Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, out on Peacock Oct. 16, dramatizes the real-life crimes of John Wayne Gacy, who was executed in 1994 for killing 33 young men and boys in the 1970s and burying many of them underneath his Chicago-area home. In 1980, he was found guilty of “murdering more people than anyone else in U.S. history,” as TIME reported back then.
The series, starring Michael Chernus as Gacy, draws heavily from a 2021 NBC News documentary series John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise (also on Peacock) which features a rarely seen 1992 interview with Gacy that former FBI profiler Robert Ressler conducted in prison.
Here’s how the show is inspired by Gacy’s real comments and crimes.
How John Wayne Gacy got caught
The new drama starts with a mother in a pharmacy looking for her son, Rob Piest, who worked there but had gone to meet Gacy, a building contractor, about a potential job and never came home.
Piest was a real person, and the search for him in December 1978 led police directly to Gacy, who readily confessed. Here’s how TIME described the sequence of events in a 1980 report:
“When police questioned him about the disappearance of a local 15-year-old named Robert Piest, Gacy began jabbering about a seven-year career of murder, of picking up boys and young men, forcing them to perform sexual acts and then strangling them. Police discovered 26 bodies in a 40-ft. crawl space beneath his house, one body under his dining room and two buried in his backyard. Four more bodies, including Piest’s, were dumped in the Des Plaines River.”
In the show, law enforcement are repelled by the smell of rotting corpses in Gacy’s crawl space. Gacy also leads them to a bridge where he claims he dumped bodies into the river below.
Most of Gacy’s victims were young men who worked for him. In the show, when he asks his lawyer why more of his employees aren’t testifying for him at his trial, his lawyer retorts, “I can’t bring in your employees because you killed most of them.”
John Wayne Gacy’s sexuality
In the drama, Gacy identifies as bisexual. That’s also how he described himself in the 1992 interview, in which he vehemently denies that he’s gay.
That said, he specifically targeted young men and boys and admitted to cuddling with the corpse of a young male during a brief stint working at a mortuary in Las Vegas in 1962. In the 1992 conversation, he insisted that he had nothing against gay people as an “outspoken liberal,” adding, “I don’t deny that I engaged in sex with males, but I’m bisexual. My preference is women. I’ve been married enough times and have children.”
Gacy’s first wife Marlynn Myers, with whom he had two children, divorced him while he was serving 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to sodomy in 1968. He was accused of assaulting a young boy, though he always claimed their relations were consensual. After he was released from prison, Gacy moved to the Chicago area, where he built his building contractor business and remarried to Carole Lofgren. While they divorced in 1976, she still described him as a “warm and gentle” lover at his 1980 trial.
Clowning around
In the first episode of the drama, Gacy opens up about his beloved hobby of clowning. His private life and the public life as a clown were his way of rebelling against his upbringing with a very conservative father.
He would march in parades, visit hospitals, and make balloon animals. In his 1992 interview, he said putting on clown makeup was as relaxing as drinking.
His lines in the show are straight out of the 1992 interview, in which he said he enjoyed clowning because it made him feel “relaxed.” He “regressed into childhood” and enjoyed how “you could let yourself go and act a fool.”
In the show, as he did in the interview, Gacy says unashamedly that you can get away with flirting as a clown and bragged about touching women without their consent. He really did say, as the show depicts, “Clowns can get away with murder.”
A botched execution
The series ends with family members being notified that Gacy has been executed, but they are not in the room when it happens, so viewers do not see his final moments.
Before he was executed on May 10, 1994, Gacy had a final meal of fried chicken, fried shrimp, french fries, and fresh strawberries. His execution was supposed to be five minutes long, but it took 18 minutes because a clog developed in the tube delivering the lethal chemicals into his veins that were supposed to knock him out and then suppress his breathing.
Of the 237 executions that took place since 1976, 18 were botched, including Gacy’s. “The monster was dead,” TIME reported back then, while highlighting other executions that had gone awry. “But was the killing itself monstrous?”
In the 1992 interview, he slammed news outlets that called him a monster. He argued that the media was looking for a monster, painting him as “a homosexual serial killer” who “strolled down the streets and stalked young boys and slaughtered them,” he said. Later on, he added, “I consider myself the 34th victim.”
The post The Real Serial Killer Who Inspired Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy appeared first on TIME.
