Visions from the Crawlspace: The Cursed Canvas of John Wayne Gacy
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
If eyes serve as windows to the soul, then paintings act as a mirror of a creator’s inner darkness. Many incarcerated murderers turn to the canvas to pass the time. While most produce amateurish work that relies solely on their notoriety for value, some inadvertently offer a glimpse into the rot feeding their spirits.
The Architect of a Double Life
Authorities arrested John Wayne Gacy in 1978 after he sodomized and murdered 33 young men and boys. He buried twenty-six bodies within the claustrophobic crawlspace of his home, hid three elsewhere on his property, and discarded four in the Des Plaines River.
Gacy mastered the art of deception early in life.
When he was 18, he became involved in politics and worked for a local Democratic Party candidate. He held numerous jobs and, in the meantime, joined the local Jaycees.
Two years after leaving home at 20 years old to work in a Las Vegas mortuary, Gacy returned to Illinois and began selling shoes at Nunn-Bus Shoe Company in Springfield. While working there, he met his first wife, Marlynn Myers, and they married in September 1964. He then worked for his father-in-law, who owned several Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. By 1967, he had two children, Michael and Christine, and was named vice-president of the Waterloo Jaycees (Iowa).
Despite his veneer of respectability and being a family man, he led a double life and engaged in homosexual encounters.
In May 1968, he was accused of sexually assaulting two high school boys.
The first teenager said that Gacy brought him to watch stag films while his wife was in the hospital giving birth to their daughter. He attacked the boy and strangled him until he almost passed out. Then he said he hadn’t meant to hurt him and took him home.
The second instance occurred in August 1967. Under the pretense of showing him pornographic films, Gacy plied Donald Voohees Jr., 15, with alcohol, allowed him to watch the films, and then persuaded him to engage in mutual oral sex. The discovery of the attack came months later when Donald Voorhees Jr. confessed the events to his father, Donald E. Voorhees Sr., in March 1968. Voorhees, Sr., was a fellow Jaycee and local politician. He immediately informed the police, leading to Gacy’s arrest and subsequent charges of oral sodomy.
As a result of the arrest, Gacy was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, with indicators that he was likely to come into conflict with society.
In December 1968, Gacy pled guilty and was sentenced to 10 years. His wife divorced him, and she was granted sole custody of his two children, along with their home, property, and alimony. He never saw her or his children again.
He served only 18 months of his sentence when he was granted parole.
He married his second wife, Carole Hoff, in 1972. She had been his high school sweetheart and had two daughters from a previous marriage.
She frequently visited Gacy’s mother, who, after learning that Carole Hoff was struggling to pay her rent, insisted that she move in with her and her son.
The relationship then became romantic and continued despite Gacy admitting to Hoff that he was bisexual. She thought he was joking, and they married in July 1972, nine days after her fiancé was arrested for impersonating a police officer, forcing a young boy to give him oral sex in his car, and attempting to run him over with his vehicle. The charges were ultimately dropped.
He committed his first known murder the same year he married Carole Hoff.
In 1975, Chicago police were told that a man named “John” cruised the area of the Uptown neighborhood picking up young men. The man in question was John Wayne Gacy, who ran a remodeling business.
Police staked out Gacy’s house and observed dozens of young men visiting at different hours. They were stopped and questioned, but none of them said anything against Gacy.
Carole Gacy observed her husband bring young men to the garage. She found gay pornography as well. Then one day, he told her this would be the last time they had intercourse.
In January 1976, police suspected Gacy had abducted a 9-year-old who had disappeared. Their surveillance of the property yielded nothing. Gacy’s wife divorced him the same year.
In March 1977, Jeff Rignall, 27, claimed Gacy enticed him into his car by offering him marijuana and then using chloroform to render him unconscious. Gacy took him to his house, shackled him with handcuffs, and sodomized him. He was released afterward. A $3,000 civil suit was settled in the case, and Gacy was charged with misdemeanor battery.
A few months later, a 19-year-old accused Gacy of kidnapping him at gunpoint and forcing him to engage in sexual acts. Gacy was taken into custody but claimed the teenager was a willing participant. An assistant state’s attorney decided not to prosecute.
Six months later, as director of the Polish Constitution Day Parade, Gacy received Secret Service clearance and met and took photos with First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
During these years, he dressed up as either Pogo the Clown or Patches the Clown, and performed at fundraising events, parades, and visited hospitalized children, which was ironic because he was systematically hunting and garrotting boys and young men with a hammer handle. He continued in his work with Democratic Party politics. He was a precinct captain in the Norwood Park Township Democratic Party organization.
Gacy was caught when investigators were tipped off that Gacy had offered a job to Robert Piest, 15, who had gone missing. Police found he had a criminal record that involved sodomy, and a search warrant was granted for his property.
Authorities found 26 bodies in the crawl space of his house, three were buried somewhere on the property, and four were thrown into the Des Plaines River.
Some victims convulsed for an “hour or two” while being garrotted before dying. He was accused of killing 33 young men, but he told investigators that the body count was as high as 45.
A retired police officer said he had reason to believe there might be victims buried in the grounds of an apartment building on West Miami Avenue in Chicago, where Gacy was a caretaker for several years.
After his arrest, Gacy named some of his employees as participating in the murders. He pointed a finger at Phillip Paske (1953-1998), a cross-dressing, child pornographer who was a close associate of John Norman (1927-2011), who during the 1970s operated a nationwide sex trafficking ring based in Chicago known as The Delta Project.
Paske was fired from his job as children’s supervisor at a fire department swimming pool in August 1977 after he was publicly linked to Norman’s child prostitution ring. They had met in prison while serving sentences for other crimes. Paske had also spent time in a mental institution. He died at the age of 45 from AIDS.
Paske was potentially involved with the kidnapping of Johnny Gosch, the first child to appear missing on a milk carton. He was a 12-year-old paperboy who disappeared in 1982. His case is still open.
According to Gacy, Norman produced snuff films of young boys; however, no such films have been found, and given the subject matter, this doesn’t mean these movies were never produced.
There was speculation that Gacy was tied to this trafficking ring as well.
Lt. Harold Hancock of the Dallas police told the Chicago Tribune in May 1977 that he arrested Norman in March 1973 on charges of contributing to juvenile violation of state drug laws. He confiscated from Norman more than 30,000 index cards listing clients around the country, some of them prominent people and some federal employees in Washington. The State Department confirmed to the newspaper that it had received the cards. Matthew Nimetz, a counselor for the State Department, said officials there determined the cards were not relevant to any fraud case concerning a “passport” and therefore destroyed them. Nimetz was unable to explain why the State Department looked at the cards only from the standpoint of possible passport irregularities or why it had not turned them over to the FBI or postal inspectors.
In 1999, Norman was declared a sexually violent predator and committed to Atascadero State Hospital in California. His psychiatrist, Dr. James Reavis, said about Norman: “John is an unrepentant adult male sex offender who, in my opinion, will go to his grave without any remorse for what he has done.”
Norman was given a supervised release from Atascadero in October 2008, but was returned to custody five months later after handing a sexually suggestive note to a 19-year-old male grocery clerk. Norman was recommitted to Coalinga State Hospital, where he died two years later. His cause of death has never been released.
After his arrest in 1978, the jury took less than 2 hours to find Gacy guilty and sentence him to death. His execution was set for 1980, but he would spend 14 years on death row. This is when he began to paint.
He produced disturbing depictions of his alter-egos, Pogo and Patches, interpretations of the Seven Dwarfs from Snow White, and pencil drawings of skulls and a tribute to fellow killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Gacy was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994, and his last words were “kiss my ass.”
Gacy’s pathology has been connected to an abusive relationship with his alcoholic father, who died in 1969. He was molested when he was 5 by a neighborhood girl who was 15 years old. When he was 8, he was molested by a contractor working on a building next to his house.
His brain was removed and is in the possession of Helen Morrison, a witness for the defense at Gacy’s trial who had interviewed him and other serial killers in a study of common personality traits of violent sociopaths. His body was cremated.
The same year of his execution, his attorney auctioned off his artwork. Some of it was purchased, and 25 were destroyed in a bonfire attended by 300 people, including some family members of Gacy’s victims.
Workers tore down Gacy’s house on April 10, 1979. In 1988, the lot at 8213 W. Summerdale Avenue, where Gacy’s house once stood, got a new address of 8215 W. Summerdale Avenue. A 2,300 sq. ft. house was built at the site for Patricia Jendrycki. It had been acquired at a sheriff’s sale in 1984 at the cost of $30,544, the amount owed on two mortgages and in back taxes by Gacy, his mother, and two sisters. It sold in 2004 for $300,000 and in 2021 for $395,000, and is currently off the market.
In 1999, Johnny Depp spoke about owning Pogo the Clown. He said, “They told me when I got it that the proceeds went to a charity or to the victims’ families or something, but I found out that wasn’t the case, so I got rid of it. It was too dark anyway – fascinating from a psychological point of view, but that was really dark stuff.”
Depp never specified who he bought the artwork from. Celebrities often buy from underground dealers or auction houses. It was known that while alive, Gacy would paint clowns if sent a photo, implying some works were commissioned directly, but it does not confirm Depp commissioned his piece this way.
In 2001, musician Nikki Stone bought Gacy’s self-portrait, Pogo the Clown. By 2005, the allure had more than worn off; in fact, he wanted to get rid of the piece.
He’d bought it for $3,000 from murderabilia merchant Arthur Rosenblatt, and he suffered for it in ways he had not anticipated. His dog had died, and his mother was diagnosed with cancer. He’d never even had the opportunity to hang it.
A friend stored the painting for him, and the friend’s neighbor was killed in an auto accident. Another friend who tried to help by keeping the painting attempted suicide.
In 2005, it was turned over to a consignment art dealer and owner of Kaleidoscope Tattoo & Art in Cambridge, Shawn McCarron. McCarron felt that he was inured from bad luck since his mother, Maureen, was stabbed to death in her home in 1999. His brother Mark had also been stabbed but made it to a nearby fire station to get help. A man who had been drinking all night at a party across from the home was eventually arrested. He knew her socially and had done work at the house in the weeks before she was killed. In 2002, the perpetrator was found guilty of first-degree murder, which carried a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
McCarron said of the painting: “I’m not afraid of it, I don’t believe in the hocus-pocus and the bad mojo that comes with it. Every murderer in the world should be rolled into one. They all owe me. People do ask to see it. They get a chill through their body. I’ve had people say, ‘Oh my God, put that back in the box.'”
In 2011, a Las Vegas gallery exhibited Gacy’s pieces titled Multiples: The Artwork of John Wayne Gacy.
The Gallery’s website described the collection this way:
“Seventy-four pieces will be put up for sale at the Las Vegas exhibition. They include pencil drawings and audio recordings, and paintings of skulls, clowns and the seven dwarves from the Snow White fairy tale.
Included among the collection is an oil painting entitled Dahmer Skull, which is priced at $2,000 and was inspired by serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. But perhaps the most controversial piece is a self-portrait entitled Goodbye Pogos listed at $4,500.
Gacy reportedly gave these portraits to ‘close pen-pals at the end of his life’.”
Critics attacked the show, and claims that proceeds would benefit victims’ families proved false. The National Center for Victims of Crime explicitly refused any contributions, stating: “We believe the idea of benefiting from an activity relating to such egregious and violent crimes would be in poor taste to the extreme. Out of respect for the victims’ families, we have not agreed and would not agree to accept any contribution that comes from the sale of John Wayne Gacy’s work, which he did while in prison for torturing and murdering young boys and men.”
In 2020, Zak Bagans bought along with Gacy’s self-portrait, letters the serial killer wrote to his step-daughter Tammy Hoff. She also sold him one of the last-ever Polaroids of Gacy and his last pack of cigarettes before being executed. There’s even a painting of the seven dwarfs from Snow White. She had received many of the items while he was on death row.
Gacy’s paintings are known for being especially high in demand, going for anywhere from $6,000 to $175,000. One he did of his house, which emphasized the crawlspace where he hid his victims, is the most sought-after Gacy illustration.
Forgotten Horrors Found
Gacy’s malignant influence continues to surface decades after his lethal injection.
In 2021, Cook County identified another Gacy victim through the use of DNA. His name was Francis Wayne Alexander, and he moved to Chicago in 1975. His marriage ended in a divorce a few months later. His family lost touch with him, but had no idea he was Victim No. 5 found under Gacy’s house in 1978. DNA taken from a molar was connected to a family member in 2020, and after 40-some years, they found out what had become of him. They never suspected this was his fate, since during those years, Alexander had cut off communication with them because he wanted to be left alone.
His family was from Long Island, and he is interred in Oakridge-Glen Oak Cemetery in Cook County, Illinois.
In 2022, it was reported that a set of Gacy’s paintings was up for auction. They had been found in a cupboard in a house in England. The owners of the property had died, and the son found them. The three paintings had been there for decades, and he had no idea his parents had purchased them. He believed they were acquired when his parents toured the United States. They are titled Christ, Skull Clown, and Hi Ho in the Winter 92, and are all signed by Gacy. They were set to be auctioned by Mullock’s Auctioneers in Shropshire.
They fetched: Christ £1100.00, Skull Clown £1200.00, which were sold in the first auction in June, 2022. Hi Ho in the Winter 92′ sold in July for £900.00.
The mystery remains: why did the owners hide the paintings in a dark cupboard for so many years? Perhaps they, too, felt the “chill” that emanates from a soul that only knew how to destroy.