Between 1972 and 1978 serial killer John Wayne Gacy (the killer clown) murdered 33 people in awful and gruesome ways in the Cook County area — the most in recorded history.   He’s also one of the most infamous murderers among students at Morton East — if not the most disturbing. 

John Wayne Gacy killed a total of 33 people in a span of 6 years in Illinois. Victims were often lured to his house or doused with chlorophine to make them vulnerable for a short amount of time. Many of his murders were teens between the ages of 15-17. He confessed to police his best method for killing his victims was strangling and suffocating them until they were left there dead. Gacy experienced a “thrill” that kept him killing.  Police discovered the first 29 bodies buried in the crawlspace in his home and 5 bodies which began to overflow the crawlspace were dumped from a bridge into the Des Plaines River.

Another serial killer, Tsutomy Mayasaki abducted little girls, killed them and committed sexual acts with their corpses. In one occasion he drank the victims blood, but also ate her hands as well. He preserved many of the body parts of his victims and sent post cards to families of his victims describing the murder.  Most of those also received calls and if they did not pick up their calls their phones will ring for more than 20 minutes.

Jeffery Dahmer killed 17 people from 1978-1991 from young boys to grown men. Dahmer one time killed a 14 year old boy and then drilled a hole in the back of his head to put acid inside in hopes that it would bring him back to life in order to use him for his sexual bidding. In another case after killing a 25 year old he carved his heart out with his bare hands, and stored it inside his freezer and admitted to the police that the heart found inside the fridge, he was going to consume.

Several people were asked who they thought was the worst serial killer they’ve heard of. 

“John Wayn Gacy:  he’s not the worst serial killer, but he’s the worst I’ve heard of; he ate them, he’d freeze them, he’d put (expletive) in them, he’d zombify them, he’d kidnap and rape them,” senior Jolee Gonzalez said. 

Many serial killers have gruesome and gory ways of disposing of their victims that send eerie chills down anyone’s spine. Many killers can even live double lives without family and relatives being aware that anything is out of the ordinary. Some serial killers are even known by friends and those who personally knew them as normal and nothing seemed wrong with them.  

“The scary thing is Jeffrey Dahmer’s life was pretty normal, I think a lot of—serial killers have pretty normal lives and end up being crazy—some have weird things about them though—a lot of people will say later that they were kind of weird—but sometimes its family and how they grow up, like Jeffrey’s (Dahmer) dad did a lot with bones, and he assumed it was okay to mess with that stuff too,” senior Jolee Gonzalez said. 

Many of the people who personally knew them often never suspected anything weird or strange about them, they were wrong. A lot of these serial killers have likely had troubled pasts such as being abused while they were young, abandoned by their families and spent most of the time being alone. These serial killers then begin to fantasize murder in their heads until it happens. 

“A lot of serial killers were obsessed with—doing the grosses things to their victims—from Jefrey Dahmer cutting off men’s genitals and carving out hearts to John Wayne Gacy assaulting, raping, and murdering teenage boys, from like ages 12 to 15. It’s disturbing how they were able to have a (façade) of a normal life,” senior Mario Osorio Galvez said. 

Many killers imagine the satisfaction of killing someone; this then leads to a chemical reaction in the brain in which a hormone called dopamine is released, leading to pleasure or happiness. After experiencing this for the first time it then becomes a cycle to fulfill that urge.