intelligence, calmly did his best. Before the judge and jury were halfway to a finding of guilty, and sentences for Speck totaling from 400 to 1,200 years in prison, there were empty seats in the courtroom almost every day. Even the shock of murders coming eight at a time can pale after a few months, especially if they occur in Chicago, where hundreds of people die violently every year.
John Wayne Gacy, Jr., was born twenty-four years before the butchery committed by Richard Speck. He was the offspring of a forty-one-year-old machinist, John Wayne Gacy, Sr., a Chicago native, and his thirty-three-year-old wife, born Marion Elaine Robinson, in Racine, Wisconsin.
The father-to-be checked his wife into Edgewater Hospital at about 9:30 P.M. on March 16. Barely three hours later their first and only son was delivered by their physician, Dr. David S. Levy. Dr. Levy would periodically continue to provide medical care for members of the family, including the healthy baby boy, for more than thirty-five years.
The baby was a Pisces, with the same birth date as Rudolf Nureyev and the same astrological sign as George Washington, Albert Einstein, and Charley Pride. On the birth certificate, his mother's profession was listed as "housewife." It was an occupation she had followed for more than three years after a depression-year wedding in 1938.
When the new baby was taken home a few days later, it was to a family that already included a two-year-old sister, Joanne. Two years later the third and last child, Karen, completed the family.
The world of war and urban violence seemed far away from that of young Johnny Gacy as he grew up on the north side. His mother had inherited a Danish respect for cleanliness from her Scandinavian ancestors, and he lived in a neatly kept home, attending neighborhood Catholic schools with his sisters until he was eleven.
The family moved at about that time and he transferred to public schools, earning a reputation as a student ranging from good to indifferent. He was a well-behaved child and got along well with his teachers. He had a newspaper route and worked part-time in a grocery store after school hours. Everywhere the family lived, his relationship with his neighbors was good. He was a typical neighborhood boy who joined the Boy Scouts, romped with his dog, and played stickball and other street games with his friends.
He hit his head on a playground swing when he was eleven, and suffered occasional blackouts until he was about sixteen, when the trouble was diagnosed as a blood clot on the brain. The clot was dissolved with medication and the blackouts stopped.
There were other encounters with the medical profession, however. The boy was hospitalized for five days to have his appendix removed when he was fifteen, and in 1958 he began taking medication for a heart ailment.
But his health was probably as good or better than many of the youngsters he went to school with. Perhaps the most significant aspect of his school experience was the fact that he attended four high schools and never completed his senior year.
The first was Carl Schurz, a huge coeducational high school on the far north side. At Schurz, Johnny Gacy was no more and no less noticeable than any other student. He was never one of the popular boys. Nevertheless, he made friends and he got along well enough with his schoolmates to earn a reputation as a generally easygoing young man, although years later he told his first wife that he was taken out of school in a straitjacket a couple of times after flying into uncontrollable rages.
His grades could have been better, but those of many of his schoolmates were worse. If there was anything outstanding about him during his student years, it may have been his neatness. Many of the other boys his age were careless about their dress. He wasn't. His clothes weren't expensive, but they were always neat and carefully chosen.
His manner of dressing was one of the things about him that most