KILLED - Episode 3: The Killer

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

A novice journalist tags along to meet John Wayne Gacy one week before his execution for Details. Featuring Nancy Rommelmann.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

A warning. This episode contains explicit language and content. Listener discretion is advised. The lead of a story is the first, you know, two, three paragraphs, whatever. It's not very long. That's what they call the lead. It's L-E-D-E. Don't ask about all the weirdo spelling and internalism. I sometimes use the analogy of a house. So, am I going to lead you through the fabulous, fancy front doors? Am I going to sneak you in the bathroom window? Or am I going to like stand outside with you for

while? The lead has so much internal music in it and beats and feeling. I have to hear everything. Everything should be metronomic. It's like tick tick tick. You should be able to tap to put through the entire story. It's like the opening daaaaaaah for the reader, like the opening scene of something. Okay, here we go. I once read that serial killer John Wayne Gacy's brain was missing. Someone had stolen it. Following Gacy's execution, the brain was extracted in hopes that probing the grey matter might shed some light on why killers kill. Though the theft is ludicrous, it also makes sense.

The public had an insatiable appetite for Gacy while he lived. Post-mortem were still trying to get a piece of him. I've got mine. A pack of prison cigarettes and several photographs from when I visited Gacy in May 1994. Is it weird to hear yourself read that? No. There are certain stories that I take in the coffin with me, and it's one of them.

From Justine Harmon and Audio Chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Episode 3. The Killer Back in 1994, when I was preoccupied with Ace of Base, Lipsmackers, and are you afraid of the dark? The nation was finally putting to bed its own unsettling chapter, a chapter that had begun more than two decades earlier. John Gacy, a man who liked to put on a clown suit and entertain children. John Wayne Gacy was found guilty to death. There are more people than anyone else in US history.

I hope he does get the electric chair. John Wayne Gacy, an unrepentant serial killer, had been convicted of killing at least 33 young men and boys. Police today found six more bodies on the 27th of whom were found buried just beneath the floorboards of his Chicago area, Ranch House. 33 in total, young men between the ages of 14 and 22. Many victims may have been mailed prostitutes or homosexuals. Did you believe that he was capable of killing all of those boys and young men? No.

He had been a successful contractor, a volunteer democratic party precinct captain, and a guy who liked dressing up as Pogo the clown at Kid's Birthday parties. He didn't expect it from him. He was always good and kind. He was a nice guy. and expected from him as always good and kind. He was a nice guy. As the world waited for Gacy's execution with baited breath in the spring of 1994,

Nancy Rommelman was a single mom in her late 20s, living in LA and dreaming of becoming the kind of writer who exposes the real America. Nancy has always been fascinated by people who live on the fringes and the counter America. Nancy has always been fascinated by people who live on the fringes and the counterculture. It was 1994. I had a little kid to support. I'd been reading scripts for a living. I was, I think, 29 years old. I hadn't really done any journalism and then I had a chance to write like a couple tiny little pieces for this magazine called Bikini. It was kind of like a dude magazine, you know, skaters and music. They sent me to a genital piercings salon

in Los Felos and where I lived. I walked in, I was talking to the person who worked there and this couple walked in and they were getting their engagement rings and they were, you know, through their genitals and I said to the woman, well what do you need to do when when people asked to see the rings and she looked at me she goes, well we'll show them and that is the moment I knew I would do nothing but journalism. I felt as though like it had dropped from the heavens into my hands. I was like, that's it.

I'm never doing anything else. And then a killer story, all but dropped from the heavens and into Nancy's hands. A friend of mine who was a video producer and director in LA, she talked like this. She said, Nancy, remember that guy's house? We went to a work. I was like, yeah, student echo park.

He was a musician, a artist. This musician artist, a 20-something guy named Rick, had spent the past two years exchanging personal letters with none other than John Wayne Gacy. With his American hero sounding name and his dad bod, Gacy, who had been sentenced to death in 1980, had become a bizarre artifact of Americana. The man had spent more than a decade on death row, filing appeals, cranking out paintings,

and sending letters to strangers, more than 27,000 letters. But now, with his options exhausted, Gacy had reached his expiration date. The execution by lethal injection was set for May 10, 1994. There were only weeks left at the circus. And Rick wanted to get a good look at the clown. But could he bring a plus one maybe a journalist named Nancy, Deliver. He asked to go visit Casey and Casey put him on the visitor's list to say it was cool and Rick thought it

would be a good article. I'm like, holy mackerel would that be good article? But I don't even know how to start this. Despite his prolific output, Gacy had declined formal interview requests from some of the most famous journalists in the world. Oprah Winfrey and Truman Capotee, negged. But here it was for Nancy, an invitation to interview the most horrific killer of her time.

So, girl I went to high school with was the beauty editor at Glamour Magazine. So I contacted her and I was like, hey, so I've got this story. Do you, how do I do that? She's like, oh, pitch it to my friend Joe Dolce at Details Magazine. Details.

As in the offbeat lad glossy with roots as a downtown culture mag. And you know, it's on my sent you and send them the pitch. Maybe he'll buy them. I'm like, cool. What's a pitch? She told me what it was. I wrote it. I faxed it because hi, we were days of facts machines. And low and behold, he buys it for, I guess it was like a 5,000-word story or something, they were going to give me a dollar worth of my eyeballs basically flow out of my head at that amount of money and they pay for the trip.

And that's how it started. Okay, so you may have picked up on the fact that Nancy's a bit of a provocateur. Her podcast, Smokeham, if you got him with Sarah Hapella, offers up contrarian takes on the celebrity news du jour. And a few years ago, she launched a YouTube series with Real Housewives of New York City star, Leigh-Mick Sweeney. They called it hashtag, mean-either.

It did not go over well. Back in 94, she was kind of the same. Even though she'd never written more than 150 words about genital piercing, Nancy and Rick would drive the nearly 2,000 miles from Los Angeles to Illinois where Gacy was set to be executed in just a few weeks' time. This is where, at least for me, it kind of becomes interesting like how the budding journalist's brain works. It's like, I did not know how to do this.

There is no way I knew how to write a big long feature like this. But I had this idea that why don't we sort of take the cultural temperature of people as we're crossing the country. So when this opportunity came, it was absolutely that I was going 100% and my daughter who was for at the time was kind of just what I was going to be gone for like 10 days up she was totally safe my my brother's girlfriend stayed at the house or father was there weekend it was she was not in danger but still you know for his for and she told me later that she she had this dream when I was away that I got in a big car

and she was standing behind the car and I was looking at her out the back window and the car was driving away and she was running after the car trying to grab the bumper. Okay, so this is like, you know, the knife in the heart of the mother, but I had to go and that's, it's work,

like it it by two and you have to do it. There was no internet, no cell phones, no coastal grandma, hologram, Tik Tok or whatever the kids are into these days. To know what Americans were thinking, you had to get out there. You had to get right up in their stuff. We decide the best way to do it. I guess it was kind of my idea is like, let's road trip it out there.

Let's rent a little car in LA and drive out to Illinois. Her first stop was in Vegas and we stayed in old Vegas and we went to this place called the Girls of Glitter Gulch where they were like, you know, stripping and we met this Australian band, the Hootoo's Goos. I didn't know they were a bit apparently they were famous. And we started talking to them and we were telling them we were going.

People had opinions and I look, oh, okay, this is interesting. Here's this guy, he's a serial killer. He's killed 33 young men and boys. And yet I'm sitting in a club in Las Vegas with naked boobs in this guy's face and talking about Gacy, like what? We stopped through New Mexico at Old Boyfriend of Mine's house and his screaming housemates

and then stopped in Oklahoma. My daughter's Native American Maltes were there and they're very religious and they took me to church and they prayed for me. And then we were in a foreign shamrock Texas and everyone shouting at the TV. I am, I am frying them because this was big news. John Wayne Gacy, it's time for you to die. Everywhere she went, people were talking about Gacy, maybe because he was like this fun house of everything terrible about humanity. That's the most notorious mass murderer in the history.

John Wayne Gacy was also Pogo the clown who loved to make his life. He committed killing the young men after having sex with them. Greed, sex, hate, apathy, clowns. It was all right there. Gacy showed absolutely no emotion as all the murder counts were read, but he winked before he left the courtroom. America gawked at Schlubby, hateful, John Wayne Gacy,

and John Wayne Gacy stared right back. Boo. And then this one guy, really quiet guy next to me, is like he's a human being. And I just thought it was so fascinating that we create this, I mean, obviously he created his own. In for me, Gacy did, but, you know, fascinating that we create this, obviously he created his own infamy, Gacy did, but we kind of create this character

that we stare at, open mouth and we're horrified. You know, a lot of your listeners may not have heard of John Wayne Gacy, but you got it, trust me. He was like the biggest serial killer America I'd ever seen. And soon enough, Nancy and Rick would be face-to-face with the guy. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. After days spent on the road, quizzing strippers in Vegas and barkeepers in Texas about the most convicted killer in American history,

Nancy and Rick reached their final destination. So we get to Menardil, Illinois, where the maximum security prison is, and it's a little tiny town, and it's pretty pokey. We finally did get to see Gacy. I took a while. After several thwarted attempts at gaining access to the man. Sorry, no more visitors this month.

Kids, you're not on the list. Prison guards finally escorted Rick and Nancy to an 8x8 room outfitted with three chairs, a table, and a trash can. There was nothing between us. We were sitting at a little school table. There was no plexiglass. There was literally we could have and Rick may have like a little school table. There was no plexiglass. There was no, literally we could have,

and Rick may have even held his hands which were handcuffed and his legs were shackled too. We were with him for five hours and he was utterly exhausting and very charming. You know, hey, it's your, it's your super friendly Uncle Johnny and get these kids some McNuggett, hey, hey kids, you can tell me, tell me about your sex life.

He was so kind of gregarious, but also kind of like, not, I can't say scary because that's what people wonder. Like, were you super scared? Here's a deal. You're in a maximum security prison. Nothing was gonna happen. The wick at one point did say,

he's like, I was kind of a freedy, might like pick up a pencil and stab you in the eye. But that's a sort of manufacturing fear, I think. But I did say to Rick at one point, I was like, did does it ever hurt you? You were like exactly the profile of someone that Gacy would kill. And he's like, yeah, but I don't really think about that because we're like friends. And Rick wasn't the only one who thought he was friends with Gacy. On the road at a club in St. Louis, Nancy met another Gacy penpal named Chuck. Chuck told her, I was fascinated with the guy, fascinated and disgusted.

Sick as it is, I thought it was cool to write him. We mostly talk about the Chicago Bears and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Rick thought it was kind of cool too. Growing up in Orange County, life was comfortable, boring, suburban, he said. Writing Gacy was like becoming a punker when we were kids, shouting, fuck you just to break the monotony. So Rick wrote to Gacy, and he said that he was interested in buying a piece of his weirdly in-demand art. Clowns, devils, gods, forty such pieces went up for auction in Napervaul on Saturday,

all created by the hand of John Wayne Gacy. I have spent some time reviewing images of these paintings, one-dimensional portraits of Elvis Presley, or Adolf Hitler, or the artist in his Pogo the clown costume. And I'm no Sotheby, but these can't be good. Still, people were into it. Johnny Depp and Marilyn Manson were rumored to be collectors, and Rick wanted in. So he sent along a note and an old photo of himself at age 17 looking, quote, really clean-shaven and pretty and boyish, figuring that's about what he goes for, he said. And it worked.

Gacy sold him a piece at a discount, and the two men kept corresponding for years. We're Gacy and Rick friends. I think Gacy gave Rick something that he needed at a time in his life, which was he felt sort of like he was brave for doing what he was doing. I think he also felt some real affection for the guy and sort of said, he's a human being. Yes, he did these horrible things, but that's not how I know that person. You know what, people compartmentalize, I really don't have a feeling one way about that

or another. Was Rick special to Gacy? I can't say, you know, he did have some visitors before he was executed, which was about I think eight or nine days, 10 days after we met with him. But I don't think that many. I mean, some family, but you know, I haven't really thought of that.

Like, was Rick special of me? Rick was actually kind of braver. Braver, as in braver than the other guys, then the recipients of those thousands of other letters. Rick was showing up. He was willing to share air with a man this sick, to look eye to eye with him, and see if they were truly connected in some human way. Because while some of the letters Gacy sent Rick were of the bears and buckets of chicken variety. Others were something else.

Rick mentions his girlfriend how they're having trouble and how quote, it just seemed easier to talk to Gacy a stranger than to my friends. I'll spare you the letter from Gacy to Rick that starts with quote, big fucking deals so you're getting lead and ends with quote, doing a number on the sheets. To Nancy, it all felt part of the story. People are weird, but fuck if it wasn't fascinating. I went as someone who was interested in the story. I didn't want to sensationalize it. I didn't want to patronize it.

But then again, I am one more person looking at this creation that we've made and commenting on it. I tried to get in touch with Rick to hear his story from him, but I never heard back. After five exhausting hours spent in close confinement with a man best known as the Killer Clown, the interview was over. I couldn't tape Gacy, and I couldn't, they wouldn't let me have a pen or a pencil. So when we got out of there, and we were rushing for a plane, which we wound up missing,

Rick was driving, and I sat there, and I like a machine. I vomited up like everything that we had said, and I'd say, Rick, Rick, Rick, when he said this, what did he say? What kind of ice cream was it? Vino, Vino, Vino. No, no, Nancy was pistachio or whatever,

and I like, I just did my best. That's all I could do. He did not grant interviews. Tonight in news, extra, the man who committed a lot. Well, he granted very few. After 12 years of silence, Gacy gave one interview to CBS Chicago. He's never talked to anyone about the case until tonight.

And one to the New Yorker. Alec Wilkinson's bracing peace conversations withations with a Killer, ran in the April 10, 1994 issue and was the result of six consecutive visits with Gacy. He was seemingly obliged a pen. Nancy had done something truly wild. She had driven across the country to get a story that had eluded some of the biggest journalists in the world. She'd gotten John Wayne Gacy to talk for what she believes was his last on the record

interview and she had done it all on details as dime. They paid for the whole trip by the way like the car and the hotels and the food and the whole thing which was great because we didn't have any money. So I got back to LA. I remember calling the editor one time and saying, oh, I'm not really sure if Rick wants his party. The editor's like, I'm gonna shit what Rick wants. And he was right.

I mean, I was pretty green, but in any case, I wrote a draft. And I faxed it and the editor, Joe Dullchick, got back to me and said, be prepared for eight or nine rewrites. I'm like, fine, I don't know. That's what that, I mean, that's how things are, right? And I did a pretty substantial rewrite. Like, look, I never went to writing school or journalism school.

Like, you got to teach yourself how to write, right? I did it and I backstid and didn't hear anything, didn't hear anything, didn't hear anything. No faxes, no phone calls. On May 10, 1994, John Wayne Gacy was executed. They brought him up to a Juliet, which is where they do the executions. They didn't do it in Menoron where he'd been kept. It was big news.

I mean, it was big news stopping the news to announce it. So I watched it on TV. And the guy took like so long to die. Like he just was not letting go. The notorious serial killer was executed early today at state bill prison in Jolly. Yep. Kill it, wow.

Kill it, wow. The silence from details was deafening. And now I'm getting really anxious because Gasey's been executed. And I, this is like the biggest thing by far that I've ever done. So, I happened to be going to New York. It had been about three or four weeks since I'd faxed in the last draft and I found out what details magazine was. It was down on Broadway in Soho and I walked in and I walked past the receptionist.

I'm like, hey, can you tell me where Joe D'Oltra's office is? She pointed me to it. I walked in. It was very nice. It was like a bunch of grannets on the wall, I thought, ooh, sophisticated. And a big desk and I sat down, I just sat there. And finally this guy walks in, he sees me,

sits down and he goes, who are you? And I said, I'm Nancy Rommelman and you told me to be prepared for eight or nine rebates on the Gacy P's and I haven't heard anything from you. I don't know, I don't know how to ask me. Anyway, he looks at me and he says, I am moving over to be the editor of Vogue. I will be passing over your work to someone so let's call her Sally Smith. I frankly don't remember her last name. I emailed with Joe about this.

He says he remembers Nancy's name but doesn't ever recall working with her. He wrote, quote, not of her story sounds familiar, but if she did show up to my office demanding something, I probably blocked her from my memory." But after that visit to Joe's office, Nancy had what she came for. She had a name, and she wasn't giving up. I was going to mark this vineyard where with my mother and my four year old for two weeks because that used to be the thing we did and I sat in a bedroom. I did not go to the beach with my mother and my daughter. I taught myself how to write.

Like I actually remember this experience very well. And I wrote a piece that I knew. I knew it worked. I knew it. And I drove into a vineyard haven to a fax machine at like this little copy store that's in like a old house in my vineyard. And I, I faxed it, and I then got back to the house, and I called my answer machine in L.A. And there was a message from like two days before from Sally Smith

details saying they were killing the article. So she hadn't even seen the right, they had just killed it. The feeling of bereftness is that a word I don't think so. I was so side myself and now I really didn't know what to do. It meant so much to me and I I worked so hard, and also like, Rick, I didn't want to let Rick down, you know? It really, it's a horrible analogy, but I felt like I was dragging around a dead body when I couldn't sell this story. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Nancy Romoman says her story about going to meet John Wayne Gacy was killed by a woman named

Sally Smith. I reached out to another woman whose name isn't Sally, but Susan. Susan would have been the editor to whom Joe Dolce passed Nancy's piece back in 1994. Susan, not Sally, wrote me back almost immediately, but said she had absolutely no memory of such a story. She wrote, it's been decades, but I think it would at least ring a bell, even a very muffled one. Also, killing a story via voicemail isn't my ammo. It's not unusual for new editors to toss out their predecessors lineup to start clean with their own stories. But anyway you slice it, the piece was dead.

And Nancy Rommelman, she ain't no pullbearer. The film reviewer for the Ellie Weekly and Thompson, who's different to this day, I said to her, what do I do? And she's like, well, you need to send it around to other places. So I sent it to Playboy and got a hand-written note from the editor at the time thing. This is a very nice piece, but it's not for us. And I was like, wow, that's cool. And then Anne said, let me get it to somebody at the weekly.

The long-standing free alt weekly that would go on to break the story of the Grim Sleeper serial killer in 2008. Pulitzer Prize winning food critic Jonathan Gold started as a music editor at the weekly, interviewing the likes of an up and coming Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and NWA in the 80s before turning his attention to food.

The weekly was cool. And I got a call from weekly and they wanted it. And I went in, they called me in this office, I remember working with an editor about my age, maybe a little older, and I remember, I don't know if this is true or if I remember it like this, I remember sitting on a little mushroom-shaped stool by his feet, like I was so, I didn't know anything,

and we literally went through it. Was there a fact-checking process at the LA Weekly? Yes, yes, there was. LA Weekly was pretty asidious about fact-checking, and I actually kept super, super good notes and I taped when I could, and I kind of understood that about being a journalist. After a thorough fact-checking process the piece was ready for publication. And then we were done. Oh my god I'm actually feeling this in my body. So the

the weeklies would come out on Wednesday mornings and I drove in my car at like 6.30 in the morning to the news stand on the corner of Hollywood and Coingham and I had not had the courage to ask if stand on the corner of Hollywood and Coingham. And I had not had the courage to ask if it was going to be a cover story. And then, you know, the guy throws the pack of weekly's off the truck and it lands and there's my story in the cover. And I, I grabbed three or five copies because there's free and went into an alley behind this bar. I used to go to call the room and I screamed. I actually screamed out loud.

Nancy's story, going to Gacy, appeared on the cover of the September 16th, 1994 issue of LA Weekly, along with a distorted image of the killer in a clown costume. The headline, going to Gacy, a cross-country journey to shake the devil's hand by Nancy Brahmelman. So yeah, it was killed, but it wound up in a better place for me because now it's on the cover of the other weekly. And they were fat. I mean, they had like 250 pages and it was the music and it was the listings and it was arts and it was politics and they were very, very dynamic and everybody read it. All of a sudden, I had a career in LA.

Details gave me a 50% kill fee of $2,500, plus they paid for the entire trip. And then it was I think it ran at about, is between 7 and 8,000 words on the weekly and they gave me a dollar a word. So I made 10 grand on that piece. The story launched a career of crashing through the back door into strange places.

Nancy's writing has since appeared in the New York Times and Newsweek. And she never did stop writing about people like Gacy. She too just couldn't look away. Think about someone that you had in your life at some point, who like you kept like doing things for, or like they would tell you something and later you'd say to them, oh, remember you told me,

they're like, oh, no, no, I didn't say that. Or they would sort of like try to blame you for something, but at the same time sort of like try to coddle you, or like be mean to you in private, but nice in public or vice versa. These are like the sort of common sociopaths that walk amongst us. And I met and written about many, many. And I think Gacy really was the first for me where I saw it at such an extreme level. I mean, we're talking about someone that murdered at least 33 young men and boys. And yet, is like, you know, basically holding Rick's hand and like, acting the father figure to him.

And it's like working okay. So I did learn from that. And then after understanding that, I was able to recognize these kinds of characters, not in so much a murderous way, but just the sort of, the sort of charm offensive. And I know that sounds bizarre. That's going to be like, Gacy was charming, but you know, he also had been like the head of the Democratic Party for his region. There's pictures of him with Roslyn Carter, Jimmy Carter's wife. This is what Gacy really taught me, okay, about sociopaths.

They know right from wrong. It is not that they don't know that what they're doing is wrong. But here's what we don't understand. We are not allowed to do these things because we're stupid people. They're smart people and they're allowed to do these things. That's what I learned from Casey. A week or so after we talk, Nancy points me to a picture from that day back at the Menard Correctional Center in 94. She's wearing high water trousers and a smart looking vest.

Next to her is Gacy, a few inches shorter and with his hands shackled in front of him. His prison issued short sleeve buttoned down, strains at the middle. His chin is cocked. In April of this year, Netflix released a docu-series featuring 60 hours of never-before-heard interviews with Gacy and his defense team. Audiences gobbled it up. And there he was. Next to the beautiful ensemble cast of aspirational shows like Selling Sunset and Bridgerton, Season 2. A familiar face, a household name, Half-Man, Half-Clown, Pure Evil.

You know, I've only, as far as I know, only met one serial killer. But I will say he had a voraciousness that was utterly exhausting. We literally still would have been sitting there talking to John Wick-Azy, but he had his way. Like, he was not gonna stop. Among the moment she's held on to over the years is a photo taken on the road of a woman wearing a t-shirt that says,

seven minutes to justice, the clown's final party. A half-smoke soft pack of Gacy's prison sigs, pyramid brand, and a photo of the killer dressed as a clown that he gave to her that day. On the back, he scrolled a note to Nancy's four-year-old daughter, Tava, the girl who once dreamed of chasing after her mom's car nearly 30 years ago. It reads, Tava, as you go through life, smile. Best wishes, Pogo the Clown, aka John Wayne Gacy. you