But Gacy was one of the most monstrously divided sociopaths in the annals of crime, and his masks concealed a hideous reality. Beneath his "man's man" persona, he was a tormented, self-loathing homosexual who preyed on young males. Beneath the smiling face, he was a leering, implacable sadist. Beneath the crawl space of his suburban house, more than two dozzen corpses moldered in the slime.
Raised by an abusive, alcoholic father--who spent much of his time deriding his son as a sissy--Gacy grew up to be a pudgy hypochondriac whose homosexual drives were a source of profound self-hatred. He also possessed a terrifyingly antisocial personality.
For a long time, however, he managed to conceal his real character beneath the veneer of an ambitious middle-American businessman. By the time he was 22, he was a married man and a father, a highly respected member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the successful manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Waterloo, Iowa. But he was also leading a secret life as a seducer and molester of young males. In 1968, after being arrested on a sodomy charge, he was hit with a 10 year sentence, although he proved to be such a model prisoner that he was paroled after only 18 months.
Gacy--whose first wife had divorced him on the day of his sentencing--relocated to Chicago, where he soon reestablished himself as an apparent pillar of the community, remarrying, starting a thriving contracting business, becoming active in local politics (on one occasion, he was photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter). Before long, however, his darkest impulses reasserted themselves--this time in an even ghastlier form. He became a human predator who tortured and murdered his young male pickups for his own depraved pleasure.
Cruising the streets for hustlers, drifters, and runaways, Gacy (who sometimes coerced them into his car by posing as a plainclothes cop) would bring them back to his house. There he would handcuff them and then subject them to hours of rape and torture before strangling them slowly. Their bodies would end up in the crawl space.
In 1978, police finally set their sights on the civic-minded contractor when a teenage boy dropped out of sight after telling friends that he was on his way to see Gacy about a job. Digging into Gacy's past, police uncovered records of his previous sex offenses. In the fetid muck of his crawl space, they exhumed the decomposing remains of 27 victims. Gacy had buried two more elsewhere on his property and dumped another four corpses in a nearby river, bringing the number of his victims to 33.
At first, Gacy maintained that he was the victim of multiple personality disorder, and that his atrocities were actually the work of an evil alter ego named Jack. But the ploy didn't work. He was given the death sentence in 1980. After 14 years on death row, the "Killer Clown" was finally executed by lethal injection.
