Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Of course everyone has the right to a fair trial. But sometimes, people will get angry and not care about that when someone does something so inherently evil - I myself tend to get that way towards animal abuse crimes. I don't think we should blame people for feeling that way, and call them names as he does in this book. People who get emotional are referred to as stupid, unpatriotic, and a woman being considered as a member of the jury is referred to as a "blonde bimbo". And this little blip of sexism is a fantastic segue way into my reason for quitting: In the years since Gacy’s arrest, there have been lingering concerns that Gacy might have been responsible for the deaths of other people whose bodies have yet to be found. And when police uncovered human remains in Gacy’s house in 1978, eight bodies couldn’t be identified. In July 2017, Cook County authorities used DNA evidence to identify one of these unidentified victims as 16-year-old James “Jimmie” Byron Haakenson, who had been reported missing since 1976. In October 2021, DNA testing identified another of Gacy’s victims as 21-year-old Francis Wayne Alexander, who also disappeared in 1976. Movie about John Wayne Gacy Phil Bettiker, a retired Cook County sheriff's officer, talks this month about his experiences as a lead investigator on the Gacy case. He was one of the first officers to hear Gacy’s confession. (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune)
He looked at his victims like he was taking out the trash. He had no feelings about them,” Amirante said, sitting in a private office at his Barrington home nearly 40 years after hearing the famous confession. “He could talk about a child who's dying of cancer and cry like a baby about this child he didn't even know or never met and feel authentically sad about this child. Then he'd talk about another child that he murdered and have no feelings whatsoever.” These victims were primarily born in the 1950s and their parents were born in the 1920s and ’30s,” Moran said. “That generation, the parents of these victims, was not ready to accept homosexuality, and because the media constantly brought up the gay aspect of this case, Sheriff (Dart) and I thought it may be what kept people from coming forward.”Amirante, a former assistant public defender who represented Gacy as his first private client, agreed that the secret to Gacy’s success lay largely in his unctuous charm developed over years as the son of a harsh, verbally abusive father and later refined as a successful shoe salesman. Gacy was a member of a Chicago-area “Jolly Joker” clown club and frequently performed in clown attire and makeup at children’s parties, charity fundraisers, and other events as his alter egos “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown.” Years later, during a conversation with detectives while he was under surveillance, Gacy discussed his work as a clown, remarking, “Clowns can get away with murder.”
We believe that there is more to Gacy's appearance in the show. As mentioned, it seems to be an introduction, not just to the coincidence overlap of their timelines and how that plays into Dahmer's story. Still, it may also allude to a second season of Monsterwith John Wayne Gacy as the subject. His is an equally disturbing story to that of Jeffrey Dahmer, with nearly double the amount of victims. He and others who worked during Gacy’s time said the case also tapped a well of homophobia that may have scared off some families from seeking information on their missing loved ones due to the social stigma. He’d have parties at his residence where he’d invite maybe 200 people. He’d be the center of attraction,” he recalled. "One-on-one, or in a group setting, he would be the last person that you’d think was a serial killer and is as devious as he was.” A photo used as evidence in the 1980 trial shows the excavation in Gacy's crawl space. (Cook County Circuit Court) Gacy pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and he went to trial on 33 murder charges. The prosecution argued Gacy was sane and in control of his actions, pointing to the elaborate steps Gacy took to both prepare for and conceal his murders. “These were certainly the acts of a man capable of premeditation, acting in his own best interest under duress, and recollecting the details of his criminal activities,” said chief prosecutor William Kunkle, according to Killer Clown. Mental health professionals testified for both sides about Gacy’s mental state.
Attorney Sam Amirante likes to joke that he was 6-foot-4 before he began representing an acquaintance named John W. Gacy and wound up 5-foot-2 after being ground down by the immense and horrifying details of the case. Amirante, who later became a Cook County judge, wrote about his experience and how his infamous former client made a drunken confession to being “judge, jury and executioner of many, many people.” I always tell people that the scary thing about Gacy was that he wasn’t scary at all. That’s the scary thing — he could have been anyone’s brother or father, uncle,” Amirante said. “He was not an intimidating kind of person, with the exception of when he would turn and change out of the very affable, charming, likable guy into the killer that he was.” While dressing as a clown is unique to Gacy, he and Dahmer appeared to be ordinary people leading normal lives. Gacy owned a construction business, was involved in local politics and enjoyed performing for children. Dahmer was well-mannered, served in the military, had a job, and, although he was somewhat of a loner, didn’t appear to be a cannibalistic serial killer. Of course, their timelines crossing has led people to compare the two before, which is likely why it was included in Monster. John Wayne Gacy was born on March 17, 1942, in Chicago to John Stanley Gacy and Marion Elaine Robison. His father, an auto repair machinist and World War I veteran, struggled with alcoholism and beat John and his two sisters with a razor strap if they were perceived to have misbehaved. John’s father frequently belittled him, calling him stupid and comparing him disparagingly to his sisters, according to Johnny and Me: The True Story of John Wayne Gacy by Barry E. Boschelli. On December 11, 1978, 15-year-old Robert Piest went missing after telling his mother he was going to meet Gacy to discuss a potential construction job. Piest’s family filed a missing person report with the police, which led to a search of Gacy’s house in Norwood Park. Authorities discovered several suspicious items there, including police badges, a pistol, hypodermic needles, pornographic films, and items that they later learned belonged to some of Gacy’s victims.
Image p2p slug: ct-john-wayne-gacy-investigation-major-players-002 Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart spearheaded an effort starting in 2010 to find out the names of the remaining unidentified Gacy victims. (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune) Gacy, for a man of the ’70s, was a traveler. He would travel all over the country for business and pleasure, and how did he turn it off in other places?” Moran said, referring to his urges to kill. Bettiker recalled the elaborately themed parties that Gacy hosted at his home, where dozens of guests unwittingly celebrated over his private graveyard.
people have been a little sour about the scene with the Trans female witness. while I don't necessarily agree with the things said to her we have to remember two things - one this was 50 years ago, the progression on this topic wasn't even close to scratching the surface. two, and he explains this later, his comments weren't personal - they served a purpose for the trial and trial alone. no one said you have to like lawyers but there is strategy behind what they do. The retelling of the murders committed by John Wayne Gacy is both compelling and revolting at the same time. It is not idle or morbid curiosity that interests, but more of a need to understand HOW this could happen. How could so many people disappear without being reported? How could so many murders occur without obvious detection? How was he able to repeat the process over and over again? And how could someone do this and NOT be insane? Gacy had everybody fooled, and people don’t like it — they don’t like that they were friends with an evildoer,” Moran said. Moran said identifying the remaining victims is difficult because of the likelihood that they were people with weak family bonds, possibly runaways or wards of the state, whose disappearances wouldn’t have raised alarms at a time when a million teenagers a year ran away from home, according to a published report from that time. He ONLY does this to "show how wrong an original perception could be" after making sure you know he "wasn't interested in embarrassing this poor little woman, or man, or whatever". This chapter closes with Donita Gannon leaving the courtroom and him writing "That woman had stood there at the outset of her testimony with her hand on a bible and sworn to god that she would tell the truth, when, in fact, she was living a lie".
Bettiker has since become a mentor to Moran, a one-man cold-case squad who was tasked by Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart in 2010 with finding out the names of the remaining unidentified victims. Other than a parent making a missing person report on a juvenile or another person, (we’d take) as much information as we could and we’d put it out to other departments,” Bettiker said. “But as far as an active pursuit of trying to locate them, there wasn’t that much done, unless they were a fragile youth or something like that. But for the ages of most of the Gacy victims, if they’re runaways, they’re runaways. We try to locate them … but there wasn’t an awful lot we could do.” Gacy, shown in front of his home in unincorporated Norwood Park Township in 1976, entertained children as a clown named Pogo. (Martin Zielinski photo)
Discover
The cops started digging up the bodies, and Amirante realized he was now defending one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. Retired sheriff’s investigator Phil Bettiker, one of the first officers to hear Gacy’s confession, has grim memories of the early days of the case, particularly when he and other sheriff’s officers began excavating bodies from underneath the home. Inside the muddy pit, days seemed to stretch on endlessly as reporters and others gathered outside waiting for the nightly body count. He remembered officers running over to a local McDonald’s to get fry baskets to sift the soil. And he recalled with a smile how a supervisor gave him and other officers the OK to help themselves to a case of Gacy’s beer after digging up his home for more than 12 hours. Sam Amirante had been a practicing lawyer for several years, but he had just started his own private practice when a guy he knew from his political precinct called him asking for a favor. John Wayne Gacy, a Democratic Party precinct captain and small business owner, was being followed around and harassed by the police in their little Chicago suburb, and wanted Sam to look into it. Something about a missing teenager. On March 12, 1980, after a short jury deliberation, Gacy was found guilty of committing 33 murders, and he became known as one of the most ruthless serial killers in American history.
Great Deal 
New Comment