Background
Born on 17th March 1942 in Illinois United States, Gacy was brought up in a low-class family and died on 10th May 1994, in Statesville, Illinois. Gacy seemed to have experienced a reasonably normal childhood though he revealed a tendency toward cruelty during his growth, leading to numerous law encounters. He was an American serial murderer, and his homicides of young men and 33 boys in the 1970s brought about shock to his suburban community and captured global media attention (Dilly 33). During his murder case, Gacy pleaded to be innocent through his claim of insanity, which was reinforced by the testament of some psychologists who identified Gacy as schizophrenic. The jury rejected the testimonials, and Gacy was found responsible for all thirty-three murders he had been accused of and then was killed by poisonous injection in 1994. The paper intends to discuss serial murder as portrayed by John Wayne Gacy.
John Wayne Gacy Serial Murder case
Serial killing involves the unlawful murder of at least two people by the same person in different events happening at dissimilar times. In 1968, Gacy was sentenced for sexually mugging a teen boy, whereby he got jailed in the “Iowa State Men’s Reformatory” and was forced to undertake a psychological assessment (Cullen 66). He was released in 1970 and again imprisoned for a sexual assault case in Parole though the charges got dropped later. In 1978, Robert Piest, one of his victims, was reported lost, and it was mentioned that the recent person who saw him was Gacy. During Piest’s search, the police came across bodies of young men and 29 boys near Gacy’s residence (Cullen 68). Four other dead bodies were found near the Des Plaines River. Later on, Gacy was pronounced guilty of serial killing and was executed.
I selected this topic because I had taken an assignment similar to the previous class, though my choice was assigned to someone else before I got the chance. The subject reflects well the meaning of serial murder and differentiates it from mass killing. Serial murder cases have played a pivotal role to criminologists by helping them distinguish between spree serial killing and classic serial murder.
Works Cited
Cullen, Eric. American Evil: The Psychology of Serial Killers. Waterside Press, 2020.
Dilly, Harriet. Theoretical Analysis of the Biological Basis for Serial Killers’ Cooling-Off Periods. Diss. University of Oregon, 2021.