Gifted Serial Killers: John Wayne Gacy Edmund Kemper Theodore Bundy
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Gifted Serial Killers: John Wayne Gacy Edmund Kemper Theodore Bundy An Honors Thesis (HONRS 499) by Lindsay Wayne Thesis Advisor Jennifer Warrner Ball State University Muncie, Indiana December 6, 2007 Will Graduate May 2007 r ,': t~ Abstract (~ l. ' /I,r; '7 The names John Wayne Gacy, Ed Kemper, and Ted Bundy were not made famous by anything good they did. In fact, these three men were some of the most notorious serial killers that the United States has ever seen. Each man was very different in the way he killed, his victim choice, and his general personality. In this paper, I describe the general background and actions of each killer, and then give a profile of each killer. Criminal profiling is a recent trend, but law enforcement now utilizes criminal profilers to examine crimes and crime scenes to help get an idea of the personality of the person responsible. Finally, I explain the gifted characteristics that each killer possessed, as this project was inspired after taking a class on giftedness. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Ms. Jennifer Warmer for helping to both inspire this thesis idea and for supporting me through the completion of this project. Her creativity and advice helped to keep me motivated and focused. ANTED by the FBI JOHNWAYNEGACY "Killer Clown" Date of birth: MARCH 17,1942 Race: WHITE Sex: MALE Eyes: BROWN Hair: GRAY Wanted for: Rape and murder of 33 boys and young men Gifted characteristics: Above average intelligence, Interpersonal intelligence and a strong leader John Wayne Gacy Background John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago in March of 1942, the second of three children to Marion and John Stanley Gacy. He was raised in a middle class neighborhood, and kept busy with Boy Scouts and different part-time jobs. Gacy had a very stressful relationship with his father, who was a verbally abusive alcoholic, and the two were never close. After spending time in Las Vegas working, Gacy moved back to Chicago in the early 1960's. He enrolled in a business college, and found he was talented as a salesman. Eventually, Gacy rose to a management position for Nunn-Bush Shoe Company in Springfield, Illinois. In Springfield, Gacy was very involved in the community in organizations such as the Chi Rho Club, the Catholic Inter-Club Council, the Chicago Civil Defense, and the Jaycees, where Gacy was even voted "Man of the Year" (Crimelibrary.com, 2006). In 1964, he married Marlynn Myers and moved to Waterloo, Iowa. In 1967, when Gacy was around the age of twenty-six, he began to bring boys to his home. At this point, he was not killing the boys, just engaging them in sexual acts. Gacy claimed the sex was consensual, even though he would do things like tie boy's hands behind their backs before he raped them. Gacy was brought to trial for sodomy and sentenced to ten years in the Iowa State Reformatory for Men in Anamosa. This was the beginning of the end of Gacy's marriage to Marlynn and contact with his children (Morrison, 76). While in prison, Gacy became one of the prison's top chefs and started a prison chapter of the Jaycees. After just seventeen months, Gacy was released for good behavior. After he was released, he moved back to Illinois, and in 1971, he married his second wife, Carol Huff, and they lived in a neighborhood on the northwest 1 side of Chicago. Gacy also started his own business, PDM Contracting. Gacy became a well respected member of the community and was always willing to help his neighbors. He would dress up as a character he called Pogo the Clown to visit sick children in local hospitals, and was well known for throwing back-yard parties with hundreds of guests (Morrison, 86). It was during this time that Gacy began to hunt for his victims. During the night, he would visit an area of Chicago called Bughouse Square, which was then a run-down area where male prostitutes were common (Morrison, 87). This was also around the time when Gacy's second wife, Carol, divorced him. Even while they lived together, he had begun to bury bodies under their home, but she claimed she never noticed anything strange or suspicious. She explained the reason the marriage ended was because he was too busy with his contracting business and helping out neighbors (Morrison, 85). Even though it soon became a common knowledge around Bughouse Square that Gacy was interested in rough sex, many prostitutes in need of money did not take heed. Gacy would drive around Bughouse Square in his Oldsmobile with his own police spotlight and scanner looking for prostitutes. Gacy would bring the boy to his home, and begin to toy with him. Often, he would handcuff the victim, tie a rope around his neck with a board between the knots, and twist the rope with a stick. Then, when the boy was nude and unconscious, Gacy would take pictures until the boy regained consciousness, twist the rope again and repeat this process until the victim died (Morrison, 87). One victim who survived Gacy's torture was Jeff Rignall. In March of 1978, Rignall decided to go to a bar after he argued with his girlfriend. As he walked down the sidewalk, Gacy pulled up in his Oldsmobile and started a conversation. Later Rignall 2 explained that Gacy seemed like a nice guy, and when he offered some marijuana, Rignall got in the car. As Rignall was smoking, Gacy forced a chloroform cloth over his face, and when Rignall awoke, he was in Gacy's house and had been bound and restrained. Gacy forced Rignall to perform oral sex on him, and then Gacy forced different dildos, as well as a fireplace poker, into RignalL When Gacy finished with him, he dumped Jeff Rignall in Lincoln Park (Morrison, 77). Rignall eventually made his way back to his girlfriend's apartment, where she took him to a hospital. The victim who finally brought Gacy to the notice of the police was Robert Piest, who was only fifteen years old when he was killed. He met Gacy at a drugstore where he held a part-time job. Gacy was in the store giving advice to the storeowner about updating the place. Piest overheard Gacy mention the wage he paid his workers, which was much more than he was currently earning. Piest asked a co-worker ifhe could leave early to talk to Gacy about getting a job, and he even told his mom who had come to pick him up that he was going to go speak with Gacy. When Piest approached Gacy, who was in his car, Gacy invited him in the car to talk to him. Gacy explained that he felt Piest was being too aggressive about asking for a job, and says that he told Piest that if he really wanted more money, he should think about selling his body for sex. Gacy then began driving towards his home, and when they arrived, he quickly handcuffed Piest. The next morning, Piest was dead, raped and murdered by Gacy's choking rope. Gacy slept with the body for a while and then dumped the body in the Des Plaines River. A few months later, the remains Piest were found, and Gacy was charged with murder, aggravated kidnapping, deviant sexual assault, and taking indecent liberties with a child (Morrison, 80). 3 Piest's body was one of the few that Gacy disposed of in the Des Plaines River. He actually dragged twenty-nine of his victims into the crawl space under his house and placed them into shallow graves he dug. The bodies were arranged in a circle, and some were so decomposed that cause of death could not be determined. Others had been buried with ropes tied around the neck, and other bodies that had not yet greatly decomposed were found with wads of material in the esophagus, possibly to stop blood from getting onto Gacy's floors (Morrison, 89). The youngest ofGacy's victims was nine, and the oldest around twenty. Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Robert Stein believed that some of the victims may have been buried alive and had tried to claw themselves out (Wikipedia.org, 2006). On March 12, 1980, Gacy was found guilty of thirty-three murders, and on May 9, 1994, he was executed by lethal injection. Profile While Gacy's thirty-three murders may have seemed to be sexual in nature, they were really about anger and aggression (Morrison, 74). Around the age oftwenty, Gacy had left his family and was working in Las Vegas as an attendant at a mortuary. He admitted to getting into a coffin and holding a dead body to himself while he grew aroused. According to Helen Morrison, M.D., who was certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology for general psychiatry and was a certified forensic psychiatrist, what Gacy was doing was a combination of experimenting with a body and something he saw as comfortable, and not acting as a necrophile interesting in actually having sexual relations with the bodies (Morrison, 75). F or a person so interested in killing, it seemed strange that Gacy would let a victim live, as Jeff Rignall did. Rignall felt he was still alive because he never resisted, 4 mainly because he was completely restrained. He said Gacy waited until he knew Rignall was experiencing pain, and then put the chloroform cloth back on his face. After he lost consciousness, Gacy would reposition him and when he awoke, explain what he was going to do to Rignall next.