John Wayne Gacy

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American homicide; indicted on 1/13/1979 for the sadistic sexual assault and murder of 33 young men and boys, most of whom he buried in his cellar. After Gacy's conviction, there were 14 years of appeals before he was executed by lethal injection on 5/10/1994 at Joliet Federal Penitentiary, IL. He was pronounced dead at 12:58 am. In November 1998, police began digging outside an apartment building in Chicago where Gacy's mother had once lived, looking for more bodies. Gacy had confessed to burying most of his 33 victims under his house, with four dumped in the river, but while in prison, he wrote a note, "Let them find the bodies." There may be more. Raised in Chicago, he was the son of a machinist, a drunk who beat his wife and terrorized their three kids. Gacy briefly attended business college and became a show salesman before being arrested in Iowa for sodomy in 1968. He served 18 months of a ten-year-sentence, during which his wife of five years divorced him, before returning to Chicago in 1970. He became a restaurant cook and opened a contracting business on the side. In January 1972, Gacy killed his first victim, a teenager picked up at the Greyhound bus station. For the next six years Gacy, who married again in 1972, lured mostly young hustlers and hitchhikers to his suburban, two-bedroom home with promises of jobs, money and drugs. After having sex, he would often drug them and then usually hang or strangle the young men and bury the bodies in the crawl space of his house. He was finally caught in 1978 after killing 15-year-old Robert Piest, who had told his mom that he was going to see Gacy about a job. While investigating, police noticed an odor in Gacy's bathroom, and began a gruesome excavation that unearthed 27 bodies. Other victims dumped in the Des Plaines River. Gacy's second wife divorced him for sexual impotency. He lived an outgoing, seemingly normal life as a successful remodeling contractor, Democratic precinct captain and amateur clown. When apprehended, he confessed to strangling the young men and boys whom he had picked up for sex between 1972 and 1978. After his 1980 conviction, he recanted his confession, declaring his innocence with great indignation. He also turned his notoriety into profit, setting up a 900-phone number through a local attorney where people could talk to him for $1.99 a minute. He also sold his paintings from prison, including self-portraits, clowns, Jesus and Hitler, for up to $100 apiece. He basked in the attentions of the press, manipulating the system until the day that he was executed by the state. In 1993, when it was learned that he had made about $100,000 in 14 years from his art, embarrassed prison authorities declared that Gacy's business was a "burden on the mail room" and made him stop. Gacy spent about half of his income on art and mail supplies and paying medical and funeral costs for his mother, who died in 1989. He was left with about $1,200 in his prison account at the time of his execution. Link to Wikipedia biography