Found Poetry: Revisiting John Wayne Gacy's Crimes // Eve Deshane

Eve Deshane, guest editor for this month's “My Dark Places” feature, looks to shift our focus from notorious killers and their acts, towards those who have been slain at those killers' hands.

You could say that it started with Body 24, James Haakenson.

Which is to say that it started with one of the most famous serial murderers of the last hundred years, John Wayne Gacy.

Which was really the problem to begin with. When I wanted to write “DoePoems”—poetry about missing and unidentified murder victims—Idid so because it took until2017 to identify Body 24 as James Hakkenson, but everyone else seemed to know about John Wayne Gacy.

Including me. I thought I knew everything about the case. What could there be left to know? John Wayne Gacy was The Killer Clown. He murdered at least 33 boys and young men. He was a contractor—a bad contractor if accounts after the fact are to be trusted—and he was from Illinois but served time in Iowa before moving back to the state. Brian Dennehy played him in a made-for-TV movie, and some unfortunate kid decided to write him letters in prison and pretend to be the perfect victim so he could spin some tales on his undergrad thesis in psychology.

In 2017, I had read enough about Gacy to be smug: both the prosecutor’s and the defense's take on the crimes, and that unfortunate kid’s work called The Last Victim, which included an introduction by his thesis supervisor, which was then made into a really bad movie called Dear Mr. Gacy (which of course, I also watched). I even tried to find the long out of print 29 Below written by one of Gacy’s survivors Jeffrey Rignall. After staring at the $300 paperback in my Amazon shopping cart, I knew it wouldn't tell me anything that I didn't already know.

I'm not entirely sure why I became obsessed with Gacy in 2017. I was already well-versed in most of the famous serial killer lore, and had been this way since high school. I'd watched the terrible films on Ed Gein and Ted Bundy, and went to the library after school to find more facts about Jeffrey Dahmer and Aileen Wuornos to round out my knowledge. I knew this stuff already.

Butten years earlier did not have podcasts about murderers. This changed everything.

I soon found My Favorite Murder, and only a few episodes in, they mentioned Gacy--but they mentioned Gacy in relation to a man called Dean Corrl. Up until the revelations of Gacy's crawlspace in the late 1970s, Corll had been the most prolific mass murderer (serial killer not yet a common term) in the US with at least 28 murders. He also killed young boys by handcuffing them and torturing them. Apparently, Gacy saw kinship in this man from Houston, Texas, and all the way across the country, refined his own MO in order to beat out Corrl's numbers. So many of the details were similar to Gacy, but I’d never heard of Corrl before.

Suddenly, I was paying attention.

Corrl worked with a team of two other boys who would have—almost could have been—victims from the way My Favorite Murder's hosts Karen and Georgia explained the case. These sidekicks were Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. and David Brooks. After Henley shot Corrl in a violent stand-off, the murder spree ended and both boys helped with body recovery. They were 17 and 18 years old at the time of discovery, but with Corrl dead, there needed to be someone held responsible, so they were charged with some of the murders. They are both still serving sentences.

I needed to know so much more.

From My Favorite Murder I found Last Podcast on the Left, since Karen and Georgia continually mentioned how good their four part series on the Houston Murders truly was. I listened. I was hooked again.

2017 was the beginning of my second true crime renaissance. I was now an adult with the means and time to search out what I wanted to listen to and what I wanted to read, and I could purchase all the documentaries or rare books I now wanted to consume. But unlike teenage me sorting through discount bins to find salacious films about murderers, I was now looking at a mass of victims and wondering how the hell any of this happened.

Dean Corrl abducted boys from an impoverished neighbourhood in Houston called The Heights. It seemed like every single week, a boy went missing. Friends and neighbours vanished. The Heights reminded me of the fictitious Derry from Stephen King's It—a comparison they make on Last Podcast on the Left—and one that still lingers in the back of my mind as I watched the most recent film adaptation of King's work. There was a literal town filled with missing boys. Their posters were on every street corner, describing their last worn items, their names, their date of birth and date they went missing. Each image told a story, each item listed underneath added to a narrative that was then brought into focus with stark vignette on a telephone pole.

There was something poetic about the whole display. Horrific, yet poetic. I couldn't turn away anymore, and so I looked back on all that I thought I’d known about Gacy's crimes. I soon realized there were still unnamed bodies in his crawlspace. Over 40 years later, and as I write this now, Body 5, Body 28, Body 26, Body 13, Body 10, and Body12 have not been identified. Over 40 years later. For one of the most famous serial murder cases. And with all of the latest DNA and forensic identification. There was still no closure, no ending.

I went and found the listings for these boys online. I read their descriptions and gazed at their reconstructed faces. I saw the same poetry in the lines beneath the bust, describing a broken shoulder, a tooth abscess, a bracelet that had the name Greg engraved. There was so much detail here, yet not enough for an ID. So much story but without an ending.

One reason for the lack of IDs can be chalked up to the homophobia of the era. Even if parents or guardians suspected their child was missing and possibly in the area, they did not want to be associated with these crimes. This was also a time period when teenagers who disappeared were not put on milk cartons; rather, they were called runaways and written off, like those boys in The Heights. Some kids, especially poor and minority children, simply disappeared and no one seemed to care.

YetI still had some hope that science would have solved this case. It had gotten John List. The Green River Killer, The East Area Rapist, and BTK were all taken down through science and modern forensic techniques. Why didn’t the same work here?

I soon realized I was not asking the right question. What I really wanted to know was: Why couldn't the missing and murdered be more famous than the killers who took their lives away? Why did we remember stupid details about murderers, but we let the details about bracelets and shirts and shoulder blades fade into the background?

I didn't want to let them fade into the background. These reconstructed faces and their last known whereabouts stuck with me, and grew beyond the Gacy legacy. I read more about the missing and murderedIndigenous women on the Highway of Tears. I regularly browsed NamUs and The Doe Network, discovering more and more faces, possible names, and items left behind that could form poetry. Who knew there were so many ways the word Doe could be compelling, each vignette a different feeling, each person so vivid in my mind, yet still not at rest?

SoI started to write poetry about these people. I submitted a handful of these works to a creative writing award at my university, and to my surprise, tied with another participant. At the award ceremony, we both read from our work. She was also writing about a real-life figure, a Canadian woman forgotten to history that she wished tore-invigorate. At the reception, we both discussed how difficult it can sometimes be to write about real things that are not our own.

Yet we must, I think, keep writing about these forgotten case histories—but not for the same reasons that I once wanted to dwell in the tragedy of Gacy, Bundy, and Dahmer. Now I want to examine the true crime hallways, comb through records, and wait in uncertainty, so I can, one day, hopefully know and call their victims by their true names.