JJohn Wayne Gacy was one of America’s most prolific – and horrible – serial killers, responsible for the deaths of 33 young people, 26 of whom he buried under his home in Chicago’s Norwood Park Township. An egocentric sociopath who ran a retirement company, had strong local political ties (and aspirations) and was lit by the moon like a clown at a children’s hospital called Pogo, Gacy was the worst of the worst. He was also, unsurprisingly, a shrewd liar, as confirmed by a 1992 interview that serves as the centerpiece of John Wayne Gacy: Devil in disguise, in which he claims that the police and the media “created an image of a fantasy monster” of him, and that “I had nothing to do with the murder of anyone.” Rarely has an arrogant murderer lied so and so blatantly.
In fact, the only real thing he can say in the entire chat, conducted by legendary FBI profiler Robert Ressler, is that “the clown has gained a reputation for what they used in my case”.
Debuting on March 25 at Peacock, John Wayne Gacy: Devil in disguise it is part history lesson, part psychological investigation and part showcase of cold and deceitful inhumanity, tracing a fine line between investigation and voyeurism. His main hook is that 1992 conversation between Gacy and Ressler, who looks closely at the imprisoned killer as he talks amicably and confidently about his innocence – he goes so far as to say that he did not even know the dead – while leafing through an enormous volume of material from research that, he believes, exonerates him. Nobody on planet Earth is believing this absurdity, including this series of documents. However, if anyone comes close, it is Craig Bowley, a longtime prison correspondent with Gacy who helped organize Ressler’s video encounter with the demon, and who has spent years making friends with him, to the point that he tells who was almost heartbroken when he finally had to say goodbye – through a hug – to his long-known confidant and confidant.
Bowley’s distorted fascination with Gacy is an area where John Wayne Gacy: Devil in disguise may have snooped much more forcefully. For the most part, however, this six-part nonfiction venture is a little too broad; like so many of his gender brothers, it could have been at least a shorter episode without losing any important facts or insights. This is especially felt in its later half, when an excessive amount of attention is paid to the minutiae of Gacy’s trial (and, in particular, his futile defense against insanity), as well as in efforts to name the handful of victims who have never been officially identified at the moment. These topics are relevant to the larger portrait painted here, but more conciseness would have strengthened the impact of these passages, as well as improved the momentum of the procedures.
Happily, John Wayne Gacy: Devil in disguise it is exhausting, enlightening and intriguing. The Gacy he reveals is a cruelly ambitious and narcissistic man who grew up with an alcoholic and abusive father and a sexual appetite for young men. He married and divorced twice (he had children with his first wife), while having homosexual encounters with countless individuals (he stood firm in the line that he was bisexual). He struggled to make inroads with political organizations and power players in Chicago (sometimes through the spread and promotion of pornography) and ran a remodeling company made up of male teenagers who had a suspected habit of disappearing. When a potential recruit, 15-year-old Robert Piest, a native of Des Plains, disappeared in 1978 when he saw Gacy about a job – this while the boy’s mother waited for him outside his workplace – the cops began to eavesdrop. What they finally found was a mass grave that had never been seen before.
Using interviews with detectives, journalists, relatives, friends, relatives of the victims and more, as well as archival news broadcasts, crime scene images, home movies and photographs, John Wayne Gacy: Devil in disguise provides a complete account of Gacy’s police surveillance and arrest, and the excavation of his nightmare home. The series avoids formal sensationalism on most laps; Dramatic recreations are absent (only scenes staged from scenarios similar to key locations are employed), and images of Gacy as Pogo – a disguise he did not use to attract victims – are kept to a minimum. There is a serious quality to his narrative, which also looks at Gacy’s troubled past before Chicago in Iowa, where he was convicted of sexually assaulting the teenage son of a state deputy and was sentenced to 10 years behind bars at the State Penitentiary of Anamosa.
“What they finally found was a mass grave that had never been seen before.“
The fact that Gacy received parole just 18 months after his sentence proves one of the many cases where criminal justice and law enforcement systems have failed. John Wayne Gacy: Devil in disguise details how Gacy repeatedly appeared on police radar for various crimes and cases of missing persons, and still always seemed to avoid it, either due to his personality or the political connections he made throughout the area. In addition, in its epilogue chapter, the series states that the police, fearful of digging up revelations that would cast a derogatory light on their initial investigation, may have deliberately ignored clues and evidence in subsequent years that would have unearthed additional victims of Gacy (he boasted that his body count was close to 45).
Explicit and implicit charges against the police are regular components of the John Wayne Gacy: Devil in disguise, and are complemented by a very persuasive conspiracy theory about the possibility that Gacy did not act alone, but was assisted by members of John Norman’s pedophile sex trafficking network, to which Gacy was connected through an employee (Phil Paske ). Gacy’s familiarity with these individuals, as well as with his shadowy trench-diggers, Michael Rossi and David Cram, makes it entirely possible that others helped him to carry out facets of his long killing spree. Consequently, although Gacy was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994, the case continues to present questions answered in an uncomfortable way.
John Wayne Gacy: Devil in disguiseThe conclusion has a compelling argument that, in some ways, more needs to be done – for example, policemen digging the backyard of the building where Gacy’s mother lived and where he possibly buried more bodies. What needs no further elaboration, however, is the depth of Gacy’s deviant depravity, which despite his affable 1992 routine for Ressler, can be seen hidden behind his hard, emotionless eyes.