It’s October in the 2020s which means there’s no shortage of true-crime retellings available to stream. Ryan Murphy’s brought Ed Gein back as a uncomfortably sexy, chainsaw wielding killer, Aileen Wuornos’ crimes are being reconsidered in a doc featuring a pre-execution interview, and over on Peacock, John Wayne Gacy is coming to life. Based largely on the 2021 documentary John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise, the very similarly titled Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy stars Michael Chernus (Severance) as the notorious Chicagoland killer, luring in unsuspecting young men to be tortured, killed, and buried beneath the house. Showrunner Patrick Macmanus tried hard to tone down the lurid, tabloid nature of the crime. Unlike past attempts at fictionalizing his life, Macmanus barely touches on the fact that Gacy had a hobby of dressing up like a clown, and doesn’t show any actual murders in the series. As he told Variety, he had to be talked into taking on the project in the first place. “I said I would do it if I could focus on the victims, the police, the lawyers, and the families,” he said.
The result is a series that hews closely to the truth (there are, of course, some exceptions — there’s no evidence Gacy gave employees of his contracting business puppet shows where the puppets pee on each other, for example) and it’s being hailed by critics as a “tasteful” take on the brutal murders. But not everything can fit neatly in an eight-part series, and there’s a reason the case is still being dissected today. We talked with journalists Alison True and Tracy Ullman, whose reporting informed the original John Wayne Gacy doc, as well as David Nelson, author of Boys Enter the House: The Victims of John Wayne Gacy and the Lives They Left Behind, to talk about the real story. Here, a look at four things that Devil in Disguise leaves out.
There might be other properties in where Gacy victims are buried.
In the penultimate episode of Devil in Disguise, Detective Rafael Tovar (Gabriel Luna) drives Gacy to court, asking him to finally admit just how many men he’d killed. The official count was 33 — that’s what Gacy was tried for, that’s what he was convicted of — but, like the fictionalized detective keeps saying, Tovar believes there’s more. In the show, Gacy suggests there are 45 — “45 sounds like a good number,” he tells Tovar — but leaves it ambiguous. In reality, he did tell Tovar the number was 45 — but there’s no way to know if he was telling the truth.
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In fact, one of the most pervasive theories about Gacy is that he wasn’t just burying bodies in his home or dumping them in the Des Plaines river. As the owner of a construction company, Gacy had access to all sorts of buildings around the Chicagoland area. The one that has faced the most scrutiny is a property on Miami and Elston Aves., about a 10 minute drive from his home where Gacy’s mother used to live. In 1998, a former Chicago detective, Bill Dorsch, came forward and said that he believed more victims might be buried on that property. Dorsch lived near the building in the 1970s, and he remembered seeing Gacy during that time, in the middle of the night, heading to the building’s front yard with a shovel. He thought nothing of it until Gacy’s arrest.
Similarly, another former neighbor, Mike Nelson, recalled Gacy dragging large, heavy garbage bags to the area. Nelson was a teenager who would sometimes work for Gacy, and remembered the contractor asking him to help dig some ditches, about six feet deep and four feet long. Chicago PD dug up part of the yard in 1998 but didn’t find human remains. A subsequent 2012 investigation by the Cook County Sheriff also didn’t find anything, but researchers still aren’t convinced it’s clear of more victims.
Gacy had deep ties with the Chicago democratic machine — and that might have helped him get away with his crimes as long as he did.
In the show — as in real life — Gacy loved to show off a picture he took with Rosalyn Carter, when she was the first lady. But there’s much more to it than that, and while the series refers to it, it doesn’t spent too much time considering those connections. “We have about 5,000 pages of research that showed that the Democratic machine knew about John Wayne Gacy,” says True, who adds that they knew specifically about the men he raped. Gacy was a dedicated member of the local political party, even serving as democratic precinct captain in the years before his arrest. He was friends with cops in the area, familiar with powerful bosses, and would throw barbecues in his back yard to bring that community together.
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Gacy may have been connected to a sex-trafficking ring — and another serial killer.
John David Norman was a notorious pedophile who managed to operate numerous organizations and publications that spread both child sex abuse material (CSAM — formerly referred to as child pornography), and operated sex-trafficking rings that provided wealthy older men access to young boys. Norman first gained some notoriety after his Dallas, Texas, home was raided in 1973, revealing pounds of marijuana and mountains of child sexual abuse material, as well as the names and addresses of thousands of subscribers to his sex-trafficking and CSAM organization, written on index cards.
The raid occurred just days after a man named Dean Corll was shot to death in Houston in 1973 by a younger man, Elmer Wayne Henley. Henley would tell police that that Corll had been a serial killer, and Henley had been one of his accomplices. Corll’s MO was similar to Gacy’s: kidnap and torture young men, sexually assault them, kill them, and bury their bodies. When Corll was killed and his crimes came to light, 27 bodies were found on his properties. “Elmer Wayne Henley was only 17 years old at that point,” says Ullman, whose book The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, which covers the case, was recently adapted into a HBO documentary. “He’d been groomed, and [had] been killing for Dean Corll for two and a half years.” Norman, then based in Dallas, was not criminally connected to Corll, though a line in a subsequent congressional investigation into the trafficking ring suggested that Dallas police had evidence linking Corll’s victims to Norman’s organization.
Shortly after that raid, Norman fled to Homewood, Illinois, a town on the southern outskirts of Chicago. Within a few years, he was charged with multiple counts of “indecent liberties with a child,” and sentenced to prison, where he spent four years. While there, he restarted the ring, according to investigators. A fellow inmate, Phillip Paske, had helped him, and after Paske was released on parole, he continued the operation out of his Chicagoland home.
Gacy would claim at various points that he had accomplices, naming several young men, including Paske. While it’s unclear if Gacy worked alone — and parsing the evidence that he had help is an entirely different rabbit hole — it has been independently verified that Paske worked for him, potentially putting Gacy in the orbit of one of the most notorious sex traffickers and pedophiles of the Twentieth century.
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There’s a lot more to the victims’ stories.
Macmanus has made it clear in interviews that the only reason he accepted the offer to work on this show is because he was allowed to center it on the victims and their backstories rather than the brutality of the crimes. Indeed, each episode is named after one or more of the boys Gacy targeted, including one who survived. But that’s only a handful, when Gacy was one of the most prolific serial killers — and brutal serial rapists — the country has known. Nelson, author of 2021’s Boys Enter the House, talked to the friends and family of the victims, as well as some who’d survived Gacy’s crimes, going even deeper on the victims’ stories. “In my book there’s a story about one of [victim] John Szyc’s friends who actually went back with Gacy to his home for a hook up. And he had just such a bad feeling about it — he had no idea that John Wayne Gacy had killed his friend just prior to this interaction, and he ran out of the house completely naked.”
By looking at the victims — many of whom were queer and frequented the city’s gay bars — Nelson brings to life a lost generation. Though they didn’t collaborate on the series, Macmanus recognizes the important work that Nelson has done for the victims and their families. “He and I are fully aligned on the desire to elevate the stories of the victims’ lives,” Macmanus tells Rolling Stone. “His book, Boys Enter the House, is a tremendous piece of journalism and everyone should read it.”
