How did John Wayne Gacy get so rich?

We live in a world where we consume media that rewards the heroes and punishes the villains. From movies and TV series, to books and comics, the good guys usually win and the bad guys usually lose.

But real life doesn’t always work that way, does it? In fact, in many cases, the bad guys win … at least for a time. John Wayne Gacy was eventually caught and imprisoned for his many heinous crimes, and executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994 at Stateville Correctional Center, which is hardly a “win.”

On the other hand, he literally got away with murder (and sexual assault) for many years, and then after getting caught, he spent his time in prison taking it easy and enjoying a painting hobby.

While some will argue over whether he got punished enough or got away with it, everyone agrees that he was a bad guy. If ever there was a villain, John Wayne Gacy was it.

He targeted teenage boys and young men for his sexual crimes, and after torturing his victims, he’d kill them. Gacy murdered 33 young men all while enjoying being treated as a respected member of his community.

But wait – there’s more! Did you know what John Wayne Gacy made a lot of money? Some estimates put his net worth at between $1-5 million.

There is some dissent about his finances, though. While some people believe that Gacy died a rich man, others believe information is based on a lie – Gacy’s lie.

Gacy was a good liar, and also good at pretending to be a moral citizen and neighbor. To this day, many find it shocking that he got away with the many evil deeds that he did for as long as he did.

As far as we know, John Wayne Gacy is the most prolific serial killer in American history, so far. How did he get away with harming so many people?

Well, he was very good at fitting in. Gacy was helpful to his neighbors, active in local politics, and even (horrifically, in retrospect) dressed up as a clown for local children’s birthday parties and charities, all of which served to make people trust him.

Before his crimes were uncovered, Gacy was known as “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown” during his public performances in hospitals and at charity events for children. After he was found out, the public renamed Gacy the “Killer Clown.”

Gacy killed all of his victims at his house in Norwood Park Township in Illinois. He lured young men to his home and tricked them into putting on handcuffs by pretending he was performing a magic trick for their amusement. 

After a victim was handcuffed, Gacy would then assault and torture them. Next, he’d murder his victims and bury most of them on his own property, (four of his victims were thrown into the Des Plaines River, instead).

Gacy’s first known murder victim was killed in 1972, and the Killer Clown killed two more people by 1975. After he divorced his second wife in 1976, John Wayne Gacy murdered at least thirty more people.

Gacy was sentenced to death on March 13, 1980, but spent his time on death row at Menard Correctional Center relaxing and creating self-portraits of himself as Pogo the Clown.

In fact, his paintings served as a strong revenue stream. John Wayne Gacy’s paintings have become very popular in the “murderabilia” subculture — these are collectibles objects once owned or created by murderers and sought after by their fans.

Gacy was very prolific, painting around 2,000 canvases before his execution in 1994.

So, how much money are his paintings worth?

There were actually a lot of buyers, among them the Tatou Art Gallery in Beverly Hills, CA, which offered to buy three dozen of his paintings. The curator stated that Gacy’s paintings were part of the genre known as “art brut,” and the most expensive painting at the gallery was of Pogo the Clown with fangs (priced at $20,000 U.S.) while another painting sold elsewhere for $200,000.

In addition to self-portraits and clowns, he painted Elvis, a skull being stabbed by bloody daggers, Elvis, and a prisoner making a jailbreak by using a pickaxe to cut a hole in the cell wall. 

But, he wasn’t just a painter. Before his imprisonment, John Wayne Gacy made his money in other ways.

At one point, he was a manager of his father-in-law’s three Kentucky fried Chicken restaurants, bringing in $15,000 per year (worth $144,000 in 2023), plus a share of the restaurant’s profits. That seems very profitable!

Gacy also started a construction company that, right before his arrest, was bringing in $200,000 a year ($908,500 in 2022). So, he was more than financially stable before his arrest.

However, some people doubt that Gacy was actually rich, and here’s why.

While some believe Gacy was rich, it’s because he constantly bragged that he was. In the Netflix show Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, one of the investigators, Mike Albrecht, claimed that Gacy was a major braggart: “Gacy was full of crap. He was always boasting about himself, how good he was, how rich he was, just every context he had.”

In fact, a lot of Gacy’s money went to alimony and child support payments to his ex wife. Not only that, but he was paying a mortgage on his home, his own expenses and also his second wife’s expenses.

Gacy loved to entertain, and spent a lot of money on alcohol and other treats for his guests, so that cut into his cash, as well. The Killer Clown actually opened a kind of club in his basement for his friends and employees to drink and play pool in. He actually gave many of his male teen employees alcohol before he tried seducing them, so he did not entertain out of a sense of generosity, but for more insidious purposes.

His old home, where he committed so many crimes, was levelled and replaced by a new residence, which sold for only $395,000 in April 2021. Currently, its estimated value is $537,300, but it probably would have been worth more without its sordid history. While a home worth over half a million is nothing to dismiss, it’s hardly a massive mansion worth a huge amount of money.

So, on the one hand, John Wayne Gacy was not poor. On the other hand, he was a known liar, boaster, and exaggerator, and Gacy had many expenses that added up to a large sum of money that drained his financial pool. It is hard to parse the truth from the fiction when it came to Gacy’s money, but he will always be remembered more for his terrible crimes.

John Wayne Gacy continues to caputure the public’s imagination. Documentaries, TV series and movies have been made about Gacy, including the popular made-for-TV film To Catch a Killer and Netflix’s Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes.

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