John Wayne Gacy: The Killer Clown’s Dark Secrets

For many of us, watching horror movies and listening to true crime podcasts is the closest we will ever knowingly come to the killers living among us, but that wasn’t the case for many young men in America during the 1960’s and 70’s.

And the killer they would meet was quite unlike any other.

He was born in 1942 in Chicago. John Stanley, our serial killer’s father, was a mechanic and a World War I veteran who often beat, verbally abused and tormented his son; a son who would become known as the infamous John Wayne Gacy.

John later recalled that the beatings from his father started when he was only four years old. His mother, Marion Elaine Gacy, would often try to shield John from her husband, but that only made the beatings worse. John Stanley Gacy would then often berate and belittle his son, calling him a “sissy” and a “mama’s boy” for needing Marion’s protection. 

The beatings became so bad and so frequent that John was perpetually afraid of getting into trouble. That was why when a family friend began molesting John when he was only seven years old, John kept it to himself instead of telling his father.

And John was always at risk of saying or doing the wrong thing. He wasn’t like other boys his age. He was softer, quieter and enjoyed spending time with his mother and sisters. A congenital heart condition meant that he couldn’t go out and play with the other children in the neighborhood or rough and tumble like the other boys liked to do.

In his father’s eyes, John was already a failure and that was something that John didn’t believe he would ever be able to fix.

Things grew worse when John turned eleven and started experiencing blackouts and seizures. Doctors discovered that he also had a brain clot as well as the heart condition. They were able to treat the clot, but between treatments and another hospitalization for a burst appendix, John had missed too much school and ended up dropping out.

Now around eighteen years old, he found work at a local political party office, something that his father also took issue with. Tensions grew between the two over John’s work and ended up reaching their boiling point when a dispute over John’s car led to him packing his bags and moving to Las Vegas.

There he found work as a mortuary assistant and slept in a cot behind the embalming room. And it was in Las Vegas that John would experience something so shocking, it sent him all the way back to his abusive father.

John had no questions about his sexuality. From a young age, he’d figured out that he was more attracted to men than he was to women, but times being what they were, openly being a homosexual wasn’t going to win John any favors. John kept his orientation to himself and tried to suppress his desires.

But when a teenage boy ended up on the embalming table on the other side of John’s bedroom wall, John found the temptation too strong to ignore. In the middle of the night, when everyone else at the morticians had gone home, John snuck into the young boy’s coffin and laid down beside him. He spent the night intertwined with the teeanger’s remains, hugging and caressing him for as long as he could.

The emotions that John experienced that night had him packing his bags and heading home the following day. Perhaps trying to distance himself from the memories as much as possible, John then enrolled into business school and quickly struck up a new relationship.

Her name was Marlynn Myers and she provided John Wayne Gacy with the fresh start that he so desperately needed. Once they were married, Marlynn’s father bought up three KFC restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa, and made John the manager. The cover of a loving wife, two young children and running a successful business opened many doors for John and helped him put the past behind him.

Allegedly, and according to John’s own account, it was then that his parents came to visit and John Stanley had a change of heart. John Wayne Gacy recalled that his father took him by the hand and said: “Son, I was wrong about you.”

If true, John Stanley had plenty of reasons for believing that his son now had it all. He had the house, the family and the business and those around him believed that John was a well-mannered and respectable man, but there was something brewing under the surface.

It started with the people that John surrounded himself with. He was part of a local club for businessmen, supposedly to help grow and support each other and their business endeavors , but behind closed doors anything was possible. Their parties involved drugs, prostitutes and even each other’s wives and they stirred up some feelings in John that he’d been so desperately trying to forget.

John built a tiki bar in the basement of his family home. He and his wife Marlynn hosted their own parties there together, but John also often invited the teenage boys he employed at his restaurants home as well. He lured them in with the promise of alcohol and entertainment and on at least one occasion things went too far.

“You have to have sex with a man before you start having sex with women,” John told the fifteen-year-old son of a friend. Donald Voorhees wasn’t quite sure if he believed him, but by then Donald was quite drunk and alone with John in the basement. Before Donald could  fully understand what was happening, John was forcing him to perform oral sex on him. It took Donald a good few months to work up the courage to tell his father what John had made him do that night, but when he did, he pulled back that curtain and revealed what was really going on inside John’s home.

By then, John had quite a few more victims, all of them young boys and most of them his employees. Furious and disgusted by the predator living amongst them, the Voorhees took John to court. John first tried to deny the allegations and then he tried to scare Donald off.

He paid another teenager that worked at one of his restaurants 300 dollars to beat up Donald Voorhees and convince him not to testify. Far from being deterred, Donald showed up in court with even more evidence against John and John was sentenced to ten years in prison for his crimes.

Instead of keeping his head low and flying under the radar, John used his time behind bars to become a model inmate. He organized a pay raise for the other inmates working in the prison and even managed the installment of a mini-golf course in the rec yard.

But then he was shaken by some shocking news.

On Christmas day 1969, John Stanley Gacy died and when he heard the news, John Wayne Gacy supposedly hit the floor of his prison cell and started uncontrollably sobbing. He was denied compassionate leave to attend his father’s funeral, but it didn’t matter much. John served only about eighteen months of his ten-year prison sentence before he was released on parole.

Part of the conditions for his release was that he would be living with his mother. He couldn’t return home because Marlynn had already divorced him and taken full custody of their children. John would never see any of them again.

Within months of being released, John was accused of molesting and attempting to rape another teenage boy. The charges were dropped when the boy failed to show up in court and John was then free to move into the yellow-brick ranch in Chicago that he and his mother had just bought together.

It was in this house that John would cement his legacy. 

He laid the foundations for what was to come by forming his own construction business and bringing a piece of his imagination into reality. During his short incarceration, John used to draw a character he called Pogo the Clown and now that he was free to walk the streets again, John brought Pogo with him. He would often dress up and attend children’s birthday parties and hospitals as Pogo the Clown and for many in the neighborhood, John and Pogo were one and the same.

Pogo provided John with a good sense of cover, but he sealed the deal by marrying again. He and his second wife Carol Hoff had once dated in high school and now she and her two daughters from a previous marriage made John look like the perfectly harmless family man that he wanted people to think that he was.

He used this image to lure young men into his garage. He promised them alcohol and porn or maybe even a summer job in his construction company and then he abused them.

Carol became suspicious of the number of young boys coming in and out of their home and when John confessed to her that he was actually bisexual, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. But what happened shortly after that, however, did. On mother’s day 1975, John climbed off of Carol and told her that that was the last time that they were ever going to have sex. This startling proclamation and the constant stream of young men was enough for Carol to realize that something was deeply wrong with their marriage.

Carol divorced John and got out just in time before things would take a turn that they could never come back from.

The first and the second had allegedly already occurred. John had supposedly mistakenly believed that one of the fifteen-year-old boys he had lured back to his yellow-brick home had wanted to kill him. John had acted quickly and without thinking. He killed the boy and stashed his body in the crawlspace of his home before anyone discovered what he had done. He allegedly did the same with one more victim before Carol divorced him and moved out.

Carol leaving gave John a freedom he had never experienced before and young men began disappearing from the neighborhood at an alarming rate. Most of these young men ended up murdered and hidden underneath John’s home. 

He liked to torture and torment his victims. He sometimes pretended that he was about to perform a magic trick and handcuffed their hands behind their backs. John would then dangle the keys in front of their faces and enjoy watching them struggle as they realized that they were actually in danger.

He also used to enjoy sitting on their chests and forcing them to perform oral sex on him. John was still a big man because his heart condition kept him from being very active, so these boys often couldn’t breathe and suffocated underneath him. John would strangle and then revive them, sometimes even drown them in his bathtub before bringing them back and doing it all over again.

And when they were gone, John would sometimes join the search parties going on in the neighborhood and pretend to look for them.

But it was his thirty-third and final official victim that John would be unable to escape from himself. Robert Piest had only walked into the pharmacy to talk to a man about a summer construction job when he disappeared. His mother, Elizabeth Piest, was still sitting outside in the car and had the police looking for her son within hours.

John Wayne Gacy’s construction company had recently renovated the Piest family’s pharmacy and the investigators quickly put the puzzle pieces together. They called John in for questioning and though they didn’t find any traces of Robert in John’s home, they did find the receipt from the pharmacy for one of Robert’s friends there.

One thing led to another and John’s stash of victims were pulled out from under his house. Robert’s remains were found in a nearby river and cemented John Wayne Gacy’s legacy as the Killer Clown. He was sentenced to death for his crimes and his last meal was a supposedly bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.