I don’t know why this bugs me so much, but it does.
I was listening to a YouTube video about serial killers, and I heard this little gem again:
“(John Wayne Gacy) …would sometimes wear his clown costume while torturing and killing his victims.”
No. Nononononono… .and more no’s.
There is no, repeat, NO evidence that Gacy wore his clown costume while murdering people. Only one of his victims lived to tell the tale, and at no time did that person mention a clown costume. He said Gacy was naked during his ordeal.
I was a teenager in Chicago during the Gacy debacle, and while Gacy was known to host block parties dressed as a clown named “Pogo”, that fact was only used back then as an illustration of how normal Gacy appeared. He was involved in the community, and threw parties for his neighborhood. Nobody was killed during these parties. The clown persona was not the least bit scary.
The whole meme that clowns are scary came years later. In Chicago at the time, clowns meant Bozo and Cookie, and nobody was scared of them.
Like I said, I don’t know why this bit of misinformation irks me. But it does.
Clowns have always been scary(to me). Bozo was the worst.
I’m sure they’ve been scary since early circuses and court jesters and those French things, Pierrot(or however it’s spelled)…
I’m think you’re right about Gacy. And his clown exploits.
I don’t think clown when I read his name. At. All.
This thread prompted me to ask Google about Gacy and his clowning around; found this relevant bit as well:
[A] common misconception is that he used this job to lure children, which was actually not true at all.
While Gacy did perform as a clown on occasion, there’s no evidence to suggest that part of his life had anything to do with the darker side. Rather, the series points to Gacy’s construction business where he hired young men to help as his primary means of finding and luring victims.
I’m from the area and Gacy doesn’t really come up much TTEAKD* compared to Dahmer or, I dunno, Pol Pot or Derek Chauven. However, when he does, it’s a killer/creepy clown reference. Or possibly a bodies in the crawlspace thing, though I think a lot of killers have done that.
I only really read about Gacy and his crimes earlier this year, and I was surprised to learn that the clowning had nothing to do with his murders. From what I’d gleaned via pop culture osmosis I assumed he’d been using his clown persona to lure young children, but in fact he was mostly cruising the bus terminal and the north side looking for young gay men to seduce and then kill.
I suppose painting him as a “killer clown” instead makes his victims seem more sympathetic, or like it could’ve happened to anyone?
He also killed a couple of his teenaged employees from his construction company. When these boys disappeared, they were just assumed to be runaways by the authorities. Good going, law enforcement.
The families of Dean Corll’s victims had been told the same thing by Houston police a few years earlier, right up until his teenage accomplices lead them to 25 dead boys buried in a boat shed. I get the impression that missing children weren’t seen as a very high priority by cops in the '70s.
Gacy called Corll an inspiration and built a replica of the “torture board” he would strap his victims to.
