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23rd Apr 2022

A new John Wayne Gacy documentary landed on Netflix this week

Katy Brennan

The stuff of nightmares.

A documentary all about prolific serial killer John Wayne Gacy landed on Netflix this week – and it looks terrifying.

For those who aren’t familiar with Gacy, Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes is a retelling of the disturbing and gruesome story of the clown killer who terrorised Chicago in the ’70s.

The series features never-before-seen footage of Gacy speaking with his defence team, interviews with key participants, and a heartbreaking testimony from a survivor.

It delves into the mind of the murderer in an attempt to understand why he committed such atrocious acts and how he managed to get away with it for so long.

Between 1972 and 1978, Gacy sexually abused and murdered at least 33 young men and boys – although 50 years on, investigators now believe the amount of victims may be much higher.

He worked as a local contractor and regularly performed at children’s hospitals and charity events in his area as “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown”.

He was known for luring victims into his home by saying he would perform a “magic trick”, before duping them into putting on handcuffs and trapping them.

Because he was a contractor, lots of young men came to him looking for work. It wasn’t long until many of the men he hired started to go missing.

When Gacy was arrested for two sexual assaults, police began to look into these disappearances and investigate him.

They soon discovered 26 bodies in a crawlspace underneath his house in Cook County, Illinois. A number of other bodies were found in the nearby Des Plaines river.

He was sentenced to death and died by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.

The three-part series comes from the team behind The Ted Bundy Tapes and Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich – and if those are anything to go by, we’re definitely going to be kept on the edge of our seats with this one.

Conversations with A Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes is available to stream on Netflix now.