On the night of December 11, 1978, Robert Piest, 15, told his mother he was stepping out to meet a contractor and would be right back. It was her birthday. Robert left the pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois, and never came home. Ten days later, police dug beneath a contractor’s house and found 26 sets of human remains.
Three more bodies were buried in the yard, and four had been thrown into a river – a total of 33 victims. The contractor was John Wayne Gacy. Neighbors knew him as Pogo the Clown, the man who entertained children at charity events and once posed for a photo with First Lady Rosalynn Carter. Over six years, he killed young men inside his home and buried them beneath the floor he walked over every day.
Dozens of families had reported their sons missing. Police treated them as runaways. Gacy had been questioned at least twice before Piest vanished, and each time officers left without acting. After each visit, more people died.
Gacy was convicted of 33 murders and executed in 1994. But the story did not end there. Eight of his victims had no names. No family claimed them.
Nearly half a century later, five remain unidentified. Robert Jerome Piest was born March 16, 1963, in Des Plaines, about 17 miles northwest of downtown Chicago. He was the youngest of three children. His father, Harold, was a quiet, hard-working man.
His mother, Elizabeth, held the family together. The Piests were a middle-class suburban family – not wealthy, not famous, not politically connected. Robert attended Maine West High School, competed in gymnastics and swimming, and was described by teachers as a diligent student always willing to help others. After school, he worked part-time at the Nissen Pharmacy on Touhy Avenue.
A co-worker was Kim Byers, 17, a fellow student. During the evening shift on December 11, she borrowed Robert’s jacket because it was cold. While wearing it, she slipped a photo-processing receipt into the pocket. She returned the jacket before he left.
No one paid attention to that scrap of paper. It would become one of the most important pieces of evidence in American criminal history. Before leaving the pharmacy, Robert told his mother he needed to step out for a few minutes. A contractor working near the store might offer him a summer job paying double his current wage.
“I’m going out to see the contractor about a job, and I’ll be right back, Mom,” he said. Those were the last words Elizabeth Piest ever heard from her son. She waited. Ten minutes, 30 minutes, an hour.
The store closed. The parking lot emptied. Robert never came back. He was not the kind of boy to disappear.
He had never been late. He always called if plans changed. So the Piests called the police that same night. Robert Piest was not the first young man to vanish in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970s.
He was not even the tenth or the twentieth. Over six years, dozens of young men had disappeared across the northwest suburbs. Families reported them missing and were told the same thing: your son probably ran away. No investigation was opened.
No search was conducted. The Piests refused to accept that answer. They knew their son. That determination would expose a secret the suburbs had hidden for six years.
John Butkovich was 18 and worked for a small contracting company called PDM Contractors, which specialized in home repairs and remodeling. In 1975, a wage dispute broke out between Butkovich and his boss. He told his family he was going to meet his boss to collect his final pay. He never returned.
His parents reported him missing and told police their son was not the runaway type. Officers took the report and did nothing. They never went to his workplace. They never questioned the boss.
Butkovich’s body remained under that boss’s garage for three years. Gregory Godzik, 17, also worked for PDM Contractors. In 1976, a year after Butkovich vanished, Godzik disappeared too. His family reported it.
This time police did question the company owner. He said Godzik quit and left. They believed him and closed the file. Two young men, same company, both gone within a year.
Each time, the owner had an answer ready. Each time, police left without asking more questions. John Szyc, 19, disappeared in January 1977. His family reported it immediately.
Police discovered his car had been sold. They traced the buyer, who led them to the same company owner, the same man questioned the previous year about Godzik. He said Szyc sold him the car to get money and leave town. Police believed him.
A 19-year-old was missing. His car was in the possession of the same man connected to at least two other disappearances. The system treated it as coincidence. Many victims were transient, relying on rides.
Many were runaways or young men living on the margins. Many were gay or bisexual in an era when the disappearances of gay men were not treated as worthy of attention. These were invisible people, and their disappearances were handled as matters not deserving time or paperwork. It took the 33rd victim for the system to begin moving.
The 32 before him had not been enough. John Wayne Gacy Jr. was born March 17, 1942, in Chicago, the second of three children. His father, John Stanley Gacy, was a Polish-American mechanic, an alcoholic, and violent in ways neighbors knew but did not discuss.
He beat his son with a razor strap and called him a fool, a coward, someone who would never amount to anything. When Gacy was 11, a swing at a playground struck him in the head, causing blackouts that lasted five years until doctors discovered and treated a blood clot in his brain. Gacy was also sexually abused several times as a child by a contractor friend of his father. He told no one.
None of this justifies anything Gacy later did. But the warning signs were present, and no one in the system acted on them. Gacy dropped out of high school, lived briefly in Las Vegas, worked at a funeral home, then returned to Chicago and graduated from a business college in 1963. In 1964, at 22, he married Marlynn Myers and moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he managed a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise owned by his wife’s family.
He joined the Jaycees and became a prominent, trusted community member. In August 1967, Gacy sexually assaulted 15-year-old Donald Voorhees Jr. In 1968, he was arrested and convicted of sodomy. A doctor who examined him concluded he suffered from antisocial personality disorder and recommended long-term, close supervision.
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. His wife divorced him immediately. He never saw her or their two children again. But Gacy was a model prisoner.
He earned his GED, became a head cook, joined the Jaycees inside prison, and campaigned for better wages for fellow inmates. After 18 months, he was released on parole. A convicted child sex offender, diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, was back in society. In February 1971, another teenager accused Gacy of forcing him into sexual acts.
The charge was dropped when the victim failed to appear in court. In October 1971, Gacy’s parole ended. A month later, his entire criminal record in Iowa was sealed by court order. John Wayne Gacy entered the 1970s with a clean slate.
Thirty-three young men would pay for that. He bought the house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park, a Chicago suburb. It was an ordinary one-story home, the kind you pass daily without noticing. He founded PDM Contractors, specializing in home repairs and remodeling.
In 1972, he married again, to Carole Hoff, a woman he had dated in high school. She and her two daughters moved into the Summerdale house. From the outside, Gacy’s life looked like a suburban dream. He hosted annual summer parties with up to 400 guests, including local politicians, business partners, and neighbors.
Through his political involvement, he met First Lady Rosalynn Carter and had his picture taken with her. The photo still exists today: a serial killer standing beside the wife of the President of the United States, both smiling. Then Gacy created his clown persona, Pogo. He designed the makeup himself and sewed the costume himself.
He visited sick children in hospitals, attended birthday parties, and participated in community charity events. Children adored him. Parents trusted him. While Pogo the Clown entertained children above ground, young men’s bodies decomposed beneath the floor of his home.
The first victim Gacy personally admitted to killing was Timothy McCoy, 16, of Nebraska. In January 1972, McCoy was passing through Chicago and met Gacy at a Greyhound bus station. Gacy took him home. McCoy was stabbed to death and buried under the house.
He was identified years later through dental records. He was Gacy’s only known knife victim; all subsequent victims were strangled or suffocated. Gacy developed a method. He lured young men to his home with promises of construction work, or with money, alcohol, or an invitation to see a magic trick.
The trick was the trap: he would put handcuffs on the victim as part of an escape act. Once the handcuffs clicked shut, the trick was over. He also used chloroform to sedate victims. In some cases, he mounted a red light on his car to impersonate an officer and pull young men over on the road.
They were all taken to 8213 West Summerdale. They were all killed inside that house. Twenty-six bodies were buried in the crawl space, a dark, damp area beneath the home only about three feet high. Three more were buried elsewhere in the yard.
Gacy walked over that floor every day, ate dinner there every night, watched television there every evening – directly above 26 decomposing bodies. After his divorce from Carole Hoff in October 1975 and her departure with the children in February 1976, the murder rate accelerated. From three victims in his first four years, he moved to at least 30 in the final two years. There was no one left in the house to ask about the strange noises, the foul odor from the crawl space, or the unfamiliar young men who arrived and never left.
When the Piest family reported Robert missing, Des Plaines police responded differently than Chicago police had in previous years. Lieutenant Detective Joseph Kozenczak took the case and began investigating immediately. Within hours, officers identified the contractor Robert said he was going to meet: the owner of PDM, the man doing repair work at the Nissen Pharmacy. His name was John Wayne Gacy.
Officers were sent to Gacy’s house. He seemed cooperative, friendly, talkative, even joking with police. He said he knew nothing about Robert Piest and suggested the boy probably ran away like many teenagers. At one point, he told a surveillance officer something the detective would never forget: “Clowns can get away with anything.
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On December 13, Des Plaines police obtained a search warrant for Gacy’s home. The first search did not find Robert Piest or any bodies, but it found other things: a driver’s license that did not belong to Gacy, a high school graduation ring belonging to an unknown young man, a fake police badge, handcuffs, sex toys, syringes and drugs, child pornography, and a photo-processing receipt. That receipt matched perfectly the one Kim Byers had placed in Robert Piest’s jacket pocket that night. A small scrap of paper became the link between Robert Piest and John Wayne Gacy’s house.
Meanwhile, police traced Gacy’s Iowa conviction. The picture was becoming clear. Gacy was placed under 24-hour surveillance. During the surveillance, two Des Plaines officers were invited inside the Summerdale house.
One, Officer Bob Schultz, was standing in the bathroom when the heating system kicked on. Hot air rose from the furnace through the crawl space, carrying a smell Schultz identified immediately. “It smelled like a morgue,” he told his partner when they left. “That smell coming from under the house wasn’t sewage.
It wasn’t a dead rat. It was the smell of decomposing bodies. ”
On December 21, 1978, ten days after Robert Piest disappeared, the surveillance team arrested Gacy on a minor charge of giving marijuana to a gas station attendant. That same night, drunk, Gacy confessed to his attorney.
He said he had killed people. A lot of people. Police obtained a second search warrant. This time they dug into the crawl space.
Officer Daniel Genty was the first to crawl into the pitch-dark space beneath 8213 West Summerdale. Within minutes, he found a piece of a human arm bone. He shouted up to his colleagues: “Charge him. I found one.
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They did not stop at one. In the following days and weeks, the digging team recovered 26 sets of remains from the crawl space. Three more bodies were found elsewhere in the yard. The final four bodies, including Robert Piest’s, were recovered from the Des Plaines River in the months that followed.
Robert Piest’s body was found in April 1979 in the Illinois River. In total: 33 victims. 33 young men killed by the same man in the same house over six years. When news of the bodies spread, the Norwood Park community collapsed in disbelief.
Neighbors stood on the sidewalk watching the digging crew carry remains out of the home they had passed every day for years. They had attended parties in that backyard. Their children had played with Pogo the Clown in that front yard. One neighbor later said the worst part wasn’t learning Gacy had killed people.
It was realizing the smell they had noticed coming from the house in the summer, which Gacy explained as moisture under the house, had been the smell of human remains. They had smelled it. They had asked about it. And they had accepted his explanation.
Elizabeth Piest, the mother who waited for her son to return on her birthday, now had to bury him. The Piest family filed an $85 million wrongful-death lawsuit against the Iowa Parole Board, the Iowa Corrections Department, and the Chicago Police Department for systematic negligence. The suit asked the question every victim’s family wanted answered: if Iowa had not released Gacy after 18 months, would my son still be alive? If Chicago police had investigated when Butkovich disappeared in 1975, would my son still be alive?
Had his criminal record not been sealed, would my son still be alive? The answer to all three questions is most likely yes. In 1979, the house at 8213 West Summerdale was demolished. Crowds came to watch.
People stood across the street as a bulldozer tore down the home where 33 young men had been killed. Many applauded as the house became rubble. In 1986, a new house was built on the same lot with a new address, as if changing the number could erase what had happened beneath the ground. The trial of John Wayne Gacy began on February 6, 1980, in Cook County court in Chicago.
Because of the intense media attention, the defense requested a change of venue. The jury was selected from Rockford instead of Chicago. Gacy did not deny that 33 young men had died in his home. The physical evidence was conclusive: 29 sets of remains from his property, fingerprints, his confession, dozens of witnesses.
Instead, the defense entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Gacy claimed he suffered from multiple personality disorder. He said an alternate personality named “Jack” committed all the murders while Gacy himself knew nothing. According to him, Jack was the killer.
Gacy was just a man who happened to live in the same body. The defense called 22 witnesses, including Gacy’s mother and sister, who described the verbal and physical abuse, the razor-strap beatings, the constant humiliation, the dog shot dead. Six psychiatrists testified for the defense, concluding Gacy suffered from schizophrenia-like conditions or multiple personality disorder. In the final days of the trial, Gacy appeared increasingly detached, repeatedly telling the judge he did not understand what was happening.
The judge, Louis Garippo, ruled Gacy still competent to stand trial. The prosecution countered with its own experts. A state psychiatrist diagnosed Gacy with antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, not any form of psychosis. They testified Gacy was fully aware of the nature and consequences of his behavior and was capable of complying with the law but chose not to.
One expert made an argument the jury would not forget: building the crawl space to bury bodies, pouring lime on the corpses to speed decomposition, and throwing the final four victims in the river when the space ran out were all evidence of deliberate calculation. This was not the behavior of a man who was insane. This was the behavior of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and carefully hid the evidence. Prosecutor William Kunkle asked one of the defense psychiatrists whether he could guarantee Gacy would spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital if found insane.
The expert could offer no such guarantee. The question echoed through the courtroom: if Gacy was found insane, he would go to a mental hospital, and if another doctor someday decided he had stabilized, he could be released. A jury of 12 listened to weeks of testimony from both sides. They saw the physical evidence.
They looked at photographs of the crawl space. They heard descriptions of how Gacy lured victims with the handcuff trick, how he strangled them with a rope, how he buried them under the house and then went upstairs to host parties directly above them. The jury deliberated for one hour and 50 minutes. One hour and 50 minutes for all 33 counts of murder.
Less than four minutes per life. The verdict was unanimous: guilty on 33 counts of murder. The jury completely rejected the insanity defense. They concluded John Wayne Gacy knew exactly what he was doing when he killed each of the 33 victims, and that he was able to stop and chose not to.
Judge Garippo sentenced Gacy on March 13, 1980. He received life sentences for 21 murders committed before June 1977, before Illinois reinstated the death penalty. For the 12 murders committed after that date, he received 12 death sentences. At the time, it was the largest number of murder charges against a single defendant in American judicial history.
Gacy was transferred to death row at Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois. He stayed there for 14 years. During those 14 years, he never admitted he had done anything wrong. In prison, Gacy began painting.
His most common subject was clowns. He painted Pogo dozens of times with wide smiles and bright colors, as if the character was a happy memory rather than the mask he had worn while killing young men. He also painted self-portraits and landscapes. Those paintings were sold to serial-killer memorabilia collectors.
Gacy’s paintings sold for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars each. He sold Polaroid pictures of himself for a dollar if he signed them. A man who killed 33 people was making money from his infamy. He also denied everything.
He retracted the confession he made on the night of his arrest, claiming it was given while drunk and had no legal validity. He said the bodies under his house were placed there by someone else, that PDM employees had access to the crawl space and could have used it to hide bodies. He said he was innocent, a victim of conspiracy, betrayed by the justice system. Thirty-three bodies under his home.
Fingerprints, graduation rings, and driver’s licenses of victims in his house. And still he stood in front of cameras and said he had killed no one. He filed appeal after appeal. Each was rejected.
In 1984, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the verdict. In 1994, the U. S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
All legal avenues were closed. On May 10, 1994, John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois. He was 52 years old. The injection procedure hit a technical problem when a tube clogged, prolonging the execution.
He died at 12:58 a. m. His recorded final words were not an apology. He said his execution would not pay for the loss of others, that this was a killing by the state.
Even to the last moment, he saw himself as the victim. He said not a single word to the 33 families. He named not one of his victims. John Wayne Gacy died, and most Americans assumed the case was over.
But it was not. When police recovered 29 sets of remains from Gacy’s house in late 1978 and early 1979, only 25 people were identified. Eight sets of remains had no names, no fingerprint matches, no dental-record matches. No family came forward to claim them.
Eight young men lay in the crawl space under John Wayne Gacy’s house, and no one in the world knew who they were. They were buried in anonymous graves in a local cemetery. Each headstone carried only a number. Not a name.
They were not only murdered and buried under a killer’s house. They were buried a second time without anyone knowing who they were. Why could eight young men die without anyone noticing they were missing? Many of Gacy’s victims were transients.
Many were runaways living on the streets. Many were sex workers. Many were gay or bisexual in an era when families sometimes disowned children for their sexuality. Some left home because of violent families.
Some were thrown out. When they disappeared, no one reported them, because to the people around them, they had already disappeared before Gacy touched them. In the 1970s system, if no one was looking for you, you did not exist. If no one reported you missing, you were not missing.
The eight young men remained in anonymous graves for more than 30 years. Then in 2011, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart decided 30 years was too long. Dart had no legal obligation to reopen the case. Gacy was dead.
There was no defendant to prosecute, no trial to prepare. Technically, the case was closed. But Dart looked at eight numbered headstones and decided that a closed case did not mean an ended responsibility. “As science evolves,” he said, “it is our duty to apply those new tools to old cases, just as we would to new ones, to help victims and their families.
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By 2011, DNA technology had advanced far beyond what existed in 1978. A new field was emerging: genetic genealogy. This method compares a victim’s DNA against online ancestry databases, where millions of people have submitted samples to learn about their family origins. If a distant relative of the victim had submitted DNA, investigators could build a family tree backward and eventually identify the victim.
The Cook County Sheriff’s Office partnered with the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit specializing in using genetic information to identify unidentified remains. The process began with exhuming the remains of the eight unidentified victims, collecting new DNA samples using modern techniques, and starting the comparisons. The first result came within weeks of reopening the case. William George Bundy, 19, a construction worker, was identified as one of the victims.
He had disappeared in the mid-1970s, and no one knew what had happened to him until DNA confirmed his remains had lain beneath Gacy’s house for more than 30 years. In 2017, the second result emerged. James Byron Haakenson, 16, was from Minnesota. In the mid-1970s, he called his mother and told her he was in Chicago.
That was the last time she heard his voice. He disappeared. His mother searched. She called authorities.
She never stopped looking. But she did not know where to look, and no one helped her. Decades passed. Then in 2017, the DNA Doe Project compared the genetic profile of the remains found under Gacy’s house against ancestry databases and found a match that led them to the Haakenson family.
Jimmy Haakenson, the 16-year-old who called his mother from Chicago, had lain beneath 8213 West Summerdale Avenue for more than 40 years. Finally he had a name. Finally he was brought home. Two of the eight were identified.
Six remained waiting. In 2021, the third result appeared. On October 25, 2021, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart held a press conference announcing that victim number five, the remains found in the crawl space of Gacy’s house on December 26, 1978, had been identified as Francis Wayne Alexander, of North Carolina. He would have been 21 or 22 years old when Gacy killed him, sometime between early 1976 and early 1977.
Alexander’s life in Chicago is documented only in scraps of paper. Born in North Carolina, he moved to New York, then to Chicago, where he married and divorced after about three months in 1975. After that, his trail completely vanished. No employment records.
No fixed address. No one knew what happened to him. His family in North Carolina did not know he was dead. For more than 40 years, they did not know.
They did not know his remains had been recovered from a serial killer’s house in 1978. They did not know he had been buried in an unmarked grave at a Cook County cemetery with only a number on the stone. The identification of Alexander proved the power of genetic genealogy. The DNA Doe Project used a genetic profile created from Alexander’s remains and compared it against online ancestry databases.
They found potential relatives, built a family tree, and narrowed the search until it led to the Alexander family. Alexander’s mother and a half-brother provided DNA samples for comparison. Combining genetic testing, financial records, autopsy reports, and other information, investigators confirmed the remains belonged to Francis Wayne Alexander. The sheriff’s office officially notified the family on October 22, 2021.
Caroline Sanders, Alexander’s sister, issued a statement on behalf of the family. “We want to thank Sheriff Tom Dart, Lieutenant Jason Moran, and the dedicated officers in the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, and the DNA Doe Project,” she wrote. “Without their tireless efforts, our family would not have the peace of mind we now feel. ”
A mother now has peace of mind.
Sisters now have peace of mind. Brothers now have peace of mind. A mother waited over 40 years to know where her son was, and now she knows. Three of the eight were identified: William George Bundy, James Byron Haakenson, and Francis Wayne Alexander.
Three names returned to three sets of remains. Three families finally learned what happened. But five people still have no names. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) released accurate facial reconstructions of two of the five unidentified victims, hoping someone would recognize them.
“John Doe” number 10 was described as a white male, 17 to 21 years old, 5’7” to 5’11”, with a healed fracture of the left collarbone and several dental fillings. “John Doe” number 13 was a white male, 18 to 21 years old, 5’9” to 6’2”, with wavy dark brown hair and a rotated upper tooth. That is all that is known about them. Height, hair color, fillings, a healed fracture – no name, no family, no story.
Detective Jason Moran, who led the identification investigation, said, “The hope is that by releasing that reconstruction image, we will get additional leads. ” Anyone with information is asked to contact authorities. The five young men are still waiting. They are no longer beneath the house, but they remain in DNA files, waiting for someone to recognize them.
Perhaps an elderly mother in a small town still wonders what happened to her son in the summer of 1976. Perhaps the answer lies in an ancestry database where neither she nor any relative has yet submitted a sample. Perhaps one phone call, one DNA sample, or one old memory is all it would take to restore a name to one of these five young men. The Gacy case left many legacies, none of them simple.
The forensic legacy is the clearest: DNA technology and genetic genealogy can identify victims decades after death. Time is not the final barrier. Science can do what the original investigation could not. Each identification – Bundy, Haakenson, Alexander – is living proof that refusing to give up matters.
The legal legacy is more complex. The case exposed systemic failure in how police handled missing-person cases, especially when victims were teenagers, gay men, homeless, or anyone society deemed unworthy of being searched for. After Gacy, missing-person reporting procedures in Illinois and many other states were revised. The principle that every disappearance deserves serious investigation, regardless of the victim’s social circumstances, became a reinforced principle in police training.
The cultural legacy is perhaps what the public knows best. The “killer clown” moniker became a haunting model that has permeated Western culture. The image of a clown with a wide smile hiding dark intentions appears in countless films, novels, and television shows. The fear of clowns many people feel today can be traced partly to John Wayne Gacy and Pogo.
Netflix produced a documentary series, “Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes,” in 2022, using previously unreleased recordings of Gacy. Dozens of books have been written about the case. But the most important legacy of the case is not in films or books. It is the lesson of systemic failure.
Five failures stacked on top of each other paved the way for everything that followed. The first failure: Iowa released a convicted child-sex offender diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder after 18 months instead of 10 years. The second failure: his criminal record was sealed, erasing the trace of his previous conviction. The third failure: Chicago police questioned Gacy at least twice after PDM employees disappeared, and both times they left without taking action.
The fourth failure: the system ignored victims because they were young, transient, or gay, or because they lacked families strong enough to force police to act. The fifth failure: systemic homophobia meant the disappearances of gay men were not treated as problems worth investigating. These five failures were not separate incidents. They were one system, and that system allowed John Wayne Gacy to kill 33 people over six years without being stopped.
On the night of December 11, 1978, Robert Piest told his mother he was going out to meet a contractor and would be right back. It was her birthday. He was 15 years old. He never came home.
But because his family refused to stay silent, because Elizabeth Piest did not accept “maybe your son ran away,” 33 victims were found. Twenty-eight of them have been identified. Three more were identified through DNA decades later. Five remain unidentified.
They are still out there, in DNA files, waiting for someone to recognize them. The case is not over. Five people are still waiting to be called by their names.