The chilling story of a prolific serial killer – in his own words

First of all – even though it isn’t really a big part of the John Wayne Gacy story, more incidental – if you needed more proof that clowns are creepy, this is it.

Gacy dressed as Pogo The Clown in a suit and makeup that reminds one of Twisty The Clown in American Horror Story Freak Show (Season 4), who is himself a serial killer and kidnapper. Fun fact: Gacy arrives in American Horror Story Hotel (Season 5) for Devils Night, played by John Carroll Lynch, along with other famous murderers Jeffrey Dahmer, Aileen Wuornos and Richard Ramirez.

“When you’re dressed as a clown you can get away with murder,” commented Gacy in a police interview. Although he was dubbed “Killer Clown”, to the best of our knowledge, Gacy didn’t carry out his evil deeds in the guise of Pogo. In fact, we don’t know very much at all, as it turns out. 

Whether Gacy was sane or insane was the crux of his trial in 1980. He comes across in his Death Row interview with FBI profiler Rob Ressler as compos mentis, although with a camera close on his face the behavioural tics that indicate lying are at kindergarten analyst level; never mind the extensive psych evaluations done, from as far back as when he was first convicted of “sodomy with a minor” in 1968, when the experts said there was no hope of rehabilitation.

He was sentenced to 10 years, paroled after a mere 18 months, and that’s just the beginning of the shoddy police work that allowed him, a textbook psychopath, to continue his killing spree, preying on teens and young men. Spoiler: psychopaths look and behave as normal as you and me.

Since his arrest in December 1978, Gacy ranged between full confessions – and he was able to provide an accurate map to the crawl space beneath his suburban Chicago house where police recovered 26 bodies – and flat-out denial. (Three other bodies were buried elsewhere on the property, and three were thrown in a river; the 33rd body, that of 15-year-old Robert Piest, whose disappearance led to Gacy’s arrest, was only discovered in 1979.)

In this same interview with Ressler, he casually tells of how he got up in the morning after a night of partying and found one of his companions asleep on the couch, the other dead on the floor. And he carried on with his day because he didn’t want to get involved. When he got back later, the body was gone. Or so he said.

John Wayne Gacy: Devil In Disguise, a six part true crime docuseries, a first for NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service and available to binge on Showmax, digs deep into the story, with multiple interviews with family members, victims’ families, police, journalists and lawyers (that Karen Conti is a piece of work). News footage from the time is included – all those bodies being brought out the house will make you shudder – as well as photographs of victims, associates and Gacy himself.

Which is my second-of-all: cheerfully smiling in your mugshot when you’ve just been bust for multiple dead bodies under your house is a clear sign there’s a lot going wrong up there in the head.

The series’ depth illustrates far-reaching tragedies – shattered parents, adolescent boys reported missing and the police saying “oh, they’re just runaways” and not investigating, the dismissal of the concept of gay rape – and in the final episode, following Gacy’s death by lethal injection in 1994, the ongoing questions that still surround the case.

It’s gripping viewing. Not easy, no. But gripping. Just look at that plump, clean-cut 50-year-old man calmly tell his side of the story – on that day, at any rate.

The show  has a 100% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “We’ll just come right out and say it: The key to John Wayne Gacy: Devil In Disguise is the 1992 interview with Gacy himself. [There are] Any number of serial-killer docuseries around the streaming landscape, but very few have video interviews with the killer himself included in the footage.” – Decider.

“Whether you’re well-versed in the Gacy story and are old enough to remember how it played out in horrific fashion over the years, or the case is barely familiar to you, Devil in Disguise stands as the definitive history,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times.