Postmortem: What Survives the John Wayne Gacy Murders

By Courtney Lund O’Neil

Citadel Press 2024

Looking at her nonfiction debut, readers won’t recognize the name of author Courtney Lund O’Neil. And likewise readers won’t even imagine that they’d recognize the name of her mother Kim. But die-hard true crime aficionados might recognize Kim’s full maiden name, Kim Byers, from the extreme fine print in the case of the notorious American serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who tortured and killed 33 young men from 1972 to 1978 in suburban Chicago.

Gacy lured these young men to his house on Summerdale Ave with the promise of beer or pot or a gainful job in Gacy’s contracting business. Once there, he strangled them, tortured them, killed them, and buried most of them in the shallow dirt of the crawlspace under his house. Once that space began to fill up, he buried a few victims in his yard. The rest he threw into the Des Plaines River.

His last victim was a teenager named Rob Piest, a good-looking, outgoing young man from a close-knit family and circle of friends. Gacy spotted him while Piest was working at the Nisson Pharmacy one night and offered him work at the contracting business for twice the hourly rate he was currently making, just a quick car-ride to Gacy’s house to talk about it and fill out some routine paperwork. Piest’s mother was there at the pharmacy to go home with him at the end of his shift, and Kim Byers was his co-worker. Kim had had a roll of film developed and on a whim had put her film receipt in the pocket of Piest’s jacket. It was in that pocket when Piest went out the door to meet with Gacy. O’Neil relates the scene:

Kim looked at Rob, and his imaged imprinted in her mind. Loyal, handsome, strong. The blue parka was made for him.

“Okay,” she said. “See you soon.”

Kim watched Rob slide his hands in his pockets and thought of her receipt. He would notice it at any moment now. But as he stopped on his way out of the store he didn’t seem to notice. He looked from King to his mother and said, “I’ll be right back.”

Reading the portentous double meanings woven into all this (“See you soon,” “I’ll be right back”), kind-hearted readers can be tempted to think time has dramatized some of Kim’s memories, just as tender allowance can be made for O’Neil’s writing about her mother’s view of the moment, that this was what she was somehow meant to do, that “a small, faraway crevasse of herself she did not have daily access to had opened,” as O’Neil puts it. “Something, someone was telling her to save the receipt.”

This is hindsight, of course, because as Postmortem demonstrates through copious transcriptions from Gacy’s eventual murder trial, the presence of that receipt in the pocket of Rob Piest’s parka drew an unbreakable connection, a through-line from that night at Nissan Pharmacy to Gacy’s body-count. Kim Byers had seen Gacy pretending to browse in the pharmacy that evening. She’d been wearing Rob Piest’s parka herself earlier in the shift, before giving it back to him.

Piest’s parents went to the police immediately and kept up the pressure in ways none of the other families of Gacy’s victims had even known to do. Thanks to Rob Piest, Gacy was no longer operating under the radar of the police and was quickly arrested (in this book, Piest’s brother echoes the sentiment of everybody who knew Rob, that he was destined to do something important, and heartbreakingly adds that in a way this turned out to be true).  While Gacy was in custody, the ghastly contents of his crawl space were discovered.

But not Rob Piest, ironically. Gacy had dumped his body in the Des Plaines River, and it wasn’t found until weeks later. When O’Neil visits the All Saints Catholic Cemetery and Mausoleum on North River Road in order to see the final resting place of her mother’s friend, she touchingly notes the quiet of the pace:

Part of me always wonders if Mr. and Mrs. Piest made the choice to keep their son at a distance – from people, from the elements. Rob was lost in the river for nearly four months. Beyond the terror of Gacy, the water and the fish defiled his body, too. In the mausoleum, nothing could touch him, ever again. No one can stand on him from above. No one can dig him up in the night. A security guard patrols, watching the guests. It feels secure in here. Safe.

O’Neil doesn’t have much to work with here, admittedly. She takes her mother back to some of the key locations associated with both Gacy and Piest, and she reflects with accessible eloquence on the various turns of the case, including Gacy’s long life in prison after Rob Piest’s death. As she rightly notes, Gacy’s lies and self-pity flooded the next fourteen years:

All the truths about the bodies were direly one-sided. Everyone knew how these stories ended: The boy was dead. But how had each death begun? The dead were silenced, and Gacy was still talking. It was important to understand that Gacy lied, a lot. From the very beginning of the investigation, when first questioned about Rob’s whereabouts. He told authorities whatever Kim Byers said about him was a lie.

But Kim Byers hadn’t lied, and in addition to everything else, her personal witness – and that photo receipt – had been crucial not only in tying Gacy to his crimes but also in humanizing Rob Piest and all the other victims. Ultimately, even though it’s built on a fairly thin foundation, the forty-year-old memories of one friend of one victim, Postmortem becomes a touching reminder of an element of serial killings that’s often overlooked: the vast out-ripples of collateral damage. As O’Neil starkly puts it (mindful of the fact that not all of Gacy’s victims have yet been identified), “Murder touches everything.”

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News