He loved doing that. broderick: he was actually a real clown. .who did tricks for little kids. and he was in a union and all that. he got kids laughing. he had little hand puppets. he had a squeaky voice that would talk to the children, and they would talk back. gacy: pogo the clown was the clowning that i did for charity hospital work for the democratic party. pogo comes from being polish and on the go all the time. so it s po-go. broderick: he got pleasure out of performing for people, particularly little kids, in hospitals. he d see this kid who s got leukemia and is, you know, diagnosed incurable. he d do his clown act and cry on their behalf.
Cahill: they went to gacy s house. gacy invited them in, offered them a drink. finder: of course, the police officers were delighted not only to go into a warmer place, but to go into the house where gacy lived. cahill: they talked with him. john would talk. john will talk your ear off. and one officer said he wanted to go off to the bathroom. albrecht: he excused himself to go to the bathroom, which is in the older part of the house. when he was in the bathroom, the heat kicked on, and this odor came up from the heat vents. hachmeister: and he equated it to the smell that he would smell at the morgue. albrecht: if you ve ever been to a morgue, around a dead body, it s an odor that you will never forget. sullivan: he had ended up coming back and telling us, man, i smelled dead bodies in there. we now were coming to the absolute conclusion
Just one aleve. 12 hours of uninterrupted pain relief. aleve. who do you take it for? hachmeister: following the execution of that search warrant, police reviewed everything that they recovered. sullivan: now we had so much literal junk from gacy s house. junk turned out to be evidence that we had to go through. things didn t move as fast back then to try to identify jewelry or a license or any of those kind of things. we had in there, among other things, a class ring that had initials on it.
Stemming from his first marriage. john wayne gacy had a fairly extensive record minor types of things, basically you know, battery, disorderly conduct. but one conviction was for sodomy, and it was learned that it was performed against a young boy. cahill: on the day he was convicted, his wife filed for divorce, left him, took his two kids. he never saw any of them again. that ended his wonderful life he was having in waterloo, iowa, because he wound up in a penitentiary. jackson: after serving more than a year in prison, john wayne gacy moves to chicago to start an entirely new life, and no one knows anything about his checkered past. he lives under the radar for years until rob piest goes missing. and then the des plaines police finally have a suspect.
Whatever it took, we were to stay with him. the second night that mike and i were on the surveillance, gacy was out late at night. he goes over to a restaurant. he sits at a table. he s all by himself. and we sit at a table a couple tables away from him. and pretty soon, he says, hey, guys, as long as you re gonna follow me, why don t you just join me? so mike and i joined him. and we developed a bit of a relationship. amirante: but life is a series of curve balls, and this was a huge curve that came at me for my first time at bat. i had planned to be this wealthy, successful personal-injury lawyer. i m sitting in my new office that i had just opened up, trying to figure out what i was gonna put on my wall. and the phone rings. [ telephone rings ] hey, sam, how you doing? i said, how you doing, john? he was the kind of guy oh, yeah, john gacy? i know john gacy. so it was like that. a neighbor, a good brother, a good cousin,