3)
Gacy was a prolific writer, painter and raconteur. He
claimed to have written more than 10,000 letters during his 14
years on Death Row, as well as completed more than 2,000 oil
paintings, entertained hundreds of visitors, made thousands of
phone calls, and fielded dozens of interviews.
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4)
The only differences between white-collar criminals and other
kinds is that the former are richer and better educated. It's
been estimated that 3% of all U.S. adult males are sociopaths.
Fox et al, p. 19. I'm convinced that a substantial number of
these twisted people become key executives by virtue of their
enormous drive for power and wealth. See footnote 16 for further
definition of the term "sociopath".
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5)
Attorneys use the word "alleged" a lot even when the evidence of
their clients' guilt is overwhelming, which exposes attorneys to
the ridicule and contempt of the general public, who have little
use for the concept of "innocent until proven guilty". One only
need watch the grotesque litany of endless American talk shows
and sports broadcasts to understand that the American
equivalents of Roman bread and circuses are welfare and mindless
entertainment. Americans don't care much about ideas or ideals
-- we just want to see blood!
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6)
August and October, 1993, and February and May, 1994. In
fact, Gacy told me when he called to say good-bye two days
before his execution that we were his last outside visitors
except for his family and lawyers.
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7)
It has truly amazed me to see the number of young (teens
to late 20’s) Americans who have sought paternal approval and
affection from John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez and other
well-known sociopaths and psychopaths. Understandably, the
criminals themselves groove on it totally. One of our four
visits to Gacy was shared with a small, skinny man in his
mid-20’s who had come all the way from California with his
girlfriend to visit Gacy because the visitor had never had any
relationship with his real father. Gacy had offered the young
man advice and fatherly concern (and gotten a blow job from him
in a visiting room with a broken camera as his girlfriend
watched; we were visiting Gacy’s inmate “bodyguard” in another
room down the hall at the time). The young man confided in me
because I was dressed in black from head to toe, including a
black linen shirt, slacks and boots, and he believed that I was
a priest because of my dress -- in spite of my pierced ear and
shoulder length hair! Gacy later told me the same story without
being asked, so it was probably true, especially in view of the
notoriously lax conditions in Illinois prisons (see footnote
14).
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8)
Gacy required that a biographical questionnaire be sent to
him by every prospective visitor, and he had one of his own that
he sent as an example. Gacy liked to write letters and make
collect phone calls, and I received several dozen of each during
the year that I knew him. He was always brusquely optimistic and
chatty. At Christmas, 1993 he sent Christmas cards with a color
photo of him as Pogo or Patches the Clown, roles he had assumed
as an entertainer at children's parties and in children's
hospital wards during the years before he was tagged as
America's most prolific serial killer. The letters and cards are
now valuable collectors items, and there was a scandal in the
months before his death as it became widely known that large
sums of money were being sent to private accounts for his
paintings, other collectibles and even a John Wayne Gacy
$1.99/minute telephone "hot line". Ostensibly, the money was
used for his legal defense fund, but Gacy's defense team was
provided at public expense.
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9)
It also delighted the women. Let me put it bluntly: "bad
boys" make women wet! See, for example, Sheila Eisenberg's Men
Who Kill & the Women Who Love Them. Sure, there are some
women such as fundamentalist Christians who want to castrate
anything male, but these are the exception rather than the rule.
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10)
Anyone who thinks seriously of committing a crime, and not
committing suicide if caught, should visit a real prison. I was
thinking recently about Charles Manson who was convicted of
conspiracy and sentenced to death (later commuted to life in
prison) for the Tate/LaBianca slayings shortly after I married
my first wife. In the quarter of a century since then, I've had
several wives and well over a hundred lovers, traveled and lived
well, and generally done what I pleased. Charlie has rotted in a
small cell, been the subject of several assassination attempts,
and been deprived of almost everything the rest of us take for
granted, even his guitar. Can any of us really conceive what
that kind of misery must be like???
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11) I
thought of Robert Ressler's spooky anecdote about his visit to
infamous 6'9" 300 lb. California serial killer Edmund Kemper.
Ressler reported that after conclusion of his interview, he rang
for the guard, who did not come for a good 20 minutes because it
was shift change time. Kemper commented that he could have
screwed Ressler's head off and placed it on the table to greet
the guard. Ressler et al, p. 47.
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12)
He sold me a graphic rendition of Wisconsin serial killer
Ed Gein (model for Robert Bloch's Psycho) complete with
realistic red paint splatters resembling blood, and a colorful
Charles Manson portrait. Gacy gave me a Hitler caricature, and I
bought a beautifully framed skull with bloody teeth (captioned
"Dahmer Skull") on black matte background at an exhibition of
serial killer art.
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13)
These included a one-of-a-kind
depiction of Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, as well
as several of the Pogo oils for which Gacy is best known, and
a one-of-a-kind portrayal of cartoon character Fred
Flintstone.
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14)
"Hey, death row's great -- death row's a fucking blast. I
get cable t.v., I get phone access any time I want, I get to
paint, I get all these privileges and nobody fucks with me. On
the other hand, the general population [of the prison], that's
for fools and animals. It's a jungle out there, so you're at the
mercy of being killed at any moment for anything, and some
people just have time to kill, they get petty." Letter from John
Wayne Gacy. I had some doubt as to the veracity of this claim at
the time, but the infamous Richard Speck video changed my mind.
Speck, a Chicago mass murderer of eight nurses, died in prison
of a heart attack at the age of 50 in 1990. Five years later a
video made secretly while he was on death row was released. It
showed Speck, with pockmarked face and hormonally-enlarged
breasts, dressed in women's panties and cavorting with a black
inmate. The two snorted what appeared to be cocaine through a
rolled $100 bill and engaged in various sex acts, all the while
bragging about what a good time they had been having. Subsequent
public outrage led to a significant crackdown on Illinois inmate
freedom.
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15)
See theREFERENCESat
the end of this article for a detailed bibliography.
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16)
Suprisingly to laymen, the term "sociopath" is usually
applied to serial murderers like Gacy rather than a term such as
"psychopath" that would indicate less responsibility for their
actions. Sociopathy is an "antisocial character disorder" in
which a person has a complete lack of empathy for others. "Yet
they are otherwise rational, logical, appropriate, competent,
even charming and persuasive." Holmes et al, p.66. Sociopaths do
exactly what they want to do without conscience or respect for
the rights of others. They can rise high in careers requiring
ambition and drive, such as business, the military, government
or even religion. See also footnotes 4 and 18.
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17)
In Gacy's day, the Jaycees were a charitable and social
group of young men in their 20's and 30's, typically ambitious,
smooth-talking self-promoters climbing fast in the business
world. They organized "smokers" at which they played cards,
drank and smoked, watched porn videos, and planned their
charitable activities. It's been claimed that they've "cleaned
up their act" following unfavorable publicity about their social
activities.
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18)
Sociopaths often are intelligent and charming. A number
of my clients and colleagues have been quite convincing in their
folksy, "Hi! How are ya?" approaches. It may take years before
one becomes aware of the evil underneath the pleasant mask,
especially when it's further cloaked in the rectitude of
fundamentalist Christianity. In general, hypocrites and other
crooks "wear" religions like shit "wears" stink!!!
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19)
Gacy had many plaintive woes that he described at great
length to anyone who would listen. For example, he claimed to
have a congenital "bottleneck" heart defect, but there is no
such medical condition. He particularly liked to say, "I'm the
34th victim." It was a mark of his lack of imagination that he
never changed his stories about such obvious fallacies as the
"bottleneck" heart even after he had been exposed in various
newspaper articles and books as a liar.
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20)
His claim of two college degrees was also a lie
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21)
He liked to say, "I'm a pitcher, not a catcher." This
meant that he took the dominant "top" role in his homosexual
encounters.
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22)
"Millions Misspent, a 1992 report, said that Texas has
spent three times more on each death penalty case than it spends
to keep a convict in prison for 40 years." Moore, p. 51.
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23)
"With 313 executions in the United States between 1970 and
the end of 1995, ... one Death Row inmate is released because of
innocence for every five inmates executed." Wertz, p. 11. This
fact, caused at least in part by badly contaminated evidence
(such as the unreliable lab reports and Detective Mark Fuhrman's
perjury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial), is just the tip of
the iceberg of the flawed American criminal "justice" system.
See the detailed discussion of fake evidence in Taylor, p. A1.
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24) Holmes et al, p. 21. Hickey, p. 131.
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25)
"According to a recent report in Science, researchers have
found discrete locations in the brain of an intricate system
that serves, among other things, as the human moral compass. ...
It is quite possible that some of history's greatest villains
harbored an unseen wound...in the prefrontal cortex. Such may be
the condition of all psychopaths. ... And now...scientists will
know where to search for that hole. It is surely where they will
look when studying the brain -- donated to science -- of serial
killer John Wayne Gacy executed last May in Illinois. Suppose
a...defect is found? Will it seem fair to have executed the man
if he was physically incapable of moral judgment? ... If moral
judgment can be broken, surely the next step is to fix it."
Time, July 11, 1994, p. 64.
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26)
Holmes et al, p. 67.
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27)
See my article"Violence: the Sour
Cherry in America's Pie"in EsoTerra #6 (also
available on the Internet at
http://members.aol.com/tornfrom/violence.html).
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28)
Real evil comes into the open only in unusual
circumstances or when it finds safety in numbers, e.g., Pol
Pot's genocidal Communists in Cambodia. I have a theory that
American fundamentalist Christians are about to show their real
face of evil under the mask of patriotism and
self-righteousness.
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29)
One recent study estimates that there are 350 serial
killers in America with an average of 10-12 victims per killer.
Holmes et al, pp. 20-21. I have seen other estimates ranging
from 50 to several thousand active serial killers.
