When we found these bodies,
it verified Gacy's story.
They're still excavating bodies
from the house,
and he said he was gonna clear up
a whole stack of murders.
[Amirante] Gacy described in detail
every single m*rder he committed.
A lot of his victims
came with him voluntarily.
Some were involved in criminal activities.
There's no doubt.
They came for money, or drugs, uh, or sex.
Some of 'em, he let go.
Others, he… he m*rder*d.
[Finder] They were male prostit*tes.
At least, that's what Gacy told us.
Who knew what the truth was?
He said that if they charged
more money after the sex act,
if it was a 20-dollar deal
and they wanted 50,
or if, uh, they just threatened
to out him, uh,
to people in the community,
those were the reasons that he k*lled 'em.
[Albrecht] But these kids,
they weren't all prostit*tes.
A great majority
of these victims of John Gacy
were just looking for a job.
That was probably
one of the scariest things about Gacy.
No rhyme or reason.
You could be walking down the street,
or a 15-year-old kid
working at a drug store,
and if Gacy'd lay eyes on you,
you have now become his next victim.
That's scary.
[Albrecht] How did he choose?
It was not so much, uh,
a type of person that he got.
It was the ability
to get 'em back to his house.
Gacy, he had different, uh, MO's,
let's put it that way.
[Zielinski] John's Oldsmobile,
it was a late-model, black…
not a fancy car,
but it had that spotlight on it.
It was a… a police accessory, I think.
[Gacy] I got a black car,
which looked like a squad car,
but I never impersonated a cop
and never said I was a cop.
However, there was occasions
when I picked up people,
and they would say, "You're a cop, huh?"
"I'll do anything you want.
Just don't bust me."
I got a lot of free sex
just by letting them plant their own seed
and letting them grow it.
[Kunkle] And he had
some 50-some different badges
from different police departments.
He had a black leather jacket
that he wore all the time
that would very much look like,
uh, plainclothes police officer attire.
They thought they were getting arrested.
Turns out they were being kidnapped.
He was able to con these kids
by various ways,
to be able to get them into his clutches.
[Bedoe] They lived in different areas
of the city or suburbs.
These people, they just vanished
off the face of the Earth.
-They were never connected to Gacy.
-He could have anybody he wanted.
He'd bring 'em all back to the house,
and all he had to do
was be able to dispose of the body.
[Bedoe] Usually somebody disappears,
they show up in… in a morgue someplace.
These people just vanished
into the crawl space.
[tense music plays]
[Tovar] As we dug, and we kept
coming up with more bodies,
obviously the first thought in your mind
was, "Just how many are there?"
[Genty] Almost all of them had something
a little different about 'em.
Either the position they were in…
In some cases, we found
ligatures around their neck.
The ligature, in this case,
was a rope with a knot in the back of it.
He would just t*rture these kids,
uh… is what we surmised
what was happening.
[Bedoe] Back at the station,
the guy's talking.
He's telling us about these homicides.
He enjoyed it. He enjoyed the fact
that he was the center of attention.
[Finder] When I arrived
at the police station,
Mike Albrecht and I went back in.
I remember asking Gacy a lot of things,
but what I remember most of all
was how he k*lled his victims.
He told us he would bring the boys
back to his house
and show 'em a magic trick.
And the first trick he'd show
was the handcuff trick.
He would put the handcuffs on himself,
fumble around for a little bit.
Then the handcuffs would come off.
Then he'd tell the kids,
"Now you'll do the handcuff trick."
[Gacy] I was horsing around
with the handcuffs.
I said, "Put 'em on. I'll show you
how to take 'em off without the key."
I said, "It's mind over matter.
You can take 'em off."
So they would obviously struggle then
and try to get out of the handcuffs,
and they couldn't
get out of the handcuffs.
[Gacy] After I get the handcuffs on,
he says, "How do you get 'em off?"
I said, "You don't. You need the key."
Once the kid put the handcuffs on,
it was game over.
Now Gacy can do with him what he wants.
I was pretty shaken at this point.
I remember, he said,
"I gotta show you how I did it."
"Bring me a rope and I'll show you."
I was just,
"I'm not gonna get you a rope."
And he said, "Okay, let's do it this way."
He pulled out a rosary,
and he touched my hand.
He said,
"Pretend your, uh, your fist is a head,
and pretend your wrist is a neck. Okay?"
[Albrecht] And Gacy wrapped his rosary
around his wrist…
[Gacy] Take a rope, tie it
around your wrist, just with a slipknot.
Okay, now when you put
the first slipknot in,
then lay a pencil on it,
then put another slipknot right over it.
Now, take the stick part and turn it
and see what happens to your wrist.
[Finder] And very gently, he twisted.
[Gacy] Once you put a rope
around their neck
and turn it two or three times,
it gets tight.
Then after they to start to get excited,
they f*cking pass out.
You got the son of a b*tch. He can't do
a f*cking thing to you, you know that?
And then you just leave 'em.
They couldn't fight back,
and… and they were m*rder*d, strangled.
That's a very personal way
of k*lling somebody.
It's not like using a g*n.
If you're gonna strangle somebody,
you gotta be right on top of 'em.
You don't do that without liking it.
[Kunkle] What he discovered was the thrill
of deciding who would live
and who would die,
and how much he enjoyed all that evil.
[ominous music plays]
-[officer] What you got? A skull, Dan?
-[indistinct chattering]
[Tovar] I'm pretty good
about compartmentalizing myself.
I had a system.
I had a big coin
that I carried in my pocket when I worked.
When I got home,
I threw the coin in the ashtray.
That's where the job stayed.
The next morning, I put the coin
in my pocket. I'm back on duty.
I never let it come into my house.
[Genty] People always say to me,
"Doesn't that stuff bother you?"
And I say, "We're there for the dead."
Somebody loved this kid.
How many people do we have here
who have just disappeared
and that leaves an empty hole
in many people's lives?
You have to try
and bring those people closure.
[Vasquez] When Mike disappeared,
for over two years,
people were always asking questions.
And being in gatherings, like if we were
at a wedding or birthday party,
where people would kind of
go off and… and whisper
about what was going on,
what was happening.
I was scared a lot,
um, and I was scared to ask questions
about what had happened.
[phone rings]
And then we got a phone call
at Christmastime in 1978.
I ran to the kitchen and my mom,
I remember the light
being really bright on her,
and my mom just being really sharp
with her answers,
and, uh, then just putting the phone down
and walking over to my dad
and saying, "Larry…
Larry, it's about Mike."
And, like, everything else feels like…
the way I remember it is all under water
because everything got very dark
after that.
[Genty] One of the things
Mr. Gacy was doing
was he would hide little things
that he had saved from his victims.
[Vasquez] They had found Michael's,
uh, fishing license in, uh, Gacy's house.
That's when I started watching the news
and seeing a lot of the footage.
I was very young, and I didn't understand
that was our story
that was happening in front of me.
[reporter 1] Police today found
six more bodies under the John Gacy house
in Norwood Park Township
near Des Plaines, Illinois.
The six bodies bring the total found
under this house and garage to 15,
all appearing to have been
teenaged boys and young men.
[Green] Everyone was in shock
from talking about kids, you know, my age
all the way to the parents
in the neighborhood.
Just in shock.
You see bodies in your sleep.
You see him in your sleep.
It… it's just too much.
[Tovar] The media was all over the place.
They wanted, uh, to try to get
whatever angle they could.
Could you please confine yourself
to the front for right now?
[Genty] Every time you stepped
out the door, somebody was filming you,
somebody was trying to ask you a question.
[Tovar] It was like a circus.
Gacy was in international news.
[Amirante] Every day there was a headline
in the newspaper about another body found.
I didn't take this case for publicity,
and all of a sudden, I found myself
in the middle of this pervasive journalism
and… and news media
from all over the world.
The search for more bodies under the home
of suspected sex k*ller, John Gacy.
John Wayne Gacy.
-John Gacy.
-John Gacy.
John Wayne Gacy.
[camera shutters clicking]
I'm watching the news,
and wow, there's John Gacy on the TV,
and I'm yelling at my wife,
"That's the guy!"
"That's the guy
that did this!"
I remember how…
deadly scared I was in his presence
back in January of 1967.
I very, very easily could have been
one of those skeletons that they found.
Those young boys that he k*lled,
I can't imagine what they went through,
but I do know the frightful face
they would have seen.
[videographer] Head to the north,
feet to the south.
Remains are still being exhumed.
[ominous music plays]
[Genty] For days and days,
we kept digging them out,
and the numbers were racking up
higher and higher.
[reporter 2] Police found
six more bodies today.
That brings the total at the house to 21.
You know, you're talking about having,
you know, 20-some-odd bodies already.
It was pretty horrible to see it.
We had to put flags into the crawl space,
numbered for the different bodies
that were found there,
because that's all we had at that time
were numbers.
We're looking for Robert Piest,
ten days at most.
All these bodies down here
were all blackened
from the decomposition of the flesh.
They had been there for a long time.
That was the big issue.
[Bedoe] No sign of Rob Piest anywhere.
We were concerned at that point
with finding Rob Piest's body,
but it wasn't in the house.
[Sullivan] We needed to find Rob Piest.
[Albrecht] We started talking with Gacy.
We asked, "Well, where's the Piest body?"
And then he said, uh,
"Well, I can't really say."
And we said, "Is he buried someplace?"
And Gacy answered. He says,
"Well, he's not above ground
and he's not below ground."
And we're thinking,
"What the hell does that mean?"
He acted like it was all
a… a big bother to him, you know.
He was arrogant.
All of a sudden, Gacy leaned back
in his chair a little bit.
He kind of tenses up and closed his eyes,
and he's like that for a few seconds,
and then he started talking.
[Gacy] Want to know something
that seems funny right now?
I've had a couple of visions.
There's a road that leads to nothing.
I picture the g*dd*mn bank of the river
where the road ends.
It's like going up a ramp of a bridge,
and then there's water.
I can see something going into the water.
There's something in the river.
Just leave Piest where he's at.
Let's assume he is under the water.
[tape recorder clicks]
[unsettling music plays]
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01x02 - A Nicely Kept Secret
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Series depicts the m*rder spree of serial k*ller John Wayne Gacy, who k*lled at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.
Series depicts the m*rder spree of serial k*ller John Wayne Gacy, who k*lled at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.