Clown-John ‘Wayne’ Gacy Execution + Last Meal + Last Words on Death Row

At 12:58 in the morning on May 10th, 1994, a man was pronounced dead on a gurnie inside Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois. There were no tears in the room, no grief, no mourning. Outside the prison walls, hundreds of people were celebrating. They laid out 33 body bags on the ground. They sang songs.

 They chanted so loudly that witnesses inside the execution building said they could hear them through the walls. This was not a tragedy. This was a reckoning because the man who had just died was not a man the world would miss. He was a man the world had been waiting 14 years to bury. A man who had shaken the foundation of an entire country’s sense of safety.

 A man who had looked his neighbors in the eyes, shaken their hands, performed as a clown at their children’s birthday parties and then gone home and committed acts so unspeakable that even seasoned detectives wept when they found what was hidden beneath his house. Hit subscribe. Turn on the notification bell so you won’t miss our deep dive drops.

 His name was John Wayne Gasey and this is the story of the 24 hours before the world was finally rid of him and the decades of horror that made those 24 hours so necessary. To understand John Wayne Gasey’s last day on earth, you first have to understand what kind of man reached that day.

 Because nothing about John Wayne Gayy was what it appeared to be. And that gap between appearance and reality is exactly what made him so dangerous for so long. He was born on March 17th, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up in a bluecollar family on the northwest side of the city, a normal enough childhood on the surface, but beneath it, his home was fractured.

 His father was verbally abusive and physically violent, and Gayy witnessed that abuse repeatedly throughout his childhood. It left marks that wouldn’t fully surface for years. As he grew older, Gayy became a man who wore his ambition like armor. He was sociable, energetic, eager to be liked. He built a contracting business.

He married, he had children. He involved himself in the community, joining local Democratic party organizations, throwing elaborate neighborhood block parties, organizing events for the people around him, and then he put on a clown costume. Gayy was a successful businessman from the Chicago suburbs who moonlighted as a children’s entertainer.

 Going by the names Pogo the Clown and Patches the Clown, he performed at charitable events, fundraisers, and hospitals. Parents trusted him with their children. Neighbors trusted him with their homes. He was by every visible measure a pillar of the community. But there had already been a warning, a warning that should have changed everything and didn’t.

 In 1968, while living in Waterl, Iowa, Gayy pleaded guilty to sodomy involving a teenage boy and received a 10-year prison sentence. He was parrolled after just 18 months, and the state of Iowa had no system in place to alert the Chicago area when he moved back. He returned to Illinois a free man, his record invisible to his new neighbors.

After Gayy was released from that Iowa prison in June 1970, he moved back to the Chicago area. and within two years, he had killed for the first time. Gayy’s first known murder victim was 16-year-old Timothy McCoy. In 1972, Gayy met McCoy at the Greyhound bus station in Chicago. The teenager had a layover on his way home to Nebraska, and he agreed to go to Gayy’s house.

 There, Gayy fatally stabbed him. What happened next tells you everything about what kind of man Gay was. He didn’t turn himself in. He didn’t fall apart from guilt. He described the experience later as giving him the realization that killing gave him the ultimate sense of power and control. He buried McCoy under his house, went back to work on Monday morning, and kept living his life.

 And then he did it again and again. Between 1972 and 1978, Gayy sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men. He buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home, buried three others elsewhere on his property and discarded the remains of his last four known victims in a nearby river. For 6 years, this went on.

 It wasn’t just the number of victims that made Gayy’s crime so haunting. It was the gruesome manner in which he committed them, luring young men into his home, binding and raping them, strangling them to death, and then burying them throughout his property. Many of his victims were lured with the promise of construction work at his company, PDM Contractors.

 Several had been employees. At least one, John Butkovich, was a Gayy employee who had gone to his house in 1975 to collect unpaid wages. He killed people who trusted him. People who were just trying to make a living, trying to get home, trying to build a future, and every single one of them ended up in the dirt beneath the floors of a house where neighbors had attended dinner parties.

The investigation that ended Gayy’s killing spree began with the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Pest on December 11th, 1978. Pest was working a part-time job at Nissen Pharmacy in the Plains, Illinois. When Gayy arrived at the store to discuss a remodeling job, Pas told his mother he was going to speak with a contractor about a job offer and then never came home.

 His family called police that same night. This is where the story of John Wayne Gayy’s freedom ends. Investigators quickly identified Gayy as the last person to have seen pest. A background check immediately revealed his Iowa sodomy conviction and police placed him under surveillance. On December 13th, officers obtained a search warrant and entered Gasey’s home.

 Inside, they found items belonging to other missing young men, including a photo receipt that Pest’s family confirmed belonged to a friend of their son. They found fake police badges, handcuffs, driver’s licenses belonging to other people, and syringes. Still, it wasn’t yet enough to hold him, but two police officers who entered the home during a later visit detected something else.

 A smell coming from beneath the floor, the unmistakable smell of decomposition. As the investigation tightened and police surveillance followed his every move, a visibly exhausted Gayy visited his attorney. After a few drinks, he began a long-winded confession that stretched into the early hours of the morning. He made a similar confession to a friend.

Later the next day, saying, “I’ve been a bad boy. I killed 30 people. Give or take a few. Give or take a few.” He talked about taking 30 human lives the way a man talks about whether he remembered to lock his front door. Police arrested Gayy on December 21st, 1978 outside a McDonald’s in Niles, Illinois on a minor drug offense.

 That same day, investigators obtained a second warrant and entered the crawl space beneath his home. They immediately discovered human remains. The excavation of his property would continue for weeks. The bodies of 26 boys and young men were eventually uncovered under the house. Three other bodies were found elsewhere on the property and four bodies, including Robert Pests, were later recovered from the Des Plains River.

 After Gayy’s arrest, it was discovered that some of his identified victims had never even been reported missing by their families. Some were estranged from relatives who had no idea they were gone. Missing person reports from distant jurisdictions had never reached investigators in Cook County. These were people who had simply disappeared from the world and the world had barely noticed until now.

 On February 6th, 1980, Gayy was brought to trial. The city of Chicago, already shaken by what had been found beneath that modest house in Norwood Park, now sat and listened as prosecutors laid out the full scope of what had happened inside those walls. The evidence was overwhelming. Gayy had confessed. Physical evidence tied him to every victim.

 The prosecution’s challenge was not proving what he had done. Everyone knew what he had done. The real question at trial was this. Was John Wayne Gayy legally sane? The defense called 22 witnesses, including six psychologists, who testified as medical experts, that they found Gayy to be mentally impaired by conditions bordering on schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder.

 They testified that he was consequently unable to understand the nature of his acts and should therefore be held to have been legally insane when he committed the murders. The defense also called Gayy’s mother and sister who described the verbal abuse and beatings he had received from his father and his witnessing of the physical abuse of his mother.

 They were asking the jury to see a damaged man, a broken man. The prosecution was not moved. Prosecutor Kunglivered the closing statement for the state. He took victims photos off a display board as he spoke. He showed him the same mercy he showed when he took these innocent lives off the face of the earth. he told the jury and then threw the photographs into a replica of the crawl space trap door that had been set up inside the courtroom.

 The jury deliberated for less than 2 hours. On March 13th, 1980, Gayy was found guilty on all 33 counts of murder. The following day, the same jury sentenced him to death at the time. This made him the man convicted of the most murders in United States history. Gayy was transferred to Menard Correctional Center in southern Illinois where he would spend 14 years on death row as his appeals wound through the courts.

 And here is where the story takes a turn that still unsettles people today. Gayy did not spend those 14 years in silence or regret. He spent them performing. He reinvented himself again the way he always had, building a new persona from behind bars, finding ways to manipulate and charm and control even from a prison cell.

 He set up a 900 number phone line, a paid hotline where people could call in and listen to him speak about his case, his innocence, his theories about being framed by the justice system. He was earning money from it. According to a 1982 report, 20 inmates at Menard signed a petition claiming that Gayy was given extra privileges that allowed him to freely move about the unit’s visiting room, carry tools like a putty knife, and relax watching a color TV or listening to a radio in his cell.

 Even in prison, he found ways to secure advantages that other inmates didn’t have, and he painted. Gayy became a prolific painter on death row. It is estimated that he created some 2,000 works, often depicting clowns, notably his Pogo the clown persona, as well as skulls, celebrities, and historical figures.

 Before his execution in 1994, he reportedly earned around $30,000 from the sale of his artwork. He painted other notorious criminals including Charles Manson and Ed Ga. He painted the seven dwarves. He painted landscapes. He stated that his intention was to bring joy to people’s lives. He painted the character he had used to gain the trust of parents and children.

 The smiling clown, the painted face, and sold those paintings while the families of 33 young men buried their dead. Throughout all of this, he maintained his innocence with absolute conviction. He gave interviews. He wrote letters. He insisted he had been framed. He cast himself not as a monster, but as a misunderstood victim of a corrupt system.

 In a 1992 interview with former FBI profiler Robert Wrestler, Gayy slammed news outlets for calling him a monster. He argued that the media was looking for a monster and had painted him as someone who stalked boys in the street. He would sit with that position until the very end. By May 1994, every appeal had been denied. Every legal avenue had closed.

 There was no reprieve coming, no lastminute stay of execution, no argument left to make. On May 9th, 1994, Gayy was transferred from Menard Correctional Center to Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, the facility where just after midnight, his execution would be carried out. The morning of May 9th carried a strange quiet at first.

 The routine of a prison day, breakfast, movement, surveillance continued as it always did. But for the staff at Stateville and for Gayy himself, everyone understood that this particular routine had an end point. That morning, Gayy received his breakfast. He was calm, disturbingly, noticeably calm. People who interacted with him in those final hours described a man who showed no visible fear, no trembling, no breaking down.

 The same detachment that had allowed him to return to work the morning after his first murder was still there. Decades later, unbroken. As the hours passed, visits began. According to Gayy’s death row attorney, Karen Condi, Gayy wasn’t particularly worried about the lethal injection awaiting him. She was present in those final hours, as was a spiritual adviser, as was his legal team.

 Still, even now, trying to find a thread they hadn’t yet pulled. His mother had passed away years before his execution. The rest of his family had severed ties over the years, unable to reconcile who this man was with the person they thought they had known. all except one, his sister Karen Gayy Kuzma, who arrived to spend what time remained with him.

 In photographs taken that day, they are seen embracing, smiling. If you did not know the context, you might mistake it for a family reunion. Her loyalty was not about approval or agreement. It was something harder to explain. The stubborn, complicated grief of someone who had loved a person long before they became a monster, and could not fully let go of who he had been to her, before the world knew who he truly was.

 His legal team worked through the morning on lastminute filings. The chances of success were vanishing small, and everyone in that room understood it. Still, they worked because that is what lawyers do, and because some of them still believed on some level in the process, if not the man. By early afternoon, a Catholic priest arrived.

Gayy had proclaimed his innocence in the leadup to his execution and had converted to Catholicism. While on death row, he had requested last rights. The priest administered them in a room where both men understood the weight of what was happening, even if only one of them fully felt it.

 Outside the prison, the atmosphere was building. Crowds gathered outside Stateville Correctional Center to protest both for and against the death penalty. Spectators laid out 33 body bags in memory of Gayy’s victims and carried signs. They sang songs, “Goodbye, Gayy” to the tune of Hello Dolly. Their chants were reportedly so loud they could be heard from the execution building.

 Inside, the pace of the day was shifting. As evening arrived, the final preparations began in earnest. Gayy was moved to a holding cell directly adjacent to the execution chamber. Guards maintained constant watch, not out of any expectation that he would cause trouble, but because protocol demanded it, and because nothing about this night could go wrong, then came the final meal.

 Gayy’s last meal was fried chicken, butterfly shrimp, French fries, and fresh strawberries. The choice of fried chicken carried an irony that was not lost on people who had followed the case. Gayy had been a successful businessman who had managed a string of KFC restaurants earlier in his life. It was one of the many ordinary chapters of his biography that made the larger picture so difficult to process.

 The same man who had managed restaurants, built a contracting business, and organized. Neighborhood block parties had buried 33 bodies under his floor. He ate his final meal. He showered. He changed into a clean prison uniform. He spent his remaining hours with his spiritual adviser and his legal team, still talking about his case, still insisting on the conspiracy that had destroyed him, still constructing the version of events in which he was the wronged party.

 To the very end, the performance held. He declined to make a final phone call. At approximately 11:30 in the evening, the moment arrived. Gayy was escorted from his holding cell to the execution chamber, flanked by prison guards. Inside the chamber, he was strapped to a gurnie behind a glass partition.

 A small group of witnesses had assembled, members of the media, representatives of law enforcement, and family members of some of his victims. Those family members had waited 14 years for this. Some of them had spent those years rebuilding lives shattered by what Gayy had taken from them. Some had never fully rebuilt.

 They had sat through a trial, through appeals, through years of Gayy proclaiming his innocence on a paid phone line and selling paintings of his clown persona. And now they were in a room watching the end of it. The chamber was still. When it came time for Gayy to deliver his final statement, the room waited.

 Some reports indicate his final words were, “Kiss my ass.” While other contemporaneous accounts suggest his final statement pointed the finger at the state of Illinois for what he called his murder. Prosecutor Kungl later claimed that no words were actually spoken. What is certain is this. There was no apology. There was no acknowledgement of the lives he had taken.

 There was no moment where the mask slipped and something human looked out from behind it. Whatever he said or didn’t say, he met the end of his life the same way he had lived it in defiance, in self-preservation, and in absolute refusal to give his victims anything resembling truth. Shortly after midnight on May 10th, 1994, Gayy was administered a three drug lethal injection.

 The first drug, sodium theopental, was administered to put him to sleep. This was followed by pancurium bromide to stop breathing and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart, but it did not go smoothly. The execution was supposed to take approximately 5 minutes. Instead, it took 18 minutes. A clog developed in the tube delivering the first drug, the one meant to render him unconscious, and technicians had to work to address the blockage before the process could continue.

 Of the 237 executions that had taken place in the United States since 1976, 18 were later classified as botched. Gayes was among them, Time magazine reported on it at the time, noting that the monster was dead, while also asking whether the manner of the killing itself had been monstrous. For 18 minutes, witnesses stood in silence behind that glass partition.

 Some of Gayy’s victim’s family members were in that room. Whatever any of them felt in those 18 minutes, relief, anguish, something they couldn’t name, they stood and they witnessed it. Gay was pronounced dead at 12:58 a.m. on May 10th, 1994. He was 52 years old. Outside the prison, when the announcement came, the crowd cheered.

 33 body bags lay on the ground in the cold Illinois night. In the hours following the execution, Gayy’s body was transported to the Illinois Department of Corrections Medical Center for the legally required autopsy. The cause of death was confirmed as lethal injection. And then came something that had been anticipated with unusual intensity, something that spoke to how desperately people wanted an answer to the question that had haunted this entire case.

 Scientists removed Gayy’s brain. The hope was that something inside it, some physical abnormality, some structural difference, would explain what he had done. That there would be at the cellular level some marker that separated him from the rest of humanity, some biological explanation that made the horror comprehensible.

 They found nothing, no significant abnormalities, no visible difference from any other human brain. The horror of John Wayne Gayy was not biological. It was chosen. 3 days after the execution, his remains were cremated. His ashes were returned to his family. There is no grave, no marker, no memorial. Unlike other notorious criminals whose burial sites have become destinations for the morbidly curious, Gayy’s final resting place remains private.

 Even decades after his execution, the work of identifying his victims continued. Five of his victims remained unidentified at the time of his death, and Cook County authorities have continued working to give those young men their names back. In 2011, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart ordered eight unidentified victims to be exumed for DNA testing.

 Through that process, James Byron Hawinson, a 16-year-old who had run away from St. Paul, Minnesota in 1976 and called his mother from Chicago on August 5th of that year, was identified as one of Gayy’s victims. He was never heard from again after that phone call. A 16-year-old boy, a phone call home, and then silence for decades. That is who John Wayne Gayy killed.

 Not abstractions, not case numbers, young men with families who waited and hoped and aged and in some cases died themselves without ever knowing what happened to someone they loved. For Karen Ki, the attorney who had defended Gayy on death row, his execution was a complicated moment. I came to know John Gayy.

 I came to advocate for his life and I lost everything,” she said, noting that she lost clients, received death threats, hate mail, and years of bad publicity for taking the case. “That is the gravity of this case, that even doing the legal and constitutional work of defending a man had consequences, that the weight of what he had done was heavy enough to fall on everyone who came close to it.

” The execution of John Wayne Gasey closed one of the most devastating chapters in American criminal history. But it did not close the wounds the families of 33 young men and the families of the victims who remain unidentified to this day carry what Gayy did to them in a way that no execution can undo. Some of them were in that room on May 10th, 1994.

 Some of them stood outside with 33 body bags and waited for the announcement. Some of them had already spent 14 years trying to hold their lives together. While Gayy sold paintings and made phone calls from death row. What makes this case so enduring, what makes it still studied by criminologists, psychologists, and investigators is not just the scale of the crime. It is the disguise.

 John Wayne Gayy was not a shadow. He was not someone who lived on the margins of society and raised alarm bells and got ignored. He was a business owner, a community organizer, a man who shook hands with politicians and dressed as a clown for children. He was the person you trust, the person you invite into your home, the person you recommend to your neighbors.

 He wore his respectability like a weapon. And he used it for 6 years before a 15-year-old boy named Robert Pas didn’t come home one night in December 1978. That 15year-old boy who just wanted a construction job is the reason Gayy was caught. that 15-year-old boy and the mother who called the police the same night he didn’t come home.

 If you’ve made it to the end of this story, you understand why this case stays with people. Not because it’s sensational, but because it’s a mirror, a reflection of how completely evil can hide in plain sight and how much damage it can do before anyone thinks to look. 33 lives, 6 years, one house in the suburbs of Chicago, and a man who to the very end never once said he was sorry.

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