Evil III

Part 3.

I met another person who would have been considered a personification of evil by many: John Wayne Gacy.

Gacy lived from about 1964 to 1968 in Waterloo, Iowa. A face people saw was that of a pleasant, hard-working, affable fellow, a man whose in-laws owned a group of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. Gacy worked at one of them, and showed promise as one who could own franchises himself one day. But, there was always the dark cloud. Toward the end of his time in Waterloo word had begun to spread that Gacy had unconventional sexual preferences. He had made passes at some of the adolescent boys that worked for him. In the spring of 1968 he was convicted of brutally raping a teenage boy. The sentence was ten years, but he was paroled in 1970, and he returned to his birthplace, Chicago. A few months after he arrived in Chicago he and his family purchased a house: a two-bedroom ranch with a crawl space. It was just outside the Chicago city limits.

By 1972 visitors to Gacy's home noticed a terrible odor. Gacy explained the odor as being from moisture accumulating in the crawl space.

No, that wasn't it.

Through 1976 - 1977 - 1978 young men disappeared, and the authorities could not pick up any trail for them. Police eventually focused on Gacy's house because the mother of the last victim remembered the construction firm at which her son had applied for work. They went to his home for the first time on December 13, 1978. They found several items that had belonged to the victims. They noticed that horrible odor. They looked in the crawl space, and found nothing. In a subsequent visit investigators noticed, in the crawl space, a mound of dirt. They dug, and found human remains. That same evening the Cook County Medical Examiner was called to the home. He recognized the stench immediately. It was the smell of death. By the end of the month 27 bodies had been found buried under the crawl space. There were others - two in the concrete of Gacy's patio, two in the Illinois River, one buried under Gacy's rec room. Poor fellow had run out of room in the crawl space, I guess.

Thirty-three in all.

I saw John Wayne Gacy briefly after he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. I was a correctional officer at the Joliet Correctional Center. I was on the tactical unit, and was taking some training in Springfield. Death Row was at the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois, just down the river from St. Louis. We toured death row. Gacy was helping with some painting, so he wasn't quite as locked down as the other inmates.

I've met three famous people in my life, and two of them were serial killers. About those people I hang out with. . .

What convinced Arthur Gary Bishop and John Wayne Gacy that other people saw themselves as things to gratify Gacy/Bishop? What persuaded them that other people don't want to live? Or, what made that idea such a matter of indifference to them?

In the prior blog posts we addressed the idea of societal pressures, and maybe that partly explains the Nazi phenomenon. But, let's not forget that those who worked at the camps made a choice to do so. Even if they made the choice with a pistol pointed at their heads, they still made a choice.

We talked a bit about evil personified  - Satan, the devil, etc. But, like societal pressure, this being, even if you accept his existence, can't force you to do something that isn't in your nature to do. Notice how much luck Satan didn't have with Job and Jesus.

What, then?

A couple of thoughts.

When forensic psychologists talk about serial killers, they talk about murder as giving these people a high. Once a killer has killed, it gives him a high that nothing else can match. It sounds almost like addiction. One prism useful to folks who work with addiction is to categorize addictions into substance addictions and process addictions. Substance addictions are the better known: addiction to alcohol, crack, tobacco, meth, and others. Process addictions are addictions to things you do, rather than things you use. To use an example, as good as exercise is as a habit, it is bad if it turns into an addiction.

For Gacy and Bishop, could murder have been the ultimate process addiction?

Gerald May, a noted author on the subject of addiction, published a book entitled Addiction and Grace. His position is that the opposite of addiction is grace. If you absent grace from your life, some form of addiction is inevitable. I think May is worth paying attention to, although I'm not on board with all he has to say.

I think this note is long enough, but I do want to follow up another time with a concept that I think may be the most relevant to discussion of evil and its origins: C.G. Jung and the concept of the shadow personality.

Thanks for hanging out. As always, I'd love your thoughts.