CHICAGO _ In the shadow of O'Hare International Airport, the winding, looping streets and small-town character of unincorporated Norwood Park Township look much the way they did in December 1978.
But gone are the lines of gawking bystanders, desperate families of missing young men and carloads of curiosity-seekers who choked the streets in the days before that long-ago Christmas, trying to catch a glimpse of the murder house.
John Wayne Gacy's confession to the rape and murder of more than 30 people didn't just awaken America to a nightmare hidden in its own backyard. The discovery 40 years ago of the dank, muddy mass grave underneath Gacy's yellow brick ranch house at 8213 W. Summerdale Ave. forever shattered the image of the safe suburban community.
A police search for missing Maine West sophomore Robert Piest led investigators to 36-year-old Gacy, a "stocky, bull necked contractor," described by neighbors and business associates as a pillar of the community: a likable, boastful divorced businessman and Democratic precinct captain who hosted themed neighborhood parties and entertained children as a clown named Pogo.
"(The public) would feel much more comfortable if Gacy was this type of creepy, sequestered ghoul that was unkempt and heinous," Detective Sgt. Jason Moran of the Cook County sheriff's office, who is a point man on the Gacy case, said recently. "But instead, he dressed as a clown and bounced kids on his knee. He would knock at your door and say vote for my candidate."
Gacy's nice-guy persona masked something far more sinister. Once they were safely restrained _ usually in a pair of handcuffs as he demonstrated a "trick" he learned as a clown _ Gacy's easy smile melted away, revealing a cold, growling predator who sexually assaulted his victims before strangling many of them with a knotted rope. He buried 29 of his 33 victims in trenches underneath and around his home and dumped four others from bridges once his property could hold no more bodies.
The horror in the tiny community and images of Gacy in his clown outfit were splashed across newspapers around the world, again associating Chicago with a killing spree 12 years after Richard Speck's massacre of eight student nurses on the Far South Side. Gacy also had chilling similarities to another charming Chicago-area killer, Herman Webster Mudgett, also known as Dr. H.H. Holmes. Quite possibly the country's first serial killer, he lured people into his personally designed "murder castle" in 1890s Englewood. But where Mudgett had trick rooms with vents that led to disposal rooms, Gacy had a knotted rope and a crawl space.
After Gacy's house was razed in April 1979, the vacant lot became a notorious gathering place in the 1980s, drawing everyone from ghost hunters to rowdy neighborhood teenagers who late at night spun their wheels in the dirt lot and dumped beer bottles.
Now a new home sits on the lot, but the block still draws the occasional tourist or documentary crew, said one neighbor who lives across the street from the former Gacy property but asked not to be identified. "If you've got two guys in a car, or an out-of-state plate, it's probably Gacy."
Gacy was executed by lethal injection in 1994, but the impact of his crimes went beyond tainting his neighborhood. In response to widespread criticism of local police for taking years to connect the missing victims to Gacy, federal and local law enforcement agencies began sharing information on runaways and sex offenders, implemented a national hotline and launched a computer database for missing people.
Police departments and schools nationwide joined forces for massive public service campaigns tasked with teaching parents and children about "stranger danger."
Experts said the case also breathed new life into old, unevolved fears about homosexuality, still a taboo subject at the time. The combination of homosexuality and the heinous nature of the murders of young men lent a tawdry element to the tale that also attached shame to the victims and their families as the unfortunately named Gacy became a punchline in living rooms and on playgrounds across the country.
