Criminal. Serial mass murderer believed to have killed a total of 33 men and boys (five of the recovered victims have yet to be identified). The victims ranged in age from 14 to 21. Born the second child (first son) of three children to John S. Gacy and Marion Elaine Gacy, his father was an alcoholic tyrant, and John Jr. was raised to doubt his own masculinity. Originally a shoe salesman, he married Marlynn Myers, a coworker whose parents owned several KFC fried chicken restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa, and he quickly became restaurant manager for one of them. He had two children with Marlynn. In May 1968, he was arrested for coercing a young male employee into homosexual acts. Pleading guilty to sodomy, he was sentenced to ten years, and released after 18 months for good behavior. After his divorce and release from prison, he returned to Chicago where he soon remarried a childhood friend, Carol Hoff, and became a building contractor. In January 1972, he began his rape and murder spree, "arresting" some of his victims with a fake police badge and gun, luring others with promises of alcohol or drugs. Initially, he planted the corpses in the crawl space under his house, but when he ran out of space, he would dispose of the bodies in the nearby river. His second wife divorced him in 1976, and his program of rape and murder increased with her departure. On October 12, 1978, he murdered 15-year-old Robert Piest, and police were able to trace his disappearance to Gacy, who had been seen offering the young boy a construction job the day he disappeared. Going to Gacy's house to question him on the disappearance of Piest, the police immediately recognized the odor coming from the crawlspace, and obtained search warrants. Under the house and in the backyard, they discovered 28 bodies. Five bodies were later recovered from the nearby river. Gacy was convicted of 33 counts of first-degree murder, and sentenced to death. After 14 years on death's row, and countless appeals, he was put to death by lethal injection on May 10, 1994, at the Stateville prison, Illinois.