Watched all three episodes of the USA's 2022  Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, based on 60 hours of conversation (November 1979 - April 1980) taped while Gacy was awaiting trial for murder, never released until now in this documentary. 

Gacy was a neighborhood precinct captain, a Jaycees chaplain, a parade and party entertainer known as Pogo the Clown, and owner of a construction company called Painting, Decorating, Maintenance in Norwood Park Township, Illinois. He murdered more than 33 boys and young men, many of whom were his employees and labor recruits. He buried their bodies underneath his house, and, when there was no more space there, he dumped his victims' bodies in the river.

The taped conversations were made by Gacy's legal defense team. The entire documentary, however, includes interviews with a criminal attorney, prosecutors, a Jaycees president, a parade director, a defense attorney, a police lieutenant, a police officer, an investigator, a former inmate at Anamosa Reformatory where Gacy was imprisoned for sodomy early on, relatives of victims, survivors, and former employees. 

The documentary is structured around the case of Gacy's last victim, Rob Piest, a 15-year-old pharmacy assistant in Des Plaines, in 1978, all the way from his being declared as missing through the time his body surfaced in the river a long time later.

As with other documentaries in this interview series, there is an attempt to provide a psychological analysis of the perpetrator from his childhood onward: a strict and abusive father, two failed marriages, a sexual identity crisis, egocentricity and arrogance, and a flair for fabricating lies and rationalizations. Gacy committed his first murder--that of whom he called the Greyhound Bus Boy--in 1972. Excavations of victims' bodies in Gacy's house in 1978 are shown, and, in the final episode, his trial (February 6 - March 10, 1980), after which he was sentenced to death.

There are interesting, rare film clips from the 50s and the 60s,.many of which the viewer will miss if he blinks his eyes too frequently and too long. 

Gacy was executed May 10, 1994. A few of his victims' bodies remain unidentified.