The Killer Clown: Here is what happened to John Wayne Gacy's father, John Stanley Gacy

TW: mentions of murder, rape, violence

Discover our latest podcast

Although serial killers are rightly considered as monsters, we can sometimes forget that they're human. In other words, they're born, live and die like everyone else. Today, we're going to look at the life of John Stanley Gacy, the father of one of America's best-known serial killers, John Wayne Gacy, aka the Killer Clown.

John Stanley Gacy, World War I veteran

John Stanley Gacy was born on June 20, 1900 in Chicago, Illinois (USA) and died on December 25, 1969 in Hines, Illinois of cirrhosis of the liver. His life spanned sixty-nine years, most of which he spent working as a machinist in a Chicago car factory. Little is known about his life before the birth of his murderous son. However, we do know that he was part of the American troops that came to support France in the trenches during the First World War, starting in April 1917.

John Stanley Gacy, abusive father of a future murderer

On March 17, 1942, while the world was once again in the grip of chaos and war, John Wayne Gacy was born in the same city where his father was born, Chicago. The second child and only son in the family, his father surely saw in him a great destiny, naming him after John Wayne, a legendary Hollywood actor.

However, it would be quite different. Long before John Junior discovered his passion for torturing, raping and murdering 33 teenagers, John Senior put him through hell. Indeed, until he was 17, John Wayne Gacy endured his father's attacks. An alcoholic, John Stanley was also a violent man. He often attacked his wife and children in drunken fits of anger. But the abuse didn't stop at physical violence. Unfortunately, it was also accompanied by verbal and psychological abuse, and it was John Wayne who bore the brunt of it. John Stanley didn't hesitate to call him pejorative and demeaning nicknames. He also often mocked his physical condition, which prevented him from playing sports at school.

John Wayne was so afraid of him and his reactions, that he never confessed to him that he had been raped by a relative when he was nine. At the age of 17, John Wayne decided to leave home and head for Las Vegas, nearly 3,000 km from his father. However, he soon returned to Chicago after discovering a fascination for corpses and being fired from a funeral home for necrophilia.

John Wayne Gacy didn't hate his father

It's hard to find anything positive to say about John Senior in the above portrait. Yet even though John Wayne Gacy admitted that the two weren't close, he also confessed in an interview with The New Yorker in 1994, a few months before his execution, that he never hated his father, also calling him 'a strong man'.

I thought I'd never be able to please him, but I still love him.

He also added:

My father drank and when he did, he was Jekyll and Hyde. If he came out of the cellar and said the walls were pink, you said the walls were pink, but you learned to stay away from him in those cases and keep your mouth shut when we were at the table.

Also in this interview with The New Yorker, John Wayne Gacy opened up about his father's death. He was incarcerated in December 1969 for sodomizing teenagers, but was unable to attend the funeral and learned of his father's death after it had taken place.

My way of remembering my father is not to be like him. It's my way of getting back at that son of a bitch.

John Stanley Gacy was far from an angel. Alcoholic, violent, abusive, he put John Wayne Gacy through hell as a child. So, indeed, John Wayne managed not to be like his father. No, he became worse, robbing 33 teenagers of their childhoods - and their entire lives - for whom hell might have been sweeter than all the abuse Gacy inflicted on them.

Who knows how John Stanley Gacy, who had died three years earlier, would have reacted to the news that his son had committed heinous crimes between 1972 and 1978.

This article has been translated from Gentside FR.