A man that was born in what appeared to be an ordinary family, with regular childhood, ended up being a gruesome teenage boy killer. He wasn’t an outstanding student but ended up being a successful business person, due to his flair towards sales. Gacy also played the role of a responsible community member, throwing barbecues for his neighbors and dressing up as a clown. To cheer up sick children in the hospital. So what triggered his desire to kill? Could it be the fact that he adored a father that was a violent alcoholic, who didn’t appreciate to be around people, used to beat young Gacy and call him names? Or can it be due to his numerous failures of going up on the social ladder, which accumulated a lot of frustrations?
Still, John Wayne Gacy didn’t just kill people, he also enjoyed in raping and torturing his victims before performing the murder. He was a violent murderer, who preferred young boys as his victims. It all started in 1972, on the 2nd of January, when he picked up a young 16-year-old boy, called Timothy McCoy, from a bus terminal, and took him on a tour around Chicago. He took the boy to his house, with the promise to take him back the next day to the bus station. According to Gacy’s statements, the killing of this boy may have been accidental. McCoy came from the kitchen, to wake Gacy up, but had a knife in his hand, which made Gacy think he wants to hurt him. Thus, he decided to hurt him instead and ended up killing McCoy. Gacy admitted that he
For instance, the case of the “Green River Killer” (Hickey, 2010:24) may offer another possible explanation for what caused Jack the Ripper to become a serial killer. Gary Ridgway is America’s most notorious serial killer (Hickey, 2010), he “holds the record for the most serial murder convictions in the history of the United States” (Hickey, 2010:24). Ridgway is responsible for the deaths of 48 women (Hickey, 2010). Like Jack the Ripper, Ridgway selected prostitutes as his intended victims (Paley, 1995).
When John Wayne Gacy was younger he grew up with a father, a loving mother, and two caring sisters. “John Gacy faced an abusive childhood and conflict over his sexuality,” states the Editors of Biography.com. His abusive father is part of the reason he started his killings in his later years. He was scared and felt like he was competing for love. Gacy and his siblings grew up with a drunken father who would beat the children with a razor strap if they were perceived to have misbehaved; the man physically
About five years after the incident doctors discovered the clot and prescribed him medicine which helped him. In need of attention after he had recovered, Gacy would fake heart conditions to be noticed. When Gacy was seven years old he was molested by a family friend who would take Gacy on rides with him in his truck. Gacy never spoke up about the incident because he believed that it would only lead to him being beaten. It is very easy to see why there would be a lack of social bonds with Gacy. Out of the four different bonds: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief, he did not have any of these. He couldn’t become attached to his abusive father. He lacked commitment and involvement because he spent a lot of his time in the hospital as a child so he could not make any ties to anything outside of his hospital room. He also had no bond to the belief that crime applied to him. This became evident when he stole from a store when he was six, was caught with his friend fondling another girl at school, and being molested by an adult and seeing that there is no punishment for it probably did not help
In Conclusion, John wayne Gacy was charged with 33 murders in February of 1980. Though his defence countered that Gacy was insane, irrational and not responsible for his actions, the jury eventually reached a guilty but sane verdict, and he was sentenced to death for 12 of the murders on March 13, 1980. He spent 12 years on death row and was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. John Wayne Gacy was one of the most infamous and relentless serial killer rapist of his time (“The Famous,”
No, I do not believe that someone such as John Wayne Gacy who went and cruised for his victims on the streets of Chicago would be able to get away with murdering as many people as he did back in the 70's. I did my paper on Gacy and had learned about about how he would lure his victims to his house and the way he would eventually kill them. Although he was able to fool many individuals I still do not believe he would be able to fool the advancements that have surfaced from science and technology. We currently live in a world where everything is filmed or being recorded if not by a stranger than by a camera on the street. Technology itself has advanced to the point that if you do not have basic computer skills you would most likely not even
John Gacy had a barbaric childhood and struggled with his sexuality. After being convicted of sexual assault in 1968, it was unexpectedly brought to the officer attention that he had killed at least 33 young males, burying most under his home and around his home. John Wayne Gacy was found guilty in 1980 and given multiple death penalty and life sentences. Gacy was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.
On Friday, December 22, 1978, Gacy finally confessed to police that he killed at least thirty people and buried most of the remains of the victims beneath the crawl space of his house. According to the book Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders by Sullivan and Maiken, Gacy said that, "his first killing took place in January, 1972, and the second in January, 1974, about a year and a half after his marriage." He further confessed that he would lure his victims into being handcuffed and then he would sexually assault them. To muffle the screams of his victims, he would stuff a sock or underwear into their mouths and kill them by pulling a rope or board against their throats, as he raped them. Gacy admitted to sometimes keeping the dead bodies under his bed or in the attic for several hours before eventually burying them in the crawl space.
As a teenager he started to develop a sexuality toward men. He became the class clown and was outwardly a model student, very nice to adults and very polite to teachers. However, his sexual fantasies continued to traumatized him and drove him to drinking. Taking a psychoanalytic perspective his life began to mirror one of the three basic situations that result in crime. He was efficiently repressing his guilt and Id for his sexuality towards men, until it led to an “explosion” of acting out behavior. Right after he graduated from high school, the repression lead to his first kill. His desires which were held down for so long became so overwhelming that they overtook his superego and ego and ran wild. After killing his first victim soon after high school his killing spree that took the lives of seventeen people began and didn’t end until he was caught thirteen years later.
Researchers and psychologists are constantly trying to find out what is going on in the criminal mind and how serial killers rationalize aspects in their mind. He began his crime sprees, mostly with small crimes like burglary and stealing cars. Unlike most children his age, Manson was already showing signs of delinquent behavior. Bravin states that Manson was arrested around the age of thirteen and was sent to a detention center in Plainfield, Indiana, where he was raped by another inmate. It was reported that, throughout Manson’s time in confinement, he would burn himself with cigarettes and put needles in himself to build up his pain tolerance (Bravin 49).
Jeffrey Dahmer was a fun and active child. He liked to wrestle, run and play with other children. But when his parents started to fight, he felt alone in the world. He began hiding in the woods and collecting the carcasses of dead animals. These carcasses gave him the comfort his family and classmates did not. At the age of 31 he went to jail for the murder of 17 people, where he was killed by a fellow inmate a few years later. What drove such a happy child to become a serial killer?
Jeffrey Dahmer killed and committed acts of necrophilia on 17 males between 1978 and 1991. In the article “Jeffrey Dahmer Biography”, it states that “Dahmer initially pleaded not guilty to all charges, despite having confessed to the killings during police interrogation, but he eventually changed his plea to guilty by virtue of insanity” (Biography.com). His defense then described all the gorey details of his behavior and murders, trying to prove that only someone who had psychopathic tendencies could commit such horrendous acts, but the jury decided to believe the prosecution's statement that Dahmer was fully aware that his acts were evil and chose to commit them anyway. The trial was so complicated that “on February 15, 1992, they returned after approximately 10 hours' deliberation to find him guilty, but sane, on all counts” (Biography.com). He was then sentenced to 15 life sentences in prison, which were going to be run consecutively, with a 16th term added on in May. Another well known serial killer was John Wayne Gacy. Gacy would dress up as “Pogo the Clown” and perform for children’s birthday parties, but no one knew that he would eventually murder and rape 33 boys. He would then hide the bodies in a crawl space in his house and kept them there for years until he was caught. The article states that “the discovery of his murders and subsequent arrest shook the community as he
Gacy was a well respected man who wouldn’t be suspected of committing multiple murders. “His first known killing was in 1972, taking the life of Timothy McCoy after luring the teen to his home” (Biography 1). Gacy’s strategy into luring kids (mostly boys) into his home was to roam the streets in search for these young kids and force them to go with him. In 1978 Robert Piest who was 15 years old went missing. His mother said Robert had went to Gacy’s home in search of a job but Robert never came back. “This time the Des Plaines police got involved and searched Gacy’s home” (Crime museum 1). When the police got involved they found things that weren’t his and items that were suspicious. Later on, “On December 22, 1978, facing mounting physical evidence against him from subsequent searches of his home, Gacy confessed that he had killed thirty-three young men and boys and buried most on his property” (Luongo 1). Gacy would torture, strangle, and rape these young men. Gacy was found guilty on all of the murders he committed and he was sentenced to the lethal injection.
Jimmy Gatz’s schedule reveals that he was very driven and strongly believed that bettering himself everyday was crucial to his life. Mr. Gatz says his son “was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something” (pg 173). With this being said, Mr. Gatz knew that Jimmy wanted to be a somebody in life and to be a wholesome person
Meet Jimmy Lee Gray. In 1968 he murdered his fiancé by cutting her throat, he only served seven years of his twenty year sentence when he was given parole. Not long after this he struck again, this time it was even worse. One June 27, 1976 he kidnapped a girl, took her to the woods where he raped her and attempted to drown her. When drowning did not work he broke her neck with his boot. Her name was Daressa Jean Seales and she was three years old.
One side of this argument is that all serial killers are raised in such a manner that causes them to commit murders. Donald Henry Gaskins is one serial killer that many believe committed his crimes based on the way his family raised him. Gaskins mother Eulea Parrott otherwise known as Molly got pregnant at the age of fourteen when she has sex with “Mr. Gaskins, a wealthy, well-known neighbor of Molly, who loved to gamble and drink… he paid Molly $1 for sex several times a week” (Donald Henry Gaskins). Later Molly would live on Mr. Gaskins farm and get paid ten dollars by Mr. Gaskins each month. Donald would later in his childhood be known as “Pee Wee because of his small height and weight,” and he was “teased and made