For some reason, I don’t know why, I grew up only knowing that John Wayne Gacy had done some Clown side work – a hideous clown face that was so sinister that you wondered why that alone never triggered suspicion about the prodigious serial killer.
The other thing I knew, as any True crime fan does, was that he’d buried his many victims in a crawl space beneath his house.
The new docu-series ‘Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes’ fills in all the blanks: that he had political ambitions, was extremely well connected in his suburban Illinois community and that…he was an a$$hole.
I know that seems obvious. I mean he killed about 30 young men and boasted that he had absolutely no remorse. But this new limited series features audio recordings with Gacy while he was in prison, and to hear his boastful, smug voice is more revealing that anything I’ve read about him to date. The filmmakers don’t rely on it as a narrative device; they sprinkle it in, here and there, like a dash of salt.
But that’s not all: this 3 part series doesn’t let you forget that the victims were real people-the sons and brothers of grieved families. By the end, you will also know more about them than you ever had before.
The cops and lawyers, the co-workers and neighbors, and a middle-aged woman who was a teenager working in a pharmacy on the day that Gacy got his last victim. Her thoughtful action helped bring down the evil jerk.
There’s also archival footage and drawings that show just how Gacy got around 30 bodies interred with hardly a suspicion.
Lately, watching True Crime docs that took place in the era before DNA identification fills me with admiration for the folks that were slogging through their police work without that magical element that makes solving crimes today a lot easier, if not always quicker.
This horrible man is not worth my time – but watching the dedicated foot soldiers bring down the guy who thought he was too smart for them, is a satisfying watch.