A NOTE FROM BRAD HUNTER: When I was commissioned to write Inside the Mind of John Wayne Gacy (Ad Lib Publishers). I wasn’t sure there was much left to tell. I was wrong. The book is available in paperback Aug. 4, 2022.
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On May 10, 1994 a needle containing a death-inducing cocktail was jabbed into the chubby arm of killer clown John Wayne Gacy, delivering him to oblivion.
While Gacy is long dead, the investigation into his sickening crimes has no end in sight.
The corpulent killer was convicted of the sex-torture murders of 33 young men and boys in the Chicago area between 1972 and 1978. Most of the victims were buried in a small crawl space underneath his house of horrors, others were thrown into the Des Plaines River.
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But even after his execution, numerous questions pervade any conversation about the suburban contractor.
Are there more victims? Who are the five young men and boys whose identification remains unknown? Did Gacy have accomplices? And finally, was the Killer Clown part of cross-country pedophile sex ring?
Retired homicide detective Rafael Tovar is convinced there are more victims. He said Gacy told him so. He told me in 2020 that Gacy said “45 sounds like a good number.”
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The Killer Clown also traveled a fair bit in the 1970s. And he was always trolling for sex with young men, who were hitchhiking in droves during the Me Decade.
His first recorded murder was occurred on Jan. 3, 1972 when he stabbed to death 16-year-old Timothy Jack McCoy after picking him up at the Greyhound bus station in Chicago.
But from 1972 to 1975 there were no recorded Gacy murders. What happened?
“From 1972 to 1975 he either didn’t kill or must have had other improvised dump sites. He doesn’t really settle on the crawl space until 1975 or 1976 and when that’s filled, he turns to the water,” criminologist Michael Arntfield told me.
“You have to look at that section — 1972 to 1975 — for a specific tally because we don’t have the graveyard that was his house. He could have been on the road where he improvised. There could be dozens of unknown victims.”
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As the clock ticked towards his demise, Gacy would tell anyone who would listen there were other suspects.
The men — Micheal Rossi, David Cram, and Phillip Paske — were all employees of his company, P.D.M. Contracting and all had keys to Gacy’s suburban home. Gacy employees had a nasty habit of ending up dead: In his crawl space or dumped into the Des Plaines River.
One Chicago detective who wouldn’t be named said there was “overwhelming evidence Gacy worked with an accomplice.”
Investigators always believed that Houston serial killer Dean “Candyman” Coryll was the killer clown’s template. Coryll recruited young men who recruited others like themselves to be raped and murdered.
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On death row, Gacy also pointed the finger at Paske, who was the top lieutenant of a man named John David Norman — America’s “pedophile of pedophiles” as the cops called him..
From the early to late 1970s, Norman ran a nationwide sex trafficking operation called the Delta Ring based in Chicago that supplied underage boys to pedophiles.
Two of the boys believed to have been slain by Gacy were last seen near Norman’s home. Norman was Gacy’s kind of guy.
A violent pedophile who had sexual-related convictions with young boys dating back to 1954 in Houston. His sex trafficking ring spanned the United States and the globe.
When he was arrested in Dallas in 1973, detectives discovered more than 30,000 index cards in his home with the names of pedophiles who paid for sex with young boys. And their sexual preferences.
Accomplices of Dean “Candy Man” Coryll alleged that the Houston killer worked with Norman and bought, sold and murdered many boys.
“Gacy, Norman and Paske are all in Chicago around that time,” Tracy Ullman, a producer of The Clown and the Candy Man documentary, told Oxygen.com. “I find it hard for all these things to just be a coincidence.”
In the 1970s, there was no internet for hookups or hunting, so pedophiles needed to have face-to-face contact with like-minded men.
“From years of research, we found that pedophiles — like Norman and Gacy — had lines of communication that tied them together, whether through coded ads in Boy’s Life magazine or actual contact to trade pornography or traffic in humans,” Ullman said.
And then there are the five remaining unidentified bodies in Cook County, Ill., unearthed from Gacy’s crawl space more than 40 years ago. Their grave markers state only their date of death and the words: “We remembered.”
Until those final bodies are identified, John Wayne Gacy will continue as something of an apex predator of the soul.
Terry Sullivan was one of the prosecutors who sent Gacy to death row.
“I felt from the very beginning there may be loose ends,” Sullivan told the Chicago Sun-Times.
The Gacy investigation remains open. There is no end in sight.
INSIDE THE MIND OF JOHN WAYNE GACY (Ad Lib Publishers) is available in paperback Aug. 4, 2022. It can be purchased at Amazon.com, Chapters-Indigo, Barnes and Noble and other fine retailers.
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