Gacy

0:25 For many of us, watching horror movies and listening to true crime podcasts is the closest we will ever knowingly come to the killers living among us. But that wasn't the case for many young men in America during the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, and the killer they would meet was quite unlike any other. He was born in nineteen forty two Chicago. John Stanley, our serial killer's father was a mechanic and oh World War One veteran who often beat and verbally abused and tormented his son, a son who had become known as the infamous John Wayne Gacy. John later recalled that the beatings from his father started when he was only four years old. His mother, Marian, would often try to shield John from her husband, but that only made the beatings worse.

1:18 John Stanley would often brate and belittle his son, calling him a sissy and a mama's boy for needing Marian's protection. The beatings became so bad and so frequent that John was perpetually afraid of getting into trouble, and that was why when a family friend began molesting John when he was only seven, John kept it to himself instead of telling his father, and John was always at risk of saying or doing the wrong thing. He wasn't like the other boys his age. He was softer, quieter, and enjoyed spending time with his mother and sisters. A congenital heart condition meant that he couldn't go out and play with the other children in the neighborhood or rough and tumble like the other boys liked to do. In his father's eyes, he was already a failure, and that was something that John didn't believe he would ever be able to fix.

2:07 Things grew worse when John turned eleven and started experiencing blackouts and seizures. Doctors discovered that he also had a brain clot as well as the heart condition. They were able to treat the clot, but between treatments and other hospitalizations for a burst appendix, John had missed too much of school and ended up dropping out. Now around eighteen years old, he found work at a local political party office, something that his father also took issue with. Tensions grew between the two over John's work and ended up reaching the boiling point when a dispute over John's car led him to packing up his bags and moving to Las Vegas. There he found work as a mortuary assistant and slept in a cot behind the embalming room. And it was in Las Vegas that John would experience something so shocking it sent him all the way back to his abusive father.

3:01 John had no questions about his sexuality from a young age. He'd figured out that he was more attracted to men than he was to women. But times being what they were, Openly being a homosexual wasn't going to win John any favors. He kept his orientation to himself and tried to suppress his desires, But when a teenage boy ended up on the embalming table on the other side of John's bedroom wall, John found the temptation too strong to ignore. In the middle of the night, when everyone else at the morticians had gone home, John snuck into the boy's coffin and laid down beside him. He spent the night intertwined with the teenager's remains, hugging and caressing him for as long as he could. The emotions that John experienced that night had him packing his bags and heading home the following day, maybe trying to distance himself from the memories as much as possible. John then enrolled into business and quickly struck up a new relationship. Her name was Marilyn Myers, and she provided John Wayne Gacy with the fresh start that he so desperately needed. Once they were married, Marylynd's father bought up three KFC restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa, and made John the manager. The cover of a loving wife, two young children, and running a successful business opened many doors for John and helped him put the past behind him. Allegedly, and according to John's own account, it was then that his parents came to visit and John Stanley had a change of heart.

4:34 John Wayne Gaysey recalled that his father took him by the hand and said, quote, son, I was wrong about you. If true, John Stanley had plenty of reasons for believing that his son now had it all. He had the house, the family, and the business, and those around him believed that John was a well mannered and respectable man. But there was something brewing under the surface. It started with the people that John surrounded himself with. He was part of a local club for businessmen, supposedly to help grow and support each other and their business endeavors, but behind closed doors anything was possible. Their parties involved drugs, prostitutes, and even sometimes each other's wives, and they stirred up some feelings in John that he'd been so desperately trying to forget. John built a tiki bar in the basement of his family home. He and his wife Marilyn, hosted their own parties together, but John often invited the teenage boys he employed at his restaurants home as well.

5:35 He lured them in with the promise of alcohol and entertainment, and on at least one occasion, things went too far. You have to have sex with a man before you start having sex with women, John told the fifteen year old son of a friend, Donald Vorhees. Wasn't quite sure if he believed him, but by then Donald was quite drunk and alone with John in the basement. Before Donald could fully understand what was happening, John was forcing him to perform oral sex on him. It took Donald a few months to work up the courage to tell his father what John had made him do that night, but when he did, he pulled back the curtain and revealed what was really going on inside John's home. By then John had quite a few more victims, all of them young boys, and most of them his employees.

6:25 Furious and disgusted by the predator living among them, the Vorhetes took John to court. John first tried to deny the allegations, and then he tried to scare Donald off. He paid another teenager that worked at one of his restaurants three hundred dollars to beat up Donald Vorhees and convince him not to testify. Far from being deterred, Donald showed up in court with even more evidence against John, and John was sentenced to ten years in prison for his crimes. Instead of keeping his head low and flying under the radar, John used his time behind bars to become a model inmate. He organized to pay raise for the other inmates working in the prison, and even managed the installment of a mini golf course in the wreck yard. But then he was shaken by some shocking news. On Christmas Day nineteen sixty nine, John Stanley Gacy died, and when he heard the news, John Wayne Gacy supposedly hit the floor of his prison cell and started uncontrollably sobbing. He was denied compassionately to attend his father's funeral, but it didn't matter much. John served only about eighteen months of his tenure prison sentence before he was released on parole. Part of the conditions of his release was that he would be living with his mother. He couldn't return home because Marylyn had already divorced him and taken full custody of their children. John would never see any of them again. Within months of being released, John was accused of molesting and attempting to rape another teenage boy.

7:55 The charges were dropped when the boy failed to show up in court, and John was then free to move into the yellow brick ranch in Chicago that he and his mother had just bought together. It was in this house that John would cement his legacy. He laid the foundations for what was to come by forming his own construction business and bringing a piece of his imagination into reality. During his short incarceration, John used to draw a character he called Pogo the Clown, and now that he was free to walk the streets again, John brought Pogo with him. He would often dress up and attend children's birthday parties and hospitals as Pogo the Clown, and for many in the neighborhood, John and Pogo were one and the same. Pogo provided John with a good sense of cover, but he sealed the deal by marrying again. He and his second wife, Carol Hoff, had once dated in high school, and now she and her two daughters from a previous marriage made John look like the perfectly harmless family man that he wanted people to think. He was used this image to lure young men into his garage. He promised them alcohol and porn and maybe even a summer job at his construction company, and then he abused them.

9:09 Carol became suspicious of the number of young boys coming in and out of their home, and when John confessed to her that he was actually bisexual, it didn't come as much of a surprise. But what happened shortly after that, however, did. On Mother's Day nineteen seventy five, John climbed off of Carol and told her that that was the last time they were ever going to have sex. This startling proclamation and the constant stream of young men was enough for Carol to realize that something was deeply wrong with their marriage. Carol divorced John and got out just in time before things would take a turn that they would never come back from. The first and second had allegedly already occurred.

9:54 John had supposedly mistakenly believed that one of the fifteen year old boys he had lured back to his yellow brick homeb had wanted to kill him. John acted quickly and without thinking. He killed the boy and stashed his body in the cross space of his home before anyone discovered what he had done. He allegedly did the same with one more victim before Carol divorced him and moved out. Carol leaving gave John a freedom he had never experienced before, and young men began disappearing from the neighborhood at an alarming rate. Most of these young men ended up murdered and hidden underneath John's home. He liked to torture and torment his victims. He sometimes pretended that he was about to perform a magic trick and handcuff their hands behind their backs. John wouldin dangled the keys in front of their faces and enjoy watching them struggle as they realized they were actually in grave danger. He also used to enjoy sitting on their chests and forcing them to perform oral sex on him. John was still a big man because his heart condition kept him from being very active, so these boys often could and breathe and suffocated underneath him. John would strangle and then revive them, sometimes even drown them in his bathtub before bringing them back and doing it all over again. And when they were gone, John would sometimes join the search parties going on in the neighborhood and pretend to look for them. But it was his thirty third and final official victim that John would be unable to escape

11:24 from himself. Robert Piste had only walked into the pharmacy to talk to a man about a summer construction job when he disappeared. His mother, Elizabeth, was still sitting outside in the car, and had the police looking for her son within hours. John Wayne Gacy's construction company had recently renovated the pist family pharmacy, and the investigators quickly put the puzzle pieces together. They called John in for questioning, and though they didn't find any traces of Robert and John's home, they did find the receipt from the pharmacy for one of Robert's friends. There. One thing led to another, and John's stash of victims were pulled out from under his house. Robert's remains were found at a nearby river and cemented John Wayne Gacy's legacy as the killer Clown. He was sentenced to death for his crimes and his last meal was supposedly a bucket of Kentucky fried chicken. So that's ten minute Murder for today, brief and bingeable true crime.

12:31 My name is Joe, I'm the host, and thank you for taking the time to listen to ten minute Murder and this story today. I don't know how we got it in the amount of time we got it done, and he's like eleven minutes or something like that. That's crazy. I did an episode on John Wayne Gacy probably two years ago. I don't remember exactly, but if you scroll back, there's going to be another episode of John Wayne Gacy and it's beefy. There's a lot to it. It's much much longer than the one today is. So if you like longer episodisodes, that's cool because there are several of them scattered in the in the you know, if you go back and search ten Minute Murders episode list, you'll find several of them there, including stories about Charles Manson, the Green River Killer, also Ted Bundy. There are several that I took time I used to do longer episodes every now and then. I don't do that so much anymore, but there was a time when I did longer episodes. So if you like those, there are some back there you can go check out. Anyway, Thank you for listening to this one. That's it. That's your episode for today. Thank you so much for listening to ten minute Murder