The Life of John Wayne Gacy - Criminology - Case Study Example

CRIJ 3320 Criminology- A Real World Crime THE CRIME CASE The case apparently started with the sudden mysterious disappearance of fifteen year old Robert Piest. Before disappearing, the boy asked his mother to wait while he went to meet up with a contractor who was offering him a good job, but he never returned. His mother immediately alerted the Des Plaines police and the investigation was led by Joseph Kozenczak. The first step was to visit the house of the contractor who had offered Robert a job. The contractor was known as- Wayne Gacy. Though Gacy denied knowing anything about Robert’s disappearance something about him did not seem right to Kozenczak. But, the truth about Gacy was far hideous than what the investigator could even imagine. Background search about Gacy revealed that, he had earlier served sentence because of an act of sodomy with a young boy. While searching his house, the investigators gathered several evidences like boy pornography books, handcuffs, drugs and some other evidences but since there was no clear proof that would relate Gacy to Robert’s disappearance he was only charged for drug possession. However, soon enough forensic evidence revealed that among some of the evidences that had been procured from gacy’s house, was something that Robert had on him before he had disappeared and a few items belonged to people, all of them young boys, who had disappeared before. This gave the police enough to dig up Gacy’s house. Whatever was unraveled was purely shocking, for under Gacy’s house were recovered 32 decomposing bodies of boys. Gacy had to confess and he finally revealed that he had lured each of his victims to his house, handcuffed them and would sexually assault them. To muffle their screams for help he would stuff socks or underwear inside their mouth and most victims choked on them and died on their own or he would kill them by placing their throats on ropes or boards while he raped them cruelly. He was charged with 33 murders (another body was found near a river but evidences showed that he was killed in the same manner) and was given 12 death sentences and 21 life sentences. Gacy’s Background Gacy’s full name was John Wayne Gacy and he was born on 17th march, 1942 to Catholic parents. He was the second among the three children in the family. Gacy’s childhood however was not normal at all. His father would get drunk and beat up Gacy’s mother every single day and to top it off , John himself suffered from a number of health problems too. His personal problems interfered with his education and he could not graduate school, however after dropping out of school and joining a business school he realized that his true talent lied in salesmanship. He was an excellent worker and a jovial person on the outside. He loved to volunteer and entertained children at parties by dressing up as “Pogo, the clown.” Perhaps, this got him the fame of being “the killer clown.” He married Marlynn Myers in 1964 and soon became father to two lovely children. It seemed that he had a picture-perfect life till rumors of his sexuality and an allegation of sodomy marred his marital life and his wife divorced him and he was imprisoned. However, he started a new life after being paroled in just 18 months of serving his sentence. He moved to a new house along with his mother and sister and in 1974 married a divorcee named Carole Hoff and started working as a contractor. It was not hard to notice that he mostly hired young, teenager boys for work. However, his sexual life with his wife was negligible and soon the marriage ended in a divorce. However, Gacy remained the jovial, hardworking man that he was. He even tried his hands at politics but that was short lived because of a rumor that Gacy had made sexual advances towards a young employee named Tony Antonucci, however Tony’s fate did not end badly when compared to some other young boys. TELEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Adler in 1941 proposed the teleological perspective to a particular act. “Human behavior is goal oriented and serves purpose within the system” (Dreilurs 1950; Mozak 1979). According to this perspective all acts of crime have a goal i.e. the criminal commits a particular crime to fulfill his personal needs. In Gacy’s case there are two dimensions which may be analyzed through the teleological perspective. One dimension is that Gacy perhaps had a physical problem (impotency/ small penis) and thus committed acts of rape on boys to attain sexual gratification which made him feel more powerful and perhaps more masculine than boys. Gacy’s interest in sex but apprehensiveness to become sexually intimate with a female is evident from the fact that when he had run-away from home he did not have sex with any female even though his cousin offered him girls for a night. In Gacy’s own words- “…. She said she would fix me up with any of her friends I wanted, meaning sexually, but I turned her down. I told her I would find my own” (Wilkinson 1991:61). Another teleological perspective is that Gacy was monstrous on the inside and was sadistic. He loved to hear people scream and beg. This is well understood from Miller’s encounter that Gacy did not stop raping Miller till he could see that Miller was in pain, however, since Miller showed no signs of fight back, Gacy let him go. Miller was Gacy’s first victim and he believed that Gacy raped solely for sadistic pleasure which perhaps made him feel powerful in some odd way. HIDDEN FANTASIES Most of us have hidden fantasies but Gacy’s hidden fantasies were hideous and almost psychotic. “Aggressive fantasies are present in serial murderers from an early age and they never outgrow these fantasies” (Schechter and Everitt, 1997:86-87). According to Wilson and Seaman, Gacy may have had taken refuge in childhood fantasies because of his family problems or perhaps his personal sexual preferences may have instigated those sexual fantasies in his mind. Among the many evidences retrieved from his house were male pornographic pictures and sexual devices. This point out the fact that, in all probability Gacy may have had hidden fantasies of male to male sexual encounters for which he raped young bys while the murders were committed in fear, or happened by chance. PARENTAL ISSUES- UNRESOLVED CHILDHOOD TRAUMAS Alice miller’s theory of Poisonous pedagogy may explain Gacy’s behavior. According to Robertson a mixture of unresolved issues with his father and partially with his mother may have traumatized him during his development years. Firstly, his father was a drunkard who would beat up his wife time and again, and though Gacy loved his father he was never loved back or appreciated. In fact he was taunted at by his father for acting “sissy”. To top this, his father abused him physically as well as mentally. As a child Gacy was in a situation that psychologists call “Catch 22” where he wanted his father’s approval but failed to attain it. This gave way to bitterness and resentment against his father. Though not much evidence can really blame the mother, “as a child, Gacy was given daily enemas for no apparent reason” (Egger, 1998:98). It could be seen by studying the case that Gacy would subjugate his victims by using handcuffs or drugs and Robertson suggests that maybe Gacy’s own childhood subjugation at the hands of his father (abuse) and mother (illogical enemas) may have caused build up of resentment and hatred. POISONOUS SEXUAL ENCOUNTERS Gacy as a child had to face some serious situations of sexual encounters which may have had some ill effects on him. In fact as a growing child no one talked about “sex” with him, thus he had no idea about sex at all. The first one was at the age of 5 where a 15 year old girl fondled his genitals. All Gacy knew was that “sex” was not good and was punishable. In 1950 when Gacy was about 8 years old a friendly contractor often took Gacy for rides in his tractor and sexually abused him. This was possibly Gacy’s first encounter with homosexuality. The man would sexually abuse Gacy but then buy him an ice-cream so that he wouldn’t tell on him. It was seen that Gacy brutalized his victims even when they had died with the use of dildos for anal sex. Robertson theorizes that the contractors brutal way of holding little Gacy’s head near his penis could have given birth to strong feeling of hatred and fear. At the contractor’s hands he felt helpless and powerless and this may explain the use of handcuffs that he used to overpower his victims. Another theory that Robertson gives is something that Gacy never mentioned but has some possibility. He says that since Gacy’s father was overly homophobic there was possibility that Gacy’s father was actually homosexual who performed acts of sodomy on his own son. Robertson noticed that Gacy’s father had a secret cellar where no one was allowed to go and perhaps that was where Gacy was sexually abused by his own father. In his own rapes too, Gacy used the garage instead of bedroom or living room. After all, most rapes are acts of hatred over sexual desires. BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER Some psychologists believe that Gacy was not a psychopath but was suffering from Borderline personality disorder. Ansevics and Doweiko (1991) were the first ones to theorize this alternative to psychopathic mind. According to them some serial killers like John Gacy had an unstable mind set. He suffered from bouts of unstable mind, mood and relationships and would turn “psychotic” only for a small period of time. They suggest that in stressful situations the criminals develop intense hatred, fear or anger which in most cases arises from feeling of rejection and loneliness and since Gacy’s entire life was full of rejection and loneliness (father’s rejection and his divorce) he may have been suffering from this problem. According to American Psychiatric Association people suffering from Borderline Personality disorder may often feel remorse or realize the gravity of the situation after committing the crime. This explains why the first victim of Gacy’s was set free even after being raped brutally. In fact Gacy dropped him off at his home without even thinking that the boy might report him which he eventually did. SEXUAL PREFERENCE It is very much possible that Gacy realized at a late age that he was sexually inclined to boys. Helen Morrison, M.D. believes that Gacy’s first brush with abnormal sexual encounter was when he worked at Las Vegas at a funeral home and touching a dead body sexually aroused him. Gacy was supposedly so horrified that he returned home and spoke to no one about the incident. However, life went well till his wife got pregnant and during her gestation period Gacy got drunk one day and fell asleep and when he woke up he was with a man who was performing fellatio on Gacy. “Gacy felt that he couldn’t ask the man to stop, and beside he was enjoying it” (Wilkinson, 1994:62). Thus began Gacy’s liking for homosexuality even though he knew that in his Catholic upbringing there was no room for homosexuality, thus he kept his preference hidden and had two children with his wife, to mask it all up. He would only hire young boys and was seen at strip clubs “trying to obtain fellatios from men by offering his wife for sex” (Egger,1998:96) He even started a social club for the young boys in his garage where they could eat, drink, take drugs and party. It was at these social meetings that Gacy would often select his victim and force them to perform fellatios on him, where he was always the one to gain pleasure. Since, homosexuality was not well received, Gacy performed them secretively. At first he was not into killing and would often give money to his first victim for the act. However, Gacy’s father’s death somehow enraged him and Gacy turned violent. His rape acts were more violent and the rape incidences were then was accompanied by murder. However, no explanation was given as to why sudden rape turned to murder by Gacy in his encounter with Wilkinson. BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE AND GENETICS Some psychologist and biochemists believe that there may be a biological perspective to a person’s behavior. Aggressive behavior has also been linked to abnormal levels of androgens, male sex hormones (Van Goozen, Matthys, Cohen-Kettenis, Thijssen, & van Engeland, 1998). Misbalance in homeostasis and biochemical balance in the body may initiate violent and aggressive behavior. Siegel in 2005 said that brain study of criminals and non-criminals revealed that criminal’s brain dysfunctions mostly occurred at higher levels when compared to that of non-criminal minds. Violent murders and acts of rape have been linked to abnormal levels of androgens or male sex hormones in the body. However, some researchers have said that genetics may also play a role in crime. Studies show that biological relatives of sociopaths had at least 5 times more chances of becoming a sociopath. One study showed that sociopathic criminals took more time to respond to something (in this case electric shock) than normal people. Lynn Scott says that as a child Gacy wanted to become policeman and would often follow ambulances to look at catastrophes. Psychologists believe that such non-responsive nervous activity makes the criminals less sensitive to certain situations. Scientists say that in psychopaths the brain activity of the limbic region which contains memories and emotions has a slow response and this problem is magnified when the child is treated abusively as had been the case with Gacy. CONCLUSION The life of John Wayne Gacy and his own recollections that I studied speaks of his horrific past yet I do not think that he had spoken all truth. Gacy never owned up to the murders that he had committed even though at the time of his arrest he had confessed to the crime of killing 33 people and burying them. However, most of the theories as to why Gacy committed the hideous acts of crime are linked to his psychology but the true reason cannot be pinpointed. Personally I feel that just one theory may not be sufficient and that Gacy’s acts of crime must have been an outcome of a combination of things. REFERENCES Dreikers, R (1950). Fundamentals of Alderian Psychology. Chicago IL: Alfred Alder Institute. Carich,M., Fisher, D., Kohut, M.(2004). Sexual Murders and sexual serial killers. NY:Tower Books. Reinhardt,J.M. (1962). The psychology of a strange killer. Springfield. Weatherby, G.A., Gonzaga, D., Gonzaga. K. (2009). An Intergrated Approach of Serial homicidal Behaviour. Journal of Criminology and Criminal justice research and education, vol 3. Egger, S. (ed.) (1990). Serial murder: An elusive phenomenon. Praeger: New York. Levin, J. & Fox, J.A. (1985). Mass murder. Plenum: New York. Kuczka, Susan and Rob Karwath. All Appeals Fail: Gacy is executed. Serial Killer Dies of Lethal Injection. Chicago Tribune, 10 May 1994. Starr,M., et al. (1984). The Random Killers. Newsweek, November 26, 100-106. Spence, D.P. (1982). Narrative truth and historical truth: Meaning and interpretation in Psychoanalysis. New York :Norton. Read More