Fall of the House of Gacy is the only authorized biography of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Author Harlan H. Mendenhall spent more than 550 hours in face-to-face interviews with Gacy on Death Row at Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois. Gacy was convicted in 1980 of 33 murders of teenagers and young men in the Chicago area, thus ranking as the man convicted of the most murders in the history of the United States. Mendenhall's book, which also contains an analysis by Dr. Tobias H. Brocher, concentrates mostly on Gacy's family history in an attempt to explain how he developed the highly complex psychology behind his criminal acts.
John Wayne Gacy was born in a northwest Chicago middle-class neighborhood on March 17, 1942, the second child of Polish-American John Stanley Gacy and his Danish-American wife, Marion. He was preceded by his sister, Carolyn, and followed by another girl, Nanci. His parents' marriage was very conflictual from the very beginning. John Stanley, who liked to be called Dad not only by his children but also by his wife, was an authoritarian, tendentially violent man, who wanted to have it his own way in all family matters. He was a strict Catholic and resented the fact that Marion was Presbyterian. For many years, she refused to convert to Catholicism, causing him continuous guilt feelings. Their matrimony ceremony had in fact been held at a Presbyterian Church. Because of this, he considered their relationship as adulterous. Furthermore, Marion insisted that her three children followed her religion rather than Dad's.
From a very early age, John suffered from poor health. He risked dying at birth, and, during his first days, he was on oxygen. Dad nicknamed his son "The Little Monster" because of his continuous crying. One night, in a fit of rage exacerbated by heavy alcohol consumption, he shoved his son's crib against a dresser, causing John to be thrown against the side of his crib, hitting his...