November 12, 2025 • 47 mins
Sixteen-year-old Timothy “Jack” McCoy spent Christmas 1971 with his relatives in Michigan, leaving on January 2, 1972, to return home to Nebraska. After arriving in Chicago for a bus connection, he met a man who offered him food and a tour of the city. Timothy accepted, but he would never be seen alive again. Fourteen years later, his family learned he had been the first known victim of John Wayne Gacy, the infamous “Killer Clown.”
Through the accounts of survivors and families, The Devil in Disguise series uncovers Gacy’s horrifying legacy and the failures that allowed his killing spree to continue for years.
You can watch Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy here.
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Guest: Patrick Macmanus
Host: Claire Murphy
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Sixteen year old Timothy Jack McCoy spend Christmas nineteen seventy
one at his aunt and uncle's home in Michigan. After
some quality time surrounded by his cousins, ringing in the
new year with them, he left on January two, nineteen
seventy two, planning to jump on a bus at the
local Greyhound station back to his dad's house in Nebraska.
In the early hours of January three, Timothy had made
(00:22):
it to Chicago. It's cold, and Timothy is waiting for
his connecting bus, which won't arrive for another twelve hours.
He's wandering around killing time when a man pulls up
to the curb and offers him a scenic tour of
the city to fill in the layover. When Timothy says
he's hungry, the man offers to take him back to
his place for food. He would never leave. Fourteen years later,
(00:44):
Timothy's family would receive the phone call they'd been waiting for.
Police finally knew what had happened to him. Their relief, though,
would be short lived, when they found out that Timothy
had fallen victim to the killer clown. I'm Claire Murphy
and this is true crime. Conversations, a podcast exploring the
(01:06):
world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who
know the most about them while he was victim one.
Timothy's story is shared in episode six of the new
Binge series The Devil in Disguise John Wayne Gacy. The
story follows the nineteen seventy eight arrest of Gaysey after
investigating the disappearance of another young boy under the floorboards
of his home. Buried in the crawl space or the
(01:28):
bodies of twenty six boys and young men. Three more
would be found buried in the backyard. One of them
was known unofficially as Greyhound Busboy. That's how Gaysey referred
to him. Officially, he was body nine, with eight bodies
having been pulled from the dirt below Gasey's home before him,
and it wouldn't be until nineteen eighty six that body
(01:48):
number nine would be formally identified through dental records as
Timothy McCoy. In episode two, We Meet Johnny Sick. He
disappeared in January nineteen seventy seven. Police are unsure what
led him to come into contact with Gaysey, but they
found his high school ring in Gasey's home. Episode three,
We meet Samuel Stapleton and Randy Reffert. Samuel's one of
(02:09):
Gasey's youngest victims. Randall went missing just a day after Samuel.
His identity was confirmed from X rays on Christmas Day,
three years after he went missing. In episode four, we
meet Billy Kindred and Greg Godzig. Billy was a bit
of a bad boy, but he'd met the girl who
would help him turn that around.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Greg worked for Gaysey.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
He left for a date with his girlfriend in December
nineteen seventy six, but never returned home. In episode five,
we meet Billy Carroll, Dale Landigan and Robert Donnelly, one
of Gasey's seven known survivors, and yes, Robert Donnelly survived Gaysey,
but he's not sure why. The then nineteen year old
was waiting at a bus stop when Gasey pulled up
in a black car, claiming to be a police officer.
(02:51):
He asked to see his ID, and as he stepped
closer to show it, Gasey pulled gunn ordering him to
get in, and handcuffed him. Robert was He was actually
assaulted several times in Gasey's home before he was told
that he was about to take his last ride, Gaysey
asking how it felt, knowing he was going to die,
but instead Gasey let him go, telling Robert that no
(03:13):
one would believe him if he told anyone about it,
and he was right. Police did take Gaysey in for questioning, However,
he claimed it was all consensual, describing the encounter as
a game of sexual slavery, saying Robert probably reported him
because he didn't pay him for it. Prosecutors declined to
pursue the case. This wouldn't be the first or even
the last time Gasey was questioned by police only to
(03:36):
be let go. In episode six, we meet Timothy, who
we revealed as Gaysey's first victim, John Bukovich and Robert Peaste.
In episode seven, we meet Jeff Rignell. Jeff, who was
in a happy thropple relationship with his boyfriend and girlfriend,
came across Gaysey while walking to a gay bar in
March nineteen seventy eight. Gasey offered him a ride and
a joint to lure him into his car and out
(03:57):
of the cold, then used a rag so in chloroform
to drug him into submission. Jeff woke up in Gaysey's house,
tied to a tortured device made of a wooden board
and chains, and naked Gaysey standing in front of him.
He was then subjected to hours of rape, torture, and
physical assaults. He also claims there was another man present
(04:19):
at some stage who also took part. He passed out
again and awoke under the statue of Alexander Hamilton in
Chicago's Lincoln Park. He told police everything, but they didn't
believe him. He took on the investigation himself and eventually
found Gaysey. Taking his details to investigators, they were slow
to act, so when Rob Peacet went missing in December
(04:40):
nineteen seventy eight, Jeff's battery accusation against Gaysey had been filed,
but he was allowed to remain free. When Gaysey was
finally arrested and the bodies found in his home. The
reporting of Jeff's story motivated many young men to come forward,
who all shared similar stories. Devil in Disguise brings just
a and full of Gasey's thirty three victim stories to
(05:02):
light and the shortfall in.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Justice they each were handed.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
As a director, it was Patrick McManus's job to do
these stories justice, and the way in which he chose
to tell them was the reason he finally said yes
to the project at all. He joins us now, Patrick,
thank you so much for joining us today and for
sharing your insights on the creation of your TV series
of Devil in Disguise. Welcome to True Crime Conversations.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Thank you still very very much for having me. I
appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
I guess we need to start off by asking you
what allowed you eventually to say yes to this story?
Because I understand you knocked back making this series previously,
so what changed for you in order for you to
turn that into a yes.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Yeah, You've done your research. I said no twice because
I just didn't understand what worth it was going to
be to do a serial killer show. Quite frankly, it
wasn't until I sort of stumbled on this idea of
telling the victim's story is that I realized that there
was a way into telling this differently. It was way
early in the process because I had turned it down,
(06:07):
as I said, a couple of times, and when they
came back the third time, they basically said, and these
are partners of mine. I've known them for years and
years and years, both at Universal Content and at peacock,
and there was what would it take? And I said,
well if I focus it not on Gaysey, And in
all honesty, I thought they were going to say no.
I thought they were going to be like, sorry, well
now move on. We've asked you three times. And when
(06:29):
they said yes, I honestly thought they were just shining
me on and telling me what I wanted to hear
and then they were going to like pull the rug
later and they never did. But I will say that
I had this like abstract idea of focusing on the victims,
the victims' families, the police, the lawyers, but I didn't
really understand how it worked until we came up with
this idea in the writer's room of the short we
(06:49):
called them short stories, where we would tell these stories
that were completely taken away from Gacy at all, and
that I keep saying it, it sort of fell into
perf clarity, like what the show was, what the north
star of the show was. And it's weird for me
to say this that it suddenly sort of became easy
to break to figure it out. So number one whatever,
(07:13):
like sort of little spark we got in the room
to figure that out. I'm very grateful four Number two.
I'm very grateful to the studio the network for taking
the chance on it and letting us explore it because
it was a swing.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Well, can we talk about that decision, because, I mean,
in making anything about John Wayne Gacy, you have endless
amounts of research material. There's the tapes that he openly
admitted to what he was doing to his legal team.
There are documentaries. There is the interview he did before
his execution from prison, like, there is books, there are
(07:43):
documentary like There's so much that you could lean on
for his story. But in choosing to focus more on
the victims, that would have been more difficult because their
stories and especially because Gaysey chose his victims for a reason,
A lot of them were from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They were,
you know, from the LGBTQ community, like people whose lives
(08:05):
were not publicly available at the time. So how did
you piece their stories together like this?
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Well, I mean you sort of landed on it. I mean,
we did an immense amount of research, and that really
is always the first step in all of the shows
that I've done, outside of Happy and Homecoming, you know,
which didn't need it. But going back to Marco Polo,
which was the first show that I ran, like, I deeply,
deeply believe in research. And so not only did we
(08:31):
have the NBC News team which did the documentary, which
was spectacular, So we had a ton of research that
was both in the documentary and out of the documentary.
That's part one. Part two was as you said, there
are there are tons of books that we were able
to draw from as well that did begin to paint
a picture of the victims. Number three, we had depositions
(08:53):
and we had court testimony. I mean, like I'll use
even as you know in the Randy Reford Samuel Stapleton
story right the state that it was very famous that
he had had this bracelet that he had welded onto
his wrist, and that was we sort of got the
inspiration from that, very much from the fact that his
mother broke down on the stand and couldn't carry on.
(09:16):
They had to pause the proceedings. And so we then
also had this. We have an amazing researcher that I've
worked with on multiple shows named Patrick Murphy. He did
a deep, deep dive into whatever he could find on
the record and about each of the victims up to
an including he went to Chicago and he actually went
to the room that to this day holds all of
(09:36):
the Gacy files and dug through that and give it
give us a very deep dive of everything that was
in there. So we downloaded quite a bit of information
to be able to try to build these stories. And
at the end of the day they a lot of
it was as always inspired by right, like we were
not able to do. It isn't a documentary, and so
we were dramatizing within the body of it. And the
(09:57):
hope is is that when when people are wh watch it,
they realized that we're not going to get it all right,
but that we're trying to get the spirit of the
story and the spirit of their story as right as
we possibly could.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I understand that you did reach out to surviving members
of the victims' families as you were going through this
process of creating this series. That must be an incredibly
difficult thing to do. And secondly, what do you do
if they say, I don't want you to do this.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
It's a really good question. Well, part one to your
question is I don't want to undersell or it. It
didn't feel difficult to do because it genuinely felt like
the right thing to do. And it's interesting early on
when we were discussing the reaching out to the family
(10:48):
members and our team at Universal were gathering whatever their
last known contact information was of their next of kin,
and quite frankly, we didn't get a ton back. Like
we'd sent out thirty letters and emails and phone I
made phone calls and we did reach out to every
last contact that they had, and we only heard back
(11:10):
from a handful of people. But in that time where
they were gathering the contact information, they were saying to me,
They're like, you know that it's very probable that they're
going to be upset at you. And I said, that's
the point, Like, the point is to open a dialogue.
And and while we were going to make the show,
(11:32):
and I was absolutely going to open open myself up
to any criticism or any perspective that was going to
come back my way. If someone said to me, I
definitely don't want you to focus on my on my
family member, we would have we would have adjusted. And
we did it early on in the process so that
they anyone that we did touch base with, had the
opportunity to say that to us. But we weren't necessarily
(11:54):
asking for permission. We were I was opening up a dialogue,
so they at least knew that they could have a
dialogue with us. And to me, I think that that's
that's that's important. And I'll go on the record as
saying that. I've said it before, and I'll say it again,
and I'll keep saying it. I know that we've probably
disappointed people like I am aware of that, and I
(12:17):
don't know if there is any way to work around it, right,
but I desperately want anyone who is listening to hear
me when I say that what I said before, that
we were trying to tell the story as best as
we could. We were trying to tell the story with
as much respect as we could, and for anybody that
we may have disappointed, I am immensely sorry. That was
(12:40):
never That's never my intent and I and what I
am proud of so far is that there seems that
people seem to be getting it like they you know,
I don't know if the family members are, but like
for the first time in my career, people are really
getting what we were trying to do. And that I'm
so proud of our writers first and our director and
(13:00):
our actors, because everyone went in with a very open
heart and a desire to get this as right as possible.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Whose story did you tell first when you were making it.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
In terms of the in terms of the victims, Yeah,
it was Johnny Sick. It was, And that was very
purposeful because in the pilot I had written in his
high school ring without knowing who it was, and so
we knew that which was real. They found that in
Casey's attic, and so we knew that Episode two was
(13:33):
going to be focused on Tovar going on that journey
to identifying the owner of the ring. Johnny's story was
not told because of any other reason other than it
made the most sense in that arc of storytelling between
those two episodes. But I will say that I always knew,
even when I was alone and I was pitching to
(13:53):
the network like what it was going to look like
before we had the green light, I knew that Jeffrey
Rignoll was going to be the last story. Always there's
going to be the last story.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
We'll talk about Johnny Sick.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Part of his story, and a part of so many
of the stories of these victims, is that they are
young gay men who are in the nineteen seventies not
openly gay. Johnny has to kind of hide it by
having a very close girl friend who are kind of
led to believe that she is his girlfriend, even though
she is herself not straight.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Correct.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
But you're telling a lot of stories about the LGBTQ community.
How do you do you consult with people in trying
to tell those stories in a way that is sensitive
to the fact that in the nineteen seventies was a
very different climate for people in that community, but also
understanding you're playing this to a twenty twenty five audience.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah, So the first answer is, yes, absolutely, we again
when I was all alone and I knew what we
were because I look, I'll fully confess that when I
came into the story, I only knew all of like
the surface little trivias about John Wayne Gacy. I knew
that he was the clown killer. I knew that he
was a contractor. I knew that he like was posed
(15:04):
with Roslin Carter, and like, I knew like all of
these surface level level things and I and I knew
that he obviously that he abducted and tortured and raped
and murdered these young these young boys and young men,
but I didn't fully understand the degree to which homophobia
(15:24):
played a part in him getting away with it. So
once I had stumbled on that piece of information as
I was running the pilot, I knew that I had
to reach out, and I reached out to Glad immediately,
because what I was most afraid of was that I
was somehow going to equate psychopathy with with queerness, and
(15:46):
that was something that I could not let happen because look,
at the end of the day, I only know what
I You know, I am a white, middle aged, you know,
heterosexual man, and I will say that I while I
believe the old adage that a writer can write anything,
I don't necessarily believe that a writer knows everything, nor
should they write everything. And so they were very generous
(16:09):
to us, not only with me. Then they came into
the writer's room and they helped us from the outline
stage through the script stage. And one of the rules
that we came to together that they were encouraging was
don't approach this through a twenty twenty five lens. You
have to approach it through the nineteen seventies. But the
one thing that is so ignorant of me, and I
(16:31):
will readily admit that. So the writers in the room,
these are writers. I've worked with some of them for
over almost fifteen years, ten years, eight years. The staff
writer was a new writer to me, but by happenstance,
they were queer, the majority queer. Not everybody, but the
majority queer. And so the room became this story ground
of our writers who were finding their identities in very
(16:54):
modern times and were struggling with the exact same the
exact same challenges. You know, what became apparent to me.
And when I'm asked what do you want people to
take away from this series, is that this is as
relevant today as it was in the nineteen seventies, And
I would go on the record as saying that I
actually believe that it is more relevant today. I believe
that the level of hatred and prejudice and bias that
(17:15):
we were seeing today that is leading to record number
of violence across the spectrum, but especially to underrepresented voices
the LGBTQ community, especially that the idea in any viewer's
mind that those problems have been solved. All you have
to do is sort of look at the world around
us and know that they haven't. So it became a
(17:36):
very powerful journey in the writer's room to listen to
these people that I've known for years expressed the same
challenges and prejudices and biases that we were exploring in
the stories in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
You do tell the majority of these stories from the
victim's perspectives, but something you touched on there about how
much homophobia played a role in how much John Wayne
Gacy got away with. You also tell the story of
law enforcement amongst this too, and not just the team
who are investigating Gaycy himself after he kills his final victim,
(18:14):
but for those officers who've investigated him in the past,
and just how difficult the families of those victims found
it when they came up against police officers who just
told them their sons were runaways or that, you know,
it didn't matter because they were sex workers, or that
they were gay and they lived certain lifestyles and so
if they disappeared, I guess they didn't matter as much
(18:35):
as the next person. Do you feel like you'll get
blowback from law enforcement for kind of exposing that storyline
amongst this as well?
Speaker 3 (18:47):
I think that if we do, then it is a
very narrow interpretation of what we were doing in the show.
And I'll expand on that in a second. And if
it is that narrow interpretation of what we're doing in
the show, I would ask that the Royal they to
go back and rewatch because I don't believe, I know
(19:12):
that what we were presenting is a reality of the
time and a reality of the system, and the idea
that it can be denied then as much as it
could be denied today is just fantasy. Right. It is
a complete and utter reinterpretation of what actually happened. So
(19:35):
putting that into a box, right, and let's pretend that
I have to defend that interpretation, and right, I will
then pivot and I will bring up what you just
brought up at the top of your question, which is, yes,
we are pointing out the systemic failure of certain segments
(19:55):
of the police force, not only about blatant prejudices, but
also communicate failures, right, which are obvious because the system
changed quite a bit after the gaycy case. But on
the flip side, we're also showing officers who were in
that pit for months on end, who were digging with
their bare hands, who could not voice at the time
(20:20):
the concept of PTSD, but who absolutely came out of
that experience with PTSD police officers who quit the force,
who lost marriages, who turned to alcohol and drugs because
of the things that they sought on there. But they
were down there every single day trying to find and
identify every last person that was buried underneath Gaycy's house.
(20:42):
So the concept that we're somehow demonizing police is absolutely
too narrow of an interpretation of the reality, because we
are showing heroes on the one end and a complete
systemic failure on the other. And I stand by that,
and I will say that I hope that people who
(21:02):
interpret it any other way will go back and just
look a little bit, a little bit more closely of
what we're trying to say in the show.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
You're listening to true Crime Conversations with me, Claire Murphy,
I'm speaking with Patrick McManus, director of Devil in Disguise
John Wayne Gacy. Up next, Patrick tells us what you
have to do to get into the mindset of a
serial killer in order to play the role. So he said,
(21:30):
before you knew some surface level stuff about Gaysey going
into this, were you as shocked as I was, because
I think I was the same as you. I knew
some stuff about him, but I didn't know the depths
of things when you did see how many times Gaysey
had been in contact with police. I mean, he went
to jail for eighteen months over the molestation of a
(21:51):
young boy and then was released. It's supposed to serve
a ten year sentence, released after eighteen months, and then
goes on to have other very very suspicious things, you know,
allegations leveled against him by all the young men. And
that's kind of it's a he said, he said situation,
And it's kind of like, go like, were you shocked
by how many times Gasey could have been stopped and wasn't.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Unbelievably so, I mean, I don't want to, you know,
give too simple or too quick of an answer, but
it's overwhelming. I mean, the it gets me every time,
the simple bit of disturbing, morbid, horrible trivia that is
a that is true. And I remember the moment in
(22:37):
the writer's room when we when we found it out
in the research that had Gasey simply done his time
for the first sodomy charge in nineteen where he went
to jail nineteen sixty eight. He would have gotten out
on the exact same day, day and year that Rob
Peaste was abducted and murdered, which we talk about in
(22:59):
the show. The concept that had he just done his time,
none of those boys would have died at his hands
is insane. And then and then you go into all
of the moments when the police knocked on his door,
all the moments when the police chased him, all the
(23:20):
moments when or followed him. Excuse me, all the moments
when family members went to the police. The kicker being
the one that I talked about earlier, which is the
Jeffrey Rignal case, which is where he was abducted, chloroformed, raped, torture,
dumped back on the street. Police did nothing. He did everything,
(23:41):
found his house, staked him out, found his house, brought
it to the police, and they still did nothing, and
Gacy went on to kill four more young men, including
Rob Peacete. After that, consfidable like it's impossible to wrap
your brain around that.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
I want to ask you if that's true too.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
When Rignold took a piece of Casey's mail to police
and said that's the guy, that's his address, that the
officer said, do you know that stealing mail is a crime?
Criminal offense? Did that actually happen or was that dramatization?
Speaker 3 (24:13):
That was dramatizing. But however, the fact that they got
his license plate, his home address and brought it and
the police said to him that there's nothing we can do,
it's out of our jurisdiction. That's true.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
What victim after telling so many of these stories now,
and I'm not saying that any are going to stand
out in more than others, because each of their stories
by themselves are so terrible and sad, But was there
any one of the victim's stories that really hit you hard?
Speaker 2 (24:45):
I mean, they all would have.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
I guess I don't know what I'm asking exactly, But
is there one that stands out for you that you
can't stop thinking about?
Speaker 3 (24:53):
So I want to say no, but I'm going to
answer the question in a different way. All of this
stories were were sort of overwhelming in various in various ways.
The story that gets me the most, and it's not
an individual story, it's just sort of a blanket of
what happened at the time, was that when the when
(25:14):
they first started breaking the case and they and they
and the police we were setting out up hotlines, and
you know, they were asking the public all over not
just the not just the city or the state or
the country, but the world if you were missing anyone
in the Chicago area. And then and the number of
calls were it was like a tsunami of calls, like
(25:34):
they were getting pings from all over the place. And
the second that the press made it out to be
that Gacy was queer and the victims were queer, it
dried up. And that always just stuck with me. I
don't I mean, look, it's I hate to I don't
want to be ignorant about it, because I'm not, but
(25:57):
it's it's just so abhorrent to me that relatives of
victims would not want the memory of their son or
brother or friend to be tainted by homosexuality. That's really
hard to that's really hard to fathom for me.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
So that's the thing too, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Because whilst we know of thirty three of Gaysey's victims,
many of whom were buried under his house, some in
his yard, some dumped in a river, that there are
still at least five unidentified at this point in time,
and they are still identifying the victims even now. I
think the most recent was twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two.
(26:39):
DNA obviously is playing a role now and they have
exhumed bodies and done for the DNA testing, but there
are still victims now that remain unidentified.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
How does that sit with you?
Speaker 3 (26:52):
I mean, I will share because he's not here. Michael Chernis,
who plays Gaycy, he and I have done a lot
of pre us separate and together, and he says like
the thing that he wants people to take out of
the show, like if you could accomplish anything with the show,
that it's that people would would come forward and somehow
(27:15):
because of our show and the other reporting, not just
our show, but like there are a lot of people
who have really tried to get this story out there
for this exact same reason that we might be able
to identify one more young young man. And so I
see it as sort of like a call to action,
and that I feel like the more successful our show is,
the more successful the documentaries are, the more successful the
(27:37):
books are, the more of an opportunity we have to
bring one one more boy home. And that to me
is sort of empowering in many ways. It's you know,
we do these social action campaigns alongside our shows, all
of our shows, and our current social action campaign for
(27:58):
Devil in Disguise is called Guarding Youth, and it's and
it is about trying to give people not just the education,
but the tools in order to try to better protect
youth through at risk at home, at school and communities.
And so I feel like this is another opportunity for
people to do something and to begin, you know, to
begin to look into your family's past and and see
(28:21):
if there is some story that you have heard about
or know about, or that might have some connective tissue
to these to these young boys. I would love nothing
more than to bring another one home, to be party
to it, not to do it on our own, but
to be party to it.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
You mentioned Michael Chennis there, who does play Gacy in
your series. How do you work with someone to recreate
someone who is so essentially evil? And I mean you
do take us through the process of him speaking to
you know, the therapist and being psychoanalyzed and getting a
better understanding as to what kind of mental state this
(28:59):
man was to have done the things that he's done,
not saying that anyone who suffers from any of those
things will go on to do what he did. But
in order to play someone like that, and I don't know.
He said in other interviews that he watched some of
those interviews and listened to the tapesticket an understanding of
how he moved and what he sounded like, but to
exist in that character for a while. And you and
I spoke just before we hit go on this interview
(29:22):
that I've been sitting in the law of gacy for
the past few days in preparation for this interview. You've
sat in this law for years now? Have you made
this and now you're talking about it again? For him,
he had to embody this evilness. How do you work
with someone to make sure that they can safely navigate.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
That well, Michael, first of all, was partner from the beginning.
I mean, I told the show and I went out
looking for looking for the person to play easy and
it became very apparent, very quickly that if Michael Churnis
was going to say yes, that he was the one.
And then he became a partner, I mean from we
were in the writer's room still for months, and one
(30:02):
of the challenges, first of all, for I think both
the writers and for Michael was how is this person real?
You know, when I wrote the first episode, even I
was struggling with how this guy the way he talks,
how he talked, Like what he's saying is so not
what you expect out of a quote unquote serial killer,
(30:23):
that it seems fake, and that if you, like had
written it on your own and it was a pure
piece of fiction, people would would call, you know, call
bullshit on you. Then the writers came in, and the
writers called bullshit on me. They were like they read
the script and these are writers again and I've known forever,
and they were like Patrick, this come on, man, like,
give me a break, Like what are we supposed to
do with this? And I said, just do me a
(30:43):
favor and go off and do some research and then
come back to me. And they did that, and they
came back and they were like, oh shit, okay, how
do we write this fucking guy right? Like he's a
whole other thing? And then then we're in it with Turnis,
and Turnis was like bristling at it right, not not
in a bad way, but in like the same way
we had it right where we're like, how do we deal, right,
(31:03):
And I said to him, and he talks about this
like that, Michael, if you don't approach it from this perspective,
which is the real perspective, which is this guy was affable, charming,
He was the guy and the charming in quotes, because
he was a goofball really right, then it's sort of
a disservice to the victims because you're because then you're like,
you know, if you're not doing it that, You're like,
(31:24):
why do you get in the car? Why do you
want a job? Why are you going home with this guy? Right?
So that was like challenge number one was just getting
everyone on the same page of who Gaycy really was.
And then as it relates to just sort of the
psychology of taking I don't know if that if the
if the question you're getting at is like, how do
you take care of an actor who has to deal
with this? You know, I will say speaking for Turnis
(31:47):
because I've heard him say this quite a bit. You know,
Number one, he's he talks quite a bit about how
as an actor and he's Julliard trained. He's like, right,
he's like a really well trained actor. He's like, you're
supposed to figure out all the ways in which you
could do which you connect and excuse someone, right, like,
you're you're this person, and he said, doing this role,
he had to throw all that training out because he's like,
(32:07):
I will never be able to accept this person. I
can't do it. He's like, I can do it to
a point. And then I get to the next point,
which is him murdering and raping and torture, and I'm like,
I can't find a way to excuse that. And we
talk about we can talk about that next. We talk
about that quite a bit, that you can't excuse it.
And you said right there that someone with mental health
issues are not going to go on to do this thing.
(32:28):
There's no way of explaining this guy away other than
the fact that he is pure, unadulterated, singular evil. Right.
There's no struggle with identity, there's no struggle with dads
and alcoholic dads, there's no struggle with mental health. Right.
That excuses this away. So turnus in terms of taking
care of himself. I know that he talks about how
(32:48):
and I saw it because I was in his trailer
quite a bit. He had a list of all of
the names of the victims on a board, on like
a fold out tryboard, And while he never did it
in front of me, he talks quite a bit about
how he would get done with his day and he
would go and he would just read the names. And
his point was, we're doing it for them, like, this
is not about Gayzy, this is about them, and so
(33:10):
that's why I'm doing it. And I thought that was
a very interesting way of protecting himself.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I think that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
What you say about Gaysey is that he is a
very difficult character to wrap your head around in that
he seems quite charming in a very fun, dad jokey
kind of way, and his ability to lure people into that,
and he talked himself up quite a bit, and you know,
heyes an important person, and people believed that, and they
believed that he would give them a job and pay
(33:39):
them lots of money, and so there was lots of
ways that he lured people in.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
But do you feel like it from your surface level.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Understanding of who he was at the beginning all of this,
do you feel like you at all could get a
handle or an understanding of the person John Wayne Gacy
who he actually is, Because I don't think anyone truly
understands them motivations for the things that he did. But
do you get it was there a moment that you thought,
this is who this guy really is?
Speaker 3 (34:08):
I know this is a podcast. I shouldn't take such
a long breath or thought, I'm it's such a you know,
it's so it's amazing. I've been doing press for this
for like a more than a month, and I've been
talking about it for three years, and I'm no one's
ever asked me this question. I I guess I'm going
to have to go back to a version of what
(34:30):
I just said, which is, I don't think there was
any world in which myself and the writers and Turness
could have read more, studied, more dissected more. I don't
know how we could have done more. And I don't
think that I can say yes that I I know
(34:53):
who John Wayne Gacy is because I and I'm stealing
a little bit from Turnis on this. But I think
that I know a lot of people who struggled with
their identity, and I think that I know a lot
of people who struggled with abusive parents and I and
struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction. Is Gaysey did and
(35:16):
and I think that I've known people I know, I
know very personally, people who have struggled with their mental
health in my family. And this is where I'm stealing
from Turnus. I think you can you can understand Gacy
only to that far, and you can't make the next step.
And so I have to attribute that answer to Michael
(35:36):
because I think it's like the most universal way of
looking at it, which is that you can understand him
only to a point, but you will never fully understand.
And then and I think that you then go to
the most base answer, which is and the most simpleton answer,
which is that he was just evil like And how
do you explain evil? Right next?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
What parts of this story did Patrick decide to leave
out of the series and why When you're deciding what
parts of Gaysey's life to include in this story and
what not, how do you then decide what to discard?
Because I understand you shot a fair amount more footage,
say in the final episode, which takes us to Gaysey's execution,
(36:25):
which we will never see because you cut all of it,
how do you decide to say, you know what, this
is a really important part of Gaysey's story, the fact
that he did receive the death penalty, and he was
eventually executed, but yet you see him very briefly in
this final episode where it should all be about him.
It is his death finally, but you choose to make
(36:46):
it not about him, Like how do you come to
that point?
Speaker 3 (36:49):
So, first of all, there is a part of me
not for a while, I want there to be some
space because I want I'll get to the answer and
this will go to why I want to want space.
But there is a very large part of me that
someday wants to release want. I want to release the
original cut of it, because I will say that Michael
(37:10):
did an extraordinary performance and he was in half of it.
I mean, I feel really bad for the studio and
the network and especially my line producer, because we spent
a lot of money that did not end up on
screen a lot, and Michael's performance is spectacular. So I
directed for the first time, and I directed the finale,
(37:31):
and I was in post on it, and I remember
it really, really clearly. It was a Sunday morning. I
woke up early. My wife and I on Saturday Sunday's
trade off, bringing each other coffee in bed and eoli.
My wife who runs our social action in our philanthropy
for the company, came upstairs with my coffee and she
looked at my face and she's like, what's wrong. And
(37:51):
I was like, I think, I think I have to
cut Surnas out of the finale. And I woke up
super early with just this like flash that it was
the last chance I had to like make the statement
that it was not about gaycy because I feel like,
(38:14):
and I can say, like the scenes were really powerful
with journies that I don't think that there was any
world in which an audience wasn't going to come away
with some semblance of weirdly feeling for him, like weirdly
like it was. It wouldn't you're not going to be
on his side. You're gonna want him to die. But
there was enough in there that there would be something.
(38:38):
And even if you didn't, right like, even if I
was guaranteed to have you have nothing but antipathy for him,
there was a world in which, you know, we were
still going to be focusing on him for thirty five
minutes of the finale. And so I asked my editor,
Ryan Denmark, who I've we've worked together for years. I
was like can you tomorrow cut me and cut without
(39:01):
Journis in it? And he's like what, And I said,
just do it and let's see how I went. And
so he did it the next day and at noon
lunch we watched it down together on zoom and we
got to the end and I just said, what do
you think and he goes, Yep, this is what it is.
And by the way, Denmark, I mean this with nothing
but love, because I'll never work without him. Is a
big asshole, like he would tell me he would one
(39:24):
hundred percent tell me if I was wrong. He not,
like That's why I love him is that he'll tell
me that I suck all the time. And then the
question was how do I tell Urnis? And it took
me a long time to tell Turnis uncomfortably long time
because I wanted to fly to New York and watch
it down with him and I couldn't make it happen.
And then I had to eventually break down and tell him.
And I got to tell you, I know he will
(39:44):
say that he he took it hard at first, like
he says, he's like the ego, the actor ego, right,
but he was very professional about it. He went off
and he watched it and he came back and he
said he got it too, And I will say, I
think it's really good because he's not in it.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
I'd love to know if you've gotten any feedback on
dramatizing true crime.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Because we did speak to the author of the book.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
On Ed Green after Rian Murphy made Monsters about Ed Green,
and he was concerned that people had the wrong impression
as to who ed Gen actually was due to the
dramatization of his life in that story. Have you had
feedback about people concern that dramatizing any of this story
(40:30):
was the wrong thing to do, yes, or maybe you've
had the opposite.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Both honestly both. I mean, as I expressed a little
while ago, like I know that I'm going to disappoint people.
And there's absolutely not a question that we've received people said, well,
that is not right, that is not accurate. I can
tell you that it's not at the same level as
what some of the pushback has been another series. Overwhelmingly
(40:57):
it's been positive. And again, like, look, there are scenes,
whole scenes in the show that in which we lifted
dialogue from depositions or from interviews, and we like made
that the dialogue.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Well you can also see that too when sometimes you
run a storyline and then you've played the actual footage
of the exact thing that was said in that episode.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Yeah, I mean yes, but I mean absolutely the preponderance
of the dialogue is fictional, right, Like we're operating under
an inspired by dramatization, and there's no way we could
have been in these conversations, right. So but I will
say again, like wherever we faltered, and I want to
put that in quotes, I will say that it was
(41:43):
absolutely inspired by a desire to get the spirit of
all of the research right. And the places where we
overstepped quote unquote bounds of what was real and dramatized,
it still all came from a place of us studying
this character and this character, and maybe these two characters
(42:03):
were never in the same room together, right, but they
were sharing an experience that was real, and that was
what we were trying to get at. So I am
in no way, shape or form casting any aspersions on
other shows you mentioned, ed Geen, I stand by what
I've said a million times and I will say for
(42:24):
the rest of my career, which is that art is
subjective and is there for a reason, and it is
going to be judged both positively or critiqued, both positively
and negatively, and that's just art, right. I can tell
you that every moment of every day in the writer's
room and then on in prep and then in production
(42:48):
was in a desire to get it as right as
we could possibly get it, even if what we're saying
is that it's a spiritual rightness. And I know that
that phrase is probably loaded and and probably is going
to upset people who don't think that we should do
this in any way. But I can tell you that
I feel very proud that we did something that was
(43:09):
super respectful, as respectful as we could possibly do one
of these things. And I'll always try to get it
better the next time, like I'll always continue to try
to evolve this process as long as I am doing it,
so that at the end of the day, I hope
that people can look at what we've done in Doctor
Death and Girl from Plainville in this show and say
(43:30):
we tried to not be sealacious, we tried to not
be gratuitous, we tried to not glorify. We really did
try to honor the memory of these stories as best
as we possibly could. Well.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
The fact that you did not show the deaths of
a single one of them, or the lead up to.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
Their deaths, that felt very respectful.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
No violence was shown throughout this entire series, and you
to think a story about a serial killer that would
be the main focus.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
That must have been a very deliberate choice.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
Oh yeah. From that was the one red line that
we that we refused to cross, and that was both
out of respect but also strategic. I mean, I will
say that I learned a real valuable lesson in Doctor
Death when we didn't show any surgeries until the finale.
(44:20):
And I was blown away by the number of people
who have come up to me over the years and
said those surgeries were so grotesque. And I was like,
you never saw anything, and I said, of course we did,
and I said, go back. You never saw anything, not
intil the finale. You see it in the finale. But
it was all imagination, sound design, imagination. And when we
(44:41):
made the decision out of respect to not show the murders,
we also knew strategically that people were going to still
find it extraordinarily like they were going to have a
visceral experience because you didn't need to see it to
feel it, and you didn't need to see it to
imagine it. And and the more that you've got to
know the people around the moment of their death, the
(45:03):
more visceral of an experience it was going to end
up being. And that is not me trying to take
advantage of those feelings. That is me just simply saying
that is the human reaction, is that your imagination is
extraordinarily powerful and you don't need to show it. I
also will say that I know that we disappointed people
who wanted to see it, Like I'm readily aware of
(45:25):
the fact that there are people who probably find our
show boring out there, and that's again the subjectivity of art,
right Like for some people it works, for other people,
it doesn't work. And I stand by what we did
because I think that it was I think it was
ultimately the right way to do it.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
John White Gacy was put to death on May tenth,
nineteen ninety four. Rob Peat's body was finally found in
the Deplains River in April nineteen seventy nine, four months
after he went missing. Victims number twenty eight, twenty six, thirteen,
twenty one, and ten still unidentified Thank you to Patrick
for helping us tell this story. You can watch Devil
(46:05):
in Disguise John Wayne Gacy now streaming on Binge. The
link is in our show notes. If you want to
see images from this story, head to our Instagram page
at True Crime Conversations. Give us a follow and have
a look at our case explainers there too. If you
enjoy this episode, please review our show on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
I'll eave a comment on Spotify.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
True Crime Conversations is hosted by me Claire Murphy and
produced by Tarlie Blackman, with audio designed by Jacob Brown.
Thank you for listening. I'll be back next week with
another True Crime Conversation. We want to hear from our
true crime fans. Tell us what kind of content you love,
(46:43):
what you'd like to hear more of, and a bit
about your listening habits. You'll final link to the show
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owners of land and water that this podcast was recorded
on
Sixteen year old Timothy Jack McCoy spend Christmas nineteen seventy
one at his aunt and uncle's home in Michigan. After
some quality time surrounded by his cousins, ringing in the
new year with them, he left on January two, nineteen
seventy two, planning to jump on a bus at the
local Greyhound station back to his dad's house in Nebraska.
In the early hours of January three, Timothy had made
(00:22):
it to Chicago. It's cold, and Timothy is waiting for
his connecting bus, which won't arrive for another twelve hours.
He's wandering around killing time when a man pulls up
to the curb and offers him a scenic tour of
the city to fill in the layover. When Timothy says
he's hungry, the man offers to take him back to
his place for food. He would never leave. Fourteen years later,
(00:44):
Timothy's family would receive the phone call they'd been waiting for.
Police finally knew what had happened to him. Their relief, though,
would be short lived, when they found out that Timothy
had fallen victim to the killer clown. I'm Claire Murphy
and this is true crime. Conversations, a podcast exploring the
(01:06):
world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who
know the most about them while he was victim one.
Timothy's story is shared in episode six of the new
Binge series The Devil in Disguise John Wayne Gacy. The
story follows the nineteen seventy eight arrest of Gaysey after
investigating the disappearance of another young boy under the floorboards
of his home. Buried in the crawl space or the
(01:28):
bodies of twenty six boys and young men. Three more
would be found buried in the backyard. One of them
was known unofficially as Greyhound Busboy. That's how Gaysey referred
to him. Officially, he was body nine, with eight bodies
having been pulled from the dirt below Gasey's home before him,
and it wouldn't be until nineteen eighty six that body
(01:48):
number nine would be formally identified through dental records as
Timothy McCoy. In episode two, We Meet Johnny Sick. He
disappeared in January nineteen seventy seven. Police are unsure what
led him to come into contact with Gaysey, but they
found his high school ring in Gasey's home. Episode three,
We meet Samuel Stapleton and Randy Reffert. Samuel's one of
(02:09):
Gasey's youngest victims. Randall went missing just a day after Samuel.
His identity was confirmed from X rays on Christmas Day,
three years after he went missing. In episode four, we
meet Billy Kindred and Greg Godzig. Billy was a bit
of a bad boy, but he'd met the girl who
would help him turn that around.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Greg worked for Gaysey.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
He left for a date with his girlfriend in December
nineteen seventy six, but never returned home. In episode five,
we meet Billy Carroll, Dale Landigan and Robert Donnelly, one
of Gasey's seven known survivors, and yes, Robert Donnelly survived Gaysey,
but he's not sure why. The then nineteen year old
was waiting at a bus stop when Gasey pulled up
in a black car, claiming to be a police officer.
(02:51):
He asked to see his ID, and as he stepped
closer to show it, Gasey pulled gunn ordering him to
get in, and handcuffed him. Robert was He was actually
assaulted several times in Gasey's home before he was told
that he was about to take his last ride, Gaysey
asking how it felt, knowing he was going to die,
but instead Gasey let him go, telling Robert that no
(03:13):
one would believe him if he told anyone about it,
and he was right. Police did take Gaysey in for questioning, However,
he claimed it was all consensual, describing the encounter as
a game of sexual slavery, saying Robert probably reported him
because he didn't pay him for it. Prosecutors declined to
pursue the case. This wouldn't be the first or even
the last time Gasey was questioned by police only to
(03:36):
be let go. In episode six, we meet Timothy, who
we revealed as Gaysey's first victim, John Bukovich and Robert Peaste.
In episode seven, we meet Jeff Rignell. Jeff, who was
in a happy thropple relationship with his boyfriend and girlfriend,
came across Gaysey while walking to a gay bar in
March nineteen seventy eight. Gasey offered him a ride and
a joint to lure him into his car and out
(03:57):
of the cold, then used a rag so in chloroform
to drug him into submission. Jeff woke up in Gaysey's house,
tied to a tortured device made of a wooden board
and chains, and naked Gaysey standing in front of him.
He was then subjected to hours of rape, torture, and
physical assaults. He also claims there was another man present
(04:19):
at some stage who also took part. He passed out
again and awoke under the statue of Alexander Hamilton in
Chicago's Lincoln Park. He told police everything, but they didn't
believe him. He took on the investigation himself and eventually
found Gaysey. Taking his details to investigators, they were slow
to act, so when Rob Peacet went missing in December
(04:40):
nineteen seventy eight, Jeff's battery accusation against Gaysey had been filed,
but he was allowed to remain free. When Gaysey was
finally arrested and the bodies found in his home. The
reporting of Jeff's story motivated many young men to come forward,
who all shared similar stories. Devil in Disguise brings just
a and full of Gasey's thirty three victim stories to
(05:02):
light and the shortfall in.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Justice they each were handed.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
As a director, it was Patrick McManus's job to do
these stories justice, and the way in which he chose
to tell them was the reason he finally said yes
to the project at all. He joins us now, Patrick,
thank you so much for joining us today and for
sharing your insights on the creation of your TV series
of Devil in Disguise. Welcome to True Crime Conversations.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Thank you still very very much for having me. I
appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
I guess we need to start off by asking you
what allowed you eventually to say yes to this story?
Because I understand you knocked back making this series previously,
so what changed for you in order for you to
turn that into a yes.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Yeah, You've done your research. I said no twice because
I just didn't understand what worth it was going to
be to do a serial killer show. Quite frankly, it
wasn't until I sort of stumbled on this idea of
telling the victim's story is that I realized that there
was a way into telling this differently. It was way
early in the process because I had turned it down,
(06:07):
as I said, a couple of times, and when they
came back the third time, they basically said, and these
are partners of mine. I've known them for years and
years and years, both at Universal Content and at peacock,
and there was what would it take? And I said,
well if I focus it not on Gaysey, And in
all honesty, I thought they were going to say no.
I thought they were going to be like, sorry, well
now move on. We've asked you three times. And when
(06:29):
they said yes, I honestly thought they were just shining
me on and telling me what I wanted to hear
and then they were going to like pull the rug
later and they never did. But I will say that
I had this like abstract idea of focusing on the victims,
the victims' families, the police, the lawyers, but I didn't
really understand how it worked until we came up with
this idea in the writer's room of the short we
(06:49):
called them short stories, where we would tell these stories
that were completely taken away from Gacy at all, and
that I keep saying it, it sort of fell into
perf clarity, like what the show was, what the north
star of the show was. And it's weird for me
to say this that it suddenly sort of became easy
to break to figure it out. So number one whatever,
(07:13):
like sort of little spark we got in the room
to figure that out. I'm very grateful four Number two.
I'm very grateful to the studio the network for taking
the chance on it and letting us explore it because
it was a swing.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Well, can we talk about that decision, because, I mean,
in making anything about John Wayne Gacy, you have endless
amounts of research material. There's the tapes that he openly
admitted to what he was doing to his legal team.
There are documentaries. There is the interview he did before
his execution from prison, like, there is books, there are
(07:43):
documentary like There's so much that you could lean on
for his story. But in choosing to focus more on
the victims, that would have been more difficult because their
stories and especially because Gaysey chose his victims for a reason,
A lot of them were from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They were,
you know, from the LGBTQ community, like people whose lives
(08:05):
were not publicly available at the time. So how did
you piece their stories together like this?
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Well, I mean you sort of landed on it. I mean,
we did an immense amount of research, and that really
is always the first step in all of the shows
that I've done, outside of Happy and Homecoming, you know,
which didn't need it. But going back to Marco Polo,
which was the first show that I ran, like, I deeply,
deeply believe in research. And so not only did we
(08:31):
have the NBC News team which did the documentary, which
was spectacular, So we had a ton of research that
was both in the documentary and out of the documentary.
That's part one. Part two was as you said, there
are there are tons of books that we were able
to draw from as well that did begin to paint
a picture of the victims. Number three, we had depositions
(08:53):
and we had court testimony. I mean, like I'll use
even as you know in the Randy Reford Samuel Stapleton
story right the state that it was very famous that
he had had this bracelet that he had welded onto
his wrist, and that was we sort of got the
inspiration from that, very much from the fact that his
mother broke down on the stand and couldn't carry on.
(09:16):
They had to pause the proceedings. And so we then
also had this. We have an amazing researcher that I've
worked with on multiple shows named Patrick Murphy. He did
a deep, deep dive into whatever he could find on
the record and about each of the victims up to
an including he went to Chicago and he actually went
to the room that to this day holds all of
(09:36):
the Gacy files and dug through that and give it
give us a very deep dive of everything that was
in there. So we downloaded quite a bit of information
to be able to try to build these stories. And
at the end of the day they a lot of
it was as always inspired by right, like we were
not able to do. It isn't a documentary, and so
we were dramatizing within the body of it. And the
(09:57):
hope is is that when when people are wh watch it,
they realized that we're not going to get it all right,
but that we're trying to get the spirit of the
story and the spirit of their story as right as
we possibly could.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I understand that you did reach out to surviving members
of the victims' families as you were going through this
process of creating this series. That must be an incredibly
difficult thing to do. And secondly, what do you do
if they say, I don't want you to do this.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
It's a really good question. Well, part one to your
question is I don't want to undersell or it. It
didn't feel difficult to do because it genuinely felt like
the right thing to do. And it's interesting early on
when we were discussing the reaching out to the family
(10:48):
members and our team at Universal were gathering whatever their
last known contact information was of their next of kin,
and quite frankly, we didn't get a ton back. Like
we'd sent out thirty letters and emails and phone I
made phone calls and we did reach out to every
last contact that they had, and we only heard back
(11:10):
from a handful of people. But in that time where
they were gathering the contact information, they were saying to me,
They're like, you know that it's very probable that they're
going to be upset at you. And I said, that's
the point, Like, the point is to open a dialogue.
And and while we were going to make the show,
(11:32):
and I was absolutely going to open open myself up
to any criticism or any perspective that was going to
come back my way. If someone said to me, I
definitely don't want you to focus on my on my
family member, we would have we would have adjusted. And
we did it early on in the process so that
they anyone that we did touch base with, had the
opportunity to say that to us. But we weren't necessarily
(11:54):
asking for permission. We were I was opening up a dialogue,
so they at least knew that they could have a
dialogue with us. And to me, I think that that's
that's that's important. And I'll go on the record as
saying that. I've said it before, and I'll say it again,
and I'll keep saying it. I know that we've probably
disappointed people like I am aware of that, and I
(12:17):
don't know if there is any way to work around it, right,
but I desperately want anyone who is listening to hear
me when I say that what I said before, that
we were trying to tell the story as best as
we could. We were trying to tell the story with
as much respect as we could, and for anybody that
we may have disappointed, I am immensely sorry. That was
(12:40):
never That's never my intent and I and what I
am proud of so far is that there seems that
people seem to be getting it like they you know,
I don't know if the family members are, but like
for the first time in my career, people are really
getting what we were trying to do. And that I'm
so proud of our writers first and our director and
(13:00):
our actors, because everyone went in with a very open
heart and a desire to get this as right as possible.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Whose story did you tell first when you were making it.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
In terms of the in terms of the victims, Yeah,
it was Johnny Sick. It was, And that was very
purposeful because in the pilot I had written in his
high school ring without knowing who it was, and so
we knew that which was real. They found that in
Casey's attic, and so we knew that Episode two was
(13:33):
going to be focused on Tovar going on that journey
to identifying the owner of the ring. Johnny's story was
not told because of any other reason other than it
made the most sense in that arc of storytelling between
those two episodes. But I will say that I always knew,
even when I was alone and I was pitching to
(13:53):
the network like what it was going to look like
before we had the green light, I knew that Jeffrey
Rignoll was going to be the last story. Always there's
going to be the last story.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
We'll talk about Johnny Sick.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Part of his story, and a part of so many
of the stories of these victims, is that they are
young gay men who are in the nineteen seventies not
openly gay. Johnny has to kind of hide it by
having a very close girl friend who are kind of
led to believe that she is his girlfriend, even though
she is herself not straight.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Correct.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
But you're telling a lot of stories about the LGBTQ community.
How do you do you consult with people in trying
to tell those stories in a way that is sensitive
to the fact that in the nineteen seventies was a
very different climate for people in that community, but also
understanding you're playing this to a twenty twenty five audience.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah, So the first answer is, yes, absolutely, we again
when I was all alone and I knew what we
were because I look, I'll fully confess that when I
came into the story, I only knew all of like
the surface little trivias about John Wayne Gacy. I knew
that he was the clown killer. I knew that he
was a contractor. I knew that he like was posed
(15:04):
with Roslin Carter, and like, I knew like all of
these surface level level things and I and I knew
that he obviously that he abducted and tortured and raped
and murdered these young these young boys and young men,
but I didn't fully understand the degree to which homophobia
(15:24):
played a part in him getting away with it. So
once I had stumbled on that piece of information as
I was running the pilot, I knew that I had
to reach out, and I reached out to Glad immediately,
because what I was most afraid of was that I
was somehow going to equate psychopathy with with queerness, and
(15:46):
that was something that I could not let happen because look,
at the end of the day, I only know what
I You know, I am a white, middle aged, you know,
heterosexual man, and I will say that I while I
believe the old adage that a writer can write anything,
I don't necessarily believe that a writer knows everything, nor
should they write everything. And so they were very generous
(16:09):
to us, not only with me. Then they came into
the writer's room and they helped us from the outline
stage through the script stage. And one of the rules
that we came to together that they were encouraging was
don't approach this through a twenty twenty five lens. You
have to approach it through the nineteen seventies. But the
one thing that is so ignorant of me, and I
(16:31):
will readily admit that. So the writers in the room,
these are writers. I've worked with some of them for
over almost fifteen years, ten years, eight years. The staff
writer was a new writer to me, but by happenstance,
they were queer, the majority queer. Not everybody, but the
majority queer. And so the room became this story ground
of our writers who were finding their identities in very
(16:54):
modern times and were struggling with the exact same the
exact same challenges. You know, what became apparent to me.
And when I'm asked what do you want people to
take away from this series, is that this is as
relevant today as it was in the nineteen seventies, And
I would go on the record as saying that I
actually believe that it is more relevant today. I believe
that the level of hatred and prejudice and bias that
(17:15):
we were seeing today that is leading to record number
of violence across the spectrum, but especially to underrepresented voices
the LGBTQ community, especially that the idea in any viewer's
mind that those problems have been solved. All you have
to do is sort of look at the world around
us and know that they haven't. So it became a
(17:36):
very powerful journey in the writer's room to listen to
these people that I've known for years expressed the same
challenges and prejudices and biases that we were exploring in
the stories in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
You do tell the majority of these stories from the
victim's perspectives, but something you touched on there about how
much homophobia played a role in how much John Wayne
Gacy got away with. You also tell the story of
law enforcement amongst this too, and not just the team
who are investigating Gaycy himself after he kills his final victim,
(18:14):
but for those officers who've investigated him in the past,
and just how difficult the families of those victims found
it when they came up against police officers who just
told them their sons were runaways or that, you know,
it didn't matter because they were sex workers, or that
they were gay and they lived certain lifestyles and so
if they disappeared, I guess they didn't matter as much
(18:35):
as the next person. Do you feel like you'll get
blowback from law enforcement for kind of exposing that storyline
amongst this as well?
Speaker 3 (18:47):
I think that if we do, then it is a
very narrow interpretation of what we were doing in the show.
And I'll expand on that in a second. And if
it is that narrow interpretation of what we're doing in
the show, I would ask that the Royal they to
go back and rewatch because I don't believe, I know
(19:12):
that what we were presenting is a reality of the
time and a reality of the system, and the idea
that it can be denied then as much as it
could be denied today is just fantasy. Right. It is
a complete and utter reinterpretation of what actually happened. So
(19:35):
putting that into a box, right, and let's pretend that
I have to defend that interpretation, and right, I will
then pivot and I will bring up what you just
brought up at the top of your question, which is, yes,
we are pointing out the systemic failure of certain segments
(19:55):
of the police force, not only about blatant prejudices, but
also communicate failures, right, which are obvious because the system
changed quite a bit after the gaycy case. But on
the flip side, we're also showing officers who were in
that pit for months on end, who were digging with
their bare hands, who could not voice at the time
(20:20):
the concept of PTSD, but who absolutely came out of
that experience with PTSD police officers who quit the force,
who lost marriages, who turned to alcohol and drugs because
of the things that they sought on there. But they
were down there every single day trying to find and
identify every last person that was buried underneath Gaycy's house.
(20:42):
So the concept that we're somehow demonizing police is absolutely
too narrow of an interpretation of the reality, because we
are showing heroes on the one end and a complete
systemic failure on the other. And I stand by that,
and I will say that I hope that people who
(21:02):
interpret it any other way will go back and just
look a little bit, a little bit more closely of
what we're trying to say in the show.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
You're listening to true Crime Conversations with me, Claire Murphy,
I'm speaking with Patrick McManus, director of Devil in Disguise
John Wayne Gacy. Up next, Patrick tells us what you
have to do to get into the mindset of a
serial killer in order to play the role. So he said,
(21:30):
before you knew some surface level stuff about Gaysey going
into this, were you as shocked as I was, because
I think I was the same as you. I knew
some stuff about him, but I didn't know the depths
of things when you did see how many times Gaysey
had been in contact with police. I mean, he went
to jail for eighteen months over the molestation of a
(21:51):
young boy and then was released. It's supposed to serve
a ten year sentence, released after eighteen months, and then
goes on to have other very very suspicious things, you know,
allegations leveled against him by all the young men. And
that's kind of it's a he said, he said situation,
And it's kind of like, go like, were you shocked
by how many times Gasey could have been stopped and wasn't.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Unbelievably so, I mean, I don't want to, you know,
give too simple or too quick of an answer, but
it's overwhelming. I mean, the it gets me every time,
the simple bit of disturbing, morbid, horrible trivia that is
a that is true. And I remember the moment in
(22:37):
the writer's room when we when we found it out
in the research that had Gasey simply done his time
for the first sodomy charge in nineteen where he went
to jail nineteen sixty eight. He would have gotten out
on the exact same day, day and year that Rob
Peaste was abducted and murdered, which we talk about in
(22:59):
the show. The concept that had he just done his time,
none of those boys would have died at his hands
is insane. And then and then you go into all
of the moments when the police knocked on his door,
all the moments when the police chased him, all the
(23:20):
moments when or followed him. Excuse me, all the moments
when family members went to the police. The kicker being
the one that I talked about earlier, which is the
Jeffrey Rignal case, which is where he was abducted, chloroformed, raped, torture,
dumped back on the street. Police did nothing. He did everything,
(23:41):
found his house, staked him out, found his house, brought
it to the police, and they still did nothing, and
Gacy went on to kill four more young men, including
Rob Peacete. After that, consfidable like it's impossible to wrap
your brain around that.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
I want to ask you if that's true too.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
When Rignold took a piece of Casey's mail to police
and said that's the guy, that's his address, that the
officer said, do you know that stealing mail is a crime?
Criminal offense? Did that actually happen or was that dramatization?
Speaker 3 (24:13):
That was dramatizing. But however, the fact that they got
his license plate, his home address and brought it and
the police said to him that there's nothing we can do,
it's out of our jurisdiction. That's true.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
What victim after telling so many of these stories now,
and I'm not saying that any are going to stand
out in more than others, because each of their stories
by themselves are so terrible and sad, But was there
any one of the victim's stories that really hit you hard?
Speaker 2 (24:45):
I mean, they all would have.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
I guess I don't know what I'm asking exactly, But
is there one that stands out for you that you
can't stop thinking about?
Speaker 3 (24:53):
So I want to say no, but I'm going to
answer the question in a different way. All of this
stories were were sort of overwhelming in various in various ways.
The story that gets me the most, and it's not
an individual story, it's just sort of a blanket of
what happened at the time, was that when the when
(25:14):
they first started breaking the case and they and they
and the police we were setting out up hotlines, and
you know, they were asking the public all over not
just the not just the city or the state or
the country, but the world if you were missing anyone
in the Chicago area. And then and the number of
calls were it was like a tsunami of calls, like
(25:34):
they were getting pings from all over the place. And
the second that the press made it out to be
that Gacy was queer and the victims were queer, it
dried up. And that always just stuck with me. I
don't I mean, look, it's I hate to I don't
want to be ignorant about it, because I'm not, but
(25:57):
it's it's just so abhorrent to me that relatives of
victims would not want the memory of their son or
brother or friend to be tainted by homosexuality. That's really
hard to that's really hard to fathom for me.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
So that's the thing too, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Because whilst we know of thirty three of Gaysey's victims,
many of whom were buried under his house, some in
his yard, some dumped in a river, that there are
still at least five unidentified at this point in time,
and they are still identifying the victims even now. I
think the most recent was twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two.
(26:39):
DNA obviously is playing a role now and they have
exhumed bodies and done for the DNA testing, but there
are still victims now that remain unidentified.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
How does that sit with you?
Speaker 3 (26:52):
I mean, I will share because he's not here. Michael Chernis,
who plays Gaycy, he and I have done a lot
of pre us separate and together, and he says like
the thing that he wants people to take out of
the show, like if you could accomplish anything with the show,
that it's that people would would come forward and somehow
(27:15):
because of our show and the other reporting, not just
our show, but like there are a lot of people
who have really tried to get this story out there
for this exact same reason that we might be able
to identify one more young young man. And so I
see it as sort of like a call to action,
and that I feel like the more successful our show is,
the more successful the documentaries are, the more successful the
(27:37):
books are, the more of an opportunity we have to
bring one one more boy home. And that to me
is sort of empowering in many ways. It's you know,
we do these social action campaigns alongside our shows, all
of our shows, and our current social action campaign for
(27:58):
Devil in Disguise is called Guarding Youth, and it's and
it is about trying to give people not just the education,
but the tools in order to try to better protect
youth through at risk at home, at school and communities.
And so I feel like this is another opportunity for
people to do something and to begin, you know, to
begin to look into your family's past and and see
(28:21):
if there is some story that you have heard about
or know about, or that might have some connective tissue
to these to these young boys. I would love nothing
more than to bring another one home, to be party
to it, not to do it on our own, but
to be party to it.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
You mentioned Michael Chennis there, who does play Gacy in
your series. How do you work with someone to recreate
someone who is so essentially evil? And I mean you
do take us through the process of him speaking to
you know, the therapist and being psychoanalyzed and getting a
better understanding as to what kind of mental state this
(28:59):
man was to have done the things that he's done,
not saying that anyone who suffers from any of those
things will go on to do what he did. But
in order to play someone like that, and I don't know.
He said in other interviews that he watched some of
those interviews and listened to the tapesticket an understanding of
how he moved and what he sounded like, but to
exist in that character for a while. And you and
I spoke just before we hit go on this interview
(29:22):
that I've been sitting in the law of gacy for
the past few days in preparation for this interview. You've
sat in this law for years now? Have you made
this and now you're talking about it again? For him,
he had to embody this evilness. How do you work
with someone to make sure that they can safely navigate.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
That well, Michael, first of all, was partner from the beginning.
I mean, I told the show and I went out
looking for looking for the person to play easy and
it became very apparent, very quickly that if Michael Churnis
was going to say yes, that he was the one.
And then he became a partner, I mean from we
were in the writer's room still for months, and one
(30:02):
of the challenges, first of all, for I think both
the writers and for Michael was how is this person real?
You know, when I wrote the first episode, even I
was struggling with how this guy the way he talks,
how he talked, Like what he's saying is so not
what you expect out of a quote unquote serial killer,
(30:23):
that it seems fake, and that if you, like had
written it on your own and it was a pure
piece of fiction, people would would call, you know, call
bullshit on you. Then the writers came in, and the
writers called bullshit on me. They were like they read
the script and these are writers again and I've known forever,
and they were like Patrick, this come on, man, like,
give me a break, Like what are we supposed to
do with this? And I said, just do me a
(30:43):
favor and go off and do some research and then
come back to me. And they did that, and they
came back and they were like, oh shit, okay, how
do we write this fucking guy right? Like he's a
whole other thing? And then then we're in it with Turnis,
and Turnis was like bristling at it right, not not
in a bad way, but in like the same way
we had it right where we're like, how do we deal, right,
(31:03):
And I said to him, and he talks about this
like that, Michael, if you don't approach it from this perspective,
which is the real perspective, which is this guy was affable, charming,
He was the guy and the charming in quotes, because
he was a goofball really right, then it's sort of
a disservice to the victims because you're because then you're like,
you know, if you're not doing it that, You're like,
(31:24):
why do you get in the car? Why do you
want a job? Why are you going home with this guy? Right?
So that was like challenge number one was just getting
everyone on the same page of who Gaycy really was.
And then as it relates to just sort of the
psychology of taking I don't know if that if the
if the question you're getting at is like, how do
you take care of an actor who has to deal
with this? You know, I will say speaking for Turnis
(31:47):
because I've heard him say this quite a bit. You know,
Number one, he's he talks quite a bit about how
as an actor and he's Julliard trained. He's like, right,
he's like a really well trained actor. He's like, you're
supposed to figure out all the ways in which you
could do which you connect and excuse someone, right, like,
you're you're this person, and he said, doing this role,
he had to throw all that training out because he's like,
(32:07):
I will never be able to accept this person. I
can't do it. He's like, I can do it to
a point. And then I get to the next point,
which is him murdering and raping and torture, and I'm like,
I can't find a way to excuse that. And we
talk about we can talk about that next. We talk
about that quite a bit, that you can't excuse it.
And you said right there that someone with mental health
issues are not going to go on to do this thing.
(32:28):
There's no way of explaining this guy away other than
the fact that he is pure, unadulterated, singular evil. Right.
There's no struggle with identity, there's no struggle with dads
and alcoholic dads, there's no struggle with mental health. Right.
That excuses this away. So turnus in terms of taking
care of himself. I know that he talks about how
(32:48):
and I saw it because I was in his trailer
quite a bit. He had a list of all of
the names of the victims on a board, on like
a fold out tryboard, And while he never did it
in front of me, he talks quite a bit about
how he would get done with his day and he
would go and he would just read the names. And
his point was, we're doing it for them, like, this
is not about Gayzy, this is about them, and so
(33:10):
that's why I'm doing it. And I thought that was
a very interesting way of protecting himself.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I think that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
What you say about Gaysey is that he is a
very difficult character to wrap your head around in that
he seems quite charming in a very fun, dad jokey
kind of way, and his ability to lure people into that,
and he talked himself up quite a bit, and you know,
heyes an important person, and people believed that, and they
believed that he would give them a job and pay
(33:39):
them lots of money, and so there was lots of
ways that he lured people in.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
But do you feel like it from your surface level.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Understanding of who he was at the beginning all of this,
do you feel like you at all could get a
handle or an understanding of the person John Wayne Gacy
who he actually is, Because I don't think anyone truly
understands them motivations for the things that he did. But
do you get it was there a moment that you thought,
this is who this guy really is?
Speaker 3 (34:08):
I know this is a podcast. I shouldn't take such
a long breath or thought, I'm it's such a you know,
it's so it's amazing. I've been doing press for this
for like a more than a month, and I've been
talking about it for three years, and I'm no one's
ever asked me this question. I I guess I'm going
to have to go back to a version of what
(34:30):
I just said, which is, I don't think there was
any world in which myself and the writers and Turness
could have read more, studied, more dissected more. I don't
know how we could have done more. And I don't
think that I can say yes that I I know
(34:53):
who John Wayne Gacy is because I and I'm stealing
a little bit from Turnis on this. But I think
that I know a lot of people who struggled with
their identity, and I think that I know a lot
of people who struggled with abusive parents and I and
struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction. Is Gaysey did and
(35:16):
and I think that I've known people I know, I
know very personally, people who have struggled with their mental
health in my family. And this is where I'm stealing
from Turnus. I think you can you can understand Gacy
only to that far, and you can't make the next step.
And so I have to attribute that answer to Michael
(35:36):
because I think it's like the most universal way of
looking at it, which is that you can understand him
only to a point, but you will never fully understand.
And then and I think that you then go to
the most base answer, which is and the most simpleton answer,
which is that he was just evil like And how
do you explain evil? Right next?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
What parts of this story did Patrick decide to leave
out of the series and why When you're deciding what
parts of Gaysey's life to include in this story and
what not, how do you then decide what to discard?
Because I understand you shot a fair amount more footage,
say in the final episode, which takes us to Gaysey's execution,
(36:25):
which we will never see because you cut all of it,
how do you decide to say, you know what, this
is a really important part of Gaysey's story, the fact
that he did receive the death penalty, and he was
eventually executed, but yet you see him very briefly in
this final episode where it should all be about him.
It is his death finally, but you choose to make
(36:46):
it not about him, Like how do you come to
that point?
Speaker 3 (36:49):
So, first of all, there is a part of me
not for a while, I want there to be some
space because I want I'll get to the answer and
this will go to why I want to want space.
But there is a very large part of me that
someday wants to release want. I want to release the
original cut of it, because I will say that Michael
(37:10):
did an extraordinary performance and he was in half of it.
I mean, I feel really bad for the studio and
the network and especially my line producer, because we spent
a lot of money that did not end up on
screen a lot, and Michael's performance is spectacular. So I
directed for the first time, and I directed the finale,
(37:31):
and I was in post on it, and I remember
it really, really clearly. It was a Sunday morning. I
woke up early. My wife and I on Saturday Sunday's
trade off, bringing each other coffee in bed and eoli.
My wife who runs our social action in our philanthropy
for the company, came upstairs with my coffee and she
looked at my face and she's like, what's wrong. And
(37:51):
I was like, I think, I think I have to
cut Surnas out of the finale. And I woke up
super early with just this like flash that it was
the last chance I had to like make the statement
that it was not about gaycy because I feel like,
(38:14):
and I can say, like the scenes were really powerful
with journies that I don't think that there was any
world in which an audience wasn't going to come away
with some semblance of weirdly feeling for him, like weirdly
like it was. It wouldn't you're not going to be
on his side. You're gonna want him to die. But
there was enough in there that there would be something.
(38:38):
And even if you didn't, right like, even if I
was guaranteed to have you have nothing but antipathy for him,
there was a world in which, you know, we were
still going to be focusing on him for thirty five
minutes of the finale. And so I asked my editor,
Ryan Denmark, who I've we've worked together for years. I
was like can you tomorrow cut me and cut without
(39:01):
Journis in it? And he's like what, And I said,
just do it and let's see how I went. And
so he did it the next day and at noon
lunch we watched it down together on zoom and we
got to the end and I just said, what do
you think and he goes, Yep, this is what it is.
And by the way, Denmark, I mean this with nothing
but love, because I'll never work without him. Is a
big asshole, like he would tell me he would one
(39:24):
hundred percent tell me if I was wrong. He not,
like That's why I love him is that he'll tell
me that I suck all the time. And then the
question was how do I tell Urnis? And it took
me a long time to tell Turnis uncomfortably long time
because I wanted to fly to New York and watch
it down with him and I couldn't make it happen.
And then I had to eventually break down and tell him.
And I got to tell you, I know he will
(39:44):
say that he he took it hard at first, like
he says, he's like the ego, the actor ego, right,
but he was very professional about it. He went off
and he watched it and he came back and he
said he got it too, And I will say, I
think it's really good because he's not in it.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
I'd love to know if you've gotten any feedback on
dramatizing true crime.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Because we did speak to the author of the book.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
On Ed Green after Rian Murphy made Monsters about Ed Green,
and he was concerned that people had the wrong impression
as to who ed Gen actually was due to the
dramatization of his life in that story. Have you had
feedback about people concern that dramatizing any of this story
(40:30):
was the wrong thing to do, yes, or maybe you've
had the opposite.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Both honestly both. I mean, as I expressed a little
while ago, like I know that I'm going to disappoint people.
And there's absolutely not a question that we've received people said, well,
that is not right, that is not accurate. I can
tell you that it's not at the same level as
what some of the pushback has been another series. Overwhelmingly
(40:57):
it's been positive. And again, like, look, there are scenes,
whole scenes in the show that in which we lifted
dialogue from depositions or from interviews, and we like made
that the dialogue.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Well you can also see that too when sometimes you
run a storyline and then you've played the actual footage
of the exact thing that was said in that episode.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Yeah, I mean yes, but I mean absolutely the preponderance
of the dialogue is fictional, right, Like we're operating under
an inspired by dramatization, and there's no way we could
have been in these conversations, right. So but I will
say again, like wherever we faltered, and I want to
put that in quotes, I will say that it was
(41:43):
absolutely inspired by a desire to get the spirit of
all of the research right. And the places where we
overstepped quote unquote bounds of what was real and dramatized,
it still all came from a place of us studying
this character and this character, and maybe these two characters
(42:03):
were never in the same room together, right, but they
were sharing an experience that was real, and that was
what we were trying to get at. So I am
in no way, shape or form casting any aspersions on
other shows you mentioned, ed Geen, I stand by what
I've said a million times and I will say for
(42:24):
the rest of my career, which is that art is
subjective and is there for a reason, and it is
going to be judged both positively or critiqued, both positively
and negatively, and that's just art, right. I can tell
you that every moment of every day in the writer's
room and then on in prep and then in production
(42:48):
was in a desire to get it as right as
we could possibly get it, even if what we're saying
is that it's a spiritual rightness. And I know that
that phrase is probably loaded and and probably is going
to upset people who don't think that we should do
this in any way. But I can tell you that
I feel very proud that we did something that was
(43:09):
super respectful, as respectful as we could possibly do one
of these things. And I'll always try to get it
better the next time, like I'll always continue to try
to evolve this process as long as I am doing it,
so that at the end of the day, I hope
that people can look at what we've done in Doctor
Death and Girl from Plainville in this show and say
(43:30):
we tried to not be sealacious, we tried to not
be gratuitous, we tried to not glorify. We really did
try to honor the memory of these stories as best
as we possibly could. Well.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
The fact that you did not show the deaths of
a single one of them, or the lead up to.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
Their deaths, that felt very respectful.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
No violence was shown throughout this entire series, and you
to think a story about a serial killer that would
be the main focus.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
That must have been a very deliberate choice.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
Oh yeah. From that was the one red line that
we that we refused to cross, and that was both
out of respect but also strategic. I mean, I will
say that I learned a real valuable lesson in Doctor
Death when we didn't show any surgeries until the finale.
(44:20):
And I was blown away by the number of people
who have come up to me over the years and
said those surgeries were so grotesque. And I was like,
you never saw anything, and I said, of course we did,
and I said, go back. You never saw anything, not
intil the finale. You see it in the finale. But
it was all imagination, sound design, imagination. And when we
(44:41):
made the decision out of respect to not show the murders,
we also knew strategically that people were going to still
find it extraordinarily like they were going to have a
visceral experience because you didn't need to see it to
feel it, and you didn't need to see it to
imagine it. And and the more that you've got to
know the people around the moment of their death, the
(45:03):
more visceral of an experience it was going to end
up being. And that is not me trying to take
advantage of those feelings. That is me just simply saying
that is the human reaction, is that your imagination is
extraordinarily powerful and you don't need to show it. I
also will say that I know that we disappointed people
who wanted to see it, Like I'm readily aware of
(45:25):
the fact that there are people who probably find our
show boring out there, and that's again the subjectivity of art,
right Like for some people it works, for other people,
it doesn't work. And I stand by what we did
because I think that it was I think it was
ultimately the right way to do it.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
John White Gacy was put to death on May tenth,
nineteen ninety four. Rob Peat's body was finally found in
the Deplains River in April nineteen seventy nine, four months
after he went missing. Victims number twenty eight, twenty six, thirteen,
twenty one, and ten still unidentified Thank you to Patrick
for helping us tell this story. You can watch Devil
(46:05):
in Disguise John Wayne Gacy now streaming on Binge. The
link is in our show notes. If you want to
see images from this story, head to our Instagram page
at True Crime Conversations. Give us a follow and have
a look at our case explainers there too. If you
enjoy this episode, please review our show on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
I'll eave a comment on Spotify.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
True Crime Conversations is hosted by me Claire Murphy and
produced by Tarlie Blackman, with audio designed by Jacob Brown.
Thank you for listening. I'll be back next week with
another True Crime Conversation. We want to hear from our
true crime fans. Tell us what kind of content you love,
(46:43):
what you'd like to hear more of, and a bit
about your listening habits. You'll final link to the show
notes to take our quick five minute survey, and you
have the chance to win a one thousand dollar gift
card just for participating. True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional
owners of land and water that this podcast was recorded
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