Director Joe Berlinger talks to ET about his latest, true-crime docuseries, 'Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes.'
John Wayne Gacy is the subject of another documentary, Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, now streaming on Netflix. This time, his life and crimes are at the center of the second installment of true-crime director Joe Berlinger’s Conversations With a Killer series, which features previously unheard audio interviews with the notorious serial killer.
Following the success of the first season, which was about Ted Bundy, Berlinger explains to ET that when he started thinking about who could be next, “Gacy came to the list, in part, because he’s naturally someone to talk about,” he says. “But also the tapes materialized.”
The director adds, “Sometimes projects find you. You don’t always find the project.”
Once in his possession, “I listened to them and it was like the Bundy tapes. It was just this fascinating insight into the mind of a serial killer,” he says. “And Gacy has always fascinated me as much as Bundy.”
Known as the Killer Clown, Gacy murdered 33 boys -- most of them teenagers -- and buried them inside his Norwood Park, Illinois, home between 1972 and 1978, before an investigation into the disappearance of a Des Plaines teenager led to his arrest. While convicted of 33 murders, it’s believed by many that Gacy, who was sentenced to death and died in 1994, is responsible for more unsolved murders or disappearances.
Despite committing such heinous crimes, the three-part docuseries shows how Gacy was able to get away with it – and that was largely due to the way he looked and acted in society. Prior to his first murder, he was a married, aspiring politician in Wisconsin, where he was a Democratic precinct captain, before moving to the suburbs of Chicago where he ran a successful contracting company.
Similarly to other killers at the time, Gacy took advantage of the trust people had in him. “He presented himself as very avuncular and trustworthy, just like Bundy,” Berlinger says, adding, “Just because somebody looks and acts a certain way, it doesn’t mean you can trust them.”
While Gacy’s story and murders have been well-documented, with Peacock releasing its own six-part docuseries, Devil in Disguise, in March 2021, The John Wayne Gacy Tapes offers a modern-day perspective or what Berlinger likes to call, “the social justice element.”
Here, that’s looking back at how “the prevailing attitudes towards the LGBTQ community is what allowed Gacy to flourish,” the director says, explaining that unlike Bundy, who preyed after young white women, many of Gacy’s victims were young queer men at a time when society was least accepting of them.
According to Martha Fourt, an Illinois-based LGBTQ+ advocate, “To be gay in the 1970s, it was a different world. The lack of trust between the gay community and the police made it even less likely that crimes against young people would be reported, or believed.”
And in that respect, the series sheds more light on the victims, with one part showing how a gay man went to the police accusing Gacy of rape and torture but ended up having to pursue the killer on his own, and another featuring an on-camera interview with Steve Nemmers, an early survivor of Gacy’s who is still haunted by his encounters with the killer to this day.
“Nobody knew anything about it because if you were gay, you were uncomfortable even reporting a potential assault because you were breaking the law,” Berlinger says. “In addition, the police didn’t take it seriously… the police just had massive homophobia and indifference towards that community.”
Yet, Berlinger is quick to point out that the docuseries’ criticism of the law enforcement’s prejudices at the time are not directed toward the authorities whose investigation into Gacy led to not only his arrest, but the discovery and excavation of all the other missing teenage boys, whose deaths would have otherwise gone unreported.
“The guys in the show acted heroically and realized the mistakes of the past,” Berlinger says. “So, I give those police all the credit in the world.”
Their heroism, however, doesn’t make up for the fact that Gacy was able to commit as many murders as he did, which makes hearing his audio tapes all the more chilling – and even frightening at times. “It really is a creepy story,” Berlinger acknowledges. “It’s horrifying.”
But for the director, that’s also what makes this story all that more important to tell. “It’s something you have to always remind yourself of. Like, don’t forget this is true and dark and you have a responsibility to the victims to make sure you never forget that,” he says.
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