Original subtitles

Derrick: I haven't been here at the Harris county cemetery in years,

but I sure remember the day in 2009 that we buried him.

[ Owl hooting ]

We buried him in Babyland, in the children's part of the cemetery.

He was in this beautiful white casket,

that was a child-size casket because he was skeletal.

We know how he died and it wasn't an easy death.

I've spent 14 years trying to figure out who this boy is.

Narrator: He's the last unidentified boy who died at the hands

of one of America’s worst serial killers: Dean Allen Corll,

otherwise known as the candy man.

Hollandsworth: This is a story without any redemption.

There is nothing but terror and madness and grief in this story.

The news tonight begins with murder.

Man on TV: So far, 17 bodies have been found in the boathouse.

Police expect to find more when they resume digging later today.

Narrator: The candy man's reign of terror was almost immediately overtaken

by another killer preying on young men.

John Wayne Gacy, otherwise known as the killer clown.

Together over eight years, they killed more than 60 boys.

Man 1: They were like kids in a candy shop.

They just saw opportunity everywhere they looked.

Woman: He came home and said, "oh, we were digging around his house,"

and it ended up they were digging their own graves.

These kids were crying for their moms.

James: They would tie them on the torture board and molest them.

Narrator: Many thought that John Wayne Gacy

and Dean Corll were lone psychopaths,

but this series investigates evidence they were linked

to a secret, nation-wide network.

Man on TV: Police in Dallas think they've uncovered a nation-wide

procurement ring for homosexuals.

Man 2: I'd call it a pedophile cell,

and I think it could be compared to a terrorist cell.

Man 1: I was sexually exploited by a pedophile ring from age five to age 12.

It's like psychological and emotional quicksand.

Narrator: It was a massive network

and one of its masterminds, a shadowy figure.

Man 3: It's a snake of snakes.

His name is John David Norman.

He's a pedophile, and he ran a ring.

Man 4: He sent boys to service clients throughout the states.

They came from all walks of life.

Doctors, lawyers, all the way down.

Man 3: And, yes, they were in communication with one another.

They knew exactly what was going on.

Narrator: This series uncovers a hidden conspiracy

of pedophiles and child-killers

and in never-before-heard conversations,

a glimpse into the twisted world of the killer clown.

Phone operator: You have a collect call from...

Gacy: John Gacy.

Hollandsworth: There's an entire industry

devoted to serial killers in America.

Even with all the technology that we now have to catch killers like this,

it's bewildering that no-one saw it happening back in 1970 to 1973.

Well, I'm a true crime writer at Texas monthly,

and I thought I knew all the major crime stories.

This old retired radio reporter I met

told me that the most devastating story

he had ever worked on in his entire career

was the story of what Dean Corll did to those boys in Houston.

And I said, "who's Dean Corll?"

Narrator: The answer begins with a phone call to the police

on a hot summer morning in 1973,

and a dark secret world starts to unravel.

Outside 2020 Lamar,

the police find three shaken teens.

Seventeen-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley,

nineteen-year-old Tim Kerley,

and fifteen-year-old Rhonda Williams

and a .22 caliber gun on the ground.

Smith: They were all sitting on a curb,

and immediately when Henley made a statement

that he'd shot Dean Corll and that his body was inside the house.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

Narrator: In the hallway is a man's naked body.

He's been shot six times.

A search of the house shows this is anything but routine.

Smith: In one bedroom, there were polyethylene.

Plastic was rolled out on the floor,

and a board with holes in it,

handcuffs and ropes attached to various sexual devices.

A lot of, ah, acrylic spray cans, marijuana.

Narrator: Thirty-three-year-old Dean Corll seemed an unlikely murder victim.

A lineman at the Houston lighting & power company,

he was a familiar face in the heights.

His mother had owned the candy store and factory

in the neighborhood.

Milligan: I was in the fifth grade,

and we were on the playground

and someone yelled, "the candy man."

And these little kids were running like mad

to the fence to get candy,

and I turned to a friend of mine and I said,

"who's the candy man?"

He goes, "ah, his family runs a candy store about four blocks over."

Hollandsworth: Dean Corll was his big, broad-shouldered young man,

thick black hair, big black sideburns, and friendly.

He was always good with the kids who came by the candy factory.

He would give them free candy that his mom had made,

pralines or Turkish delights or pecan logs.

He set up a pool table in the back room, he let the kids play there.

He would sometimes give them rides on his motorcycle.

He was sort of like a good boy scout leader.

He wasn't someone that people were scared of.

Narrator: Why, then, would a 17-year-old kid from the neighborhood

claimed he had to kill the candy man in self-defense?

The story Henley tells the police

paints a very different picture

of the friendly guy in the neighborhood.

Smith: They were having a party there.

They were, uh, what we called in those days, bagging,

they're sniffing the acrylic spray out of a bag to get high.

They got so high they passed out,

and when they woke up,

uh, they were all tied up or handcuffed,

all three of 'em, including Wayne Henley.

Narrator: Henley tells the police that the candy man had a secret obsession.

He liked underage boys.

Corll had no affinity for women whatsoever.

He was angry with Henley because Henley had brought the girl there.

Corll wanted Henley to have sex with the girl

while he had sex with the other young boy that was there,

and Henley had refused.

Narrator: Henley says Corll threatened him with a gun,

so he agreed to do whatever Corll wanted.

Henley talked him into letting him out of the hand cuffs,

and when he did that, he immediately grabbed the pistol and shot him.

[ Gunshots ]

Narrator: It seemed an unbelievable story,

and might have ended there:

A drug-fueled sex orgy that got out of hand,

until Henley tells them an insane story.

Smith: That's when he told the story about Corll telling him

about murdering, torturing,

sexually assaulting young boys

and burying them in a boatshed.

[ Typewriter keys clicking ]

And he even had names of some of the boys

that he said Corll killed.

I didn't believe him.

It just seemed such a bizarre story,

and I've heard many bizarre stories before

that didn't turn out to be true.

We started checking out these names to see if they were missing persons

or runaway juveniles, and that's when we learned

that some of them have been listed as missing or runaways.

Narrator: Missing boys, bodies in a boatshed.

Henley says he can take them there.

Henley was, I would say, matter-of-fact.

He was a very smart, streetwise kid.

He showed no emotion about it.

Narrator: That afternoon, Henley leads the police on the 30-minute drive

to 4500 silver bell street.

Smith: We found the boatshed but it was locked.

I got a tire tool out of the car

and I broke the hinges off of a galvanized door.

And immediately, when we open the door,

it smelled really bad.

At that point, I thought Henley's right.

I believed him.

Smith: I knew for a fact that something was dead inside that boatshed.

I mean, I'd smelled that before.

Looking around the ground, I saw a position

on the left side of the boatshed

where the ground was cracked and raised up.

That's where I grabbed a shovel.

I had some trustees there.

And we started digging, and about six or eight inches under the ground,

we found the first body.

Nude, wrapped in plastic.

It had begun decomposition,

but, uh, it hadn't been there that long.

James: You could smell it when you got out of the car,

it was black gumbo

in a, you know, 15 by 25-foot boat stall.

It had the most horrible smell you could ever imagine.

Of course, it was new to me.

I'd only been in homicide for about a month when that took place.

[ Digging ]

Smith: We just kept digging and kept finding more.

They were layered on top of one another.

Some had been buried for a long time,

some of them were nothing but skeletons.

James: You'd hit lime first,

and when you hit a section of lime,

you knew that there was a body underneath it.

We didn't even have gloves.

All we had, we had body bags.

You know, there wasn't much talking

until you stuck a shovel in

and pulled out some white lime.

You said, "well, here's another one."

Narrator: Body after body, hour after hour.

The more they dug, the more they found.

Smith: It was chaos.

We tried to keep the media at bay,

but they would, uh, get closer all the time.

I had to tell some of them to get out

because they were walking into the boatshed.

After an hour of moving the shell and soft Sandy Clay around,

the skeletal remains of body number nine is found under a layer of lime.

Smith: Henley, he was standing outside the boatshed.

He was still handcuffed

but he asked me if he could call his mother.

One of the members of the media had a car phone.

[ Henley speaking ]

[ Mary Henley speaking ]

The only emotion I ever saw from him is when he was on the phone

with his mother that night at the boatshed.

Other than that, he was just matter-of-fact.

James: Henley thought that since he had killed Corll, it was over.

It was just beginning.

Narrator: The gory details swept through Houston.

Local TV stations cut into regular programming.

Police in Houston, Texas, tonight are unraveling

the grisly details of a mass murder.

Twelve bodies have been found.

It's feared there may be more.

Henley said the murders took place at a torture chamber in this house,

and he killed Corll yesterday afternoon in self-defense

after a paint-sniffing sex party.

While hiding his face in the backseat of a police car.

Henley talked to KHOU newsman Judd McIlvain.

[ Mcllvain speaking ]

[ Henley speaking ]

Milligan: When the story broke about the killings,

and all of us knew someone,

multiple people who were touched by this.

Furstenfeld: Oh, it was huge news, especially to those of us in the heights,

that thought of the heights as a safety ground.

Narrator: It was a typical working-class neighborhood,

like so many others across America.

The next morning, another teen from the heights turns himself in,

and things go from bad to worse.

David Brooks went into the Houston police department with his father.

Narrator: The eighteen-year-old says Henley isn't telling the whole story.

He says Corll didn't act alone.

Henley wasn't an innocent bystander,

he was a willing participant.

Smith: That's when Henley decided to tell the truth.

Male reporter: Late today, police said Henley, who's already been implicated

in the 12 murders, has confessed to involvement

in a total of 25 to 30 murders.

And tonight, police are going to another site

at lake Sam Rayburn,

about 100 miles away, to look for more bodies.

[ Digging ]

Narrator: That evening at the lake,

in the woods near a cottage owned by Corll's parents,

the police dig up four more graves.

There seemed to be no end in sight.

[ Helicopter hovering ]

Hollandsworth: Henley said, "well, there's some more bodies,"

and they're over at high island.

And so they did this kind of en masse trip to high island,

and Brooks and Henley sat on a sand dune.

Reporters went up to 'em and asked them questions, took their photos,

and they watched and pointed to where they saw,

they remembered the bodies being buried.

There were young families out there,

and kids with pails and shovels digging in the sand.

It was the weirdest surreal scene you could imagine.

James: I was out there more or less,

I guess, babysitting Henley and Brooks,

while other detectives and other agencies were looking for bodies.

David Owen Brooks was very quiet.

He was just like he was kind of staring off into space.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

And I tried a couple of times. Since he didn't reply,

I just gave up on it.

I did speak at length with Elmer Wayne Henley Jr.

He was very talkative.

He was just talking like a magpie, you know.

And he was telling me

how they would go out and find boys walking the street.

They'd say, "hey, you want to go to a party? We're going to have a party."

And they would either offer 'em money,

uh, booze, or there'd be girls there.

Narrator: Henley explains that once inside,

the party turned into something different.

James: Henley told me that he had a torture board there.

He said they would tie them on the torture board and molest them.

They would let the boys go and they would come back on more than one occasion.

Then he said when they got tired of 'em, they would kill 'em.

And Henley said, I didn't know how hard it was to strangle someone.

I was just floored by that.

He said that they would load the bodies in the Van.

That's how they removed them from the house,

and they would either Bury 'em or put 'em in the boat stall.

Then they started going to lake Sam Rayburn and high island.

Smith: They all went together,

and usually Brooks drove Dean Corll's white Van,

that had the body box inside, what they called the body box.

Henley sure wasn't upset about it.

He never shed a tear.

He just didn't.

It was just another date for him, I guess.

Hollandsworth: Henley and Brooks

didn't just talk teenagers into getting into the Van.

Once they got to the apartment,

they helped get them strapped to the torture board,

they gagged their mouths, they bound their hands.

They put them in position so that Dean could have sex with them.

It was just as vicious as what Dean was doing.

Narrator: It was a brutal, calculated killing machine.

How did Corll buy their silence?

And how did no-one in the heights notice what was happening?

[ Police siren blaring ]

Hollandsworth: I'm still the same staff writer I was 30 years ago.

This is a story without any redemption.

There is nothing but terror and madness and grief in this story.

Before a few days ago, the public had never heard of Dean Allan Corll.

Now he's laid to rest as the state's most publicized murder suspect.

Narrator: Six days after Wayne Henley killed Dean Corll,

the police unearthed the bodies of 27 boys,

seventeen from the boatshed,

six from the beach, and four from lake Sam Rayburn.

This orgy of murder was the worst in American history.

James: I've thought about it every night for a long time.

You still think about it, even today,

and whether or not we got all the bodies.

Narrator: Desperate and angry parents of boys who had disappeared

flooded the police department with calls.

When we went back to pull reports with kids who were still missing,

there was maybe 40 to 50 of those.

We contacted parents, asked for dental records.

Hollandsworth: They were identified through belts,

the tennis shoes they wore.

You know there's no DNA going on back then.

Narrator: At the morgue,

the medical examiner's office worked around the clock.

Families just waited for the knock on the door.

Massey: I personally had to go to the morgue daily.

That was just a horrific experience,

because as soon as you got off the elevator,

the smell of decomposing bodies was just overwhelming.

I don't know how the medical examiners worked in that environment.

When you go back to the family and say,

"your child has been identified, and was a victim,"

and it was really, really heartbreaking.

Man on TV: One of the first victims identified was 13-year-old David Hilligiest,

who has been missing for more than two years.

The Hilligiests' had spent thousands of dollars

for private detectives and in advertisements

in underground newspapers in search of their son

and a neighbor who disappeared with him.

I feared from the very beginning

that something had happened to them.

But naturally, along with our fears,

we held our hopes that some day they would come back.

Narrator: David and his 16-year-old friend Malley

disappeared in broad daylight.

Winkle: Malley and David were going swimming,

swimming at the local pool.

The pools open in August, September.

Let's have some fun, let's get with it,

let's do whatever.

And then they were gone.

Narrator: Both boys were barefoot, wearing their swimsuits

and last seen getting into a white Van.

Henley got so involved in this

that he brought his own friends

to meet Corll and later be killed.

David Hilligiest,

who lived just down the block from Henley's home.

Mark Scott, who invited him late

to one of his birthday parties.

Homer Garcia, who was in Henley's driver's ed class.

All of them were murdered.

All of them disappeared.

All of them had parents who drove the streets at night

looking for them.

Winkle: Wayne Henley even put up posters

that they just made for David and Malley.

Uh, he put them up around the neighborhood

and he was responsible for abducting him in the first place.

Malley may have worked for Dean Corll

at the candy shop for a little period of time.

It turns the pit of my stomach.

It is so very scary and painful

that he was that close to that man.

Narrator: Questions swirled.

How could this happen right under their noses?

And of all people,

the guy everyone called the perfect gentleman,

the candy man.

Hollandsworth: Dean Corll grew up in Indiana and Tennessee

his dad was an electrician.

They came to Texas in 1962.

They opened a candy shop.

Dean went to high school.

He played trombone in the band.

He was well-liked, he made decent grades.

He had girls that liked him.

He went to the us army.

He became an expert in radio operations.

He came back to Houston, worked for his mom,

became the neighborhood candy man.

His mom gets divorced, she marries a merchant marine.

And he says to her,

"you know, I think there's something wrong with Dean.

I think he's got some homosexual tendencies.

He sure does like being around other boys."

His mother was so upset

that she divorced the merchant marine

and she closed the candy factory and moved to Colorado.

Now she might have assumed that Dean,

who was so close to her, would come with her.

But he said, I'm staying in Houston,

and I'm gonna work at the Houston power and light company

as a lineman,

and for the first time he was alone,

he had an apartment,

and that's when something came unleashed in him.

Narrator: Corll felt free to act on his dark desires

and lured two teens from the neighborhood

to be part of his killing machine.

As Brooks and Henley got involved,

the candy turned to sex parties and weed.

Brooks was a boy of about 12

who started coming over to the candy factory,

and so had known the Corlls for a long time,

and would hang out there

because he had no father to watch over him,

and his mother sort of was happy that he had some place to go.

Brooks' father said,

"Dean's the first grown man I know

that hasn't made fun of you."

Corll had an apartment at the Yorktown apartments,

which was a place where a lot of young singles

were starting to make their first marks in business

and economy, and in Houston.

And it was there that he brought David Brooks,

who is this aesthetic-looking, pimply-faced young man

who a lot of kids made fun of because of the way he looked.

He had long blonde hair. He wore thick aviator glasses.

Dean had given him money and he'd bought him a car.

He had taken care of him

in a way that his own father had not.

And Brooks sort of saw Dean as a father figure.

When Dean asked Brooks to pull down his pants

so he could give him what Texas law at the time

described as oral sodomy,

David did it.

It wasn't that David was gay.

David felt like that's what he had to do

to continue to keep his father figure's affection.

A few weeks after that happened,

David goes up to the apartment

and just assumed he could walk in,

and he saw Dean having anal sex

with two terrified teenage boys on the bed.

And Dean said, "get out of here."

Later, Dean told David

that he shot both of those boys

and buried them in a boat shed.

So he initially went to David and said,

"this is what I'm doing.

If you will bring me boys,

I will pay you $ 200 per boy."

And he began to lure boys into the Van,

saying, "hey, we've got some marijuana,

we have some beer."

And then one of the boys he lured into the Van

was Elmer Wayne Henley,

who came from a broken home as did David.

And Elmer got involved,

and he began to help recruit other boys

and brought them into the Van or the car

and took them to one of Dean's apartments.

Dean was so well-liked by these kids,

parents who got to know him, that they invited him over.

Henley's mom invited Dean over for dinner,

and Dean took the time to fix her car.

So she was very aware that her son, Wayne,

was hanging out with Dean Corll,

and it didn't bother her whatsoever.

In a way, you can understand every 15 or 16 year old boy

who's lonely, who feels like an outcast,

who's embraced by this other kind of person.

You can understand it,

but you just never expect it to go as far as it did.

Narrator: Dean Corll has been dead for almost 50 years.

But what he did to 16-year-old Malley winkle

still haunts his brother, Ben.

I mean, he was a good kid. He was a good brother.

I always wanted to hang out with Malley.

I always wanted to be with him.

We'd just run around, do things that kids did.

We slept in the same room together, so, and...

He took care of me as best he could.

Right? He tried to make sure I didn't get in any trouble

and stuff like that.

Kid: What's your name?

- Malley winkle. - Malley winkle?

Uh, what's your city?

Houston.

Narrator: But, like many of the other murdered boys,

Ben's family was broken.

Winkle: When I was eight,

my mom, she actually lost everything.

She was a single mom working two of our ships.

A lot of the time we were there by ourselves.

That was a big deal. My mom would say,

"Malley, take Ben with you and take care of him."

His dating.

He was trying to date. I always remember...

The concept of him trying to date,

you know, 15, 16-year-old kid.

I always wanted to be with him.

And as an eight-year older brother,

he never wanted me to be with him.

My mom, when she wasn't home,

I wasn't home either.

And she just couldn't control me.

She had placed me into a boy's home

called boy's harbor in la Porte, Texas.

And she tried to get Malley into the harbor as well.

And he didn't get in.

I don't know if it was his age or what,

uh, but he wasn't allowed in.

He had come out on one of the visiting Sundays,

and that's when that picture was taken.

And in the following year, he was abducted.

He was found in the boat shed.

Obviously, later in life, I learned the truth

and, uh, it has been very painful since then.

Narrator: Back in '73 when Henley shot Corll

and the story hit the newspapers,

20-year old Bernie Milligan could think of only one name.

Milligan: Frank Aguirre was one of the missing kids,

and he and I had attended Hamilton junior high together.

We had a lot of mutual friends.

I had no idea who the perpetrators were

until I opened that newspaper and saw their faces.

Narrator: One of those faces was Dean Corll.

He and I had an encounter.

Narrator: Three years earlier,

Corll tried to lure Bernie into his car.

Milligan: As I was walking, Corll approached me

on the side with his lights off.

He kept trying to offer me a ride.

"Hey, man, I'll drive you wherever you want to go",

and I'm trying to be very clear,

I'm not gonna take a ride in anyone's car.

And he finally said, "hey, be a guy."

That was the first strange thing I heard out of him.

And he got a little more insistent,

and I took off.

[ Running footsteps ]

Thank goodness I was an athlete,

because I was making tracks, running.

I would stop and stand in an alley

'cause I could hear him with those lights on, driving around.

And, uh, finally, I lost him.

I told my mother about it.

We didn't call the police

'cause I didn't have a description of the car.

I focused on him.

Narrator: Bernie has a second encounter with Corll.

This time, Corll brings his friends.

Milligan: I turned around and there was a car.

There sat David Brooks

and Elmer Wayne Henley was in the back seat.

And there was a driver,

but I couldn't see the driver from where I was.

David Brooks goes, "hey, we're heading up to Sam Rayburn.

Would you like to go fishing?"

And I noticed the driver looked through,

turned his head to the side,

and uh, he recognized me.

I didn't know Dean Corll's name.

I only recognized him as the guy

in September of 1969.

And all he said was, "we have to go right now,"

and threw the car into drive.

Narrator: Once again, Bernie escaped Carl's grasp.

One month later, Corll was dead,

shot by his buddy Wayne Henley.

A few weeks after the news broke,

there were whispers around the heights

that both Henley and Brooks

were trying to break free from Corll.

Milligan: Brooks was terrified for his life.

He had just got married and he had a child.

He was going to have to break away

from what was going on.

The story I received

is David would take a couch or chair,

and move it in front of the door every night

and sit with a shotgun...

Thinking that Henley and Dean Corll were gonna break through the door

and kill him and Bridget and the baby.

He had apparently confessed to his father.

His father had informed David that the supreme court

was working on outlawing the death penalty.

Keep your mouth shut.

This is what I was told.

I did not hear it from David Brooks

or even Bridget myself.

Narrator: Henley also feared for his life.

Dean told him he belonged to an organization out of Dallas

that bought and sold boys.

Henley said,

"Dean told me his organization would get me

if I ever did anything to him.

He said he tried to tell his mother,

but she just wouldn't believe me."

Hollandsworth: The truth is that Mrs. Henley needed money.

She was divorced,

and her husband wasn't giving her much child support.

And so Wayne getting $200

is a huge deal,

even if it required him to turn a boy in to be killed.

If Henley had not mentioned the boat shed to the police,

how are the police gonna know about it?

It just could have been this one sort of crazed night

of paint huffing in a house in Pasadena

with Dean Corll and three teenagers.

And no one would have made the connection

to the other disappearing boys.

No one had made that connection yet.

Why would they start now?

I don't mean this to sound crass.

I mean, there's pedophilia,

and then there's this stuff that Dean Corll did.

He would do this game with them

where he would put handcuffs on them and say,

"let's see how quickly you can get your handcuffs off."

He would do the handcuff game first,

then he would give the handcuffs to the other boy.

That boy could not get the handcuffs off,

and that's when it began.

It's so hard to talk about,

and I've covered a lot of crimes.

When I realized that this was going on

in what is now this beautiful yuppie neighborhood,

that back then, the kind of depravity

that just does not seem possible...

It's still hard for me to imagine.

Of these 28 eight boys who were killed

in the most gruesome of fashion,

at least 22 of them had grown up

in a neighborhood called the heights.

11 of those boys went to the same junior high school.

Newsreader: The Houston police department says

it gets more than 5,000 reports

of runaway children each year,

and there is no way to check them out thoroughly.

They say there aren't enough policemen.

Narrator: Between 1971 and 1973,

more than 400 kids were reported missing in the heights,

an area two miles wide and three miles deep.

Smith: It was a different time.

Kids hitchhiked all over.

Some of these victims were hitchhikers.

You know, it was the age of drugs, sex and rock and roll.

Hollandsworth: It was a strange time in America

because there were a lot of boys who did disappear.

And there were, in truth, some boys who ran away

and some boys who wanted to go see

what the other part of the world was like.

Narrator: Back then, being a runaway wasn't a crime

nor a priority for the police.

Runaways or missing persons who were juveniles

was handled by a division called the juvenile division,

which was separate from homicide.

They were on the fourth floor,

we were on the third floor.

Smith: Offense reports by patrol officers

were frequently hand-written.

In fact, the juvenile division, the way it was set up,

we did all of our reporting on manual typewriters.

There was probably only two or three electric typewriters

in the whole division for a hundred people.

Narrator: 14-year-old Jimmy glass, one of the first victims,

disappeared in December of 1970.

He was last seen leaving a church service.

Hollandsworth: Jimmy glass had run away from home before

for a very brief amount of time.

But when the juvenile officer for the Houston police department

was assigned that case and learned this,

he shut the file, figuring he'd just run away again.

It happened over and over and over.

It was totally mishandled.

And as that grief began to pour out,

there was a lot of anger at the cops.

We have the statistical data on it,

exactly how many were reported missing,

and we see nothing over that period of time

that indicated a pattern at all.

As a matter of fact, we had a lot heavier incidents

in some of the other districts.

Hollandsworth: Herman short said,

"the problem here is the parents.

The parents need to keep more control over their boys,

otherwise these boys would not have any problems."

Some of these parents are not exactly

uh, discharging their own responsibility

so far as these runaways are concerned,

so far is raising and disciplining their children.

Hollandsworth: These parents would come to the Houston police and say,

"my boy just doesn't run away from home.

He was packed and ready to go on a family vacation the next day.

He's disappeared.

Something horrible has happened to him."

And the Houston police said,

"ma'am, there's just a lot of runaways in America at this time."

This is the hippie era.

They get disgruntled

and they're told to run away by their friends,

and that's what they do.

Narrator: Ben knows his brother was no runaway.

Winkle: Malley and David,

they were just going down there to go swimming.

Do you run away in your swimsuit?

I mean, that doesn't make any sense.

Newsreader: Under Texas law,

Elmer Wayne Henry faced a maximum sentence

of life imprisonment for each of the six murders.

After less than an hour's deliberation,

they returned the maximum penalty:

Six separate 99-year sentences.

Narrator: Nine months later, David Owen Brooks

was convicted of one murder:

The strangulation of 15-year-old Billy ray Lawrence,

and received a life sentence.

With Corll dead and his two accomplices behind bars,

the Houston mass murders faded from the headlines.

America's fascination with serial killers

was still years in the future,

but for many of the families, the grief lasts a lifetime.

Winkle: My mom, it destroyed her.

His murder overshadowed most everything else.

She made the ultimate sacrifice.

She gave up one son

by putting me in the harbor, boy's harbor,

and then she lost her other son.

He was very innocent. He was just an innocent kid.

He never really had a chance.

Narrator: Unluckier still are the families of Corll's victims

whose bodies were never identified.

Dr. Sharon Derrick started a new job

at the Harris county medical examiner's office in Houston.

As she looked around her new workplace,

something old suddenly became new again.

Dr. Derrick: I saw these three boxes

and each of them said "Houston mass murders" on them.

And I immediately clicked back to when I was in high school.

And I thought, "oh, my gosh,

they have some of the remains from that

and they're not identified?"

I was kind of star struck at the three boxes,

to tell you the truth.

And so I asked the deputy chief

may I be assigned these cases,

and he said yes.

Narrator: It wasn't going to be easy.

Those boxes contain the forgotten bones and bits

of the last nameless victims of the candy man.

It became a lot more than just

putting the bones on the table and sorting them out.

You had to look back into all of the old files

that are still present.

There aren't very many.

Narrator: Since 2006, with the help of DNA,

she's identified five of those boys.

One last boy remains.

We need family who think they might have had a victim

of this terrible crime submit DNA.

Narrator: If the last nameless boy wasn't from the heights,

where did he come from?

Boys were disappearing across America,

and a thousand miles away,

a similar monster had just begun operating in plain sight.

He just hadn't been caught yet.

When John Wayne Gacy the clown

began his rampage in Chicago,

and when it was finally discovered

that he had numerous boys in the basement of his home,

you had to wonder

if Gacy was nothing more than a copycat of Dean Corll.

Most of the the boys that Gacy killed were street kids,

runaways, people who have been involved with the law.

Gacy's problem came when he picked a good kid to take.

Narrator: It's two weeks before Christmas.

The parents of 15-year-old Robert Piest

come into the Des Plaines police station

to report their son's disappearance.

It's only been a few hours, but they're worried.

The hippie era was ending.

I mean, it was not uncommon for kids to run away.

Tovar: Maybe they're out drinking.

Maybe that young man got lucky

with a young lady somewhere, you know.

It started off just as a simple missing person's, you know?

It wasn't a big deal at the time.

Narrator: Rob Piest worked part-time as a stock boy

at Nisson pharmacy in Des Plaines.

He worked the day shift and was wrapping up for the evening.

His mom had come to pick him up.

Albrecht: Actually, that was his mother's birthday,

and they're gonna do their birthday celebration.

Sullivan: At closing time, he just told her,

"mom, I'm gonna talk to this guy about a job."

He'd be right back.

And he never came back.

Narrator: The Piest family is adamant

Rob wouldn't leave his mom waiting,

especially on her birthday.

Sullivan: They knew that there was a man

by the name of John Gacy who Rob had talked to,

but they couldn't find him

or couldn't find anything about him.

Albrecht: And the officer that handled it,

he took the report and made a point

of talking to the juvenile division.

And a lot of times what happened, these kids

weren't entered into the computer as missings right away.

But he felt there was something different about this case.

Narrator: Still, the Piests are told nothing can be done

until the morning.

A missing-person report normally carries a 24-hour waiting period

before the police investigate.

The parents were out all night looking for anything

that they possibly could,

all the way from the priest at the Greek church

to Christmas-tree lots

to everything to try to find anybody who knew about it.

Narrator: The next morning,

Rob's parents are back at the police station

looking for an update... Anything.

Here's a young man who all of a sudden disappears,

and it's his mother's birthday.

He was not a problem in school, a good student.

Tovar: You know, in my job,

I've seen many, many dysfunctional families.

This was not one of them. This was a good family.

All seemed to care about each other.

It just didn't fit.

I did a criminal-history check on all the people

that were listed in the report.

A man called John Wayne Gacy had been in the drugstore

that night before.

We learned that he was a contractor.

He was doing some estimating or talking to the owner.

He was an ex-con out of Iowa, and he had a criminal history

which involved sodomy of a child.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

Sullivan: Gacy was convicted of having two boys in his house.

Handcuffed them to one of the big legs of the pool table,

and that's where he sodomized them.

Narrator: Gacy received a 10-year sentence,

but served only 18 months.

There was no sex registry in 1970,

so the conviction didn't follow him to Chicago.

Kozenczak: And when we heard that,

the hair literally stood up on the back of our necks.

This must be something a little more serious

than what we're thinking about here.

And that's what prompted us to go to Gacy's house

and confront him one-on-one.

So he opened the door. He was not very clean.

He wasn't a clean person. He was unshaven.

His clothes were dirty.

He started to tell me that his mother had just called him.

His uncle had died,

and he was helping his mother with funeral arrangements.

Once he found out we did not have a search warrant,

he got real belligerent.

So when we walked outside, we all agreed that this guy

knew more than what he was telling us.

Narrator: Gacy's behavior,

coupled with his sodomy conviction in Iowa,

strikes an ominous note,

and it's enough to convince a judge

to agree to a search warrant for Gacy's house.

Sullivan: I wanted to see if the police officers could find

anything that would show that there was a body there,

to show that there was a live body, hopefully,

and someone who was being held against his will.

Tovar: From the time we went in, we could tell that

he was marching to a different drummer

because the paint job, for example.

The hall was painted brown and then had, like,

zigzag gold lines going up and down through it.

I mean, it was really weird.

Clown pictures were everywhere. He had one right over his bed.

♪♪

And then he had junk stacked everywhere.

Narrator: They searched the house top to bottom.

Tovar: We found sex books, sex toys.

We found a board.

It's a 2x4 with holes at the end of it,

which could be used like old-fashioned stocks

where they used to butcher.

So it was some strange stuff.

Narrator: In a closet off the front room,

they found a trap door leading to a crawl space.

The place was a dirty, stinky place.

The water tank was very high in that neighborhood there,

so the sump pump was constantly going and the earth was muddy.

So we were looking for a mound of dirt, maybe,

if he had buried someone down there.

Narrator: But they find nothing.

However, other items scattered around the house raise questions

about the suburban contractor...

A photo receipt from Nisson pharmacy,

handcuffs,

various sets of car keys,

and a lot of police badges.

Kozenczak: And we found various jewelry and ID cards

and driver's licenses that didn't belong to Gacy.

Narrator: The Rob Piest case was taking a bigger

and disturbing turn.

That was the start of realizing that we were on to something,

a heck of a lot more than the disappearance of one kid.

♪♪

[ Crow caws ]

Narrator: Jewelry, high-school rings, ID bracelets,

driver's licenses, and dozens of police badges,

all found in contractor John Gacy's home,

none of it belonging to him,

and no sign of the missing teen Rob Piest.

Sullivan: We truly had hoped that he was alive

and that we might find him bound up in Gacy's house.

Narrator: Detectives widen their search.

They start by going back

and talking to everyone in the pharmacy

the night Rob disappeared.

We knew from talking to people that he had gone out

with John Wayne Gacy to get an application for a job.

John Wayne Gacy had been in the modeling company

called P.D.M. Painting, decorating, and maintenance.

Albrecht: He was offering him a summer job for $7.50 an hour.

So a 15-year-old kid,

and he was all anxious about turning 16 and buying a car.

Tovar: This young girl Kim,

she was working the counter up near the front door.

She was cold, and she borrowed Robert's jacket.

It was a nice, blue, down jacket.

Sullivan: When he was going out to see Gacy,

he said, "Kim, let me get my jacket back."

Tovar: He told her, "I'm going with this guy

to fill out an application."

A lot of these people actually didn't notice

anything suspicious.

Sullivan: There was absolutely no reason

to think that he wouldn't have come home.

[ Siren wailing ]

♪♪

Narrator: Despite Gacy's sodomy conviction in Iowa,

the 36-year-old suburban contractor

appears to be a likable, hardworking businessman.

The neighbors loved him. His associates loved him.

Albrecht: Gacy would have parties

around July 4th every year, and people that attended them

was the who's who of Chicago politics.

Narrator: He was a parade organizer

for the mayor of Chicago

and a Democratic precinct captain.

He seemed a model citizen.

He was very active in business

and very active with politics.

Sullivan: At one particular time,

there's a Polish day parade.

The first lady of the United States, Rosalynn Carter,

was in for the parade,

and he actually got up on the stage with her

and even had his picture taken with her.

♪♪

He was a certified clown

that would volunteer his time

to go to hospitals and entertain children.

Narrator: He calls himself pogo the clown,

and he took it seriously.

However, a dig into Gacy's past paints a different picture

than the model citizen in Chicago.

Tovar: Well, we interviewed people in Springfield, Iowa,

also, where he had lived.

He did not graduate from high school.

He went out to Las Vegas to work,

and while he was there, he worked for an ambulance company.

His job was picking up deceased remains

and delivering them to either

funeral homes of choice or whatever.

Well, they started finding some disturbing things

as that he was messing with the bodies.

He was necrophiliac, and he was having sex with the bodies

at night in the funeral home.

They discovered that because they found the clothing

on the bodies messed up and they approached him about it,

and I guess he confessed to it, so they fired him.

Narrator: Gacy was married twice and divorced twice.

He has two kids from the first marriage in Iowa

and lives alone.

Back at the Des Plaines police station,

detectives sift through the items taken from Gacy's house.

A high-school ring with three initials, j.A.S.,

gets their attention.

We were working on the Rob Piest disappearance.

And then all of a sudden, as you can imagine,

finding something like a class ring

that had initials on it.

Tovar: We learned that ultimately turned out

to belong to John Szyc.

Narrator: 19-year-old John Szyc was from Des Plaines

but was living in Chicago

when he went missing a year earlier in January 1977.

Tovar: We spoke to his mother, and she told us

he had been missing

and that his car was missing as well as a television.

We had seen a television that kind of, maybe matched

in the house.

We started digging for information

on other missing kids.

We found a list of employees, and we started checking on them,

started finding out that a lot of those were also missing.

Sullivan: How many other kids had he offered the same deal

as he was doing with Piest?

In other words, "come with me

and I'll double whatever you're making right now."

Narrator: Gacy's name comes up more than half a dozen times

in Chicago police reports,

ranging from kidnapping to rape and assault.

Chicago police did investigate,

but nothing came of any one of them.

Hachmeister: It was at that point, really,

turned everything upside down.

He was no longer, in my opinion, a person of interest.

He was definitely a suspect.

Rob Piest has been missing for four days,

and all eyes are on Gacy,

but the police need more evidence.

They put him on round-the-clock surveillance.

I was hoping that if, in fact,

he had done something with Rob Piest,

that he would lead us there.

This is the four of us that were on the surveillance.

Bob and Ron had the noon to midnight,

and Dave I had the midnight to noon.

Hachmeister: Our goal as a surveillance unit was to,

no matter what, keep him in view

so that if there's any evidence to be out there through Gacy,

he would not be able to destroy any of the evidence.

Surveillance work can be boring at certain times,

although I kind of had the personality for it.

I could sit and, you know, I had a lot of Patience

for something like that for one reason or another.

That first night, I sat by myself for quite a while.

This was an extremely cold day. We're in December.

It was so cold that I had to keep my car running.

When he came home, he could see the exhaust from my car

billowing up from the car,

so as he drove by, he knew that we had interest in him.

He spotted the car, and the first thing he did

was wave to me as he drove by.

So he knew right away that we were following him,

and we just had to make the best of it.

You'd think this guy is like a bad guy,

he's really gonna be a tough guy to deal with,

but he was just the opposite.

I mean, he welcomed us when we followed him into bars.

He would buy us beers.

Afterwards, we would go to restaurants,

he would invite us to his table.

We'd have breakfast with him.

He seemed like a great guy.

He seemed to be very concerned about Rob Piest,

saying he would do anything to help us out.

Lie-detector tests, do anything. He was very, very concerned.

And, matter of fact, my partner and I

would have to occasionally remind each other,

"hey, we've got to be really on our toes here."

♪♪

There was one time that we were following Gacy,

about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning,

he was checking on a job site.

On his way home, he was going through gay neighborhood,

and he happened to spot some guy walking down the street.

He just about turned his head totally around

looking at this young man.

You could tell that he was really wanting to do something,

but he couldn't do anything because we were so close to him.

He never talked to us about being gay.

I mean, he would always actually kind of go overboard

about saying, "wow, did you see that woman?

What a good-looking woman," you know,

and he would kind of go out of his way to mention

to us to make us think that he was straight as an arrow.

Narrator: His bluster extends

to the perks of working as pogo the clown.

Albrecht: Gacy, the cocky bragger that he was,

he looked at us and said, "you know what?"

You could sit on a woman's lap, you know,

and you could sit there and talk to them and feel them up

or whatever you want to do,

"and clowns do get away with that."

And he said, you know... He looked at us

and he said, "you know, clowns...

Clowns can get away with murder."

♪♪

Narrator: It's been five days since Rob Piest disappeared

and Des Plaines detectives lean on Gacy's employees,

hoping they'll provide some clue about the teen's whereabouts.

Hachmeister: He had two really loyal followers

who worked for him, Michael Rossi and David cram.

Narrator: The young men had been working for Gacy for two years.

Sullivan: One was more cooperative than the other.

I wouldn't say that either of them were real cooperative.

Kozenczak: I think he saw Gacy was in trouble,

and he didn't want to be brought into it any more than he had to.

And he started giving us information about employees

who come to work one day

and then the next day they were just gone.

Narrator: Rossi mentions one kid in particular

who worked for Gacy two years earlier,

who never showed up for work one day

and never picked up his last paycheck.

Gregory Godzik was 17

when he took a part-time job at P.D.M. Construction in 1976.

I remember the day when he came home and he said to my mom,

"you know, I met this man, and he's offering me a new job."

And my mother said, "oh, my god, what kind of job?"

Finish school so you can go to college.

And at the time, he was making $2.25 an hour, and he said,

"mom, this man's offering me $5 an hour."

And my mother said, "I don't want you to do that."

Of course, every 17-year-old,

you know, they're gonna do what they're gonna do.

And I remember a couple days later he said,

"mom, I got this job from that man I was telling you about."

Narrator: Three weeks later, Gregory disappeared.

[ Dog barking ]

Godzik: He was going out on a date with a new girlfriend

or somebody.

The next morning, my mother said,

"did you see your brother?" And I said, "no, why?"

Because every time my brother would come home,

he'd always, "mom, I'm home," or give her a kiss.

And she said, "he didn't come in."

And I said, "that's odd."

And then it was like two days after that,

they found my brother's car in a parking lot, and in the car,

there was his driver's license and his wallet and...

And even my mother said, you know,

"why would he leave his car? It was a prized possession."

My mother went to Gacy's house that week.

She said, "well, he should know

if he was supposed to be working."

And he said, "oh, yeah, I saw him a while ago,

but, oh, yeah, he left a message on my machine."

My mother said, "oh, well, let's hear the machine."

He goes, "oh, I erased that."

And he said, "oh, 17-year-olds",

"they run away, but they'll be back," you know.

My mother said, "nope, that's not my son.

My son would never do anything like that."

But you have your hands tied.

What are you gonna do? You only can do so much.

You hire a private investigator, you go to the police.

They don't... you know, "we have other things."

You know, "we're doing the best we can."

And you just live with it.

Narrator: Three teens... Rob Piest, Gregory Godzik,

and the owner of the ring found in Gacy's house,

17-year-old John Szyc...

All missing, all tied to John Gacy.

Then an item, a slip of paper found in Gacy's trash,

becomes a turning point in the search for Rob Piest.

Hachmeister: We recovered a photo receipt

from Nisson pharmacy, and it only had numbers on it,

so you didn't know who it was issued to.

This receipt, and the film finally came back,

and the numbers corresponded to Kim Byers,

who was an employee with Rob Piest at Nisson pharmacy.

Sullivan: She put that receipt in Rob's pocket,

and then Rob came and got the check.

Narrator: That's when Rob left the pharmacy

to talk to Gacy about a job.

Proof Rob's jacket was in Gacy's house.

So where is the teen?

Investigators keep the pressure on Gacy's two closest employees.

Both Mike Rossi and David cram

had lived in Gacy's house for a time.

Hachmeister: The investigators, they were nonstop.

They'd follow these individuals everywhere,

interview them at work, at home.

And they were starting to get tired of seeing the police.

Narrator: One of the employees agrees to come to the station

and answer more questions.

Gacy had had these kids

digging in his crawl space in the basement.

They were digging where Gacy would be able to put some lime,

which would absorb odors.

This was kind of odd to us, you know.

Why would you do something like that?

But they explained it away,

that Gacy said that there was a sewage issue

and that it was drainage for that sewage issue.

Kozenczak: And then I finally said,

"could you just tell me, please,

if I was gonna look for Robert, where should I look for him?"

And he put his head down and he said,

"in John's crawl space."

So we knew at that point that we had to get another warrant

and go back into Gacy's house,

into his crawl space and start looking again

because apparently, we missed something the first time around.

Narrator: The surveillance team has been tailing Gacy

for more than a week.

Hachmeister: At this point, he hadn't shaved for a couple days.

He's slouching. His whole demeanor is different.

He was doing some uppers and downers.

It had to be killing him on the inside,

knowing that we were not gonna let up on this investigation.

At this point, we were like dogs with a bone.

Narrator: On the morning of December 21st,

they follow Gacy to his local gas station,

where they witness him handing over drugs to the attendant.

Hachmeister: When he left the gas station...

[ Tires squeal ] ...He took off like a wild man.

So when we pulled him out of the car,

I kind of pushed him around a little bit and said,

"John, you're under arrest

for possession of and delivery of marijuana."

He didn't really say anything.

He just seemed to be staring into space.

Narrator: That same day, the second search warrant arrives.

Sullivan: We had to get down to the crawl space

because that's where the two kids

who worked for him said they were digging trenches.

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

Tovar: I think it was Phil Bettiker

who started digging.

And he found a left femur.

So he kept digging, found a second left femur.

Kept digging, found a third one.

Sullivan: That's when I said, "stop there."

And we called in the medical examiner,

and he identified that as a human bone.

♪♪

Narrator: Four days before Christmas,

and John Wayne Gacy sits in the Des Plaines police station.

Seven miles away, police uncover bones in his basement,

bones belonging to more than one body.

[ Truck beeping ]

These bodies were decayed for the most part.

Robert Piest had only been missing for 10 days.

So we knew for a fact that this was not Robert Piest.

It was somebody else.

Hachmeister: I get a phone call.

They said, "we have dead bodies in a crawl space."

I turned to Gacy, and I said,

"John, you're under arrest for murder."

I was elated. I had to try to be calm and cool.

But it was like the most unbelievable thing

that ever happened to me... Undescribable.

Tovar: He knew at this point

that we were gonna find all the bodies.

And we told him we'd already started digging.

Albrecht: Gacy looks at me, and he says,

"were you guys in a crawl space?"

I says, "yeah, John. Why?"

He says, "well, that's what the lime was for."

I said, "well, what do you mean? What do you mean the lime was?"

"To cover the smell."

And he said something really ridiculous.

He said, "well, I don't want you guys messing my carpets up,

so I'll draw you a map of where everything is."

This drawing is a photocopy of

Gacy's crawl space, that he made this drawing,

and you can see in one spot here,

there's a rectangle with an "x" on it.

That's where the first body was buried.

Narrator: Over the next few hours,

Gacy confesses to killing dozens of boys and young men

and burying their bodies under his house.

In chilling detail,

he tells them the murders started in 1972.

The first one was self-defense.

This kid tried to come after him with a knife in the morning

after they had spent the night together having sex.

He knifed him.

Narrator: What Gacy describes goes beyond self-defense.

Albrecht: At that time, he was married, still.

His wife was still there.

He mentioned... it was either mother's day or Easter

that he told his wife, "this is the last day

that we're ever gonna have any type of sexual contact."

Narrator: It was the start of a three-year killing spree,

picking up most of his victims at night,

cruising around Chicago's gay area, Bughouse square.

He had this car that he outfitted

to make it look like it was a police car.

And he was able to stop kids and tell them to get in the car.

Narrator: This ruse was part of his well-honed routine.

♪♪

Once he had them in the car, he drove to his house.

There, he plied the kids with alcohol and drugs

and entertained them with his handcuff trick,

the same trick used by Dean Allen Corll, the Candyman,

on his 29 victims in Houston just a few years earlier.

Unwittingly, these young men would handcuff themselves,

and once they were incapacitated like that,

he would do the rope trick.

Tovar: When he would turn them around,

he'd take a piece of rope with the loops on the end,

loop them together,

put a piece of wood through it as a tourniquet,

and start tightening it around their neck.

Hachmeister: He had it down to such a science

that he could get it to where he could rest the stick

on the individual's back and it wouldn't unwind,

and then he could go around and do different things in the house

and go back and torture the young man and kill him.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

We tried to remain as calm as we could listening to this

and how he tortured these young men.

It actually made the hair on the back of your head stand up.

It was unbelievable.

Narrator: Gacy admits to raping and killing

more than 30 young men in his home from 1972 to 1978.

He was flippant about it. To him, it was a game.

♪♪

By now, word spread around Chicago...

Bodies in a basement on Summerdale Avenue.

The police had information where the bodies were

and were going to bring them out.

I, like all the other reporters in town,

rushed to the scene and watched it happen.

Tovar: The medical examiner said he wanted us to dig

in a archeological-type situation

so we could verify where everybody was taken.

So each one of us got a section of the house to dig.

Mine was the kitchen.

Eventually, the whole floor was completely taken up

so that the investigators had enough room

in a narrow crawl space to be able to dig.

Tovar: Whoever was in the hole digging up the body

would put the pieces of flesh and bones

into a body bag down in the hole,

and then you'd give them to someone who was above you

on the floor level.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

We took extreme care to honor and respect the remains.

Jacobson: The story was huge from the minute

we first saw or heard of the first body

and then subsequently, everyone thereafter,

the story just got bigger.

Police digging under a house in Des Plaines, Illinois,

found four more bodies today.

That brings the total to nine.

Man: They found two more bodies today,

long dead and decomposed,

man #2: Six bodies bring the total found to 15.

Narrator: Each day, the crowds grew.

Hundreds stood outside, reporters and onlookers

all waiting for the nightly body count.

Human nature loves bad crime stories.

This couldn't have been any worse.

So everybody was interested.

[ Indistinct chatter ]

You have to realize, you know, there were a few TV stations

and everybody carried the same thing,

and when it came on, I do remember my mother said,

"your brother's one of them."

Narrator: By December 28, 21 bodies were removed

from the house on Summerdale Avenue.

Gacy's map was proving accurate.

Still, there was the question of Rob Piest,

the young man whose disappearance 10 days earlier

led to all of this.

He never seemed to be rattled about anything.

The only time I saw him get irritated

was when detective Adams asked him about Robert Piest,

whether he had suffered.

Narrator: In chilling detail, Gacy tells them what happened

that night at the Nisson pharmacy.

Rob Piest's death was like so many others.

Gacy's pattern remained the same.

Tovar: I-55 is a major interstate

going south from here,

and it crosses the Des Plaines river.

And what Gacy did to Robert Piest

and three other victims

is he'd pull up to the side of the bridge

and turn on that red light he had.

So people driving by assumed there was a police officer,

and they just wouldn't pay any attention.

And he'd open the trunk, take the body,

and just throw it over the side into the river.

♪♪

Narrator: 29 on his property, four in the river,

all young men, all raped and strangled.

John Wayne Gacy was now "the killer clown"

and America’s most prolific killer.

By new year's day, dental records helped

police identify six victims, including 19-year-old John Szyc,

who disappeared two years earlier.

His high-school ring was found in Gacy's house.

Gregory Godzik's family also got the knock on the door.

I remember they come in, they make you sit down.

And they said, "Mr. Godzik and Mrs. Godzik,

I would like to tell you your son

is one of the official victims of John Wayne Gacy."

And they turn around and they walk out.

And that's when I said to my mother,

"I told you he'd come home.

I just didn't think it would be this way."

Narrator: It was the early spring before Rob Piest's body

was recovered from the Des Plaines river.

By then, Gacy is charged with 33 counts of murder.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

He pleads not guilty by reason of insanity,

now claiming it was his alter ego,

Jack, who did the murders, not him.

By making a statement to us about a split personality,

he really cemented himself in with that defense

by the time it came to trial.

It didn't work.

Narrator: The trial lasts five weeks.

Woman: It took the jury of seven men and five women

less than two hours to find

John Wayne Gacy guilty of murdering 33 young men.

Gacy was convicted of murdering more people

than anyone else in U.S. history.

I feel that the jury certainly sent a loud message to him

and others who might want to do it in that manner by the fact

that they only deliberated for an hour and 45 minutes.

Woman: It was an emotional time for relatives of the victims,

and many, like Ken Piest, whose brother was killed,

want revenge.

There's only one solution now.

What is that?

I want to see him go to the chair.

I hope he does get the electric chair.

Then it'll make everybody feel better.

I'm sure it'll make the other mothers feel better, too.

Narrator: Gacy is sentenced to death.

Revenge... that he killed my son and that we're gonna kill him.

And, you know, it's a life for a life,

is what it boils down to.

Tovar: We started out with a missing

15-year-old boy in a suburban town.

And then it just grew to what it grew.

♪♪

Albrecht: They were just young kids,

15 to 17 years old,

and got taken advantage of by a vicious, evil man.

♪♪

Sullivan: Not only did he have his victims,

but he affected so many, so many people.

A mom and a dad,

maybe a brother and a sister, maybe more than that.

Friends.

Now take that and multiply that by 33 that we know of.

♪♪

♪♪

Tovar: Had he not taken Robert Piest,

who knows how long he could have kept going on?

♪♪

Godzik: My father was very religious.

He was very catholic with the rosaries,

and he said, "god would never do this to me, but he did."

And from that point on,

my father never went back to church again after that.

Never.

♪♪

We were lucky enough that in two years,

we found closure in our family,

but other people could be wondering, "where are they?"

Who are they?" That's the sad part.

♪♪

Moran: I grew up in Chicago.

There wasn't really a person in the Chicago area

that did not know of the Gacy killings.

Narrator: Lieutenant Jason Moran was a kid in 1978

when Chicago's most notorious murder spree unraveled.

He never dreamed, when he became head

of Cook County's cold case unit,

that the killer clown's case would be one of them.

Lieutenant Moran came to me and said,

"hey, you know, the largest cold case is the Gacy case."

He was convicted of all those cases,

but there was eight boys who were never identified.

Narrator: In 2011, armed with DNA technology,

lieutenant Moran set out

to identify those last eight young men.

Moran: As soon as we announced the reopening of the case,

I mean, it was absolutely overwhelming, you know,

because there could only be eight.

There was only eight unidentified victims,

so there could only be eight families

looking for their missing loved one.

Within a couple of days, we received over 100 calls

from family members of missing persons all over the country,

and I was becoming a national repository

for missing kids from the '70s.

Narrator: The killer clown

and mass murderer Dean Allen Corll,

the Candyman in Houston,

awakened America to a nightmare hidden in its own backyard.

Moran: When you do criminal investigations

for any amount of time,

you know that there's always more to a case

than you hear in court or that you hear in the media.

Narrator: And there was a lot more.

Gacy and Corll were two piranhas in a much larger pond,

a hidden network, a web stretching across America.

This was a guy that just could not stop.

Woman: The raid last night netted police

box after box of pictures of young males available

to older men for homosexual activities.

This was a pond of perversity.

Narrator: Next time on "the clown & the Candyman"...

And this John David Norman was absolutely a traveling criminal.

Man: He sent boys to service clients throughout the states.

They came from all walks of life.

Man #2: They would infiltrate organizations

like the boy scouts, like big brothers,

police departments.

Man #3: This was a national scheme.

They were supplying boys all over the country.

It's a very good cover for these individuals because

they look like "philanthropists,"

that they're helping young boys.

Grooming is like psychological and emotional quicksand.

When you realize what's happening,

you're already neck deep and you can't get out of it.

>>>>oakislandtk www.opensubtitles.org