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John Wayne Gacy Execution- May 10, 1994

John Wayne Gacy was the killer clown from suburban Chicago who in the 1970′s picked up young men and took them back to his tiny house. There he raped and killed them, burying most of them beneath the floor boards of his house. Other bodies he threw into a nearby river. In all, he murdered 33 young men — or at least that was how many bodies were eventually found.

After the usual interminable delays in the judicial process, Gacy was finally scheduled to be executed on May 9, 1994, and Howie went out to Chicago with his producer Kevin Straley and engineer Larry Bruce, who took these pictures. At noon, a local radio station held a parade and rally in the Loop in “honor” of the execution. Howie did his show from WLS, talking to the mother of one of the victims, who was having beans and franks for dinner while her son’s killer dined on steak and smoked a final cigar with the warden. In prison, Gacy had become an artist of sorts, with his paintings (of clowns, naturally) fetching thousands of dollars.

As the hour of execution approached, at the prison in Stateville the usual crowds gathered for the magic moment. Quakers and Amnesty International types holding their traditional candlelight vigil, while a few feet away the pro-capital punishment types whooped it up, drinking, chanting, “This Bud’s for you, Gacy!”

After his execution, Gacy’s house was briefly placed on the market, but there were no takers, and it was eventually razed. It remains a vacant lot to this day.