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Dead Under the Floor: How Gacy Hid Thirty-Three Murders in Plain Sight
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Twenty-nine bodies buried beneath a suburban Chicago home, a contractor who dressed as a clown, and the neighbors who explained away the smell for years. This chapter follows the crimes, the crawl space, and the December 1978 disappearance that finally broke John Wayne Gacy's case wide open.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There's a number that sets this case apart from almost every other in American criminal history. Not the trial.
Gacy's house sat at eight two one three West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park Township, just outside Chicago. It was a single-story ranch house.
Starting in nineteen seventy-two, Gacy began luring young men and teenage boys to his home under the pretense of construction work and job offers. His victims were mostly teenagers and young men, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-one years old.
At some point the smell became undeniable. Neighbors noticed it.
On December thirteenth, nineteen seventy-eight, a fifteen-year-old named Robert Piest finished a shift at a pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois. He told his mother he'd be right back.
Gacy didn't stay silent. That's worth pausing on.
In March nineteen eighty, Gacy went to trial. His defense team pursued an insanity argument, claiming he suffered from a personality disorder that made him unable to control his actions.
By April nineteen seventy-nine, the house on West Summerdale Avenue was gone. Authorities demolished it.
On May tenth, nineteen ninety-four, John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center. He was fifty-two years old.
The Gacy case reordered a lot of assumptions. It established clearly that a serial killer could operate for years inside an active, social community life without triggering detection.
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