By December 16, Gacy was becoming affable with the surveillance detectives, regularly inviting them to join him for meals in restaurants and occasionally for drinks in bars or at his home. He repeatedly denied involvement with Piest's disappearance and accused the officers of harassing him because of his political connections or his recreational drug use. Knowing these officers were unlikely to arrest him on anything trivial, he taunted them by flouting traffic laws and succeeded in losing his pursuers more than once. [150] That afternoon, Cram consented to a police interview, in which he revealed that, because of his poor timekeeping, Gacy had once given him a watch, explaining he got it "from a dead person". [151] [p] In his opening statement, one of Gacy's defense attorneys, Robert Motta, remarked: "The insanity defense has been looked [upon] as an escape; a defense of last resort. The defense of insanity is valid and it is the only defense that we could use here, because that is where the truth lies... because if [Gacy] is normal, then our concept of normality is totally distorted." [175] Presenting Gacy as a Jekyll-and-Hyde character, the defense produced several psychiatric experts who had examined Gacy; [173] [176] three testified they found him to be a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personalities. [31] [177] The jury deliberated for one hour and fifty minutes. [186] Gacy was found guilty of 33 charges of murder; he was also found guilty of sexual assault and taking indecent liberties with a child, both in reference to Robert Piest. [167] [187] [188] At the time, his conviction for 33 murders was the most for which any person in U.S. history had been convicted. [189] [190]

Investigators interviewed both Cram and Rossi on December 20. When questioned as to where he believed Gacy had concealed Piest's body, Rossi replied Gacy may have placed the body in the crawl space. [57] [156] Rossi agreed to submit to a polygraph test. He denied any involvement in Piest's disappearance or any knowledge of his whereabouts. He soon refused to continue the questioning, and Rossi's "erratic and inconsistent" responses while attached to the polygraph machine rendered Kozenczak "unable to render a definite opinion" as to his truthfulness. [155] Rossi did, however, further discuss the trench digging he did in the crawl space and remarked on Gacy's insistence that he not deviate from where he was instructed to dig. [157]Frank Landingin's cause of death was certified at autopsy as suffocation through his own underwear being lodged down his throat. His

On February 15, 1983, Henry Brisbon, a fellow death row inmate known as the I-57 killer, stabbed Gacy in the arm with a sharpened wire. He received treatment in the prison hospital. [201]On June 3, Gacy killed 17-year-old Michael Bonnin, who disappeared while traveling from Chicago to Waukegan. Gacy strangled Bonnin with a ligature and buried him under the spare bedroom. [101] [102] [103] Ten days later, Gacy murdered 16-year-old William Carroll and buried him in a common grave in the crawl space. Carroll seems to have been the first of four victims known to have been murdered between June 13 and August 6, 1976. [99] Three were between 16 and 17 years old, and one unidentified victim appears to have been an adult. By mid-1978, the crawl space had no room for further bodies. [8] [31] [45] Gacy later confessed to police that he considered stowing bodies in his attic, but had been worried about complications arising from "leakage". [48] Therefore, he chose to dispose of his victims off the I-55 bridge into the Des Plaines River. [67] Gacy stated he had thrown five bodies into this river in 1978, one of which he believed had landed on a passing barge; [45] only four were ever found. [121] NamUs - National Unidentified Persons Data System Case Report - 11004". Archived from the original on April 1, 2016 . Retrieved July 30, 2017. Jason Michael Moss (February 3, 1975 – June 6, 2006) was an American attorney who specialized in criminal defense. He was best known as the author of The Last Victim: A True-Life Journey into the Mind of the Serial Killer (1999), a memoir about his exploration of the minds of incarcerated serial killers, which started as a research project in college. He corresponded and conducted personal interviews with several notorious killers.

Twenty-six were buried in the crawl space beneath his home; others were buried elsewhere on his property, while a handful were dumped in the Des Plaines River. On December 30, Gacy abducted 19-year-old college student Robert Donnelly from a Chicago bus stop at gunpoint. [125] Gacy drove him to his home, where he raped, tortured, and repeatedly drowned Donnelly to unconsciousness in a bathtub as he made statements such as, "Aren't we playing fun games tonight?" [78] Donnelly later testified at trial that he was in such pain that he asked Gacy to kill him. Gacy replied "I'm getting 'round to it." [125] After several hours, Gacy drove Donnelly to his workplace and released him, warning him that if he complained to police, they would not believe him. [78] 1978 In October 2011, Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart announced that investigators, having obtained full DNA profiles from each of the unidentified victims, were to renew their efforts to identify all of them. At a press conference held to announce this intention, Sheriff Dart stated investigators are actively seeking DNA samples from individuals across the United States related to any male missing between 1970 and 1979. [18] Test results thus far conducted have confirmed the identification of three victims, ruled out the possibility of numerous other missing youths as being victims of Gacy, [19] [20] and solved four unrelated cold cases dating between 1972 and 1979. [21] [22] [23] [n 1] Popular culture [ change | change source ] Movies [ change | change source ] Moss, Jason; Kottler, Jeffrey A. (1999). The Last Victim: A True-life Journey Into the Mind of a Serial Killer. Virgin Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7535-0398-0. When John Wayne Gacy was convicted in 1980, he had the dubious distinction of boasting the largest number of murder convictions for a single individual in United States history. Between 1972 and 1978, Gacy killed at least 33 men and young boys, burying the bodies of 26 of his victims in the crawlspace of his home in a Chicago suburb.John Wayne Gacy (March 17, 1942– May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, tortured, and murdered at least 33 young men and boys in Norwood Park Township, near Chicago, Illinois. He became known as the Killer Clown due to his public performances as a clown prior to the discovery of his crimes. Stephen Gregory Bier Jr., Marilyn Manson's keyboard player from 1989 to 2007, was known as Madonna Wayne Gacy, a stage name made from the names of Madonna and Wayne Gacy. Cook County medical examiner Robert Stein supervised the exhumations of the victims buried on Gacy's property. [220] The crawl space was marked in sections and each body was given an identifying number. The first body recovered from the crawl space was assigned a marker denoting the victim as Body 1. [112] He was identified as Jon Prestidge on January 6, 1979. [121] No cause of death could be determined. John Wayne Gacy was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, [1] on March 17, 1942, the second of three children and only son of John Stanley Gacy and Marion Elaine Robison. [2] [3] His father was an auto repair machinist and World War I veteran, and his mother was a homemaker. [4] [5] Gacy was of Polish and Danish ancestry, and his family was Catholic. [6] [7]