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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with Your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening.
John Wayne Gacy raped, tortured, and murdered thirty three boys and young men, bearing most of them in the crawl space under his Chicago home. Karen Conti was in high school at the time, watching the bodies being removed on the television news. Fourteen years pass through a twist of fate, Conti, now a young and inexperienced attorney, is called upon to handle Gasey's final death row appeals. The serial killer soon
becomes her most famous, difficult, and haunting client. Thirty years after Gasey's execution, Conti looks back through the eyes of a seasoned professional on the legal and media circus that ensued, and her countless hours of detailed conversation with the killer clown. We hear for the first time about Gasey's gruesome bodybook. Were there more victims conspirators involved in the murders? What secrets were buried with him? If one were to ask Conty,
How could you represent such a monster? She would respond, What you really want to know is what was he like? This book answers that question. The book that we're featuring this evening is Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy defending America's most evil serial killer on Death Row with my special guest attorney, media personality and author Karen Kanti. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Karen Conti, Hi Dan, thank you for having me.
Thank you so much, and congratulations on this book, Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy. Extraordinary book. Thank you so much.
I'm glad you read it. I'm glad you liked it.
Now tell us where you were personally and professionally in October nineteen ninety three and your partner Greg Adamski before you take us to October nineteen ninety three and the fateful drive that you had listening to the radio with Greg.
Well, I've been a Chicago area in native my whole life, and I went away to college and law school also in the state, and at that time in the ninety three, I had been out of law school about six or seven years, and I had never handled a murder case. I had never handled a death penalty case, and I would say that, you know, when you're six or seven years out, you're still inexperienced attorney. I was practicing law with Greg who was my life partner and law partner.
We had a boutique law firm in Chicago, which means it's a small firm. We did criminal defense, we did civil litigation. We did a variety of things, and had argued before the US Supreme Court a couple of years back, so we had gotten some high profile cases and had handled some important things, but nothing as significant as a death row appeal.
Yes, you're right that you were litigators, so you were used to going to trial, not just drafting wills and contracts.
That's right. There's really kind of two kinds of law. One is where you're drafting things, whether you're cutting a deal in a business setting, where you're papering a deal, or you're writing, like you said, a will or a trust. But litigation is a whole separate area. It's two people suing each other for money, damages or obviously criminal work, which is the government bringing charges against a person. So it's a much more active practice. It's very contentious and to me it's more exciting.
Now. Tell us about this drive home to suburban Chicago and you're with Greg and you're listening to the radio and you hear an announcement. Tell us about what is announced and the conversation that ensues.
Well, John Wayne Gacy, just by way of background, was a serial killer back in the seventies. He was arrested in nineteen seventy nine, tried in nineteen eighty, and was sentenced to death. So flash I had. This is fourteen years and Illinois really didn't have a lot of death penalty, a lot of executions going on. In fact, there was only one in my lifetime, and it was one where the defendant wanted to be executed, so there was no hoopla.
So Greg and I are driving home to oak Park, which is the first suburb over from Chicago, and we hear on the radio that Gaysey's execution date has been set from May tenth, nineteen ninety four, and we both looked at each other and we said, Gaysey's going to be executed. I didn't know Illinois was using the death penalty. I mean, we didn't even think about it. We thought about it, and we kind of recounted the horrible crimes and where we were when those crimes were being uncovered.
I was in high school at the time. People were taking bets about how many bodies were going to be taken out of his home. It was terrifying. It changed the fabric of Chicago. As a young person, it was really impactful because I didn't understand what that meant and that these kinds of people actually existed. But now it's fourteen years later, and I turned to Greg and I said, well, would wouldn't it be unbelievably interesting if we represented him?
And we just laughed it off because obviously we were not death penalty lawyers and we had no connection with Gasey. But that changed very soon after that conversation.
Yes, you talk about very soon, you say, one week later, and two days after the execution date is announced, you get the call. Tell us what Greg says and what was the call.
Well, a call came from some family member who was kind of doing Gaysey's work and trying to put together some legal defense for him. But strangely, the call came in and what Gasey wanted was a lawyer to help him with some civil matters that he had pending. They were trying. The government was trying to get him to pay for his incarceration. There's a law in Illinois that says that if you are able to pay for the cost of incarceration, the government can bring a lawsuit for
a good reason. He was evil, he was guilty, and he was not unrepentant, and Gacy was making money on his paintings, and the prison wanted to bring a lawsuit and they did, and Gacy wanted us to represent him because we had done some First Amendment work before the US Supreme Court. Frankly, Dan, we had no desire to represent him in anything civil. Why would you care about your money when your life is being threatened in seven months time. But Greg was like, Oh, we're not going
to do this. And I was like, we have to. We have to go down to death row and we have to see what death row is like, and we have to talk to the most evil man in the history of our country at that time. He was the most prolific serial killer ever. And I was so curious. I wanted to look evil in the eye. I wanted to see what caused that, what caused him to be he was? Who is he?
Is?
He normal? I just wanted that experience. I'd read everything about his case. I read a lot about his psychology. I was fascinated. So a few days later there we were going down six and a half hours south from Chicago to visit John wayn Gazy.
You also talk a little bit later in the book, though, that you came to this honestly there's a curiosity as an attorney, but you also talk about your background and what you term in an obsession. Tell us about that.
Well, I've always been fascinated by serial killers, and now I'm very relieved to know that I'm not alone. People are very fascinated by serial killers, as you know, and I think people are fascinated by the best of the best, you know, the Olympic athletes that we see, and people are likewise fascinated by the worst of the worst. And when I was a kid, I used to watch all the shows and read everything about Jack the Ripper and later on about Ted Bundy, and so I really was
fascinated with those stories. And I knew quite a bit about all of them, including John Gacy because he was a homeboy, so you know, we had read all the books about him that were written. There was a. There was a couple there were a couple of movies docu dramas with Brian Denihey, that I had watched, and so I knew that story pretty well.
Now, you say you were sixteen years old at that time, in nineteen seventy eight, but even at that time you regarded the death penalty as wrong.
Tell us why I always thought the death penalty was wrong even before I was sixteen, because I do remember having conversations with my parents, who were both in favor of it, and I would argue all the time. I think I was a born lawyer, but you know, I just kept saying, it doesn't make sense if you kill somebody and that's wrong, how could the prosecutors kill you too? That makes no sense. That it's wrong for that guy to do it, it's wrong for the other people to
do it. And that was my logic, and that's always been my logic. And when I started taking classes in college about criminology and then in law school, I became more and more entrenched in my position that the death penalty is something I don't believe in. I don't think it deters crime. I think it's too expensive, it puts
a focus on the criminal and not the victims. It's racially unjust in a lot of ways for a lot of defendants, and it's not applied equally throughout the United States, and the rest of the civilized world doesn't have it when but I never handled a death penalty case, so I didn't have reason to shout out about it or to represent somebody against it, But it was something that was always ingrained in me that it was just wrong.
Now let's get back to this adventure, and you're going to see with Greg to visit John Wayne Gacy. And with everything you know about the case and everything you say that you were affected by this case and this story for so many years. So with that, you're going to Minard Correctional Center to visit John Wayne Gacy. Tell us about the experience.
Well, all the preconceived notions that I had were kind of thrown out the window, because first of all, you think that you're going to be behind plexiglass like in the movies. Well, that wasn't the case in death row in Illinois at the time. We were led into this bullpen where all of the people on death row who had visitors that day, whether it was a minister a girlfriend or a lawyer. They were all milling about walking
around free range. And as a lawyer in Chicago, we kind of know who the serial killers are and who the people on death row are. I mean, I'm saying, oh my gosh, that guy killed four people. That guy killed three, this guy used to eat body parts. I mean, these are like the most horrific people you can imagine. And here we are walking in you know, thinking to myself, Gaysey is probably the least intimidating of all these people here. So that was the biggest shock. And you know, seeing
Gaycy was also putting your preconceived notions away. You have this idea in your head that I'm going to be able to tell how evil he is what I don't know, a tattoo on his head, that he's going to have fangs dripping with blood. I mean, you don't really think that's going to be the case, but you think I can distinguish an evil person from a non evil person. Gacy was short. He's five foot nine. He was kind of dumpy. He was you know, had that prison pallor I call it, which is for years of not going
outside and eating crummy food. And he was just not intimidating whatsoever.
So you are curious and you want you don't quite understand why he would want to file these this make these filings with an imminent execution in the wings. So you want some explanation of why you would do that, and so does Greg. But tell us about the conversation and tell us about overall when it came to you that you needed to be involved in his case. But in as far as the death penalty went, well, it came.
To realize that Geese was very oppositional and very confrontational, and he made a lot of bad decisions. Like that's probably the mildest thing I could say about John Gaysey. He you know, he didn't know what was good for him, He didn't know where he should focus his energy, and he was really fixated on this lawsuit brought by the government, and you know, we talked about it, and we talked about possible defenses, and Greg and I were both really
not interested in representing him on that. I mean, we weren't going to get paid, so like, what would be the purpose of doing that. It's just spinning your wheels on something. And so but we used the time to talk to him and we chatted with him. Gacy was very glib, he was very engaging, he was very funny. We talked to him a little bit about some of his appeals in the past and about his life on
death row, which we were very interested in. We dined together on prison affair, which was really disgusting, and so at the end of it we didn't promise to do anything. We told him we were going to think about it. But as soon as we left the prison, I turned to Greg and I said, we have to get on the death penalty team. I don't care about his civil actions. I want to be part of the fight to have the execution lifted. And again, just for your listeners, Dan,
we never thought about getting him out of prison. It was not about exoneration. It was not about letting him go free. That was never going to happen, and that was never our goal. The goal was simply to not have him executed.
So Greg undertook that and you were you were to convince Gacy that you could be involved along with Greg in the death penalty fight.
Right the next day, I got on the phone with Gasey and I told him, you know, we'll help you with your civil stuff, but we need to be on this team. You need help. You have two excellent death penalty lawyers already engaged. I said, we can help them. We have resources, we have law clerks, we have some experience and appellet work, and we want to be on that team because we think it's important to try to
save your life. And strangely, Gasey didn't want us on that team, and so I had to convince him that was in his best interest to have more hands on deck than fewer, which was the most bizarre thing in the world that I have to convince a serial killer that I'm going to lend my support to his team, and he's fighting me on it. So but I finally convinced him that it was a good idea.
You said they had two experienced death penalty attorneys, and so, needless to say, Greg did convince him those two that you would join forces, didn't he?
Right?
Yeah, you know, when you have a team of lawyers, you have a lot of egos. Mine probably the least of the of the four of us, but you know, everyone wants to do it their way, and it really does make sense to have one lawyer kind of take the lead and create the plan and then have people
execute it on it. Otherwise too many cooks kind of thing, right, But so so Greg, who had a sizeable ego, you know, had to you know, basically back down a little bit and take the lead from these other two lawyers who were clearly more experienced than both of us were.
So everybody's divvied up into specific roles. What is your specific role in this team?
Well, everyone worked on the appeals, including me. I took the role as sort of the spokesperson because one of the things, one of my goals is that the death penalty is really largely based upon public opinion. Over the years, it's waxed and waned in popularity. After World War Two, the approval rate plummeted because of the Holocaust and things
like that. So I thought that if I could make the statement that the death penalty is wrong, even for John Wayne Gacy, I was not only advocating for Gaycy, but I was also advocating for other people on death row, not only in Illinois but other states, to make the statement that it's racially unjust that people get wrongfully executed all the time. Gaysey didn't have any of those defenses, but other people did. And I thought that we can just move the ball down the court just a little
bit to try to make that statement. So I was out there at the press, I was doing a lot of interviews. I had all my statistics, and I tried not to be preachy about it, because everyone has an opinion about these kinds of issues, like the death penalty. But I really thought if I could educate the public a little bit, maybe I could move the ball. And so that was my main thrust.
At the same time, you were very familiar with the crimes of John Wayne Gacy. You referred to a book called Buried Dreams, and you got Greg up to speed via the details that contained in that book. But you wanted the truth from John Wayne Gacy, and you wanted some answers to how this could have happened, and you asked him those relevant questions.
Yeah, Bury Dreams. It might be out of print now, but it is really the best book on the gay sy crimes, and it has a lot about the Gaycy trial and about Gaysey's background. It's very well done. Gasey confessed to the crimes when he was first arrested. My understanding is that he had escalated as a lot of serial killers do what he needed to satisfy him. At first in frequency did not work anymore. So he was
really getting out of control. And there was one night he killed three boys, abducted one, brought him home, went back out three times. So it was I think it was wearing on him, and I think he was relieved when he was finally caught, and so that relief resulted in him explaining what he did. He had names of some of them, he had almost a photographic memory of where he buried them in his basement and his crawl space.
And but thereafter he started denying that he ever confessed and told everyone who would listen that he's the victim and he didn't kill and of them except the first one, and that was self defense. And that was just Gacy lying and manipulating, which is very much par for the course for a sociopath. But you're right, Dan, I did.
I did try to ask him of those questions, and frankly, it wasn't even relevant to my representation because most of our issues related to the method of execution and things like that as opposed to actual innocence, because we're you know, that was that ship had already sailed, but I wanted to know, John, if you're lying, you're lying to me, like how did all of those young men and boys get buried in your house? If you didn't do it, come on, ga, he tell me, you know, and he
just wouldn't address it. He had all these different read between the lines, theories about who else could have done it, but it was all just bs.
You know.
That was Gaysey in denial about what he did.
It is interesting the things he did eventually tell you regarding filming again, some shocking information in your book in that I'd never read this before at all, that you talked about investigating Gaycy being out of town and some good evidence that he was out of town at several of the murder dates, and also tell us a little bit about that information.
Yeah, and I'm going to kind of gloss over some of it because I do want people to read it, because that really is one of the I would say first times maybe someone has made these claims. But Gacy kept telling us he was out of town during some of the crimes, and we kept thinking, you're lying again like you always do. He said, go get the records therein the storage unit, the evidence unit. So we went there and we got his business records, and he kept
meticulous maniacal records because gets how Geesey was. And it had receipts, and it had dates, and it had his contracts that he had with different organizations where he was building or rehabbing certain ice cream shops and drug stores. And sure enough, there were several times where he was clearly out of town when the boy or man went missing. And even if you took a few days on either side of it to say, like maybe they were wrong about the date, he was not in town anywhere near
when these kids were missing. The next part of that was, you know, there were two young men living with Casey at the time after his second wife moved out, and they forced these two young men were apparently having sex with him. They were working for him, and they testified a trial that they actually dug the trenches under the crawl space. Their contention was they didn't know Gaycy was murdering people, and they never buried the bodies, but rather
they just they just dug the trenches. All right. To me, that makes no sense. How do you how do you how do you dig trenches and not know why you're digging trenches. Gaycy was so poortly he couldn't have gotten out in that crawl space, especially carrying bodies and laying them like lined up. It was unbelievable. My clear belief to my dying day is that those two young men helped Gacy or actually committed some of those murders.
Wow, that's incredible. Let's get to what he said about what could be some form of rationale to why this all happened, And that's the relationship he had with his father.
Yeah, he had a father who was an alcoholic and who was very abusive mentally, emotionally, and physically. He beat Gacy in the basement of all places, which might be telling from a psychological standpoint. His mother was a very lovely woman, but passive. But this at the time, this was going on nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, This was not a you know, this was not a typical because that was the time where women stayed at home and men went out and they drank too much and they you know,
they spanked their kids. And I'm not saying it was the best upbringing, but it certainly people with that type of upbringing didn't kill thirty three people. He did have a situation to situations where he was sexually abused when he was young. And he also had a couple of head injuries, and I talk about that in my book, having access to his family members who detailed some of these facts that I don't know that anyone ever really
talked about. And as we know when you study true crime and you study death penalty cases in particular, sometimes head injuries when you're young can affect a part of your brain that has to do with empathy and also impulse control. And if you look at the Hillside Strangler and Son of Sam and many, many, many of these serial killers I had serious, if not one, but two head injuries when they were young. So you combine all those things, and then you also add to it that
Gacy was probably a homosexual. He started to understand that, and that was definitely at odds with how his father wanted him to be and how the Catholic Church wanted him to be. This was a different time where this was not an acceptable thing to be. So all of those things and maybe the guilt of feeling those feelings. The psychologist will say that maybe he was trying to kill himself each time he killed one of these victims.
You talk about not acceptable at that time, that's certain in society there was no acceptance of homosexuality. But the father was very specific saying you're going to grow up to be a queer, and was admonished him for all of the things that were not masculine, which John Wayne Gacy seemed to enjoy and had, has you right, a pretty good relationship with as sisters at that time and
his mother, so it was much more. Again, it was a shame, a guilt, and it had to it seemed to have a major factor in this when he denies as even a homosexual later on.
Absolutely, and just think about it for your listeners who don't remember who John Wayne was. But he was the macho cowboy you know of the movies, and his father named him John Wayne Gacy because he was thinking his son, his only son, was going to be this macho guy who likes sports and hunting and all those things. Gasey wanted nothing to do with it. He wanted to stay home with his mother and cook and garden and do
those kinds of things, and he just was. His father was relentless about criticizing him for that.
Let's get to what you and Greg are proposing to do to extend John Wayne Gacy's life. Tell us what would be successful in your fight for John Wayne Gacy and what you employ, what you're looking for, and the kinds of things that you're doing to defend him in this death penalty suit.
Once the death date is set, and that was set before we met him, all of the traditional appeals have been exhausted. So there's state appeals and it goes to the federal court, to the US Supreme Court, comes back down. There are all kinds of tangent issues, and so it's a whole medley of appeals and those were all done. So by the time we got to it, we had to be creative, and you know, we had to attack
the method of execution. We had to say that it was inhumane, we had to say it was against international treaty. We we you know, made all the arguments we possibly could.
But the problem was that because Gacy was literally the most prolific serial killer ever in the history of the country, not just Illinois, and he was so unrepentant, and he was selling stuff from jail and making money on his crimes, and everyone hated this guy and even people who said I don't believe in the death penalty, They're like the
gaycy exception is, yeah, he should be executed. So what I'm saying is that when the judges got these appeals, even though they were very well researched, we had, you know, they were very well written, they were well presented, the judges were hearing nothing of it. No elected judge is ever going to reverse anything in a case involving John Wayne Gacy. They would be not only not re elected, but they probably would be physically assaulted. This was how
high the tension was in Illinois at the time. So even though we were making some arguments that may have worked with other defendants, they were going nowhere with John Wayne Gacy.
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So tell us about John Wayne Gacy because you travel back in the book to his execution date because of it's on the verge in nineteen ninety four and John Wayne Gacy on death row, and tell us a little bit more about your experiences. You talk about how things had changed in your legal career. But the attitude you say from judges and from any men and other attorneys was very, very interesting and disconcerting for you.
I naively thought that everyone would understand that we were just doing our jobs and that everyone deserves a defense, especially when the ultimate punishment, death is on the table. I may have understood that the public wouldn't be pleased, and that we as lawyers get associated with the bad acts of our clients. I understand that, but I didn't think that other lawyers and judges would be as critical
and harsh. I have many situations during this time where I would go to court on another matter and the judge would pull me in the chambers and say, what are you doing. You're making us all look bad. Let the guy die, Thinking to myself that you're a judge, don't you understand that the system is set up for zealous advocacy on both sides. Prosecution probably had fifty lawyers working on it, casey had four. We were going to
do what we needed to do. I mean, I think a lot of the bad press, you know, was focused on me because I was out there talking more than the other lawyers. And I think because I was a woman, and I'm not whining about being a woman. I like being a woman, and I think females have something to
add to being lawyers in different ways. And I think I have always used my femininity, you know, to listen to people, to be empathetic with people, and to convince, you know, the courts to do certain things in ways that maybe men can't. But the criticism was largely focused on me. And it wasn't just criticism, it was threats. I had death threats, I had a bond threat and
it continued on and on. I mean, to this day, I'm sure this book being published will bring people out of the woodwork and they're going to focus, you know, not on the issues or anything else or how bad Gaysy was, but they're going to focus on me. And I've just known that that's the case, and I'm just going to have to accept that.
You mentioned that your team would have to get very creative, and especially you and Greg. And so you found a professor Boyle, and so he had a novel idea and it seemed to work. Tell us about how it seemed to work and then what happened afterwards?
It seemed to work until it didn't. How about that? Yeah, So my law professor, you know, this was years later. I called him up and I said, you know, can you help me with can we think of something? And he came up with a really great idea to file in the Intercommission on Human Rights, which is this commission in Washington, and it has to do with enforcing treaties. And so he found a portion of a treaty that said that you cannot use Nazi research to you know,
to do anything like that. It's off limits. Nazi research is so horribly acquired that we can't use it, even if it's for a good reason. Well, the lethal injection machine in Illinois was invented by not a doctor, not an engineer, by about a guy who was a Holocaust revisionist, that's what I can say about him. And he used Nazi research to devise this lethal injection machine that had failed in other states, didn't work, clogged, you know, which.
You know, people say, I don't care how someone gets executed, but you can't can't torture someone to death. And so we used that statute the treaty and said you can't use this machine because it violated international law. We had a couple other cool and unusual punishments under international law. We filed it and we won. It was the only thing we won. It might be the only appeal that Gacy won, and fourteen years he was on death row.
But when it came to enforcing it, our governor looked at that order that said the execution should stop, and our governor ignored it.
Now afterwards, you're going to I guess you're via telephone. You're talking to John Wayne Gacy. But there's another visit to me in our correctional centater and Greg can't come, so he suggests one of your associates named Ellen. Tell us who Ellen is and how experienced or inexperienced she is, and tell us about your experience together at Minard.
Well, I would say Ellen was not as curious as I am. She didn't really want to go. She was just out of law school. She had a master's and a lot of grace. She was very intelligent. She was very beautiful, tall, and you know, dressed beautifully. And I had a convincer to go with me. I said, you know, how could you pass this up? You may never get
a chance to do this again. She wasn't convinced, but she went down with me and we got a lot of attention at the prison, as you can imagine, which always happens when you're a female, but in some ways you feel a little bit protected because everybody there knows that you're there to try to save a life, and they also know that if Gaysey goes, then the rest
of them are going to go as well. So it was it was an interesting That was one of the chapters that probably was a little bit lighter because there was a lot of huber that went on there because she was so frightened about what was going on, and she met some of the state's most evil serial killers and killers. And that was the That was the time where my birthday gifts were given to me by Gacy, which was of course the horrible paintings that he created while he was in prison.
Yes, you provide Brents of that in your book. I thought the is it c shatty something about the sea scaping exhibited quite a bit of talent, and I thought it was quite good.
Actually in person, maybe it's not so much. They really aren't very good, you know, and I don't even know that he actually did all of them, but he certainly made some money. And you know, you can look around and these things are still being sold for way too much money. In my view.
He thought it was a big deal to give you those gifts, and you didn't let them down in that regard.
No, I thanked him profusely. You know, I took them home and put them on the ground face down.
Yeah, now, maybe this is giving a little bit away. Tell us about Ellen and her legal career afterwards.
Oh yeah, Well she did not like the experience. I mean, nothing bad happened, but she I think decided she did not want to be associated with our law firm like many people, you know, we clients quit us. We had Like I said, I got kicked out of a restaurant just because people were looking at us and making, you know, making comments about how could we represent a serial killer and a child killer? So, I mean she just literally took her stuff out, quit her job, moved down to Florida.
I think she's writing Wills down there. Now.
You had you said it was a strange sort of bond or an odd bond. But you did have a relationship with John's sister Karen, Yes.
Yes, and you know one of she she just wrote a book called The Silent Victim, and it's about how people who are family members of convicted killers really are grieving too. And she had no idea about any of this. In fact, she said, if John didn't tell her, yes, I did commit these crimes, she would to this day still deny it because the John she knew was kind and generous and funny and a good brother, protective, a good father, you know, all of those things. And a
lot of people said that about Gaycy. So when he was convicted, I mean and she everyone had to change their names and everyone had to move away. You know, that became a horrible process. But she had no ability to stand out and say, look at me, I'm a victim too. I mean, she to this day talks about the family and of the you know, the victim's families, about how she feels horrible, like could she have done something? Could she have recognized this? Could she have stopped Gaysey
from becoming who he became? And she has no ability to be righteous in her grief. And listen, the state executed her brother and she's still grieving that. So you know, there's there are all different sides of this case and in all different ways you can be empathetic with the people affected by this for horrible bunch of crimes.
Tell us about life on death row for John Wayne Gacy.
Well, you or I would be appalled at the lack of freedom, the fact that you're living in a room that's half the size of a parking space. Minard has been condemned over and over again. People have died from heat, people have died from cold. It's an old place. It's dangerous. Imagine running around with you know, two hundred of the worst criminals in Illinois. He was stabbed when he was there by a guy who's just out of his mind, who I ended up meeting on one of my trips there.
He was truly frightening. So the food is horrible. You know, Gaycy didn't even go outside because he knew he was a target and he was safer inside and not in the yard. It's a horrible place. The guards are not the nicest people in the world generally, and they're not really that interested in protecting anyone. They're mostly interested in keeping themselves safe, which I think I probably would would be too if I were a prison guard. So it's horrendous.
One day in the prison, like spending six hours, it seemed like eternity. It would seem like a month. You walk out of there, you thought the calendar had just stopped. Wow, And it's so stressful and awful. And if people don't think that's punishment, it's punishment. Although I will tell you this, people like Gacy adapt in prison, and Gacy adapted pretty
well because he had regularity. He knew when his meals were coming, he had visitors, he had correspondents, he had a routine that he followed, and I think that was preferable to his psychology then going out and doing what he did, even though I will tell you if Gacy had an opportunity to get out of prison, he would have gone right back to killing people, no question in my mind.
And there's lots of evidence just from this book that he really reveled in that notoriety. He really enjoyed that he did.
You know, it's kind of hard to describe, but you think there would be shame that he was being called certain things, and he was being called horrible things, and he would make jokes about it, and he would you know, there's one part of my book that you might recall, Dan, where I was talking about Henry Lee Lucas, who was a serial killer in Texas who had been spared execution by Governor Bush. And they were tagging him with like two hundred murders, and I don't think he committed all those.
I think they were just trying to close the books on certain crimes. But I started talking to John about it. It was like, hey, you know, Henry Lee Lucas is going to beat your record. Well, he did not like that at all, and he started arguing with me about how those were not crimes that he committed. The government is just tagging in with all those, and he just fought me and fought me, and it was really interesting because I saw that truly he was prom of what he
did as sick as that is. That's really the case.
Now let's get to some of the things that really are Again, you will face criticism for and you have, and not not only you, but some of the real arguments you have against the death penalty. And you chose a case that one of the most if not the most reviled man in America at that time, and yet you still thought this person deserves not to be killed, not to be executed. So tell us all of the reasons why this was important to you. What's your case
against the death penalty? Even for guys like John Wayne Gacy and guys like the Despicable Ripper Crew that you read about in this book as well.
Yeah, it's I'm just opposed to it on all aspects. And you know, I've traveled quite a bit. I've travel to fifty countries this point in my life, and everywhere I go I talk to people about the duct penalty, and they are mostly stunned that we still haven't. They don't understand why we're still executing people. I mean, Europe has abolished it, most of the Western countries have abolished it, and we use it. We're right up there with Bangladesh,
China and some of those countries Pe. I think Pakistan as far as executions. So instead of saying why should we abolish it, I always think of it as why should we have it? And number one, it doesn't deter I will tell you this. If it deterred people from committing crimes, in particular murder, I might just say, okay, I can let down my morality arguments here and just say, Okay, if it's going to save a life, let's execute people and it'll set a precedent for others. But that's just
not the case. In fact, the most murderous states are those that have more executions, Yeah, to deters someone from doing it again. If you execute someone, I understand that, But if you compare it with life in prison. When I say life in prison, actual life in prison without the possibility of parole, it doesn't deter any more people than an execution. So you know, it's racially it's invoked
in a racially discriminatory matter. Not just the defendants are mostly are largely higher percentage of brown and black people, but also the victims. If the victim is white, the chances of the defendant getting the death penalty a skyrocket. It costs more to execute people. People don't understand that, but you will see if you look at the stats. There's really no disputing it. It costs more to try
and have the appeals on death penalty case. Why because there's more precautions that get involved, so there's more lawyers and forensic people. Even the executions are expensive. And Idaho they're just getting ready to spend seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a firing squad chamber. You know, take that money and prosecute more kid killers, you know, don't use it to just execute someone which is not going
to really help anything. I do think there's an argument that the death penalty is too easy, and that being in prison for sixty years under the conditions I just described might just be more punishment than killing somebody. And you know, there's all kinds of other there's the moral issue, and I suppose most importantly is people get executed all
the time who are actually innocent of the crimes. And if you think that that's not the case, you have to look at Illinois and just google twelve exonerated, thirteen executed. Put that in there. In a period of time of about I would say fifteen to twenty years, we had twelve people, twelve or thirteen people actually walk out of death row, not on technicalities, but because they were actually innocent, and about the same amount were executed. And that's a
really poor batting average. If you can't get it right for a death penalty case, you shouldn't be in the business of killing people. And our very conservative Republican governor thought the same way, always in favor of the death penalty. He took one look at this when he was governor and he said, I can't in good conscience continue to use the death penalty in the state, and you can imagine how popular that decision was, but in my view, it was the right decision and a courageous one.
Yeah, there's no legal foundation when all those people have been proven exonerated, and thank God for DNA. In that regard, you would think that that would be a cornerstone of the judicial system that you could not have that that should be ingrained, that you can't have that, So the death penalty would again be reversed or abolished because of that, that even one innocent person be put to death, would
be should negate all of it. And you know, it's very interesting you say you went to fifty countries being born in Canada, we don't quite understand your laws because regarding death penalty, because it's the inherent unfairness of having one state have a death penalty where they're hurrying the person to death row and execution, another state like California where you're on death row but almost no one gets executed, it seems, and then another state where they're very adamant
and the death penalty is applied. So there is no federal law like in many countries like Canada, where that murder law criminal law would be federally applied. You wouldn't have a state by state application of something just by virtue of having that. That's an inherent unfairness completely. So I the understand.
Yeah, I mean like in Texas you could be a getaway driver and get the death penalty. In Illinois you could be the getaway driver where there's a murder committed and do four years in jail. So it's just not
applied evenly. And and you know the other thing that you have to understand is when you have a really bad crime that's a death penalty eligible crime like multiple deaths or a child or you know, a torture or something like that that enables the prosecution to go for the death penalty, you have jurors who are so horrified about the crime that they're more likely to get the wrong guy because and so so the police and so
the prosecutors they want to close the crime. They want to they want to close the book on the on the chapter. They want to make sure you know, we're doing justice, and in so doing so, many bad decisions are made. So with the more horrible the crime, from what I see, the more likely you're going to get a wrong decision.
Yeah, in so many ways too, that death penalty has this undue leverage against the defendant, so that he would lead guilty to avoid the death penalty with the threat that this is an imminent death penalty case and you're going to be executed, so you better not take a chance. And an attorney has advised something like that even.
Yeah, and you know, going back to the Gacy case, you know, and there's a lot of people who will, you know, give me criticism for this, but think about how important it is for the defense lawyers to do their jobs, because I truly believe those two young men are out there and they helped Gaycy commit these crimes, if not committed a few of them on their own. They certainly, in my view, hid the bodies. They certainly had culpability in what went on. They may have even
procured some of these young men for Gaycy. I don't have facts on this necessarily, but I will tell you, if defense lawyers do their job, we make sure that the right person gets punished, you know, because you don't want the wrong person to get punished and have the other one out there continuing to do their bad acts.
Let's use this as an opportunity to hear these messages. You say that he may have had accomplices, David cram And, but you're not saying that there's any possibility of John Wayne Gacy being not guilty. You're just saying that these people knew a lot more than the police ever determined from them.
Yes, I believe Gaycy was guilty of many of the murders, absolutely, But I believe that these two young men were recruited by him, and they were in some way. You know, he honed their taste for it and gave them self esteem, and gave them jobs, and gave them money, and gave them drugs and alcohol and allowed them to live with him. And I think all of those things maybe turned these otherwise okay kids into murderous apprentices. And that's not the
first time that's happened. There was a case down in Texas, the Dean Choral murders, where he did the exact same thing. He recruited two young men to procure some of the victims and to help with the crimes and to help with the disposal of the bodies. And these kids, by
all accounts, weren't really evil kids. They were just sucked into the vortex of this guy who promised them things and picked them because they had bad family homes, they had bad parental relationships, and were able to get these kids to do the most immoral, horrible things you can imagine.
You say that it might have been the case where the prosecutor and maybe even the police, but at least the prosecutor wanted to make a much simpler case and it happens as far as the narrative, so that they didn't dig too deep and there was no charges against these two or anything.
Yeah, I think it was easier for the prosecution just to tag Gacy with all of them. It would have complicated it had the young men also been accused, and who knows what would have happened. You know, I don't mean this in a bad way because the prosecutor who just passed away, Bill Huncle was a friend of mine, became a friend of mine, and I respect him greatly. But you know, he got the world record serial killers.
I mean, he had a great career afterwards because he was the one who put Gacy away for all of those crimes. And I think those kinds of considerations are I understand those considerations. But again, it was frightening to me that those two young men were walking around. One of them committed suicide, by the way, the other one is still with us.
You're right about something called the bodybook, which I had never heard of. Tell us a little bit about the body book.
One of the visits we had with Gacy, he was sitting there and he had this notebook and it was very thick, and it had the words bodybook on the front of it, and I said, what is that? And he kind of kept it like he was like possessive with it, didn't want to show it to me, and I give it to me. I want to see this. So I opened it up and it was just terrifying. He had color coded tabs of all the victims were
found on his property. They had on the pages were pictures of their high school yearbook, pictures, their pets, the house where they lived, maybe a clip from their little league, you know, sports story, and then almost always and a little short about the person being found, either found by in the Gacy house or when they went missing. And remember this was at a time, you know, we had
this done. It was like in the nineteen eighties. There was no internet, you know, there was no googling this stuff. You had actually go to the newspaper and go to the microfiche and copy it and find old papers and take these things together. And that's what someone had done. Gacy had retained a private investigator from Canada to put all these things together, and it was just astounding, and obviously this was his souvenir book. But I asked him,
I said, why did you do this? And he said, well, I just want to see if all of these young men like had something in common so I could figure out who actually killed them. And you know, my BSM meter went off on that one. But he also called it the body Book, and I questioned him on that. I said, these were human beings, John, why are you calling them bodies? And he would he said something. One of the times I asked him, he said, what were
their parents? Where were their parents when they went missing, as if to say they were to blame for getting killed and ending up in his cross space, Which was the most one of the most chilling things he ever said to me, because it just demonstrated how he dehumanized those kids. He just they were nothing to him. They were deserving of what they got, and that is probably that's the most evil part of Gaycy that I ever.
Saw you write about death day, and that's what you call the chapter. And there are the last legal briefs that you and Greg file and requesting a stay of execution, and you're waiting for the answer, and you go back to that. He's been transferred to Stateville and via helicopter. So he's pretty excited, it seems when you come there and visit, tell us about this last day, his behavior, his attitude, and what was said. Tell us a little bit about that.
I'm going to leave some of the for my readers because I think that it's something that I'd like to have my readers look at themselves. But I will tell you this, Gaycy to the end was very excited he had He went up to Stateville the first time in fourteen years he had been out of his prison. He was in a new prison. He was allowed to have
his last meal there. He was allowed to have all of the lawyers who represented him over the years, his neighbors, his friends, his family were all allowed to visit him. At one time. He was allowed to kind of walk around and talk to everyone, albeit in handcuffs, and he was thoroughly enjoying himself. And it was really bizarre because I can't imagine knowing that you have a date with death a certain minute to the on the clock, that they're going to put that lethal injection into your arm.
And here he was like he was at a cocktail party and not a lethal cocktail party. It was surreal and it really was difficult for me to watch that because he had was not coming to grips with what was going to happen to him. And maybe that was better for him. Maybe being in denial at that point in his life is a good thing.
Can you describe the mood you say, describe it a certain way, the mood of the crowd and the media that was assembled. Just give us a little as it's very vivid. How you describe it in the book.
It was like a circus, and there were cameras from all over the world, Italy and England and South America. They were covering this. And there were people lined up along the path to Stateville. There were kids who weren't even born when Gaycy was, you know, convicted, and there were people dressed up as clowns. There were drums beating,
people were drinking alcohol. This was a school night. This was a Monday night in May, and it was really unsettling because again, I think that if the government is going to take a person's life for committing horrendous crimes like Gaycy, that this should be a very solemn and somber kind of atmosphere. You know, he's going to be executed. Okay, if you think that's good, that's good. Let's have some respect for the victims' families. Let's have it happen, and
let's be done with it. But there was so how much focus on Gaysey that I thought to myself, how could the victims' families even like this, you know, when their names were not even mentioned and it was all about Gaysey and it was all about him being executed. I don't know, I've just found it really, I found it really Circuslike.
Yeah, you say that John Wayne Gacy had said something about you being involved in this case and your future career. Can you tell us what he said?
Well, I'm going to gloss over that a little bit, but he had some final words for me that are in my book, and he was absolutely right about them. The idea being that I'm going to be forever associated with John Wayne Gacy. I didn't really think that at the time, but it's very true. And even now, after all these years, when I finally decided to write my book, because I all those years that I didn't write it, people kept telling me, you have a story, Please tell
your story. It's interesting, it has some lessons in it for everybody, and some actually lighter notes and positive things and empowerment coming out of it. But I just didn't want to stir that up again because it was very negative at the time. But I can't help it. Everyone who knows who I am, when they introduced me, it's like, oh, here's Karen. She represented John Wayne Gacy and his death
row appeals. That's just like my tagline. And even though I don't do death penalty work, I don't even do criminal work anymore, I'm still introduced that with that tagline, and it's never going to end. That's what my obituary we'll read. I'm quite sure.
Yeah, you' write that soon after the OJ Simpson Trial of the Century occurred, and you were ready and you were prepared. You had done so much work doing press conferences, and you were had been prepared to do the necessary sound bites and to be very effective when you did anytime you did it, do a press conference and whenever you spoke on behalf of John Wayne Gacy and the death penalty lawsuit that you were filing.
Yeah, and so it was less than thirty days after Gaysey's execution when OJ Simpson took that little drive in his white Bronco. And so of course when the media started to cover it, I was on their list because I had on a first name basis with people from CNN and Fox and MSNBC and all my local stations. And so I became a legal analyst, and that was a direct result of having represented Gacy and preparing myself and doing my homework and learning how to speak to
the media. I've also had radio shows for over thirty years. Almost immediately after Gaysey, the local station in Chicago, one of the bigger stations, offered my law partner and me a radio show, and we took it and we won awards, and I've had radio shows pretty much ever since. I have one right now in WGN, which is one of our major am stations. So some of these things that happened to me that were good, where as a result
of something that was really bad. And that's kind of a lesson that I tried to teach in my book, which is we will all have bad things happen to us, whether it's professional, whether it's personal, depths in our family, illnesses, getting fired from a job, whatever your adversities are, they're actually good for you in the long run. Not to say it death is ever really good. What I'm saying is it makes you more resilient. It can make you more resilient, It can teach you lessons, It can teach
you what you're really made of. And I'm not sure that I would have learned what I was really made of had I not done gacy that really put me through a lot of different kinds of tests, and I think I came out more resilient and a better person and a better lawyer.
And I guess you must be somewhat satisfied the progress that the death penalty is being abolished in many states. Give us the stats on how many states now doesn't exist.
Yeah, Illinois abolished it twenty eleven, and I would say it's somewhere between twenty and twenty five states have either abolished it, put a moratorium on it, or in effect they just don't use it anymore. So we've got about half our states not really using it. And even as the states that use it, prosecution prosecutors are seeking it less, jurors are giving it less, even for some of these horrendous school shootings. The jurors just don't have the stomach
to give the death penalty to a young person. And I think it's just the tide is changing. I think that the fact that other countries don't use it, the fact that younger people are much more sensitive to these kinds of things, that there is a complete change in the polls. And I think it's the lowest right now that it's been in over one hundred years as far
as the approval rate for the death penalty. And I don't know if it's going to happen in my lifetime, but I do see that in the near future there is going to be an abolition of the death penalty.
Yeah, so congratulations on your work in that regard.
Thank you. I'm not sure that I move that needle any with John Gasey, but I'd like to think that I'm at least a little part of it.
Yes, I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about killing time with John Wayne Gacy defending America's most evil serial killer on death Row. For those people that might want to check out your other work on do you have a website and do you do any social media?
I do? You can just find me on Facebook of the usual at Karen count twenty three. My website is where you should go for anything related to gaysey, if I do book clubs and speaking engagements, and or if you want to ask me a question, it's www Karenconty dot com. And my radio show WGN Radio can go on and listen to all my podcasted episodes Legal in Nature, and I have some really interesting guests. But thank you for giving me that opportunity.
Dan, Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure killing time with John Wayne Gacy defending America's most evil serial killer on death Row. Thank you so much for this interview Karen Conti, and good night, good night,