How John Wayne Gacy’s killer sense of humour helped him hide in plain sight

Karen Conti says that, although not exactly friends, John Wayne Gacy was ‘a little bit more gentle’ with her than he was with his male lawyers (Pictures: Bureau of Prisons/Getty/Karen Conti)

One of serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s death row lawyers says ‘there’s no question’ he had more victims whose bodies are yet to be discovered.

Gacy was convicted of murdering 33 young men and boys between 1972 and 1978, burying most of them under his house in Chicago.

Days after his execution date was finally set nearly 14 years later, up and coming attorney Karen Conti received a call from America’s most prolific killer requesting her services.

Speaking to Metro.co.uk, Gacy’s only female lawyer reveals the unique perspective that gave her into his depraved mind and how even ‘the most evil man on the planet’ had a human side.

Despite having never handled a murder case at the time – let alone represented a serial killer – Conti gained some publicity after arguing in front of the Supreme Court.  

So it was that she and her partner, late husband Greg Adamski, were invited to visit Gacy on death row at the maximum-security Menard Correctional Centre and ‘look evil in the eye’.

Serial killer John Wayne Gacy pictured after his arrest in 1978 (Picture: AP)

Karen Conti with her infamous client 14 years later (Picture: Karen Conti)

She recounts her experiences representing arguably the country’s most infamous serial killer in her new book, Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy.

First impressions of ‘the most prolific of all serial killers’

‘He wasn’t as big as I thought he would be,’ she tells Metro of her first impressions of the creep.

‘He was kind of dumpy looking. He didn’t look like he could out-muscle anybody. He was very average looking. He was very average acting.

‘You have it in your head that this person somehow is going to look like a monster, but really your rational brain says if he had looked and acted like a monster, he might have killed one and then he would have been done.

‘But the fact that he was so prolific means that he could compartmentalise who he was when he was doing these crimes.’

Gacy lived a double life.

By day he was a married father who owned a successful construction company and was active in politics and well-known for his charity work.

But by night he was a sexual sadist whose six-year reign of terror involved luring young men and boys – including his own employees – to his home with the promise of jobs or money where they would be tortured, horrifically abused, strangled, and then discarded like rubbish in his crawl space.

Bodies are pulled from Gacy’s home (Picture: Sally Good/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Gacy later callously blamed his victims, saying they ‘killed themselves’ by staying out late or agreeing to be restrained.

He would ply them with drink or drugs before asking if they wanted to see his ‘handcuff trick’.

Gacy would bind his own wrists and quickly slip free before challenging them to do the same.

When they inevitably couldn’t, he would taunt them, saying: ‘The trick is you gotta have the key.’

Helpless, they would then be subjected to his ‘rope trick’, effectively a makeshift garrotte fashioned with a length of rope and piece of wood which he would crank to make it tighter.

Although his crimes were undoubtedly evil, Conti says Gacy did not present as some terrifying maniac utterly incapable of keeping his homicidal urges under control.

‘I was not afraid of Gacy, because knowing what I knew about him he was the type of sociopath who was organised, which means he didn’t lose his temper,’ Conti says of finding herself in an enclosed space with such a remorseless killer.

‘He was very calculated in what he did, and I also wasn’t his type of victim. So that was not an issue.

‘However, when you are on death row in a very dangerous prison like Menard, the other people who are there their own murders, and they’re not as contained, they’re not as measured as he would be.’

Gacy’s relationship with women

Conti says that, although not exactly friends, the monster was ‘a little bit more gentle’ with her than he was with his male lawyers.

Gacy was named John Wayne after the macho cowboy actor by his father, who wished for a similarly tough and masculine son.

But he ‘was anything but’ tough and masculine.

Gacy posed for the Des Plaines Police Department (Picture: Bureau of Prisons/Getty Images)

His relationships with his mother and sisters was much softer than that with his cruel and abusive father, and that carried over to Conti as the other close female in his life at the time, with the two often taking about cooking and gardening.

‘He treated me differently, which was really important because I needed to get him to do certain things and he was very difficult to deal with, even though he was intelligent,’ Conti says.

‘He would confront, and he’d be oppositional. But I was the one who was kind of able to get to him and kind of cajole him into doing what we needed to do which was in his best interest.

‘So, I wouldn’t say we developed a friendship, because it’s hard to be friends with a sociopath – there’s nothing there, they’re a shell of a person – but I do think that our relationship was more cordial and a little bit more gentle.’

Close encounters on death row

The same could not be said for some of the other infamous killers she encountered on her excursions to death row.

Those included ‘I-57 Killer’ Henry Brisbon Jr, whose terrible spree included sexually assaulting a woman with a shotgun before pulling the trigger and watching her die in agony.

‘People on death row usually don’t just kill one person. It’s usually something multiple or something egregious,’ Conti says.

‘There was one episode in my book where the youngest person ever on death row in Illinois had killed his entire family – mother, father, three brothers and sisters – because they were getting on his case for his music being played too loud.

‘He lunged in to our little cubicle where we were sitting and he was out of his mind. He was in a manic state, and he had what I call Manson eyes where he looks right through you.

‘You hear people talk about that, but when you experience it a chill just goes down your spine because he was out of control, and he was not in his right mind.

‘There were several incidents like that.’

Conti describes how those killers were able to rein in that manic side around her because of how useful she might prove to them down the line should Gacy’s case be successful.

Gacy’s killer sense of humour

One of the recurring themes in Conti’s book is her murderous client’s killer sense of humour.

Gacy was convicted of killing 33 young men and boys and sentenced to death (Picture: Peacock/ NBC Universal)

‘It’s kind of hard to talk about humour when you’re talking about a serial killer who did the most evil things that I can ever imagine a human being doing to someone else,’ she says.

‘So, I’m going to preface that because I don’t want someone to think I think anything he did was funny.

‘But I talk about it in the book because if you were to ask me what were the main parts of his personality and what traits helped him commit these crimes in such amazing numbers, I would have to tell you that his sense of humour was one of them.

‘He was engaging, he was glib, and he had this ability to kind of put people at ease by making jokes and being the class clown.’

Pogo the Clown

Gacy notoriously dressed up as a clown and created his own character, ‘Pogo’, which he would roll out at fundraisers, parties, and children’s hospital wards.

Although the get-up played no part in the murders, Conti writes about how Gacy loved clowns for their mischievous side, saying they were always ‘up to no good’.

Gacy notoriously dressed up as a clown and created his own character, ‘Pogo’ (Picture: Netflix)

A self-portrait by Gacy of Pogo the Clown (Picture: Steve Eichner/WireImage)

She describes how he had routines for ‘good, happy Pogo’ and ‘sad, evil Pogo’, depending on how the children he was entertaining behaved.

If they were good, he would hand out candy with a smile. But if they were bad, he would pinch them, swear at them, or threaten to kill them.

Should any angry parents confront him demanding to know why the clown made their child cry he would always brush it off, he claimed, because ‘clowns get away with murder’.

‘No question’ Gacy had accomplices – and more victims

Gacy offered full confessions to the 33 murders he was eventually convicted of, first to his original lawyers and then to the police over the course of several interviews before rowing back almost entirely and insisting he could only recall a handful of them.

His main crime, he said, was ‘running a cemetery without a licence’.

But Conti is convinced he did not act alone.

‘There were two young men who lived with him who I suspect strongly were involved,’ she says.

‘In fact, the dates when several of the men and boys disappeared and were murdered did not line up with when Gacy was in town.

‘There may have been a trafficking ring – it sounds like a conspiracy theory but at that time there were all kinds of those things going on. There was one [case] down in Texas that was going on with a guy named Corll who had a couple of young men who were helping him procure other young boys and kill them.

‘I think Gacy had a ring like that, and I think it may have been connected to people in higher spheres at the time and Gacy liked his money.

‘So, my guess would be that he was making money doing something involving these boys.’

The Killer Clown and the Candy Man

Dean Corll tortured, raped, and murdered at least 28 victims down in Texas after luring them to his home with the help of two teenagers.

While Gacy was dubbed the ‘Killer Clown’, Corll was known as the ‘Candy Man’ for handing children free sweets from his family’s shop.

Conti says that although Gacy never admitted the murders attributed to him in her presence, he revelled in his then-status as the most prolific murderer in US legal history.

‘He would really bristle at the idea there might be another serial killer who killed more people because he wanted to be the record keeper,’ she says.

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And the lawyer believes 33 is ‘just the tip of his sociopathic iceberg’.

‘Gacy travelled outside of Illinois a lot to do construction work,’ she says.

‘There’s no question in my mind it would have been easier for him to abduct young men and boys in some of these rural areas where he was not known and where there is not as much urban activity.

‘And my guess is that maybe at some point we are going to be able to tie him to those crimes. But again, we didn’t have that database that connected everything.

‘I do think there are some digs that they need to do. There was an area behind a house where his mother used to live that needs to be dug, in my opinion, to determine whether or not there are more bodies underneath there, because he was seen outside with a shovel.

‘I do think there are going to be additional victims and others identified, because there’s still some unidentified victims [from the 33 bodies found].’

Gacy backlash continues to this day

Conti suffered huge backlash for her links to Gacy and her fight against the death penalty.

And while she hates pontificating on the matter, the case she presents against execution by the state is a compelling one.

She cites a 15 to 20 year period in Illinois where 12 men walked free from death row after being exonerated because they were factually innocent – the same number of inmates put to death in that same timeframe.

The attorney also busts the myth that it is cheaper to simply execute the most heinous criminals, presenting studies showing it actually costs more when you factor in all the additional appeal processes.

Karen and Greg pictured outside Menard (Picture: Karen Conti)

‘Did anything surprise you about Gacy?’

Conti reveals in her book that she was the lawyer tasked with informing Gacy his final legal arguments had been rejected and his lethal injection would be carried out that evening.

She and Greg travelled down to Menard to break the news to him and found the convicted serial killer surrounded by sobbing relatives, friends, neighbours and colleagues.

‘I would say his relationship with others is what surprised me,’ Conti says.

‘They were professing their love for him, and it surprised me because he had people who loved him unconditionally – knowing what he did.

‘It was confusing to me because I couldn’t have that feeling for him because he was a shell of a person. It’s very strange. I don’t know that we ever have a situation where you know exactly when someone is going to die, and that’s a strange feeling.’

‘You are going to be forever connected with me’

As they embraced for a final time and Gacy thanked Conti for the work she had done, he told her: ‘You are going to be forever connected with me.’

‘He was right,’ she tells Metro. ‘You hate to say it when a serial killer is right. Interestingly, when you are associated with someone so bad that they are famous or infamous people think differently of you.’

Drawing parallels with the lawyers from the 90s’ trial of the century, the OJ Simpson case, she observed that the lawyers from the Gacy case ‘have all gone on to have great careers because their calling card is having prosecuted or defended the most prolific serial killer in the world’.

Conti’s one and only capital punishment case earned her a law professorship teaching the death penalty, roles as a legal commentator for CNN and Fox, and her own radio show which she has hosted for the past 30 years.

Asked what first springs to mind when someone mentions Joh Wayne Gacy, she says: ‘What I think about is a time in my life when everything changed.

‘It’s hard to describe it, but I was just moving along as a lawyer and this bizarre opportunity came up and it was just curiosity that made me go down to see him.

‘I wanted to look evil in the eye, and I did. I didn’t have any clue that we were going to represent him.

‘I just feel like it’s a reminder to me that we should first of all do what we think is right, no matter what. And I’m proud of myself for having stood up to do that even in the face of adverse reactions.

‘But I also think that taking someone out of your comfort zone makes you resilient. It makes you more confident, and I’m proud that I did that.

‘It helped me forever as a person, as a lawyer, as a citizen, and I’m glad.’

Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy: Defending America’s Most Evil Serial Killer on Death Row is available to pre-order on Amazon and is released as an e-book on March 26.

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