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A Cook County jury convicted John Wayne Gacy Jr. on March 12, 1980, of murdering 33 boys and young men between 1972 and 1978, and he received death sentences on 12 counts and natural life terms on the other 21 before his execution in Illinois in 1994.

Gacy was born in Chicago on March 17, 1942. By the mid-1970s, he ran PDM Contractors, a painting, decorating and maintenance business, from his ranch house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park Township, an unincorporated part of Cook County outside the Chicago city limits. He was active in local Democratic politics and performed as a clown at parades, hospital visits and children's parties. He had been convicted of sodomy in Black Hawk County, Iowa, in 1968, sentenced to ten years and paroled in 1970.

Most of the victims were drawn to the Summerdale house by offers of construction work, money or drink, and most died by ligature strangulation. Gacy buried 26 bodies in the crawl space beneath the house and three elsewhere on the property. After the crawl space was full, he disposed of four in rivers southwest of Chicago.

Robert Jerome Piest, 15, was a stock boy at Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines. On December 11, 1978, he told his mother he was going outside to speak to a contractor about a job and did not return. Des Plaines police, under Lieutenant Joseph Kozenczak, established that Gacy was doing remodeling work at the pharmacy and discovered his Iowa conviction. A December 13 search of the Summerdale house found no body, but officers seized a photo-development receipt from Nisson Pharmacy that was later traced to a co-worker whose jacket Piest had been wearing that evening.

Police kept Gacy under round-the-clock surveillance for the next week and obtained a second search warrant on December 21, 1978. Gacy was taken into custody that day and began admitting to the killings. Excavation of the crawl space began on December 22. Piest's body was recovered from the water at the Dresden Island lock and dam in Grundy County on April 9, 1979, the last of the 33 victims to be accounted for.

Twenty-eight victims have been identified, while five never have. The Cook County Sheriff's Office holds DNA profiles for all five and continues seeking family reference samples. The most recent identification was Francis Wayne Alexander, previously known only as Victim No. 5. Sheriff's police formally notified his family on October 22, 2021.

Gacy was charged in the circuit court of Cook County with 33 counts of murder, one count of deviate sexual assault, one count of indecent liberties with a child, and one count of aggravated kidnapping. On his own motion, the indictments were tried together before Judge Louis B. Garippo from February 6 to March 12, 1980. The defense was insanity, and the aggravated kidnapping count was dismissed during the trial. After deliberating for under two hours, the jury found him guilty on every remaining count. Illinois had re-enacted its death penalty statute in 1977, making only the 12 murders committed after that date capital. The jury returned death sentences on those counts on March 13, 1980, and the court imposed natural life terms for the other 21 murders. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences on June 6, 1984. Gacy spent most of the next 14 years at Menard Correctional Center and was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, in the early hours of May 10, 1994. The procedure was interrupted when the second drug congealed in the line. He was pronounced dead at 12:58 a.m. at age 52.

The video is a roughly 32-minute edited segment, not a raw tape. It comes from an interview that Craig Bowley, a long-time correspondent of Gacy's, arranged and filmed in the warden's office at Menard Correctional Center in 1992; the complete interview ran about three and a half hours and has never been released publicly. Robert Ressler asked the questions after retiring from the FBI in 1990 and while working privately, so he was not an agent at the time and this was not an FBI interview. The circulating version appeared in NBC News Studios' Peacock docuseries "John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise," which premiered on March 25, 2021, and includes the production's editing, colour grade, score and archival photo inserts throughout. A "Voice of Robert Ressler, Ret. FBI Profiler" caption appears at about 29:24.