Pogo The CLown

 I was 8 years old and spent a lot of time in front of my mom and dad's old black and white tv they had in there room. Most of the time it was watching reruns of The Brady Bunch and Different Strokes. But during Christmas break of 1978, the black and white glow was full of police who have begun one of the grisliest excavations in the history of American crime. Probably the scariest clown to affect my life would be John Wayne Gacy.

For weeks to come, Chicago and the nation watched in horror as the crawl space under the home of 36-year-old John Wayne Gacy, a one-time children's clown, was revealed to be a makeshift tomb. The bodies of 29 young men were eventually recovered from his Norwood Park neighborhood home. Four others were found in Illinois rivers.

The first victim died in 1972, the last in 1978, only 10 days before Gacy's arrest. DesPlaines is only an hour and a half away from me so as a child I was frighted. I think this is when the world changed. We could no longer just run around the neighborhood alone always had to tell our parents where we were going. For the rest of the school year parents took us to school we could no longer walk. We all changed.

 For decades, authorities could not identify eight of the victims. According to published reports, Gacy was a diagnosed psychopath who did not express any remorse for his crimes.

 His final statement to his lawyer before his execution was that killing him would not compensate for the loss of others and that the state was murdering him. His final spoken words were "Kiss my ass."