For serial killer John Wayne Gacy, normalcy was camouflage. Despite being convicted and serving time for sodomy in 1968, Gacy established himself as a community fixture in Chicago — a local general contractor who also worked as a part-time clown with ties to local politicians. So when young men in the area began disappearing in 1972, few looked in his direction.
Between 1972 and 1978, 33 young men aged 14 to 30 vanished in Chicago, and Gacy’s mundane life as an average white man shielded him from suspicion. So did a culture of normalized homophobia.
In the 1970s, many teens ran away from home after being ostracized by their families. So Gacy would approach these vulnerable young men, and once they were in his home, he would chloroform them before raping, torturing and killing them. But he wasn’t caught — for six years. Instead, local police chalked up their disappearances to new cases of runaway teens, and Gacy continued to live his life.
In a new installation of the true crime series Conversations with a Killer, John Wayne Gacy’s life is once again put on trial. Director Joe Berlinger pulls from 60 hours of conversations Gacy had with his defense team, as well as new interviews from people at the center of the tragedies, to dissect the mechanics of Gacy’s predatory habits and the social conditions that helped him escape responsibility for so long. Speaking with Tudum, Berlinger discusses how he captured a glimpse at this convicted murderer through a new lens, and what the weight of his murders mean for us today.
At the beginning of Conversations with a Killer, Dr. Kim Byers-Lund, who was friends with Gacy victim Rob Piest, reads a diary entry she wrote about Piest going missing. Why did you choose to open with this scene? We wanted it to bring people into the world of what it’s like to have somebody just vanish. A lot of Gacy victims were young gay men who weren’t comfortable living at home. So they had to flee because of the social mores at the time, which is a driving theme of the show. All the 33 killings happened without any knowledge, without any police reports, without anyone looking for missing people.
So Piest was a catalyst for the rest of Gacy’s story? [It was] a narrative challenge because you can’t tell that story. There’s no manhunt, there’s no police chase the way there was with [Ted] Bundy. When [Bundy] was apprehended in Colorado, he escaped prison and there was a national manhunt. But even before they knew it was Bundy, there were daily press reports covering this maniac that was killing young women in the Pacific Northwest. In the Gacy case, young gay men were disappearing and nobody seemed to care, and they kept writing it off to runaways. The police didn’t take it seriously. How do you tell a story where there’s just nothing to cut to, nothing to show? So we wanted to start with Rob Piest. And then start with the suspicion and the arrest, and then peel back all the crimes.
You went through 60 hours of Gacy conversations when making this series. How did you decide which clips to include and which clips to leave out? You build your structure, [and] you figure out what stories to tell. We were really happy that there were several people who had never spoken before. For example, Steve Nemmers, the survivor who just barely escaped, he hadn’t talked [publicly] before. Dan Genty, who led the excavation, hadn’t [spoken either]. Gacy is not new. A lot of people have told the story, but I wanted to lean into some new people who hadn’t spoken before, into a psychological unpacking of who Gacy is. So, as the story came together, it directs you as to which [sound] bites to use. He was challenging in particular because he’s also lying a lot, and he’s an unreliable narrator.
How did you navigate that? Gacy lying on tape, that is. You have to be careful how you use him, because we don’t want to give oxygen to his false ideas. But, to me, listening to how he spun things is a fascinating portrait of a sociopath, because a sociopath feels no remorse and always blames other people. And so, I was looking for those moments that weren’t necessarily truthful or untruthful from a factual standpoint, but what are those moments that reveal something, even when he’s being untruthful? What I wanted to focus on is what material there gives us an insight into the mind of the psychopath, into the mind of the sociopath, even when he’s being untruthful.
You were a teenager when these killings were unfolding. In the ’70s, serial killers were just starting to be labeled that, and the entire idea around one person actively and repeatedly murdering specific groups began surfacing in the mainstream. Right. The term serial killer was just [then] being used.
Did experiencing the advent of serial killers help steer you toward a career in true crime? I was very aware of these serial killers when I was a teen. I can’t say that my feelings about the serial killer back then led me to true crime per se — I think there were a lot of things that led me to true crime, but they definitely made a deep impression on me. And I think that’s why I’m still endlessly fascinated, because I remember the horror of learning about these things as a teenager and not understanding how these people could have gotten away with it for so long. And so, I wanted to explore that as a filmmaker.
What was it that made you decide to tell the story of John Wayne Gacy, specifically? There’s a handful of serial killers that I’m endlessly fascinated with, and he’s one of them. From the mid-’70s until the early ’90s, so from Gacy to [Jeffrey] Dahmer, it’s a whole bunch of angry white men who got away with horrible murders, in part because of social values at the time. In the case of Gacy, it’s because of prevailing attitudes toward homosexuality. And it was an era where police departments didn’t cooperate and all this information was available.
Right, and I think that’s what makes Gacy’s story so heartbreaking to watch today. As somebody who has done true crime for 30 years and has really looked into these kinds of stories, we want to believe that people who do evil are evil all the time. So that when you spot somebody who’s a serial killer, they just look like a serial killer. They look evil, or they act evil. And that gives us a false sense of comfort that we can avoid the fate of becoming a victim of a serial killer. But that’s a false notion, that they’re easily identifiable. In fact, the worst serial killers in American history are people who are well liked, and you wouldn’t imagine that they could have done something evil. That’s the reason I like to do these shows and put that message out.
What is your message here? What do you hope viewers take away from this? It’s a lesson you can’t learn enough: Just because somebody looks and acts a certain way, it doesn’t mean you should trust them. As a father of daughters who are in their 20s, it’s a message I want to put out there for them and for the next generation who may not be familiar with these particular serial killers. Just because somebody looks trustworthy doesn’t mean they are. And I think Gacy epitomizes that.
