Last Podcast On The Left - Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy: An Interview with Karen Conti
Episode Date: May 3, 2024This week the boys are joined by very special guest and author of the new book "Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy: Defending America's Most Evil Serial Killer on Death Row" - Karen Conti joins us to d...iscuss the new book, her firsthand experiences representing Gacy during his final death row appeals, and a peek into the convoluted mind of one of history's most prolific killers.
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Welcome to the last podcast on the left ladies and gentlemen.
Really fun way to get into it.
I'm Marcus Parks.
I'm here with Henry Zabrowski and Ed Larson and we're on spring break y'all!
We are on spring break. We're having a good time.
Everybody's- I'm showing them.
Yeah, he is and ooh, the beads are accumulating.
But you aren't on spring break,
so you have to hear us talk.
And this was fun as hell is that we recorded this interview
with this incredibly fascinating woman, Karen Conti,
who worked with with would you say
your favorite Eddie. I wouldn't I want to say my your baby. I
like him because I always root for the fat guy. You know like
that's that's why I think he might be my favorite. Yeah,
only because he's fat. Well, it's getting a fat quarterback.
That quarterback is now my favorite quarterback. Oh, yeah
Cecil Fielder was a baseball player
Favorite I we what we like to say here is we like to say most interesting who we find the most interesting that works
Yeah, yeah
we find the most interesting is John Wayne Gacy and John Wayne Gacy was
Represented by Karen Conti when he was on death row and she wrote a book about it called killing time with John Wayne Gacy was represented by Karen Conti when he was on death row and she wrote a book
about it called Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy defending America's most evil serial
killer on death row.
She's got some stories.
She does.
Oh my gosh.
I mean, imagine that just like every day you go in and you're just hanging with Gacy.
You know, though, honestly, I I kinda know what it feels like now.
So here it is, our interview with Karen Conte.
Enjoy very much, ladies and gentlemen.
Fly from your grave.
All right, people, we are here with the author
of Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy,
defending America's most evil serial killer on death row,
Karen Conte, how are you doing today?
Doing really well.
I'm so excited to be on your podcast.
This is amazing.
I just want to say, number one, does meeting John Wayne Gacy,
when you meet him, are you like, God, I love being a lawyer.
No, usually I don't get asked that.
The question I usually get asked is, were you afraid of him?
And of course, you guys would know the answer is no.
He was as normal as can be and he was like your favorite uncle.
What was chilling was to know that the Gacy's of the world are out there looking completely
normal and you just look around you and you wonder, who am I working with?
Who am I sitting on the bus with?
Who's just like Gacy?
Normal on the outside, but a horror show on the inside.
Well, first of all, let's start with what your relationship
with Gacy was.
Well, first of all, Gacy was committing his crimes
in the 70s, and I was in high school at the time.
So he was sentenced to death for killing 33 young men
and boys, burying most of them under his house.
So flash ahead, I'm now a lawyer,
I get the call to go down there.
And I was just curious.
I didn't have any intention of really representing him
because I never did a death penalty case before.
I didn't do criminal defense on that level.
And so, but I wanted to look evil in the eye.
So I did.
And when I got down there,
I realized I wanted to represent him in his death row So I did. And when I got down there, I realized I wanted to represent him
in his death row appeals
because I've never believed in the death penalty.
It's just something that I don't believe in
that for gays of the world, I think it's wrong.
But I had to develop a relationship with him.
I had to talk to him.
I was on the phone with him every day.
I spent hours on death row with him.
And so I kind of developed
a very friendly relationship with him. I so I kind of developed a very friendly relationship
with him.
I'm not saying I was his friend, but it was congenial.
It was humorous.
He was kind to me.
He was kinder to me than the other lawyers,
I think because I was a female.
But I will tell you that I have had other clients
who have been a lot less likable than John Wayne Gacy.
Wow, that's a, what a heck of a report guard.
Can I ask, like, when you, like, one thing, just to clear up, like, legal-wise, like,
what is, like, the difference when you're trying a case for the first time than when
you're going through an appeals process?
Like, as you're walking him through, like, what is different about that than if you were
going to be representing him first up? Well, you know, a trial, you know, you're going him through, like, what is different about that than if you were going to be representing him first up?
Well, you know, a trial, you know, you're going to trial with him.
You're getting all the tests to make sure that he's not insane.
You know, you're preparing for trial, looking at exhibits and doing all that kind of stuff,
preparing cross-examination and the like.
And so that's a daily issue.
The appeals are far removed from the trial.
And by the time I got involved,
we weren't trying to get him out of jail.
We weren't trying to say he was actually innocent
because that would have been going nowhere.
But what we were trying to do is to stop the execution.
And there are a whole bunch of arguments
that death penalty lawyers make in that regard,
regarding like the method of execution
and that's cruel and unusual and those types of things.
So they're more creative, they're more removed, and you're going to the appellate court, not a
trial court every day. So he is like, it's a less intense process. And would you say that then he
has more kind of say with how it's done? Like, do you feel like what is a more client centered
approach? Is it the original or the appeals?
Like, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I just don't understand, because I'm not.
Well, in a trial, you're sitting by your client
day in and day out for a period of time,
whether that's two months or six weeks or two days.
So you're with that client the whole time,
and you're going into the jail cell at night
to prepare him for the next day.
And yes, there are strategy things you have to do,
but in an appeals process,
you're not just doing one thing.
You have all these different appeals going.
You want to stop the execution this way.
We have an international appeal we're filing in Washington.
We're filing cases to the US Supreme Court
and we're submitting them.
So it's intense in that there's a lot of work involved.
And some of them are work that you have to do overnight because you have time deadlines, but you're not
sitting with him all day long, making those decisions and trying the case.
But you know, you do need someone's cooperation when you're having these
appeals filed because you need him to approve of what you're doing.
Yeah.
So when you were interacting with John Wayne Gacy on those times that you had to go see him,
like what were you talking to him about?
Like what were you talking about strategy
or just getting to know him as a client?
Well, both.
And in order to get to him, to get him to talk to me
about the decisions he needed to make,
you had to kind of manipulate him back.
He was a very manipulative guy.
So he would divert your attention. He'd talk to me about something personal because he wanted
to get information from me so he could use it later to try to manipulate me. That's how he was.
But he was better with me than with the male lawyers. So he was actually very soft and feminine
with me. He talked about cooking. He talked about gardening. And so we would have a good half an hour
where we would just talk BS.
And then that would get him to relax.
And then I'd present the things
that we needed to have him sign on.
And he was very oppositional.
I don't know if you've ever been around someone
who if you say yes, he's gonna say no,
you say no, he's gonna say yes.
So Gacy had to do the end run
to kind of make him think that he thought up this great appeal and then he would finally eventually sign on. But I spent a lot of time
asking him questions that had nothing to do with the appeals just because I'm a curious
human being. And I wanted to figure out why did he become what he became?
Yeah, what did you think? Yeah. How, how did you open that door? Well, you know, I would just talk to him.
I'd say, John, you know, you're sitting here, you're accused of all these things.
You, you know, you have these young men and boys buried under your house and he
denied, he did it. And I said, well, then how did they get there?
He says, the only thing I'm guilty of is running a cemetery without a license.
Wow. So that was his idea.
He used that line on you.
That's such a classic true crime line.
It's a classic true crime line.
And DC may have originated it though.
So that, that was a long time ago.
So, um, yeah, you know, I would say things I would, would be direct.
But then I'd say, you know, Johnny read a lot of the psychiatric reports and
sounds like your dad was a real ogre and he used to beat you up and call you gay
and call you gay and
call you all these different kinds of things and then he would fight me on it say my dad wasn't
that bad but you know he was a son of a bitch and yeah he did do that and um I asked him about being
sexually abused because that's in the psychiatric reports he refused to talk to me really about that
I asked him a lot of questions about his childhood it It seemed to me that he was always effeminate
and he grew up with this name, John Wayne Gacy.
And John Wayne, of course, was the macho cowboy
who his father wanted him to take after.
And he wasn't that, he wasn't athletic.
He didn't like to hunt and fish
and do all the things that boys do.
And so he really gravitated toward his mother
who was a kind, person he had 2 sisters
who are fabulous in fact I became friends with one of them
for the last 30 years and he really liked his wives that you
know we married so he he liked women he associated with them
more than men and so you know that was a big part of how I
dealt with him.
Did you work for the state?
Did he employ you?
Who paid you?
Nobody paid me.
Really?
Really?
So at that point, it will come.
So buy the books.
Yeah, buy a few of them, actually.
Yeah, so at that point, all the traditional appeals were done.
So he had run out of state funded attorneys.
And so everyone at that point volunteers.
And if you do this kind of work, if you do criminal defense work, it's very common that
you take on some causes that are high profile in nature or important in the cause.
And we do this for, you know, we do this for several reasons.
First, we believe in the cause.
And when you're representing a John Wayne Gacy,
you're not just representing him,
you're representing all the people on death row,
not only in Illinois, but all over.
And you're making these arguments
to kind of move the needle forward,
pardon the pun, to abolish the death penalty.
So we take on these cases because they're important.
And, you know, I'd say we donated
about a quarter of a million dollars to the Gacy Fund.
And that was real hard on us.
That was that, you know, that's not easy on anyone
and it wasn't easy on us.
What was your positioning in the appeals?
So what was your case for John Wayne Gacy?
To say that he was innocent,
that he should not go to the death penalty?
There were a bunch of them.
One of them was in an international commission.
The machine in Illinois that's used
was invented by a Holocaust revisionist.
And he used Nazi research to create this machine.
He wasn't a doctor, he wasn't an engineer.
He was just, I would say an idiot. He was just a guy? He was just a doctor, he wasn't an engineer, he was just, I would say, an idiot.
He was just a guy?
He was just a guy, random guy. He had been arrested for denying the Holocaust happened,
which is a crime in certain countries. And he went to Nazi research. You can't do that. You
can't use Nazi research to invent or do anything because it's obviously wrong morally and it's
against international treaty.
But that's
I won't even buy a VW bunk.
Exactly.
Right.
And by the way, all executioners and everyone who comes up with executions are all just
guys.
There's no university to go to for execution.
There should be.
It's like being a studio executive.
Well, and there's no doctors can't be involved.
Yeah. Hippocratic. Hippocratic oath. And they can't inject the lethal inject. doctors can't be involved. Yeah.
Hippocratic oath.
Hippocratic oath.
And they can't inject the lethal inject, they can't do that.
They would lose their license.
So you have all these amateurs making these amateur machines and you have the amateurs
injecting and the clients are getting clogged and you see them all the time, the botched
executions.
And that's what happened with Gacy.
And we also predicted it wasn't going to work because it had malfunctioned in the past and it in fact did. So we made these arguments that that
was cruel and unusual. We made the arguments that a doctor should have been the one doing it,
but couldn't and therefore there was no execution. We made, you know, some actually the best argument
we made, nobody listened to. It's a little complicated, but Gacy got only seven death sentences out of the 33 because
during the time the other boys and men were killed, we didn't have a death penalty because
it was deemed unconstitutional. So we found his records. His records were in storage and they
showed meticulously that he was out of town during most of those seven murders. And you're asking me,
well, then what happened? He had other boys and men living with him at the murders. And you're asking me, well, then what happened?
He had other boys and men living with him at the time.
And two of them testified they dug the trenches.
And it's beyond my comprehension
that they didn't know what was going on
and that they didn't actually participate
in some of these deaths.
And in fact, one victim who escaped with horrible injuries
told the police that there was more
than one perpetrator inflicting the harm on him.
So I think he had, I think other, those other boys either helped him or did some of them
on their own.
I think this is a part where I am fascinated.
I saw an interview that you did that you guys were all kind of banding about this idea that
John Wayne Gacy might have been inspired by Dean Correll and that the serial killer Dean
Correll and that some of that the idea of the torture board and using kids as accomplices
was like he might have been inspired by that coverage.
Like is there any real, like, hard evidence?
Because the guy you brought up was Philip Paske.
That was, like, he was somewhere, he was where,
because, like, I got fascinated with the connection
of Dean Coral, John Wayne Gacy,
and this man by the name of John David Norman,
that I'm trying to figure out, like,
how you put all of this together.
Who was a child pornographer,
who was a distributor of child pornography across the country.
And there was rumors that some of Dean Corl's victims were featured in some of
the video work that John David Norman had sold.
Now like, is there any physical evidence that ties anything or is this still just
sort of like, well, he just wasn't there.
So it might've been one of these people.
I don't think that the researchers who have devoted literally their lives to looking at
these intersections have come up with any definitive fact that ties them together.
There are a lot of coincidences.
Like you said, the method of execution, it was like Gacy read the playbook of Dean Correll
and the whole idea that Dean Correll had two apprentices who were, he,
they would go out and procure the boys and they would get paid per boy. And if they were good
looking, they would get paid more. But there was very, very similar things. And there's a lot of
speculation from people who know more than I do that there could have been just a ring of men who
liked this kind of thing. And that Gacy may have been recording this stuff.
There may have been a snuff film operation.
They apparently took a lot of sophisticated at the time film equipment out of Gacy's house
that was never seen again.
Apparently Gacy had lists of people that were also never found again, important people that
may have been part of a ring of this type. So, you
know, we can speculate, but I just don't have any specific facts that definitively tells
us that that's what happened.
And none of his art runners, like, because at the time when you were working with him,
like that was also, it was, it was as after he already was told he could not profit off
of his paintings anymore and like his work.
Well, first of all, a lot of people don't know this, but the son of Sam laws were all stricken
down because the First Amendment allows prisoners to do their art and to make money. But what they
proved what the prison did to Gacy was there's a statute in the oil that says if you can afford
your incarceration, then you have to pay.
So at the time it was like $35,000 a year to stay at Chelley Menard Corrections. And
so they sued him. And so of course, Casey said, well, just evict me. So actually we
handled that case and we used it to say, Hey, you know what? You sued Gacy. So we have to extend the execution until the case is resolved.
So the state resolved the case very quickly and, and Gacy didn't pay anything.
Cause he really, he really, truly didn't have much at all.
Well, I know like Gacy, like to that point, like Gacy is one of the, one of the few
serial killers who had like kind of an entourage on the outside.
Like, did you have any dealings with those people that kind of did Gacy's bidding on the outside?
I did.
One of them was a relative and there were a couple of lawyers who were involved.
And I don't really know exactly what they got out of it, but I'm sure they got something out of it.
But that was that was how Gacy worked.
In fact, one of the creepiest things
about representing Gacy was he had this book
that he called the body book.
That was a scrapbook of every single one
of his victims, color coded, tabbed.
And he had enlisted and paid a private investigator
up in Canada to go and get all these pictures
from the yearbooks of these boys,
the family home, the family home,
the family dog, the Little League newspaper article, the day the kid went missing, the article that was...
So this was at a time before the internet. So this guy would have had to have gone
to the newspapers and got the microfiche or the newspapers and cut them out.
So this was a lot of work and it was very expensive, but that, that's what Gacy
did when he had money, he would get people to do his bidding, whatever that was.
Wow.
So how did it, did you ever like kind of ask him, well, if you didn't kill any of
these kids, where are you keeping a scrapbook of every single one of them?
Oh yeah.
And I said, John, why are you calling it a body book?
These are boys and men, they're human beings. And he responded to me.
Well, what were they doing out late that night anyway?
So that's when you catch Gacy off guard and he tells you what he really thinks,
which is they're not human beings. That's what he told me.
Did John, how come John Wayne Gacy, why do you think he didn't throw his accomplices under the bus?
Yeah.
I guess that's my one question. Do you think that he just like, because I feel like Dean Coral
got close and they stopped that.
Dean Coral got killed.
He got killed.
Like he got killed before he even-
Oh, one of his apprentices.
Yeah, but before he even spoke with, one of his apprentices. Yes. But before he even spoke with police, Steen Koral was hot.
But I think that you could see maybe at some point, because they were saying, right, that
Wayne, what's his name?
Henley.
He maybe saw for a second, oh, I might be next.
I might be on this block.
Yeah.
We talk about with the Ken and Barbie murders with Carla Homolka, and we wonder whether
or not she felt the same way.
Oh, maybe I'm next.
Maybe it's time for me to flip.
Like, I wonder why, like, no one,
he wouldn't have just been like, I didn't do it.
Here's the five guys that did it.
Yeah, I have a couple thoughts on that.
I think that my strongest thought
is that he wanted credit for all of them.
And that if he's gonna go down,
and he's gonna be executed,
because even if he killed two of them,
he probably would have stayed in jail
or gotten the death penalty.
I think he wanted credit for all of them.
I had a really interesting conversation with him.
I was talking about Henry Lee Lucas,
and I said, John, Henry Lee Lucas, he's blowing your numbers out of the water. I would kid him. He would get
so mad and he knew all the things. And this is no internet, right? They didn't have internet
back then and he wouldn't have had it in the prison. He knew all about the thing. He was
tagged with 232. He didn't do all those. They wanted to close cases. There's no way he did
that. That guy's a fraud. He know, he would have these arguments with me.
So I think he was in a way proud of his world record, which,
which it was at the time. So as creepy as that is,
I think that was the main reason.
I also heard some talk that John Wayne Gacy,
it is quite possible that he killed outside of his home and he killed when he
was on the road.
Have you heard any of that or what are your thoughts on the idea that John Wayne
Gacy might have had other murders attached to him,
but way outside of his house?
Well,
remember that Gacy was convicted of molesting a young man
in Iowa before he started his killing spree in Chicago.
He was sentenced to 10 years.
He served two. And there are people who I know who have researched this that tie Gacy to two
murders up in Iowa before that happened. I don't have confirming facts on that, but that's very
possible. When he got to Chicago, he started this crime spree and it started
to escalate. There were nights where he would go out and abduct one child, then go back and
abduct another one and then kill and go back and do another one, you know. And so he was escalating.
Now, during this time, he was out of town doing these like Brussels ice cream construction jobs.
So we saw his records. He was in rural Wisconsin. He was in Pacific Northwest. He was in Florida.
And you can't tell me that he would take a three week trip during his crime spree and not continue
it, particularly because these places, it would have been easier for him to get boys and obviously
to do his dirty deeds and to bury them. So, you know, someday some really ambitious podcaster
is gonna go and look at those records
and figure out where in Wisconsin he was,
when were there boys and men who went missing
during that time and maybe tie them to Gacy?
I don't know that we'll ever get a definitive answer,
but my guess is that yes, there are other victims.
Yeah, I saw a really good documentary
on the Soft White Underbelly YouTube channel
of someone talking about how they are dead certain
that they were near miss from John Wayne Gacy
while he was staying at a motel.
And it's very interesting.
So yeah, I do feel like, yeah,
why would he pause being John Wayne Gacy
because he's on a work trip?
Yeah, and there's also,
I know there's also a lot of speculation
that he murdered or that
he buried other victims at some of the construction sites, like around Chicago.
So it's likely that it was far more than just 33.
But you know, one of the questions I want to ask is as far as, you know, saving him
from, you know, or trying to save him from being executed.
I mean, I know part of the reason, I mean, all of us are also anti-death penalty people.
And, you know, it's not just because it's morally wrong,
but because, you know, you also lose whatever information
that person may have had when they die.
So what secrets do you think died with John Wayne Gacy
that we may have gotten out of him eventually?
I think the two things we talked about
are probably the top ones,
and that is more victims and more perpetrators.
But it could be that if we could have cut a deal
for him to live the rest of his life in prison,
and he could have given us some information
like about this crime ring,
or was there a snuff film operation,
or were there other police
were there police who were covering for him and again I'm not I don't want to be a conspiracy
theorist but if you read in my book and you read some of the other books on Gacy he was
caught so many times or a kid would disappear Mr. Gacy said the cop where you know you were
last seen with this kid where'd he go I don I don't know, he's a runaway. I have no idea. Happened time and time again.
The kid who gets out totally, you know,
damaged from Gacy, he gets, Gacy gets charged.
Police dropped the charges.
How come they didn't know that Iowa,
there was that, that conviction in Iowa.
And I know we didn't have the database at the time,
but someone should have known that he had served time
for the same thing that kind of was looking like it was happening. There were should have known that he had served time for the same thing that
kind of was looking like it was happening. There were so many passes that he got. Was
someone protecting him? Again, I don't know, but that's something that I would like to have known
from Gacy. Well, do you think that has something to do with like just the inherent homophobia of
police officers? Cause we've seen that, well, like we saw that with Dean Kroll, we saw that with
Jeffrey Dahmer. Like we saw it again and again, like we saw that with Dean Caroll. We saw that with Jeffrey Dahmer.
Like we saw it again and again, where for the longest time, police just thought
anything having to do with homosexuality was a little bit icky and they just kind of didn't want to deal with it.
Do you think maybe Gacy had something to do, like Gacy going free had
something to do with that?
I absolutely think that's the case.
I also think that a lot of these boys, not all of them,
were runaways or male prostitutes, or the police thought they were male prostitutes,
because Gacy would disparage them. So whenever Gacy was confronted, he's like, oh, that kid,
he's a drug addict and he ran away and he was trying to hustle me for sex. And so he was very
good at that. So the police would be like,
oh, you know, throw away. And that's, you know, it's how a lot of serial killers get away with it.
You know, they, they target people who aren't going to be missed or who aren't going to,
you know, provoke a real active police search. In fact, the last kid, Rob Piest, a beautiful young
man, his mother was her birthday, drives him to the drug store to apply for a job with a man
who had a construction company. That was the last she saw of her son. He had about an hour, he had
taken the boy, taken him to his house, raped him and killed him and put him in the crawl space.
So you're talking about mostly kids who are not going to be missed right away.
But Peace was the one, Peace was the one where their mother said, go, go look at that guy.
And that's, that's what caused Gacy to be caught.
And I am also doing my best to not become a conspiracy theorist again, as well, when
you also wonder whether or not there were people in law enforcement that were involved with some of the maybe
not in an official capacity, but in a kind of a casual capacity at various things like
functions at John Wayne Gacy's house, things that you probably knew we had in that house
that you did not, maybe you thought it was kind of weird or icky and they didn't want
to be kind of announced that they knew that they were also a part of that. There's so many things. I'm sure your listeners have seen
the iconic picture of Gacy next to Rosalind Carter. Oh yeah. We just
opined on the beauty of Rosalind Carter last week. What a lovely lady rests her soul. Had she only known she would have probably died a lot sooner.
Lovely man.
She met both John Wayne Gacy and Jim Jones in the same year.
You speak too many people when you're that popular.
But I mean, so the secret service is following her around during this Polish day parade or
whatever it was that he was running. And the job of the Secret Service is to make sure that she's not surrounded
by felons who have violent felony convictions like Gacy. So where was the Secret Service in
doing their due diligence? I mean, that's another thing. Like, how did all of that happen?
You know, again, like, I can't imagine a police officer protecting a known murderous pedophile,
but are they looking the other way because he had something on them?
You know, it may be that, you know, back then being gay was not something you came out about.
You know, you covered it up and you could lose your whole job and your career if you
were outed.
So, Gacy may have had the dirt on people. Oh, yeah
I just said, you know, stay away from my house
Don't ask me any questions or I'm gonna you know, look at this list and I could see see doing that
That's that's exactly a Gacy move or he could they all can kind of agree that they're quote-unquote cleaning up the streets of non
Wanted people that's what they do, too. Yeah, that's also true.
I hope that's not the case.
The Polish Day Parade, actually, at night.
The funny Polish joke.
Funny Polish joke.
That's a funny Polish joke.
I'm Polish, I'm allowed to make this joke.
He's allowed.
You are allowed.
You are allowed.
Two thirds of this podcast is Polish.
Yes, it's true.
You know, we might ask one dumb question.
One dumb question I knew that you wanted to ask, which is sad, and I'm sorry we're going
to do this, but what did John Wayne Gacy smell like?
Oh, I can smell it right now.
It was a combination of like, burl cream.
Yeah.
Because he used that in his hair to like comb it back.
And prisoners always have the smell of not body odor,
but sweat because they don't shower often.
So you know that smell that you just,
someone hasn't taken a shower in four or five days.
But that, and it also,
he also had a little bit of a sweet smell
from some kind of cheap cologne
that he bought at the commissary
because I asked him about it.
Wow.
So it was a, you know how a smell can bring you back to that.
I can smell it like it was yesterday.
Wow.
So I guess, like, I mean, let's stick with like Gacy, the man for a second.
Like, was he kind of like, was he a storyteller or was he more of just like
a quippy type guy where you just, you wouldn't really get nothing but snippets
out of him.
He was, you know, some people are storytellers
and some people are one-liners.
He would be, he was more of a one-liner.
Yeah.
But he did like to talk.
He was very glib.
And I guess that is one of the qualities
that antisocial people have.
They, you know, they just talk.
They don't want any extra time that's, that's, that's,
that's silent.
So Gacy was a big, big talker,
but he didn't just talk about himself.
He actually asked a lot of questions.
But I think, again, that's garnering information.
And Gacy was very smart, but not educated.
So you would hear his grammar was not so good,
but he was very smart.
And the one thing I talk about in my book is that
he had somewhat of a photographic memory
when it came to things not in writing. So
I told him, he asked me where I grew up and I told him, and it was not anywhere near where he grew up,
and he said, oh, I remember I told him where I worked on the street, you know, intersection.
And he said, oh, there was this building and that second building was built in like the 1800s. And
then there was that other car dealership and whatever.
And he could name the entire block.
So then I thought, this is BS.
He's just making it up because he's full of BS.
So that weekend, I was going to visit my mother, who by the way, wasn't pleased with my courage
choice.
Yeah.
And we went past that intersection.
And would you know, he was absolutely right about every single one of those.
And he hadn't, he hadn't been there for 16 17 years how did he remember that so every single time he
says he didn't remember he was full of absolute shit yes he had an amazing memory especially visual
memories and when he was arrested and he confessed to his first lawyer he actually drew a map of where all the kids were
buried almost like completely accurate.
Yeah. Sam, Sam Amarante. That was his first lawyer, right? Yeah. Yes.
And that we, when we did a Gacy episode many years back, we read his book.
And he, yeah, he compared himself to John Adams in the first chapter.
Sir, you are no giant.
Somebody had to defend those British soldiers and somebody had to defend John Wayne Gacy
and that man was me.
We played the national anthem behind him.
I'm embarrassed for our profession.
I guess one last wrap up question.
Honestly, all of your experience as a lawyer, can you give our audience some advice?
Is there going to be like, what do you do to not end up like John Wayne Gacy?
Besides just not killing?
I think not killing is a really easy way to avoid.
Yeah, choosing not to kill on a daily basis is probably a good move.
Yeah.
And, you know, to be serious for maybe one minute.
Please, Ors.
You know, and I say this because I just wanted to understand what he became.
I do not believe that little babies are evil. I don't believe that.
I believe that there is a combination of things that happen to a person that causes this I mean, Casey was sexually abuse he was
beaten by his father but a lot of people have those in their backgrounds and
don't do what he did.
He had two very serious head traumas which are known to get rid of the empathy
factor in your head or impulse control issues.
And he was gay, he knew he was and had those leanings but
he was raised in a very strict was and had those leanings,
but he was raised in a very strict Catholic upbringing
at a time where you couldn't be gay.
So if you combine all of those things,
the theory that I've heard espouse
that makes more sense to me is that he was killing himself
over and over when he was killing these boys.
And so advice to people is raise your children right.
And if you see them, you know, torturing animals
or bedwetting or setting fires,
get the kid to help immediately.
Yeah.
That's actually the same advice
that we've been given on our show for years.
It's nice to know we're in agreement on that.
Henry had one more question about Kate Gacy's food choices.
This is dumb.
This is dumb.
And one more dumb question.
This is what I can figure. And I got one too. This is dumb, this is dumb. And one more dumb question. This is what I can figure.
And I got one too.
This is Chicago astrology.
What is his favorite pierogi flavor?
Was he allowed to have pierogies in jail?
Was he, cause I know he was a Polish.
That man must have consumed more Polish food
than anybody. You can make a pierogi in jail.
All you need is flour and a filling.
I just don't have flour.
They have potatoes.
He never told me about that, but he did give me recipes for
commissary food, which was really special. Like there was one and I'm going to get it wrong,
but you take a bag of like Fritos, you crush them all up and you put some kind of goopy,
you know, whatever you have mayonnaise or whatever, and you put it in the microwave
and it's like a tamale or something. I mean, you know, he had all of these
recipes. So actually, I put one in the in the book he did like
to eat. And usually when I go there, because I'm kind of a
health, I'm kind of a muscle. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're
very strong. I was like, I'm not eating this shit. Sorry, I'm
not eating this food. But I didn't want to be appear to be
like not grateful that some other inmate sacrificed their meal for me.
So I pushed it around.
I said, John, yeah, I'm just not hungry.
You know, could you eat this?
And he would eat the whole thing.
Yeah.
Of course he would.
Well, yeah, he was, I think he was head of the commissary
with the first time he went to prison, right?
Like our-
I know he did some cooking.
Yeah.
I know when he went in for sodomy,
when he went in for the kid.
Now, were you, cause you obviously were defending him
to try to not get the death penalty removed,
but were you there when the death penalty
wasn't acted on him?
No.
And it's interesting,
the lawyers were not allowed to be with him.
And I thought that was.
Why is that?
Wrong, because your lawyers, you're entitled to a lawyer at every step of the process. And I thought that was wrong because your lawyers,
you're entitled to a lawyer at every step of the process.
And you would think that the most important part
of your representation when someone's going to be executed
that you would have a right to a lawyer,
but in Illinois, that's not the case.
And interestingly, the victims' families
were not entitled to be there in person.
They could be like with the live video feed.
So it was a lottery.
So a lot of the media was there to witness the execution.
Wow.
And what do you think about his last words?
Kiss my ass.
He didn't say that.
He didn't really?
He did not say that.
Really?
And I will tell you the prosecutor who was there,
who became a friend of mine,
I talked to a month before he died,
which just happened recently.
He said it did not happen, categorically no,
that he didn't say anything in last words,
and he did not say that.
He said nothing, okay, wow.
That was an urban legend.
Okay. Good.
Hey, we updated something.
Yeah. Guys, this is incredible.
Thank you so much for taking your time to talk with us.
Karen Conti, Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy.
I can't wait to read this book.
Yeah, it's available in paperback.
It's available on Kindle Unlimited
if you are a subscriber,
and the audiobook is also available.
And the audio CD!
Good, I-
Yes, and I'm the one reading it.
That's great.
No, I listened to some of it on your website,
and you do a hell of a job with it.
And the other plugs?
Oh, coming up, I'm coming up.
I'm writing novel now.
After I get past this promotion of this book, now I got the bug.
I really like writing, so I'm going to try to write a novel.
Great, great.
And then maybe you can get some serial killers out of your brain
unless you're going to write a serial killer novel, then you're
going to put them right back in your brain.
No, no one's going to die in my novel.
Very nice.
Good.
Congrats.
No one ever dies in a book.
That's what's nice. You can murder as many people as one ever dies in a book.
That's what's nice.
You can murder as many people as you want inside of a book.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me, guys.
Really a pleasure to talk to you.
It was a pleasure to have you.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Take care.
Now that's a smart lady.
You think that's what John would every time she left his cell, it's like, now that was a smart lady. You think that's what John, every time she left his cell,
was like, now that was a smart lady.
That was a smart lady.
You know, how would you feel about sticking me
in some clown makeup?
You already did it.
But I do like, it's wild to me to think about one of
America's worst monsters as a human and hanging out.
They say human being with flesh and blood that you meet and talk to.
And like just hearing the emotion in her voice, talking about how like after that he was put to death, like there was that there was a conflict.
We talked a little bit afterwards about how there was a conflicted moment because it's a person.
You're meeting a person.
Yeah, a person that she knew, that she spent a lot of time with over just a period of months
and years and then all of a sudden that person is gone.
He's a bad guy.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, he's fucking whore.
He's John Wayne Gacy.
I mean, he's one of the boogeymen of the 20th century and yet, like, she just, I mean, she
proves at the end of the day is
like they truly are just fucking dudes.
Unfortunate truth. John Wayne Gacy is a normal human being. Well, not normal, but a human
being.
He's a person. So one of the things that we've came across since we did our episode is that
now we know that there have been up to, I think they say five unidentified victims.
Yeah, it was seven for many, many, many years.
There were seven out of the 33 or not 33 because 33 was the total number of victims.
And I think he ended up dumping five at the end because he ran out of room in the crawl
space. Yeah.
But out of the ones that were in the base in the crawl space, yeah, there were seven that were unidentified for decades.
Well, this dude, Francis Wayne Alexander was just identified in 2021.
And that really comes from the family pushing to figure out where their son went,
which is extremely sad. But it took a long time.
They said that the the sheriff's department had worked with this thing called the DNA dough project
Which is which uses genetic information to locate relatives of dead people who have not been identified
I think it's partially even more so in the the world of
DNA collection services that we see around this is what's allowing some of this to happen. Mm-hmm
So it's like which I'm I don't know if I'm jazzed about
Ambivalent and then it's when I wonder all time glad we're catching people like I'm glad we got the Golden State killer
Of course. Yeah, but it's like hopefully they don't look for somebody's
Smoking too much weed
You don't commit crimes
Really have to worry about this no and even in my little my accountants will let me do tax evasion
Yeah, and you guys won't know no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I've done enough time for all of them. Four days. You really have. He did four days in the clink.
You really have.
For everyone in the room.
No.
So what's it like being the closest
to John Wayne Gacy of the three of them?
Physically, mentally.
Yeah.
Yeah, oh, man.
I am... I was impressed that he wanted to do clowning.
Although it just turned it out that it was just a way
for him to, like, touch people.
Well, one thing I did not get to bring up when we were talking was the idea that, you know,
I was saying before that he had multiple clown personas.
The clown personas really did come out during the height of his murder spree.
Yeah.
So you think he ever killed anyone dressed as a clown?
He definitely,
there was one kid who was a survivor that said he was hanging out with John Wayne Gacy and John Wayne
Gacy's like I'll be right back and he came back in and he was in full pogo
Makeup yeah, because well think about is you all right, so you're with your boss. Let's say you're a young man
You're with your boss. He says come over my house. We'll have a couple of beers you go over that house
He puts on some pornography, right?
You're like cool
Because what's nice about it cuz what's nice about it no difference between a pornography and a stag film the pornography a lot
Of them are still alive
John Wengezi he puts on this thing and then he's your boss and you're drinking a little bit and first it starts with some
Straight porn and you're watching guys
He's a guy checked out check out this one and then the next one's like guy dress up as Dalmatian
Another guy dressed up as a fireman. They're starting to go like having a different kind of fire get put out
You know and John Wayne Gacy is like, let me check you back your big fat weird boss and you're just sitting there like
Maybe you don't know you're gonna be you're good because they brought this up on this interview, too
How many these guys showed up?
Expecting there to be sex at the end of this arrangement a lot of them didn't all of a sudden you've got your boss in a full
Clown outfit comes out for the back room after you've been drinking is gay porn playing on television with projector even worse
Yeah, but how long did it take for the put it on?
That's a costume change. I think he worked on it. Oh, he would leave them there with some joints or
something. Yeah. He'd leave them there with joints and a beer and all that. And I would imagine that
Gacy knew how to get in and out of that thing real fast. The makeup. Yeah. It was, it was actually
pretty, it was very simple. It was very, it changed a lot. And that was very simple. And that's the
other thing about his makeup is that that's fascinating about it, is that he went
against one of the cardinal rules of clown makeup.
With clown makeup, you want everything to be very rounded.
And Gacy's makeup was very angular, which makes people uncomfortable.
Sometimes he had the round mouth occasionally.
Occasionally, but the eyes were always angular, which gives it more of like this haunted harlequin feel.
But yeah, you don't ever want to use angular makeup.
It weirds people out, but I think he liked that.
Yeah, of course he was trying to upset people.
But I tell you what, that's where I'm kind of, that's where I'm a survivor in my own
way is that if he showed up there, I'd already be sucking that dick.
Because I know for a fact you get that come out right the fuck now. And then he takes a nap.
Yeah, yes. I want you guys, that's a lesson for everybody. If you're a boss, if you're
just having casual drinks and your boss emerges from there saying, with dresses a clown, say
if you want to see a trick, don't ever go to your boss.
Don't ever drink with your boss.
You don't want to, it's taking a step too far.
No, but my main, honestly, just take that bullet, take that that L for yourself suck that dick right then mm-hmm
Get it out of a system and then go back to watching anything else
I didn't be like hey you see Ricky Stanicky
Yeah, you know like that you you try you plan if you kind of move toward our good buddy Jermaine Fowler's in it
Yeah, and that's a good movie to see after you've gotten done sucking your boss's dick in a rumpus room toss on Ricky Stinnicky
Now you guys can just laugh. Are you inviting me over to watch Ricky Stinnicky?
Where do you think his porn collection is now is real the real porn
Oh, did they like a lot did the cop have to like watch every second of that and then log what happened?
I would imagine they just put all that shit into an evidence locker.
Although they might have watched all of it.
I would imagine all of these fucking Chicago, these Des Plains Iowa guys like stag party.
Yeah dude.
And they all got together.
It's like, where'd you get this?
Fucking Gacy's place.
Yeah and then they put it on and they're all like, oh no.
Are we supposed to be jerking off to this?
I feel sad and
happy and
hearty.
I'm just really glad,
well this was great, I'm glad that Karen
Conti fought against the death penalty
Yeah, yeah, everyone does it no one deserves to die by the state. We're not into it
I still think that they should be technically I guess trying robot drugs on them
But I feel like that's a whole other very unpopular opinion the state should not be killing anybody for any reason ever
Yeah, the state the country there's only seven or, there's a very small amount
that are federally on death row right now.
And what I worked with, when I worked in with Jeff Ross
doing their jail special,
I learned a lot of things about death row.
I learned that one out of-
Jeff said that due to jail with the special.
Yes, and I'm gonna get to that.
That's what kind of changed my mind about death row,
to be honest with you, and the death penalty in general. I know that one out of 20 people is presumed innocent on death row,
which is a very horrifying statistic. That's way too much. Even one out of a hundred is too much,
but one out of 20 is a huge number. But there was a fella that we interviewed when we were doing the jail special, and he has been recently convicted and sentenced to death
for killing a professor over at Texas A&M.
And he killed a very popular tenured professor,
and then he tried to kill his wife who was in a wheelchair.
He slid her throat, he's a bad guy.
You know, the world doesn't need this guy.
But when we interviewed him, which did not air in the special,
because we were like, that's too fucking weird.
We didn't know who he was.
We were in the violent section of the jail.
And he basically said he was Asian and, you know, not Jeff's best joke.
But he he said, what are you in here hacking a computer?
And he said, hacking.
See, you know, you could say hacking for sure.
You can say I hack someone screen off is what he said.
And and then later on, we find out that what the crime that he was.
I was accused of, but he wasn't supposed to be talking to anyone at the time.
And so it was so the state of Texas subpoenaed the footage from Comedy Central and then later used that interview as an excuse that he felt no remorse for the crime that he did and then sentenced him to death.
Jesus Christ.
And that was the day that I changed my mind on the death penalty.
penalty as.
Yeah, because you sent a guy to the chair.
I oddly I felt I definitely felt some responsibility.
And I was like, someone who I thought that should be dead.
Someone I thought that shouldn't be around anymore.
And then once it came that close to home, I'm sorry that it had to take that. But I was like, this is awful.
No one should, this should not happen.
This is wrong on so many levels.
It's doesn't, it's not, he's a horrible human being lock him away forever. It's worse
It's so much worse, you know, and so it's just like now he's gonna in Texas
We know that they're like trying out new shit. They're like to try they're trying to figure out new ways to kill people
Well, it's like I said in the episode is like there are no doctors that are involved in that like there
There's there's nobody that actually has gone to school for any like these are just guys that are involved in that. Like there's nobody that actually has gone to school for any, like these are just guys that are trying shit just because they may have read a couple of books.
Yeah.
And they're-
It's kind of a fun job. Can I go do it?
Definitely, I'm sure it's not that hard to get in there. I know that John Oliver had a great expose on the death penalty recently. I don't know if you guys got a chance to see it, but they're buying these chemicals from,
I mean, chemical plants, people who don't make medicine.
Obviously it's not medicine, because it kills people,
but it's like they're buying it from people
who had nothing to do with the human body.
So it's a very terrifying, horrible thing,
and to know that one out of 20 of them are actually innocent
shakes me to my core.
Also, we never know, and I think you brought it up too, we never know what you're going
to get out of these guys while they're alive.
You don't know.
Like keeping them alive is a resource to learn in the future.
I think that whatever it is we got to do to get that information, which I've learned is
you just put a guy in a room, you'd be surprised eventually to start talking.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so much that we could have learned from Ted Bundy.
There was so much that we could have learned from Ted Bundy. There was so much that we could have.
I mean, a lot of it would have been horseshit,
but it is sifting through the horseshit of these types of personalities that we
get to see how they think.
And the more we know how they think or the where they come from,
the more there might be some form of science at some point that
detects this before it blows up into murder.
There might be one day some way to tell if a kid's going to grow up to be a serial killer.
Because no kid grows up wanting to be a junkie.
No.
No.
Remember that?
Remember that?
But then, I actually, I do know some kids that did like the idea of drugs very young.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But no one really wants to be like a serial murderer as a child.
Not as a child.
I don't know.
I've never met one lucky for me.
I have not met one.
No.
I have not either.
It's rare.
I feel like you were probably as close as you get.
I was just fascinated. Either man, it's rare. I feel like you were probably as close as you get
But I knew I wanted to be in a more pure art form entertainment
Thank you so much for listening everybody you can watch this episode and every episode if you are a patreon subscriber go to patreon.com
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Oh, you can sit there and you can go. What is a tour? I'm going to see us physically
in front of you. Put a last podcast on the the left com and get tickets for our new tour JK ultra
Yeah, Denver's almost sold out. We're looking at you Seattle. You're next and DC. We're rolling, baby
Yeah, and we got know what to do with those toss salad and scramble
Yeah, they're calling again
Scrambled eggs all over my face.
And when we come back this Wednesday on Twitch, we're gonna have the brighter side.
So I'm super excited to do that again.
So we'll come check out Amber Nelson and I and we will be positive.
It is the exact opposite of the show.
Yes.
I can be positive.
You are positive.
I'm positively amusing.
I can be positive. You are positive. I'm positively amusing.
Hells Aiden, goodbye. Hell again, goodbye. Hell Karen Conti. Yes, please. Goodbye.
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