AT first glance serial killer John Wayne Gacy was a master at concealing his malevolent intentions, by dressing as a clown at charitable events and holding huge garden parties for the community.
In reality, though, the slayer of at least 33 young men was hiding in plain sight.
A new eight-part ITV drama called Devil in Disguise examines how police blunders allowed Gacy to kill again and again in the 1970s in a suburb of Chicago in the United States.
Even though at least four of Gacy’s building firm employees went missing from 1975 onwards, it took another three years for detectives to search his home.
Officers believed Gacy, who was a member of the Democratic party and claimed to know Chicago’s chief of police, was an upstanding member of the community.
That’s despite the fact that he had been jailed for the offence of sodomy on a 15-year-old boy in 1968 and had been arrested for two other allegations of sexually abusing young men in 1971.
While in prison, a psychiatrist assessed Gacy to be a sociopath and concluded he posed a serious threat.
It wasn’t until Detective Rafael Tovar started delving into the disappearance of Robert Piest in 1978 that officers made a connection between the building contractor’s past crime and the missing men.
While some of his victims were runaways whose families had not reported them missing, many other parents did demand the detectives look at Gacy.
Rafael, who is portrayed by The Last of Us actor Gabriel Luna in the TV series, defended his predecessors, saying: “At that time 98 per cent of the kids who went missing were back the next day.
“Unfortunately some of the kids fell through the cracks.
“He was a very smart man, he had a good gift of the gab and a lot of these boys were street boys, they might have been homosexuals
“In 1972 to 1978 I have got to admit not many people cared what happened to gay individuals. They didn’t have the protection they do now.”
There is a clear reason why Gacy targeted young men who he thought the police wouldn’t care about – he didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past.
In 1967 the first person known to have been sexually abused by Gacy was the son of a local politician.
That dad made sure the police pursued Gacy and brought him to justice.
Some of the kids fell through the cracks
Rafael Tovar
The next two young men he was arrested for sexually abusing weren’t so fortunate. One court case couldn’t go ahead because the victim went missing and the next was dropped because of allegations Gacy had been blackmailed.
After that Gacy made a new life for himself in the Norwood Park suburb of Chicago, where no one knew of his past offending.
He married his second wife, Carole Hoff, who had two daughters from a previous marriage, set up a firm called PDM Contractors and hosted fancy dress parties every summer.
Gacy also volunteered to perform as a clown for children in hospital, creating the characters Pogo and Patches in 1975.
Chilling escape
But many young men who came into his orbit discovered that the make-up hid a deeply disturbed and violent individual.
One of the men to survive an encounter with Gacy was his employee Tony Antonucci in 1976.
Tony, who was a 16-year-old high school wrestler back then, was persuaded to engage in what he thought was a play fight with his boss.
He said: “At one point he gets a handcuff on one of my wrists. I fought and he knocked me to the ground.
I fought and he knocked me to the ground
Tony Antonucci
“He left the room. I noticed the cuff wasn’t very tight and I managed to get out. When he came back into the room I knocked him down and pinned him down.
“I reached in his pocket and got the key to cuffs and handcuffed him. He said ‘you are the one who got out of the handcuff, but also got it on me.’”
Missed signs
Tony’s friend and work colleague John Butkovich, 17, was not so fortunate.
He went missing in July 1975 after working for Gacy for six months.
The police thought John had just run away from home despite clear evidence to the contrary.
The youngster’s pride and joy was his car, which he would surely have used if he had gone away.
Instead it was discovered half a block from his parents’ home with his John’s wallet containing $40 on the seat.
If the police had only paid attention to us, they might have saved many lives
Marco Butkovich
Officers also failed to question two of John’s friends who had witnessed Gacy getting into a row with his young employee prior to him going missing.
When John’s body was eventually discovered underneath Gacy’s house during a police search in 1978, his dad Marco made his feelings clear.
Marco said at the time: “We told the police to go there and investigate. But they didn’t do it. I talked to Gacy on the phone after that and he said the police never talked to him.
“If the police had only paid attention to us, they might have saved many lives.
“I’d like to know what good are all their damn computers if they can’t put two and two together.”
Scared to tell
Most of the young men who escaped from Gacy had been too scared of him to go to the police.
That included Steve Nemmers, who told Gacy very clearly that he wasn’t gay, but the building contractor attempted to force his 18-year-old victim into a sex act by threatening him with a gun.
Steve cried so much that he let him go.
He said in a Netflix documentary titled Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, that: “I didn’t report it to the police because it’s not something a young boy wants to talk about.”
Autopsies for the bodies found in Gacy’s home revealed that some of them had been strangled.
Victims who escaped told how he would put a rope around their necks and nearly choke them to death.
Law and Order actor Jack Merrill was another person who managed to live to tell the tale.
Jack, 66, who was aged 19 at the time of the attack, said: “It had ropes and pulleys, and it went around my back and through my handcuffed hands in a way that if I struggled, I would choke. I did at one point and started to lose air.
When the first remains were discovered, it was like ‘what have we got here?’
Rafael Tovar
“He stuck a gun in my mouth. Then he raped me in the bedroom. I knew if I fought him, I didn’t have much of a chance. I never freaked out or yelled.”
Gacy had taken Jack to his house by making him unconscious with an unknown substance.
Other boys were lured there when Gacy pretended to be a police officer, by flashing a fake badge.
Dogged detective
In December 1978 15-year-old Robert Piest went to Gacy’s house to discuss working for him.
He died during the sadistic “rope trick” because Gacy left him hanging while he went to speak to someone on the telephone.
It was only because detective Tovar discovered the building contractor had a previous conviction for sodomy and had met Piest that he was finally caught.
The retired detective Tovar said: “This started as a missing person’s investigation and then got some information that there might be other missing kids that could have been associated with Gacy.
He stuck a gun in my mouth
Jack Merrill
“When the first remains were discovered, it was like ‘what have we got here?’
“We knew it wasn’t Robert because he had only been missing for ten days and these were bones.”
Gacy confessed to killing several young men and was found guilty of 33 murders at a trial in 1980.
He was executed in 1994 by lethal injection.
Many of the remains found under his home have not yet been identified, but by using advances in DNA the current Cook County Sheriff is trying to put names to Gacy’s victims.
The police might not have helped them when they went missing, but they can help their loved ones answer a tormenting mystery now.
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