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Loyalty, I like that. It's one of the qualities I like most. If I hang around till you get off, could we talk then?"
An inconsistent book mostly about what it was like to be John Wayne Gacy's lawyer. I was immediately swept into the book by the opening, which recounts a fateful visit by Gacy to a pharmacy for a small contracting job. We get the fictionalized perspective of a boy who works at the pharmacy, Gacy, and others and I hoped it would continue like this, but unfortunately most of the book simply recounts the experiences of the lawyer and not necessarily even about his extensive interaction with Gacy the year before the trial. No, no one can ever get into the head of Gacy and none of the psychiatrists and psychologists could agree what was wrong with him, though something certainly was off, but more of an attempt to flesh out his role as clown, brother, boss, community volunteer, husband and father would have illuminated his identity. I felt the reader doesn't spend enough time with Gacy in the book. The book tells us more than it shows about his "good" side and, in scenes meant to capture how unpredictable Gacy is, the book is so poorly written, the awkwardness obscures any insight the episodes might provide. And the exclamation points! Where was the editor?
Amirante, a former assistant public defender who represented Gacy as his first private client, agreed that the secret to Gacy’s success lay largely in his unctuous charm developed over years as the son of a harsh, verbally abusive father and later refined as a successful shoe salesman. Everyone who ever knew John Gacy knew one thing about him—he was a master manipulator. He could sell ice cubes to Eskimos. He had the Polish version of the gift of gab. John had already decided that this young man was coming home with him. He was not taking "no" for an answer. Bettiker recalled the elaborately themed parties that Gacy hosted at his home, where dozens of guests unwittingly celebrated over his private graveyard. Not a fan of the way the author describes people's bodies (large bodies, ladies' bodies, trans bodies). He doesn't describe thin bodies at all, but feels the need to describe every lump or roll of a fat person's. A trans witness is on the stand and he calls her a he/she and aggressively deadnames her.
A grim but fascinating story with real insight into the crimes, the US legal system and Gacy himself. In the years since Gacy’s arrest, there have been lingering concerns that Gacy might have been responsible for the deaths of other people whose bodies have yet to be found. And when police uncovered human remains in Gacy’s house in 1978, eight bodies couldn’t be identified. In July 2017, Cook County authorities used DNA evidence to identify one of these unidentified victims as 16-year-old James “Jimmie” Byron Haakenson, who had been reported missing since 1976. In October 2021, DNA testing identified another of Gacy’s victims as 21-year-old Francis Wayne Alexander, who also disappeared in 1976. Movie about John Wayne Gacy Gacy had everybody fooled, and people don’t like it — they don’t like that they were friends with an evildoer,” Moran said. In his earliest confession, he says he buried the bodies of 27 victims on his property, most of them in the crawl space. Five other bodies, including that of Piest, Gacy says were thrown into the Des Plaines River. Sam, could you do me a favor?" A seemingly simple request sparks the story that has now become part of America’s true crime hall of fame - the journey of a young lawyer, fresh from the Public Defender’s Office, whose first client in private practice turns out to be the most evil serial killer in our nation's history.I really enjoyed the legal sides of the arguments and how it affected Amarante's family being Gacy's lawyer. Both lawyers had independent psychological profiles done claiming opposing viewpoints. It definitely makes you wonder if Gacy was truly evil or desperately unwell. These victims were primarily born in the 1950s and their parents were born in the 1920s and ’30s,” Moran said. “That generation, the parents of these victims, was not ready to accept homosexuality, and because the media constantly brought up the gay aspect of this case, Sheriff (Dart) and I thought it may be what kept people from coming forward.”
There are also some very disturbing remarks made by the lead attorney to the Reader. For instance, one witness at the trial turns heads as she enters the room and testifies. The attorney states, though, that “Donita” is actually “Don,” a transgender person. Therefore, it was the attorney’s duty to challenge the veracity of Donita’s remarks since Donita was obviously living a lie. It naturally followed that much of her testimony was also a lie. That observation made me very, very uncomfortable.On December 11, 1978, 15-year-old Robert Piest went missing after telling his mother he was going to meet Gacy to discuss a potential construction job. Piest’s family filed a missing person report with the police, which led to a search of Gacy’s house in Norwood Park. Authorities discovered several suspicious items there, including police badges, a pistol, hypodermic needles, pornographic films, and items that they later learned belonged to some of Gacy’s victims.
Today, with airliners crisscrossing the skies above, Norwood Park Township, with its small bungalows and two-flat buildings, resembles other neighborhoods at the edges of the city, popular with municipal workers and ethnic whites. In the aftermath of the gruesome discovery on Gacy’s property, his neighbors had difficulty reconciling the friendly, gentle neighbor with the killer. I was willing to put up with the author’s waxing poetic about the flawlessness of the American justice system for the first 9.5 hours until he recounted the story of his questioning of the witness Donita Gannon, in which he outed her as a trans woman in an attempt to discredit her testimony for the defense and insinuate to the jury that “her entire life was one big lie.” He explicitly states this intention in the book and stands by it. All in the name of defending a literal serial killer. I think maybe he should take society’s disdain for criminal defense lawyers a little bit more seriously. Sam, could you do me a favor?’ A telephone call, seven short words, a simple-enough request. That’s how it all began,” writes Amirante in his chilling memoir John Wayne Gacy: Defending a Monster . Phil Bettiker, a retired Cook County sheriff's officer, talks this month about his experiences as a lead investigator on the Gacy case. He was one of the first officers to hear Gacy’s confession. (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune) By 1978, Gacy’s crawl space had no more space for bodies, according to Killer Clown, and he started to dispose of his victims in the Des Plaines River from a bridge off Interstate 55.Sam L. Amirante is a retired judge and lawyer. His first case after leaving the Office of the Public Defender was The People of the State of Illinois v. John Wayne Gacy. In 1988, he was appointed to the bench as an Associate Judge of The Circuit Court of Cook County where he served until his retirement in 2005. He is now the principal attorney of the firm of Sam L. Amirante and Associates, P.C. Amirante authored procedures adopted by the Illinois General Assembly such as the Missing Child Act of 1984 (I-SEARCH), which is credited with helping to locate more than 3,000 missing children. Sam lives with his wife and children in Barrington, Illinois.
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