John Wayne Gacy was among the very few cases of serial killers who have been caught and apprehended in court. Having been found guilty on thirty-three counts of murder, he remains to be the person to have had the highest number of murders in the United States of America (Linedecker, 1993). The sheer numbers of body counts that have been found and linked to John Wayne begs one to wonder at type person who he was. Profiling, therefore, becomes important in understanding John Wayne deeply (Turvey, 2011). It also presents an opportunity to understand other serial killers based on the characteristics that might have been observed on a single person (Turvey, 2011).
In essence, one can simply sum up the life of John Wayne as that of a person living a double life. He was the happy, contented family man who lived with his neighbors harmoniously; on the other hand, he was the violent homosexual who preferred young teenage boys to prey on. One of the neighbors goes on to describe him as being brilliant and incapable of committing murder, yet John Wayne himself admitted to having killed all those young men while violently raping them (Linedecker,1993).
He engaged in political and charitable activities within his community and numerous occasions he dressed as a clown for parties making the people who associated with him to get a totally different picture of him. The successful contractor scenario allowed him to hire the teenage boys who later became his victims. He used the position of being a contractor as a means of targeting the young boys. The characteristics of generosity, hardworking nature, devoted family man that people knew of, fell off on the new realization of the serial killings.
References
Linedecker, C. L. (1993). The Man Who Killed Boys: The John Wayne Gacy, Jr. Story. Macmillan.
Turvey, B. E. (2011). Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis. Burlington: Elsevier Science.
