CHICAGO — John Wayne Gacy’s killing spree ended 41 years ago, yet he’s still a fixture on TV.
The Chicago-area building contractor who killed at least 33 young men and boys and sometimes performed as a clown at neighborhood parties is the subject of Thursday’s episode of the Oxygen network series “Mark of a Killer.” Last year alone, the Travel Channel, Reelz, HLN and Investigation Discovery aired new TV episodes about Gacy.
“We’ve got a couple more I know that are coming up towards the end of the year, one by a local producer named John Borowski,” Mike Albrecht said about media projects exploring the Gacy case. “Since the 40-year anniversary, there seems to be an uptick.”
Albrecht — a former Des Plaines police detective who tailed Gacy and helped arrest him on Dec. 21, 1978 — estimates he and his partner at the time, Dave Hachmeister, have participated in more than 30 documentaries about Gacy over the years.
Albrecht, William Kunkle and Larry Finder — who were interviewed for the “Mark of a Killer” episode — say they have been fielding more producer phone calls than usual since December 2018, the 40th anniversary of Gacy’s arrest. They talked to the Chicago Tribune about what it’s like to repeatedly revisit the most horrific case of their careers for TV.
Finder used to have a recurring nightmare about Gacy: His arms were crossed as he leaned against Finder’s car while waiting for him in a parking garage near the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
Finder was a young prosecutor when Gacy confessed to him and showed him “the rope trick” method he used to strangle his victims. Finder said he no longer has that nightmare, but the case had a “profound effect” on him.
Since he participated in the three-part Investigation Discovery series “Deadly Legacy,” which aired in December 2018, Finder said he’s received calls from producers with “several” TV networks. He said he shares his story to warn that there are evil people who may not seem so.
“I think it’s important for people to know that, had you met John Wayne Gacy at a restaurant, at a bar, whatever, he could appear very normal. And that’s the scariest part for me because the man was pure evil, and yet he could function like a normal person. And that’s scary because how many more John Wayne Gacys are out there?” said Finder, who works as a lawyer in Houston.
“So the reason that I have agreed to talk about this publicly — and frankly I say things now I couldn’t say before, during the trial — is that it’s good to be trusting, but you have to be a little wary. It’s kind of like what Ronald Reagan said about the Russians — trust, but verify.”
Even before the true-crime TV boom, many documentaries, TV specials and feature films were made about Gacy. Just last month, several obituaries about Tony-winning character actor Brian Dennehy recalled him playing Gacy in the 1992 TV film “To Catch a Killer.” Gacy’s IMDb page — yes, he has a page on the entertainment database — only lists 23 projects that feature archive footage of him.
One of them, “The John Wayne Gacy Murders: Life and Death in Chicago,” is due out in August if writer-director John Borowski can raise enough money to finish it. Borowski told the Tribune his documentary film has turned into a four-to-six-hour series that will place “Gacy’s life under a microscope” with a dive into the efforts of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office to determine the names of Gacy’s unidentified victims through DNA technology. Two of eight men have been identified since the sheriff’s office reopened the case a decade ago.
Kunkle was interviewed for the Borowski project. In his 45-year legal career, Kunkle served as a criminal defense attorney, Cook County assistant state’s attorney and Cook County Circuit Court judge. He’s handled many high-profile cases, but none have drawn as much interest as Gacy. He led the prosecution against Gacy and witnessed his execution by lethal injection in 1994.
Kunkle, who said his plans to co-author a book about Gacy were shelved because he couldn’t find a publisher willing to pay for it, received eight or nine calls about Gacy projects in the last two years. He said he’s spent hours, even days for one project, discussing the 14-month investigation and month-plus trial. Usually only a few sound bites make it onto an hourlong TV episode.
“If I don’t do it then someone else will, and the someone else may not have all the information I do or in my view, tell the correct story. Just to keep the record straight I suppose is the prime mover as far as I’m concerned, but I’m starting to have limits. I’m pretty tired of it,” Kunkle said.
Albrecht — a one-term Des Plaines mayor who retired from Cook County Forest Preserve law enforcement in 2017 — recognizes he’s a part of history. He said participating in Gacy projects can be repetitious, but it helps when producers show a genuine interest in learning details about the case.
“I’m kind of glad they’re talking to us because we are getting a lot older now,” he said.
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