She was a kid, really, the 28-year-old attorney Karen Conti when she came face-to-face with the serial killer John Wayne Gacy and this is what she saw: “His face was ashen, splotchy and bloated. A dimpled chin and several beneath it were wedged against his blue prison-issue shirt. … There was nothing attractive about Gacy and his light blue eyes were somehow flat and lacking in depth or warmth.”
That is how Conti recalls her first encounter with Gacy. It was October 1993 and he was locked on death row in the Menard Correctional Center in downstate Chester, Illinois. Conti, along with her partner in law and life, Greg Adamski, had been contacted to possibly represent him in some civil matters, one of which was fighting the prison’s attempt to stop him from profiting from sales of paintings he had created while in jail.
Over the next months she, as the only woman on his legal team, and Adamski would come to know Gacy in close fashion. They met with him often, shared meals, phone calls to their home, banter and personal stories. They would eventually represent Gacy in his last set of death row appeals.
Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. Adamski and Conti would carry on, cohosting a radio show and otherwise fashioning high-profile legal careers. He died in 2011 and Conti continues as a weekly WGN-AM720 radio host, TV commentator, practicing attorney and professor.
Happily remarried, she was compelled during the quiet of the pandemic to revisit her time with Gacy and now that, and much more, is packed onto the 250-some pages between the covers of her surprisingly compelling book, “Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy: Defending America’s Most Evil Serial Killer on Death Row.”
I say surprising because, frankly, I have had more than my fill of the killer and never expected to revisit his life or crimes or death again. He and his evil have shadowed me ever since the snowy/icy December day in 1978 when, as a young reporter, I watched as some of the dead bodies of young men and boys were removed from the crawl space of Gacy’s ranch house near Norridge, in an unincorporated village in Norwood Park Township.
I stood in a crowd of stunned and curious neighbors, cops, a couple other reporters, medical technicians and others, many of them crying and all, it goes without saying, trying to grasp this particular manifestation of evil.
Eventually 33 bodies were discovered, 29 in the house and four others nearby. Gacy went on trial, he was quickly convicted and sentenced to death. Even before that came, the foundation of his “immortality” had begun to form.
As the TV critic for this paper in May 1992, I wrote about his five-part gabfest with WBBM-Ch. 2’s Walter Jacobson: “(despite) typically hyperbolic promotional messages (‘The most notorious mass murderer in history talks’), the series of interviews was sedate … in fact so dull as to beg the question, ‘Why did you bother to air this?’” Also WGN-TV and its Steve Sanders at the same time offered a three-part “The Gacy File: Unanswered Questions” during its nightly newscast.
In that same story, I reviewed Brian Dennehy as Gacy in “To Catch a Killer.” I wrote that it was a “fine, tense and surprisingly reserved film … not the sordid, blood-stained romp that many might have expected.” Of Dennehy I wrote, “(he is) riveting. More physically imposing than the real killer, he has menace written across his crooked smile.”
Most recently, in 2021, I wrote about what I called a “a brilliant and provocative” six-part, six-hour documentary, “John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise” on Peacock, “handsomely made, judicious in its uses of archival footage.”
Evil fascinates and this particular evil has also generated a shelf full of books.
Even though I know Conti, I would not have been drawn to open her book had it not been for Scott Turow, the best selling author and a lawyer who handled big cases as a U.S. attorney, including serving as lead counsel in the Operation Greylord trial and later, in private practice, helping free an innocent man from death row. He has called this book “addictively readable…[and it] answers some of the law’s most fascinating questions” and there are few lawyers or writers I respect more than Turow. His is just one voice in a chorus of praise the book has received, such as “unique and engaging” and “powerful.”
Those opinions are correct. This book also serves as a memoir and you get to know Conti’s background, the reasons why she has been a lifelong opponent of the death penalty and why she was able to grasp the humanity (if that’s the right word) inside Gacy. He calls her “Dollface” and she listens as he tells her, only hours before his execution, “You’re gonna be glad you represented me. Your career’s gonna skyrocket. … You’re gonna be forever connected with me … I love ya.”
It is difficult to determine how her encounters with John Wayne Gacy might have forever altered Karen Conti. She writes that she has been asked to “participate in a John Gacy seance, to be the judge in a Halloween horror costume competition, and to host a serial killer jeopardy game for charity. Handling this case has made me a legal novelty whether I like it or not.”
But it has also, in palpable ways, made her a talented writer, provocative storyteller and decent human being.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
