♪♪
Gacy: To me, clowning was a way of relaxation for me.
You regressed into childhood. You were able to relax.
And you could be goofy if you wanted to.
And still, you had the facade of your face being covered.
♪♪
Welcome to "very scary people."
I'm Donnie wahlberg.
It was the mid 1970s, years before the phrase
"serial killer" had even been coined.
So no one in Chicago could have imagined
there was one living among them.
And that's just how John Wayne Gacy wanted it.
By day, he was a beloved community volunteer,
a friendly neighbor, and a successful businessman,
even a professional clown who made kids laugh.
But by night, John Wayne Gacy became the stuff of nightmares,
cruising the streets of Chicago looking for prey.
The things Gacy did to his victims were unspeakable.
What made this seemingly normal guy
into such a depraved monster?
And how would police ultimately discover his evil secret?
♪♪
Godzik: I remember being in bed.
My mother came into my room and said,
"do you know where your brother is?"
I said, "no."
And she said, "he didn't come home."
It just wasn't something we were used to.
And immediately, she called the police,
and they said to my mother,
"well, what do you want us to do about it?
17-year-olds are goofy.
They all run away.
But they'll be back."
That was the mantra.
"He'll be back. Don't worry about it."
Albrecht: The '70s was a different time.
Kids were running away all the time.
In Chicago, thousands upon thousands of young men
and women go missing.
Woman: James Byron haakenson disappeared
shortly after moving to Chicago.
Man: John butkovich, an 18-year-old north side youth,
who disappeared on July 31st, 1975.
[ Telephone rings ]
Missing persons. Polito. Can I help you?
Sullivan: The police departments were understaffed
when it came to the juvenile divisions.
And it was very difficult to try to track runaways.
Sneed: Typical in this case, and in many cases,
families go to the police department,
or they call and they say, "my son's missing,"
and they say, "well, wait 12 hours.
Well, you know, he may come home.
Just let us know."
My mother kept saying, "there's something wrong.
There's something wrong."
There's no way that my brother would have left.
My brother at that time thought he was on cloud nine
because he had a girlfriend.
He got a car that he always wanted.
He got a job making $5 an hour.
He'd been working for this contractor for about a week.
We were contacting anybody that would have
a connection with my brother.
My mother went over to the contractor's house.
And she knocked on the door.
And she said, "my son has been missing."
Have you any idea where he could have gone?
The contractor said, "you know, it's really odd
that he left a message on my answering machine,"
and my mother said, "well, let me hear it."
He goes, "I erased it already."
And he said, just like the police said,
"you know, kids at 17... They run away all the time.
You just got to give it time.
They'll be back."
But the next day,
when my mother was driving around in the neighborhood,
she found his car parked
in a parking lot two miles from our house.
The car was unlocked,
and inside the car was his wallet.
There's no way that my brother would have left
without taking his car, his driver's license.
She knew that there was something wrong
because this was his pride and joy...
This car that he just got.
This is so out of character.
This is not your brother.
Duke: What no one knew at the time
was that a lot of these kids were not runaways.
They'd been abducted, and all by the same man.
♪♪
He was on the prowl to find people to have sex with.
Cahill: He liked young men 14 to 20,
short, fit, but not muscular.
And he'd find himself cruising the streets
where the young hustlers were.
And he'd pick them up.
Pull to the corner, roll down the window, and just say,
"hey, kid, you want to go get a drink?
Want to get a beer? Want some work?"
You know, "come on. Get in. Let's go for a ride."
And he'd find a vulnerable child
who would be susceptible to this kind of sympathy.
Duke: After taking the kid to his home,
he would subdue them with a trick.
He would trick his victims into handcuffs.
Amirante: He would show them a magic trick,
and he would put handcuffs on himself.
And then he'd go around, turn around,
and take the handcuffs off.
Presto-change-o.
He would be spinning the handcuffs
around on his fingertip.
Now the victim is fascinated.
"How did you do that?"
And he goes, "I'll show you.
Put your hands out."
♪♪
So, in other words, his victims allowed him to put handcuffs on.
And once you're in handcuffs, you can't fight back.
♪♪
Hachmeister: Then he says, "I can't get out of these things.
What's the trick?"
And he pulls out a key... A handcuff key...
And he says, "the trick is you got to have the key."
♪♪
[ Tires screech ]
Wilkinson: He had a second manner,
which I would guess he employed when he was growing frustrated
and he couldn't find a kid who was vulnerable,
which is that he would pretend to be a cop.
His big, black oldsmobile that he tricked out
to make it look like a police car.
[ Tires screech ]
He'd wear a leather jacket, a leather bomber-type jacket.
So he could look as if he was an undercover cop.
Wilkinson: And he'd say, "I'm a cop. Get in the car."
And he'd put handcuffs on the kid, or something like that.
Sort of scare them, but then say, "don't worry.
Everything's gonna be okay."
Sneed: And I think he was getting very confident
that he could do whatever he wanted to do
and was gonna get away with it.
♪♪
Cahill: Once he had them handcuffed,
he would do painful sexual things to...
To them through...
...awful tortures.
He would drown them in the bathtub, pull them out.
He would burn them with his cigarillos.
He would show them tricks... Clown tricks,
magic tricks, things he had learned.
Only they turned out to be deadly things
that ended their lives.
Rignall: Shortly after I got in the car with him,
he placed a rag over my face.
He floats in and out of consciousness,
and finally begins to plead to be killed
because what he's going through is so awful.
He had it down to a science.
♪♪
Sneed: 1970s Chicago...
...young men were going missing.
[ Telephone rings ]
Cahill: And for the most part, they've run away.
And you're a police officer...
You don't really look into that too deeply.
The Chicago police department was inundated.
Wilkinson: People knew in Chicago
that boys were disappearing.
But of course, if you have one boy disappear
and a week goes by and another disappears,
it takes a long time before a pattern emerges.
But nobody in Chicago knows that the explanation
for the disappearance of all these boys
is that a serial killer is operating in these haunts.
♪♪
Sneed: This guy... His name was Jeff rignall.
Walking outside a bar one night...
...when a guy in a black oldsmobile picked him up,
asked if he wanted to share a joint.
He was a clean-cut-looking man.
And I got in the car with him.
And shortly after I got in the car with him,
he placed a rag over my face,
of which turned out to be chloroform...
...and proceeded to have a lengthy drive.
Every time I would come to,
the rag would go back over my face.
And I remember him carrying me into his house.
The boy wakes up in a man's house.
Of course, he must not have had any idea where he was.
♪♪
But he's being tortured by this man
who's just doing unspeakable things to him.
♪♪
He did express he appeared to become almost a monster.
His face changed. His eyes changed.
And he became a completely unrecognizable being.
Wilkinson: He floats in and out of consciousness
and finally begins to plead to be killed
because what he's going through is so awful.
Sneed: And then for some bizarre reason... who knows?
The man put him back in the car
and drove him to a park,
did not kill him, dumped him off.
That's the last thing I remember until I was... found myself,
about 5:00, 5:30 in the morning on the steps
right by Lincoln park,
half dressed, my face completely burned.
He's bleeding from his backside,
and he's got burns on his face from the chloroform.
Sneed: The guy gets to his girlfriend's house.
She takes him to a hospital.
He goes to the cops, and the cops don't believe him.
So now he's determined to find this man that did this to him.
Rignall: What I did, since the police took the matter
very, very lightly...
I rented a car and sat where I thought I was,
approximately, waiting for his car to come by,
waiting for a very distinct car...
A black four-door sedan with the license plates pdm42.
♪♪
So I just... took me about a week for that car to pass.
♪♪
And I just followed it to the house.
Sneed: It was just a regular, old, ranch-style house,
a very nondescript kind of house.
Jeff rignall reported the address to the police.
He then goes to the police and says,
"this is the man who assaulted me,"
but the police don't bring charges because they think
we have a somewhat established citizen in our community.
The story just doesn't seem to square with the image
that we have in our community of this man.
Here was a guy who was respected in his neighborhood.
Everybody knew John Wayne Gacy.
Sullivan: He was in politics.
He was involved in bowling leagues,
neighborhood parties for the 4th of July...
Themed parties... Hawaiian, Italian festival,
sometimes 400 people at the parties...
Important people.
Wilkinson: He had a contracting company called p.D.M...
Painting, decorating, and maintenance.
If John was walking down lasalle street
and the mayor was walking the other way,
the mayor would say hi to John.
Hachmeister: He had his fingers in everything.
And everyone thought he was great.
Sullivan: And he did a lot of functions for charity
that involved him dressing up as the clown.
He loved doing that.
Broderick: He was actually a real clown...
♪♪
...who did tricks for little kids.
And he was in a union and all that.
He got kids laughing. He had little hand puppets.
He had a squeaky voice that would talk to the children,
and they would talk back.
Gacy: Pogo the clown was the clowning that I did
for charity hospital work for the Democratic party.
"Pogo" comes from being Polish and on the go all the time.
So it's po-go.
Broderick: He got pleasure out of performing for people,
particularly little kids, in hospitals.
He'd see this kid who's got leukemia
and is, you know, diagnosed incurable.
He'd do his clown act and cry on their behalf.
Cahill: He became the director of the Polish day parade.
That, in Chicago, is a big deal.
On one of them, he met rosalynn Carter,
the wife of the president of the United States.
So it's really no wonder with a reputation like that,
that after this guy Jeff rignall went to the police,
that even though they did charge Gacy,
the charge went nowhere.
Hachmeister: Jeff rignall reported this
to the Chicago police department,
and Jeff really didn't have that much information.
So they couldn't do too much with it.
He turned out to be an individual
that the police didn't believe.
Duke: But what no one knew at the time,
and would never have guessed, is that Jeff rignall
was really the luckiest of all of Gacy's victims
because Gacy never showed him his scariest trick.
The final trick was the rope trick.
Broderick: The rope trick was a thing that he developed.
Put the rope around the kid's neck,
and he would use, like, the handle for a hammer
or any kind of strong piece of wood that he had handy...
...and then twist it, twist it, twist it.
♪♪
He had arranged it in such a way
it was lodged against the kid's back.
The more he struggled, the tighter it got.
Hachmeister: And he got so good at this rope trick.
At every half turn,
the body would start reacting a little bit differently,
and he knew exactly what he could do or not do
with the body at that point.
So he had it down to a science.
Pretty eerie and pretty creepy.
We got a report of a missing person.
Finder: There was something apparently evil
that had happened.
I think everybody kind of agreed that
there was more to this than a runaway,
and it just started building up.
♪♪
Nobody knew that Gacy found a niche
in which he was operating.
♪♪
Hachmeister: I was assigned to the detective unit.
We got a report of a missing person...
Robert piest.
Rob piest was a 15-year-old kid that was active in high school,
a good kid with a loving family.
He was working at a pharmacy called the nisson pharmacy
in des plaines.
Albrecht: He worked part-time as a stock boy,
and his one desire was to buy a car
when he was 16 and able to drive.
Hachmeister: The night that Rob piest went missing,
his mom had come to pick him up at the end of his shift.
It was his mom's birthday that particular day.
They were gonna go home and celebrate her birthday.
She was waiting outside in the parking lot.
Rob went out there and said, "I'll be back in a few minutes.
I just want to talk to this guy about a job."
She said, "no problem. See you in a few."
There was a contractor in the store.
He was there doing an estimate for the owners of the pharmacy.
Hachmeister: This contractor had been hiring young people,
and he paid them pretty well.
When he heard that he could maybe make $5 an hour,
to basically double what he was making,
he was excited and wanted to approach him for a job.
Cahill: And that's the last anyone saw of Rob piest.
He was not the kind of young man
that one would expect to run away or just go missing.
So there was something apparently evil
that had happened.
The owner of the pharmacy had identified that contractor
as John Wayne Gacy.
The detectives went out to his home that following morning
and spoke to Gacy,
in hopes that he had seen the young boy.
He denied any involvement or any contact with Rob piest.
Hachmeister: We really had nothing big to go on.
All we had as far as evidence was Rob piest going out
to talk to John Gacy
and never being seen again.
Hachmeister: Sometime after that,
a check was made on Gacy.
Finder: There was no Internet at the time,
so it took a little while to get court records
and to dispatch leads to local police departments
to find out more about him.
♪♪
John Gacy was married to a very pretty young lady.
He had two children with her, a boy and a girl.
Jacobson: He said that he liked playing
kind of a fatherly role.
And he insisted that he was a very warm and loving father.
Man: Were you strict with them?
No, I don't believe in hitting children.
I don't believe in spoiling a child, either.
He was extremely successful.
His wife, marlynn's, father
had three Kentucky fried chicken stands,
and John was hired on to manage all three stands.
In Waterloo, John joined the junior chamber of commerce.
He did a lot of work for the jcs.
He was the chaplain for a while.
If you serve other people,
it'll come back to serve you, you know?
I've always believed that way with generosity.
There was some evidence during those years
that John was gonna be a normal suburban guy.
Investigators in Chicago discovered that John Wayne Gacy
had charges in Iowa from 10 years ago
stemming from his first marriage.
John Wayne Gacy had a fairly extensive record...
Minor types of things, basically...
You know, battery, disorderly conduct.
But one conviction was for sodomy,
and it was learned that it was performed against a young boy.
Cahill: On the day he was convicted,
his wife filed for divorce, left him, took his two kids.
He never saw any of them again.
That ended his wonderful life he was having in Waterloo, Iowa,
because he wound up in a penitentiary.
Jackson: After serving more than a year in prison,
John Wayne Gacy moves to Chicago to start an entirely new life,
and no one knows anything about his checkered past.
He lives under the radar for years
until Rob piest goes missing.
And then the des plaines police finally have a suspect.
I think everybody kind of agreed
that there was more to this than a runaway.
And it just started building up.
It was shortly after that we got the first search warrant
looking for Rob piest.
We really had the confidence that we had the right guy,
but to put it together
to where we had some sort of criminal case,
we had nothing.
The investigators did not know
what they were about to get into.
The hairs on the back of my head just went up.
♪♪
Welcome back to "very scary people."
After Rob piest disappeared from his job at nisson pharmacy,
detectives learn that John Wayne Gacy
was the last known person to see him.
They also learned that Gacy had a criminal record
for sexually assaulting another 15-year-old.
Now they were pretty sure they had their man,
but they still had to find a clue
that tied Gacy to the boy's disappearance.
And as the investigation continued,
they realized they were dealing with something, and someone,
far more sinister than any of them had ever imagined.
The des plaines police did get a search warrant early on
to search John Wayne Gacy's house.
It was determined that, in fact, he was restraining,
kidnapping Rob piest,
and that kid possibly was still being held in his house.
During that search warrant, a variety of items
were found in his house... Some pornography, some sex toys,
and they recovered some driver's licenses of young boys
and some jewelry.
While much evidence was taken from that residence,
Rob piest was not found.
Of the items that were taken, and there were many,
two stand out in my mind.
Hachmeister: Maine west class ring.
Rob piest had gone to Maine west.
So we felt that, "oh, man, is it even a possibility
that there are two or three or four other victims?"
So that was just unimaginable in itself.
There was another thing there that the police came back with,
and that was a partial receipt found in Gacy's garbage.
Duke: It was a pickup slip for a roll of film
that was being developed at the nisson pharmacy.
And that was the pharmacy where Rob piest disappeared from.
♪♪
Sullivan: A day or so after the first search warrant,
I asked the police department if they would put
a 24-hour surveillance on Gacy with the hopes that, in fact,
he would go back to wherever Rob was now.
Two 12-hour shifts, two guys...
They watched him around the clock.
Hachmeister: My partner and I...
Really, we had no exact direction
where to go with this case,
other than the fact that we were not to lose him.
Albrecht: I decided pretty much that the first night that we were out,
that if Gacy went into a public place,
Dave and I would go in and follow him.
Hachmeister: We didn't want to leave him alone for one minute.
Whatever it took, we were to stay with him.
The second night that Mike and I were on the surveillance,
Gacy was out late at night.
He goes over to a restaurant. He sits at a table.
He's all by himself.
And we sit at a table a couple tables away from him.
And pretty soon, he says, "hey, guys,
as long as you're gonna follow me,
why don't you just join me?"
So Mike and I joined him.
And we developed a bit of a relationship.
Amirante: But life is a series of curve balls,
and this was a huge curve that came at me
for my first time at bat.
I had planned to be this wealthy,
successful personal-injury lawyer.
I'm sitting in my new office that I had just opened up,
trying to figure out what I was gonna put on my wall.
And the phone rings.
[ Telephone rings ]
"Hey, Sam, how you doing?" I said, "how you doing, John?"
He was the kind of guy... "oh, yeah, John Gacy?
I know John Gacy."
So it was like that.
A neighbor, a good brother, a good cousin,
somebody who's helpful all the time...
I mean, that's the reputation he had.
He said, "can you do me a favor?"
"Sure, John. No problem. What do you need?"
He said, "could you please find out
why the des plaines police are tailing me?
They're all over me. They're ruining my business."
I was shocked at that and very curious
as to know why they were tailing him.
I said, "John, I know those police officers.
I know the chief over there. I'll ask him.
I'll find out what's going on."
Gacy was not a scary person.
There was no reason to believe
he would have done anything criminal or wrong.
And I was just gonna help him out.
He needed a favor, and that's what I was gonna do.
[ Laughing ] It turned out to be
my first case in private practice.
Albrecht: Gacy walked into the room,
people just gravitated towards him.
I mean, he was very popular, very well-liked,
and very well-respected.
Hachmeister: Everyone that they talked to
just swore up and down that Gacy was,
like, the best guy that they ever knew.
He was, like, the best neighbor, the best coworker,
just a great guy.
And that's the way he came across to myself and my partner.
He was a lot of fun to be with.
His conversations were funny and fun and carefree.
We had to, on many occasions, remind each other,
if one was getting a little too comfortable,
you know, the other would remind him,
"hey, it's looking like maybe this guy's involved
with maybe a homicide here or a couple.
So let's try to stay sharp.
Let's not fall into any bad habits here."
This one particular time, we followed him around,
and he goes into the all-night restaurant for breakfast.
So we're all sitting around a table just discussing
all kinds of different things... Vacations and you name it.
And he starts bringing up his being a registered clown.
And he said, "I got to tell you, Dave",
this registered-clown thing is pretty cool.
As a matter of fact, I can go on a parade route
and I'd be in my clown outfit, and if I see a nice-looking gal,
I can go up right alongside of her, sit down,
"put my arm around her, and get a little feel."
He says, "that's what clowns can get away with.
In fact, clowns can get away with murder."
And he just stared me in the eye and said that to me.
I tried to remain cool.
You know, I tried to just let it go over my head,
but, man, the hairs on the back of my head just went up.
Amirante: Police were tailing him,
and they certainly knew a lot more than I knew about it.
I came in totally cold.
And they sincerely believed that he had kidnapped Robbie piest.
And I said, "oh, come on. He didn't do that."
But, of course, they had already investigated his background.
They knew about the sodomy conviction.
We were on top of something that just was too much
to even believe by ourselves.
Amirante: John and I continued to meet,
and I would ask him over and over again what happened.
"Did you do this? Did this happen?"
Vehemently, unequivocally denied.
We decided to file a lawsuit
against the des plaines police department
in the federal court to stop them, restrain them
from violating our client's civil rights
by tailing him for no reason at all.
We were concerned that if there was a federal lawsuit
and an order against us, that our case would be over.
Our investigation could really go nowhere else.
He had ended up coming back and telling us,
"man, I smell dead bodies in there."
And I said, "boys, we might be dealing
with a lot more than we think."
♪♪
Hachmeister: Following the execution of that search warrant,
police reviewed everything that they recovered.
Sullivan: Now we had so much literal junk from Gacy's house.
Junk turned out to be evidence that we had to go through.
Things didn't move as fast back then to try to identify jewelry
or a license or any of those kind of things.
We had in there, among other things,
a class ring that had initials on it.
Finder: The class ring that did not bear Gacy's initials
said "js."
So, what was Gacy doing with that?
Hachmeister: They ran that ring down,
and they found out that that ring came back
to a young boy by the name of John szyc.
John szyc had been reported missing,
and he was an ex-employee of Gacy's.
They determined that some of these driver's licenses
that were found in Gacy's house were from young boys
that had been reported missing.
Sullivan: There was way too much that came back
on the first search warrant
for us to think that we were just looking for Rob piest.
And I said, "boys, we might be dealing
with a lot more than we think."
And we had no idea where it was gonna end.
Quite naturally, some of the first paths that we took
were to try to interview some of the people that worked for Gacy.
And one of the key things that they found out
was that he had instructed these employees
to go into his crawl space and dig trenches.
And he claimed it was because they had a sewage issue
and that he was trying to resolve that problem.
And occasionally, the smell would come back up,
so he'd instruct them to go in there with lime
and spread lime down there,
which would cover up that smell for a while.
Sullivan: They certainly were helpful in telling us
that we really probably wanted to get down to the crawl space.
Duke: Then, one really cold Chicago night,
Gacy actually invited the surveillance team into his home.
Sullivan: Gacy was trying to make it seem
as if he was friends with the police
and that there was no reason
that they should be surveilling him.
Cahill: They went to Gacy's house.
Gacy invited them in, offered them a drink.
Finder: Of course, the police officers were delighted
not only to go into a warmer place,
but to go into the house where Gacy lived.
Cahill: They talked with him.
John would talk. John will talk your ear off.
And one officer said he wanted to go off to the bathroom.
Albrecht: He excused himself to go to the bathroom,
which is in the older part of the house.
When he was in the bathroom, the heat kicked on,
and this odor came up from the heat vents.
Hachmeister: And he equated it to the smell
that he would smell at the morgue.
Albrecht: If you've ever been to a morgue, around a dead body,
it's an odor that you will never forget.
Sullivan: He had ended up coming back and telling us,
"man, I smelled dead bodies in there."
We now were coming to the absolute conclusion
that this guy had to be stopped.
We needed to get a second search warrant
to get back into Gacy's house.
You can't just start ripping apart
someone's crawl space because of a bad odor.
You need judicial approval, so you have to get a warrant.
The problem with getting a warrant is you have to connect
John Wayne Gacy to Rob piest on the night he disappeared.
Amirante: He called me and said, "it's very, very important
I talk to you."
And I didn't know what to think.
I had a zillion things going through my head, like,
"oh, my god. What am I gonna do?"
Nobody could have predicted this.
This is more than people would have ever believed possible.
Duke: As the evidence was building up against Gacy,
it became clear that he was starting to feel the heat.
Hachmeister: We really started to see his demeanor change quite a bit,
say, five or six days into the investigation.
Typically, early on, he would come out of his house,
and he'd say, "hey, I'm going to check on a job, this and this,"
and he'd take off, and we'd follow him.
But now he seems to not be telling us that,
and on the way to job sites, actually trying to lose us,
driving like a mad man through the city.
He was driving 75, 80 miles an hour through a residential area.
Hachmeister: Many times, we had to cut him off
and pull him out of the car
and shake him around a little bit and say,
"Gacy, you know, you're gonna hurt somebody.
You're driving like a mad man. You got to slow it down.
You know, we don't want to arrest you on this."
Amirante: Gacy called me and said, "it's very, very important
I talk to you.
I have to tell you something."
I'm like, "okay, John. It better be important."
It better be new because you're telling me
the same old crap all the time.
I don't want to hear it." "No, it's something new.
It's something important I have to talk to you about."
He comes into the office, and I'm getting pissed
because he's telling me the same old stuff
he had been telling me.
I lost it. I lost it.
And I start pounding my hand on the table,
pounding it really hard.
I said, "John, tell me the truth.
It's bull [bleep].
I don't want to hear it anymore."
He goes, "okay, do you have anything to drink around here?"
One of my investigators in the public defender's office
happened to give me a bottle of v.0.
That day as a Christmas gift.
And I had it in my car.
I ran out to the car, and I go in with the bottle.
Gacy says, "fill it up."
We all toasted.
Gacy... glug, glug, glug, glug... drank it.
"Fill it up again."
Poured another little thing.
We each had a shot. Glug, glug, glug, glug.
And he looks at me, and he says,
"I'm gonna tell you the whole story from the beginning.
I've been a judge, jury, and executioner
of many, many people.
Now I want to be my own judge, jury, and executioner."
My heart started pounding,
like, ba-bum, ba-bum.
"What are you talking about, John?"
And he goes, "I don't want you to interfere.
I just want you to listen to what I have to say."
Meanwhile, across town, cops had a big breakthrough.
They finally figured out that that photo receipt
they found in Gacy's garbage
belonged to a woman named Kim byers,
and she happened to be a coworker of Rob piest
at nisson pharmacy.
And the story behind that was Kim byers
was gonna go out and take a break,
and she asked Rob if she could borrow his coat.
And just before she did that,
she processed a roll of film and took the film receipt
and put it in the jacket of Rob piest's coat.
Sullivan: Rob eventually borrowed his coat back.
Jackson: How would that photo receipt
that was in Rob piest's jacket pocket
have ended up in Gacy's house,
unless the two of them crossed paths that night?
So now police have the proof and the evidence they need
to get that search warrant to go back into Gacy's house
to examine that crawl space.
Amirante: So maybe six hours, he talked continuously,
describing every murder.
♪♪
He remembered every single detail
about every single murder.
♪♪
It was getting daylight.
He finished his talking.
His head just dropped.
[ Chuckles ] He started snoring.
So now I'm sitting there watching Gacy sleep.
All of a sudden, he sat up perfectly straight
and looked at me, but, like,
looked right through me, like I wasn't even there.
And I'm going, "John? John? John, you awake?"
He stands up,
and he starts walking toward me.
I always have a baseball bat around.
I went over, and I picked up this bat.
And I'm walking backwards.
And he sat down, and he started snoring again.
And I didn't know what to think.
I had a zillion things going through my head,
like, "oh, my god. What am I gonna do?"
It was frightening.
This guy just told us he killed all these people.
He's crazy.
He's crazy, and the police are out there.
What are we gonna do now?
And I was in a panic.
♪♪
Gacy: I believe I... I did kill him.
Finder: I had never seen anything like this before.
I had never heard anything like this before.
I had never experienced anything like this before.
Hachmeister: On our job, we see a variety of horrific things,
but this was out of the norm.
Man: Identities unknown,
victims of a man who probably did not know their names.
Woman: You see bodies in your sleep.
You see him in your sleep.
It's just too much.
Woman #2: It was very eerie
'cause you know exactly what was happening.
Nobody can explain what he did.
Who can explain that?
♪♪
John Wayne Gacy's detailed confession
to a gruesome seven-year killing spree
was almost impossible to believe.
But within 24 hours,
police would learn the truth for themselves.
The questions on everyone's minds were,
"how did Gacy become so evil?
And how did he get away with killing
so many people for so long?"
The shocking conclusion
of "John Wayne Gacy: Evil secret" next.
I'm Donnie wahlberg.
Thanks for watching.