Why I Apologized to John Wayne Gacy
Correcting a wrong story mattered even even for someone with no reputation left to damage.
The nadir of my career as an editor came in July 1989, when Chicago magazine, under my auspices, published an article claiming that serial killer John Wayne Gacy got his start in multiple homicides with the as-yet-unsolved murder of three boys in 1955. The victims, Robert Peterson, 14, and brothers John and Anton Schuessler, 13 and 11, had been strangled and were found naked in a forest preserve. Two days earlier, they disappeared after they had gone downtown to watch a movie. For years, the story horrified Chicago-area baby boomers and their parents, and there was some diabolical symmetry if this perversely salacious crime launched the career of a man who, two decades later, was accused of killing more people than anyone in American judicial history.
The story came to the magazine from a retired police detective who had pursued this theory for years and was written by a friend with no experience in journalism. Given its explosive nature, I entrusted the piece to one of our most experienced senior editors. Gacy’s age of 13 at the time of the crime most strained credulity (the detective claimed he was really 15). But by then, he had been imbued with almost superhuman strength and cunning as a serial killer, which may have added to our gullibility. The detective tied Gacy to the crime with the record of his arrest for sodomy near the area where the boys were found, along with other potential connections to the victims. Meanwhile, the writer had penned several letters to Gacy in prison, supposedly leading to incriminating admissions about his possible involvement.
A few weeks after the article appeared, I received a letter from Death Row in the Menard Correctional Center, where the sender was awaiting execution by lethal injection (it would finally happen five years later). In short order, Gacy convincingly dismissed the idea he had anything to do with the Schuessler and Peterson killings. Moreover, he revealed the many letters he received from the article’s author to win his trust and affection, which the pen pal then betrayed. He said he consistently denied killing the three boys, and nothing in his letters would indicate otherwise unless it was taken out of context. While I was ashamed we hadn’t done a better job of fact-checking, I was even more upset that he had been approached under false pretenses—a kind of ambush journalism I have never condoned. I retracted the article, apologized to our readers, and wrote a personal apology to Gacy.
As it turned out, Gacy was right. Five years later, Kenneth J. Hanson was convicted of killing the boys. A serial predator, he used horses under his care to lure his victims to a stable, where he abused them and killed them if they put up a fight. His employer, Silas Jayne, a renowned equestrian trainer and dealer, helped Hanson dispose of the bodies so police wouldn’t uncover his illicit behavior involving fraudulent horse sales and arson. Jayne was later convicted for his involvement in possibly five deaths connected to the contract killing of his half-brother, who had become his fiercest saddle club competitor. For once, as far as the Scheussler-Peterson story was concerned, Gacy was eclipsed by other shady characters, although not nearly as lethal.
Still, in 1989, did it matter if our article ran? Absent his unethical associate, the retired detective behind the theory sincerely believed he was putting a notorious crime to rest. This attitude animates a lot of misguided Cold Case investigations. Besides, the story could not possibly have damaged a serial killer’s reputation more than it was already. You might argue that no one deserved an apology less than Gacy.
But my response had nothing to do with his feelings. My only thought was for the victims and their right for us to reach a truthful resolution to their tragic end. I feel a similar obligation to the victims in Submerged. One is living, wrongfully convicted, and now wrongfully incarcerated for more than a decade. But as Jason Tibbs has often told me, clearing his name means more than his freedom. With the publicity surrounding his arrest and conviction for a murder that took place two decades earlier, his disgrace reached Gacy-like proportions in Northwest Indiana. As for the murdered victim, Rayna Rison, her family, and the courts failed to protect her from a violent predator. He, too, is dead, but the least we can do is hold him accountable for her death.