The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read Online Free

began cooperating with authorities. Interviewed by agents of the FBI ’s Behavioral Science Unit, he offered invaluable insights into the psychology of serial killers. He also confessed to twenty-eight murders (though he is suspected of more, perhaps as many as one hundred).
    Ultimately, the legal process caught up with him. He was electrocuted in February 1989. Outside the prison walls, hundreds of people toasted his death with champagne.

“We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.”
T ED B UNDY

John Wayne Gacy

    John Wayne Gacy; from Murderers! trading card set
    (Courtesy of Roger Worsham)
    John Wayne Gacy was a man of many masks. There was the mask of masculinity. To live up to the two-fisted name bestowed by his tyrannical father, Gacy cultivated a gruff, swaggering air. There was the mask of middle-class respectability, symbolized by his tidy ranch-style house in a Chicago suburb.He even wore a literal mask, making himself up as a grinning clown called Pogo to entertain hospitalized children.
    But Gacy was one of the most monstrously divided sociopaths in the annals of crime, and his masks concealed a hideous reality. Beneath his “man’s man” persona, he was a tormented, self-loathing homosexual who preyed on young males. Beneath the smiling face, he was a leering, implacable sadist. Beneath the crawl space of his suburban house, more than two dozen corpses moldered in the slime.
    Raised by an abusive, alcoholic father—who spent much of his time deriding his son as a sissy—Gacy grew up to be a pudgy hypochondriac whose homosexual drives were a source of profound self-hatred. He also possessed a terrifyingly antisocial personality.
    For a long time, however, he managed to conceal his real character beneath the veneer of an ambitious Middle American businessman. By the time he was twenty-two, he was a married man and father, a highly respected member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the successful manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Waterloo, Iowa. But he was also leading a secret life as a seducer and molester of young males. In 1968, after being arrested on a sodomy charge, he was hit with a ten-year sentence, though he proved to be such a model prisoner that he was paroled after only eighteen months.
    Gacy—whose first wife had divorced him on the day of his sentencing—relocated to Chicago, where he soon reestablished himself as an apparent pillar of the community, remarrying, starting a thriving contracting business, becoming active in local politics (on one occasion, he was photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter). Before long, however, his darkest impulses reasserted themselves—this time in an even ghastlier form. He became a human predator who tortured and murdered his young male pickups for his own depraved pleasure.
    Cruising the streets for hustlers, drifters, and runaways, Gacy (who sometimes coerced them into his car by posing as a plainclothes cop) would bring them back to his house. There he would handcuff them and then subject them to hours of rape and torture before strangling them slowly. Their bodies would end up in the crawl space of his house.
    In 1978, police finally set their sights on the civic-minded contractor when a teenage boy dropped out of sight after telling friends that he was on his way to see Gacy about a job. Digging into Gacy’s past, police uncovered records of his previous sex offenses. In the fetid muck of his crawl space, they exhumed the decomposing remains of twenty-seven victims.Gacy had buried two more elsewhere on his property and dumped another four corpses in a nearby river, bringing the number of his victims to thirty-three.
    At first, Gacy maintained that he was the victim of multiple personality disorder, and that his atrocities were actually the work of an evil alter ego named Jack. But the ploy didn’t work. He was given the death