John Wayne Gacy, who killed 33 young men and boys in the 1970s, was executed early Tuesday, despite a problem with the lethal injection used to kill him.
Hours after exhausting the legal appeals that had filled and perpetuated his life, Gacy, 52, died strapped to a gurney in the execution room at 12:58 a.m. at Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet.
Howard A. Peters III, head of the Department of Corrections, said the second of three chemicals that were to flow into Gacy’s arm apparently “gelled” or was blocked by a clot of Gacy’s blood. Officials attached a new tube to the needle and resumed the execution.
The state’s $25,000 lethal injection machine releases three chemicals: the first causes sleep, the second stops breathing and the third stops the heart.
Executioners had started the chemicals flowing at about 12:40 p.m., and the execution had been expected to take about 10 minutes, not 18.
Peters said that Gacy apparently felt no pain or discomfort because of the malfunction. “The reaction was like he was going to sleep,” Peters said. “He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.”
“He got a much easier death than any of his victims,” said William Kunkle, a witness at Tuesday’s execution and an attorney who prosecuted Gacy.
A former building contractor who sidelined as a clown at children’s parties, Gacy was the nation’s most notorious serial killer. His conviction for 33 killings was only surpassed by Donald Harvey, an Ohio nurse’s aide who admitted killing 37 people.
Peters said Gacy’s last words were that the execution was unjust.
“He said taking his life would not compensate for the loss of the others and this was a mistake,” Peters said. “He said taking his life was basically murdering him.”
Even as he was transferred by helicopter Monday morning from a Downstate prison to the execution building at Stateville, Gacy, still looking to appeals, carted along boxes of legal papers. But by the time he had a last meal of fried chicken and butterfly shrimp, the U.S. Supreme Court had denied his last request for a stay.
At 6 p.m., six hours before the execution was to begin, one of Gacy’s attorneys emerged from a meeting with the condemned man and said his client did not seem to believe the execution would go forward.
“His attitude is he isn’t going to die,” said the attorney, Greg Adamski. “I don’t think he understands the reality of what he is facing.”
Later, however, Gacy was reportedly “reflective.” Gacy and Nic Howell, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections, took an after-dinner walk around the prison courtyard, each puffing a cigar.
“I think he has finally come to grips with his fate,” Howell said. “He’s talking about the past. He’s not talking about the future.”
The last execution in Illinois took place in 1990, when Charles Walker was killed by lethal injection after asking that no appeals be made on his behalf. Walker’s was the first execution in the state since Illinois reenacted the death penalty in 1977.
Gacy’s was the first involuntary execution in the state since 1962.
For Gacy, the legal process, so slow for a decade and a half, ended with a flurry of litigation.
At 6:55 p.m. Chicago time, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 8-1 to deny a request for a stay. Justice Harry Blackmun, a death penalty opponent, was the only dissenter.
Earlier Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals took just two hours to reject Gacy’s appeal for a stay.
A three-judge panel of the Chicago-based court noted that Gacy’s lawyers didn’t file their appeal of Friday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge John Grady until 12:20 p.m. Monday, less than 12 hours before the scheduled execution.
“If his lawyers believed that deluging the court with paper at the last instant would lead us to delay the execution in order to have more time to read the documents, they were mistaken,” said the opinion, written by Judge Frank Easterbrook.
Two of Gacy’s lawyers, John Greenlees and David Keefe, said they have no secretaries or staff and had been been working for more than 48 hours straight to prepare the 28-page appeal.
Earlier, Greenlees had said the attorneys probably wouldn’t seek clemency from Gov. Jim Edgar, since he had already publicly announced his opposition.
The scheduled execution of Gacy became a rallying point for those who favor the death penalty and those who oppose it.
Some 400 people, mostly supporters of the death penalty, stood outside the walls of Stateville while the execution was carried out.
Earlier, several hundred people marched from the plaza of the Dirksen Federal Building north on Dearborn Street to the Daley Center in support of Gacy’s execution.
Gacy had been killing for six years before he finally was arrested in December 1978 in connection with the disappearance of a 15-year-old Des Plaines boy.
Many of Gacy’s victims were male prostitutes picked up on Chicago’s Near North Side. In many cases, Gacy would pretend to be an undercover police officer. Gacy would handcuff the “arrestees” as soon as they got in his car and then he drove them to his northwest suburban home, where all 33 killings took place.
It wasn’t until 15-year-old Robert Piest disappeared on the way to his mother’s birthday party on Dec. 11, 1978, that police took a serious look at Gacy.
Piest, an honor student at Maine West High School, had run into Gacy outside a local drugstore where he worked as a stock boy. Piest’s mother also had gone to the pharmacy to pick up her son to attend her birthday party. As his mother waited inside the pharmacy, Piest went outside to Gacy’s car. Piest’s mother never saw her son alive again.
Two days later, authorities obtained a warrant to search Gacy’s home in Norwood Park Township, where police discovered a film-developing receipt they believed belonged to Piest.
Eight days later, police conducted a second search of Gacy’s home that didn’t end for several days, as the remains of 27 young men and boys were removed, piece by piece, from the crawl space of Gacy’s home.
Two other bodies were found buried in Gacy’s back yard, and four others, including Piest, were found floating in the Des Plaines River.
Police were aided in their search for the bodies by Gacy himself, who even drew a map showing the location of the graves he had dug in his crawl space.
At trial, Gacy pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.
