Sentenced to death for killing thirty three boys between 1972 and 1978, Gacy holds the record in America for the greatest number of murder convictions. After fourteen years on Death Row, he was executed on 10 May 1994.
Gacy served a prison sentence 1968 for committing sodomy but could not curb his sexual perversions. He worked at various times for the Kentucky Fried Chicken organization, as a shoe salesman and then a building contractor. In 1971, he moved into a house in Norwood Park, a suburb of Chicago, which provided a base for his contracting business.
In 1972, he married a second time and, during that summer, his wife complained of the smell coming from the crawl space beneath the house. He put lime down to neutralize the smell which he attributed to a broken sewer pipe. His wife left him in 1976 at a time when a found a role in community, performing as Pogo the Clown at charity functions.
In January 1978, a serious charge was made against Gacy, a nineteen year old boy told the police that he had been abducted from the street at gunpoint by Gacy and raped by him. Charges were not pursued because Gacy said he had made a deal with the boy who only complained because he had not been paid. But the net was drawing closer and, in December 1978, police with a search warrant arrived at Gacy's home. The parents of a missing boy reported that their son said he had a job with a contractor called Gacy.
While in the house, one of the officers, who had worked in a mortuary, detected a familiar smell coming up through the forced air-heating system. In the crawl space underneath the house, searchers found the remains of seven boys and eight more bodies were disinterred from the garden. Of the thirty three boys that Gacy killed, only twenty four were identified.
He trawled the streets for boys to satisfy his sexual needs. He handcuffed and tortured them before committing deviate sexual acts and finally strangling them. He sometimes passed himself off as a police officer even to the extent of putting a flashing light on his car roof.
according to the police, he confessed to his crimes, but Gacy later refutted this. He refused to give evidence at his trial in 1980 where a plea of insanity was pleased on his behalf. the jury convicted him and demanded the death penalty. In 1984, the US supreme Court confirmed his sentance and he remained on Death Row. He spent his time painting and drawing and wrote an account of his trail called A question Of Doubt. He maintained that he had not confessed to murders.
On 10 May 1994, John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center, Illinois. He was fifty two years of age. demonstrators outside the prison, some dressed as clowns, mocked him at his moment of death, chanting 'Justice, Justice, Not Too Late- John Wayne Gacy Meet Your Fate.' two businessmen were reported to have spent $7000 buying up Gacy's paintings so they they could be consigned to a bonfire for the satisfaction of his victims' relatives.