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Robert Piest and the Warrant That Exposed Thirty-Three Dead
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On December 21, 1978, Des Plaines police entered John Wayne Gacy's ranch house looking for a missing teenager and found a crawl space that had hidden twenty-nine bodies for six years. This is the chapter where the smell, the diagrams, and a fifteen-year-old's disappearance finally brought the killer clown's world down.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's December twenty-first, nineteen seventy-eight. The temperature in Norwood Park Township is well below freezing.
To understand how December twenty-first was possible, you have to understand what John Wayne Gacy looked like to the people around him. He ran a legitimate contracting business called P.D.M.
The neighbors noticed something eventually. Not the comings and goings of young men.
On December thirteenth, nineteen seventy-eight, a fifteen-year-old named Robert Piest was finishing a shift at a pharmacy in Des Plaines. He told his mother he needed to speak to a contractor about a summer job, one that paid well.
When officers entered the house on December twenty-first, the smell hit them immediately. There was no ambiguity.
Gacy provided detailed accounts of what he'd done. He didn't deny the killings.
In March nineteen eighty, after a trial that laid out the full scope of the killings, John Wayne Gacy was convicted of thirty-three murders. At the time, it made him one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.
Those fourteen years did not produce significant public drama. Gacy painted, including portraits of clowns that would become perversely sought-after objects of curiosity.
Eight of Gacy's thirty-three victims remain unidentified as of twenty twenty-four. These are eight people who disappeared at some point between nineteen seventy-two and nineteen seventy-eight and whose families, if they exist, have never had confirmation of what happened to them.
Gacy's house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue was demolished in April nineteen seventy-nine, just months after the discovery. It couldn't remain.
Step back from the details for a moment and the structure of this case is stark. For six years, John Wayne Gacy killed teenagers and young men, buried most of them under his house, maintained a functioning public life, operated a real business, performed as a clown at children's events, and was never caught.
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