9/14/2023 0 Comments Clown serial killer![]() ![]() Utilizing interviews with detectives, journalists, relatives, friends, victims’ family members and more, as well as archival news broadcasts, crime scene footage, home movies and photographs, John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise provides a thorough account of cops’ surveillance and arrest of Gacy, and the excavation of his nightmare dwelling. What they eventually found was a mass grave the likes of which had never been seen before. When one potential recruit, 15-year-old Des Plains native Robert Piest, vanished in 1978 while seeing Gacy about a job-this as the boy’s mother waited for him outside his place of employment-cops began snooping around. He strove to make inroads with political organizations and power players in Chicago (sometimes via the dissemination and promotion of pornography), and he ran a remodeling business staffed with male teens who had a suspicious habit of disappearing. He was married and divorced twice (fathering kids with his first wife), all while carrying on homosexual trysts with countless individuals (he held firm to the line that he was bisexual). The Gacy it reveals is a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic man who grew up with an abusive alcoholic father and a sexual appetite for young men. Such topics are relevant to the larger portrait painted here, but more concision would have strengthened those passages’ impact, as well as improved the proceedings’ momentum.įortunately, John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise is otherwise exhaustive, illuminating, and intriguing. That’s especially felt in its back half, when an inordinate amount of attention is given to the minutiae of Gacy’s trial (and, in particular, his futile insanity defense), as well as on efforts to name the handful of victims who were never officially identified at the time. For the most part, however, this six-part non-fiction venture is a bit too comprehensive like so many of its genre brethren, it could have been at least one episode shorter without losing any key facts or insights. Yet if anyone comes close, it’s Craig Bowley, a long-time prison correspondent with Gacy who helped set up Ressler’s videotaped meeting with the fiend, and who spent years befriending him, to the point that he recounts being just about heartbroken when he finally had to say goodbye-via a hug-to his long-time acquaintance and confidant.īowley’s warped fascination with Gacy is an area into which John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise might have pried much harder. No one on planet Earth is buying that nonsense, including this docuseries. ![]() ![]() Its main hook is that 1992 conversation between Gacy and Ressler, which gazes in close-up at the incarcerated killer as he chats amiably and confidently about his innocence-he goes so far as to say that he didn’t even know the dead-while flipping through an enormous tome of research material that, he believes, exonerates him. Premiering March 25 on Peacock, John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise is part history lesson, part psychological inquiry, and part showcase of cold, deceptive inhumanity, treading a fine line throughout between investigation and voyeurism. ![]()
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