Anyhow to cut the conversation short, what happened is that he ended up blowing me and I believe I went down on him.’Įventually Vorhees reported the incident to his father and Gacy was subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison. So me, like an a*****e, I took him over to my house and I showed him the films. Gacy retells the story of how he picked up the hitchhiking teenager and brought him back to his house. ‘That included Democratic local politics, polish parades, parade director and ‘Pogo the clown.’ He said that clowning ‘almost like the feeling you get out of coming out of church on Christmas Eve’ ‘I enjoyed the limelight of being involved with something,’ said Gacy on the doc. He was very proud of Pogo the clown,’ said Zielinski.
‘Pogo was John’s own creation, from the style of the makeup to the way he acted. His picture-perfect family man image came crashing down in 1968, when Gacy was convicted of sodomy for assaulting 15-year-old Donald Voorhees, the son of a fellow Jaycee.ĭuring this time, Gacy began regularly performing as ‘Pogo the clown’ at charitable functions. At meetings, Gacy often provided fried chicken and insisted on being called ‘Colonel.’ Despite his reputation for being a blowhard, he eventually worked his way up to being vice-president of the Waterloo Jaycees for his deft fundraising skills. He also joined the local ‘Jaycees,’ a civic organization for men between the ages of 18 to 40, who are interested in doing charitable work. ‘If somebody needed a garbage can or somebody needed a bulb changed, or somebody needed their driveway shoveled, the precinct captain would be there to help them.’ ‘Precinct captains take care of people in the neighborhood,’ explained his lawyer, Sam Amirante to Netflix. He described this period of his life like ‘being in church all the time.’ĭuring this time, Gacy became active in local politics as a precinct captain for the Democratic Party. He welcomed two children shortly after, Michael in 1966 and Christine in 1967. ‘I enjoyed the first years of my married life, I was really wrapped into it, I just had such a nice warm feeling and I was so happy with her,’ said Gacy in the Netflix series. The couple moved to Waterloo, Iowa where he was given the opportunity to manage three Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises for his father-in-law. He had his conflicts on his sexuality which led him to try on her underwear and he was attracted to that.’Īfter a short courtship, Gacy married Marlynn Meyers in 1964. ‘She made me wear it, and she punished me with it,’ he says on the tapes.Ĭlinical psychologist, Richard Rappaport who served as the chief psychiatrist for Gacy’s defense told Netflix: ‘He liked his mothers softness and genteel attitude compared to the father. He claimed that he enjoyed the scent and soft texture of the panties, but his mother was less forgiving when she discovered Gacy trying them on. Gacy naturally gravitated toward his mother’s more nurturing demeaner, but eventually developed a strange fetish for her underwear. ‘Now I want to be my own judge, jury, and executioner, I’m going to tell you everything that happened.’
While awaiting trial for murder, Gacy was interviewed by his legal defense team in over 60 hours of recorded testimony. ‘I’ve been a judge, jury, and executioner of many many people,’ he says in the unearthed recordings. To this day, five victims remained unidentified. Four others, including Piest, were dumped in a nearby river when he ran out of space beneath his house. The depravity of Gacy’s crimes shocked the public, who learned how he buried 29 bodies in the crawl space of his quiet Chicago suburban home.
In his free time, Gacy performed at children’s hospitals and charitable events his alter-ego, ‘Pogo the Clown.’Įven as close associates around him began to disappear, nobody suspected that the man beneath the harlequin veneer was a homicidal sociopath who raped, tortured and strangled dozens of young men and boys during a six-year-long killing spree that lasted from 1972 to 1978. By all outward appearances, the Democratic precinct captain and father-of-two was a seemingly ordinary man.