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John Wayne Gacy and the South Chicago Horror

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To all who knew him, John Wayne Gacy appeared to be an affable and likable person.
He was charming and quite easy to get along with, respected in his community, owner of a successful construction business, a good Catholic, captain of his Democratic Party precinct, and an active Jaycee member.
He organized street parties with his neighbors and friends and entertained children in his Pogo the Clown costume.
He was a hard-working, generous, friendly person devoted to his family and community.
But he was also a psychopathic serial killer, whose grisly sexual perversions shocked a nation.
Gacy was born on March 17, 1942 in a south Chicago Illinois hospital, the middle of three children in a devout Catholic family.
He attended Catholic school and had the reputation of being a quiet boy.
He was a Boy Scout and worked bagging groceries and with a newspaper route in order to earn money.
His childhood was entirely normal except for a number of health problems, and a difficult relationship with his father.
When Gacy was eleven years old, a swing hit him on the head and caused a blot clot on his brain which was not diagnosed until five years later.
During this period the boy suffered blackouts which were eventually treated with medication.
When he was seventeen he was diagnosed with a heart problem which hospitalized him several times in the course of his life.
Later, when an older teenager, Gacy began experiencing difficulties with his father, who was an alcoholic and wife-abuser.
The father also verbally abused Gacy and his sisters.
The family problems interfered with Gacy's schoolwork, and he eventually dropped out of school and moved to Las Vegas where he obtained menial work which depressed him.
On returning to Chicago he enrolled in a business college near a south Chicago hospital from which he later graduated.
His salesmanship abilities brought him increasingly lucrative jobs and community respect.
He joined the Jaycees and became a vice-president, and later was named Man of the Year.
When he was twenty-two he married a coworker whose parents owned a chain of KFC franchises, and Gacy went to work for them in an executive position.
Besides his dedicated hard work in his in-laws' business, Gacy joined many volunteer organizations.
He and his wife had two children and presented the picture of a loving family of the suburban middle class.
However, rumors began to surface about Gacy's sexual proclivities and in 1968 he was indicted for committing sodomy with a teenage boy.
The boy claimed that he had been tricked by Gacy into allowing himself to be tied up, and then Gacy raped him violently.
Gacy denied the charge but four months later he was accused of hiring a thug to assault his accuser (the thug was caught and admitted to police that Gacy had hired him).
Gacy was sent to prison for ten years and his wife then divorced him on the grounds of infidelity.
A model prisoner, he was paroled after two years and moved in with his mother in Chicago.
Gacy remarried in 1972, and moved to a home in a quiet neighborhood near a southern Chicago suburbs hospital.
However, his neighbors complained about a horrible stench which seemed to emanate from beneath Gacy's house.
Gacy explained that it was caused by moisture buildup in a crawlway beneath the house.
Over the next few years Gacy's homosexual proclivities had become more obvious, and his new wife divorced him in 1975.
Gacy was also becoming subject to violent mood swings.
Then, the disappearances of nine young men who had worked for Gacy's contracting business in the late seventies attracted the attention of the police.
Gacy's suspicious behavior under interrogation led to an investigation which turned up his earlier record, and led to a search of Gacy's home and the discovery of cadavers in the house crawl space.
Three days before Christmas, 1978, detectives arrested Gacy, who admitted to having murdered at least thirty boys and burying the remains of most of them beneath his house.
He explained that he would trick his victims into allowing themselves to be handcuffed, then he would rape them and then kill them by strangling them as he raped them.
Eventually thirty-two victims' bodies were found.
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