What Happened to John Wayne Gacy’s House? Inside the Home Where He Hid Bodies

John Wayne Gacy‘s modest and unassuming ranch-style house had horrors hidden underneath it.

Neighbors in Norwood Park Township, Ill., knew Gacy as a successful contractor who dressed as “Pogo the Clown” for kids’ parties and children’s hospital visits and was active in local politics, even once meeting First Lady Rosalynn Carter. However, beneath the makeup, amiable veneer and his seemingly normal brickfront home lurked unbelievable darkness — and a putrid odor that ultimately did him in.

In December 1978, Gacy confessed to kidnapping, raping and murdering dozens of boys and men, some as young as 14 years old, and hiding many of their bodies in a crawl space under the house.

In March 1980, Gacy, dubbed the “Killer Clown,” was convicted of 33 murders and received the death penalty. He died by lethal injection at age 52 on May 10, 1994.

Devil In Disguise: John Wayne Gacy explores his double life, the investigation that led to his arrest and how his murders impacted the victims’ families. All eight episodes of the series, in which Severance star Michael Chernus plays the serial killer, premiered on Peacock on Oct. 16.

Here is everything to know about what happened to John Wayne Gacy’s house after his arrest and how police found the victims it contained.

Where did John Wayne Gacy live?

Gacy owned a ranch-style house at 8213 West Summerdale Ave. in Norwood Park Township, Ill., a suburb of Chicago.

He described the interior of his house in a 1992 interview with CBS News.

“It’s not a house where you live and you work 9 to 5 and come home and it’s like a house where you live in,” Gacy said. “The living room was a private office section, one of the bedrooms was a terrarium, the kitchen was more like a fast food kitchen.”

He used the office for his contracting business, P.D.M. Construction, and often let his workers lodge there as well.

One thing Gacy left out of his description of his home was the crawl space under the house. Investigators found a trap door leading to the crawl space — which the Chicago Tribune reported was about 40 feet wide — in Gacy’s garage.

What did John Wayne Gacy’s house smell like?

Gacy’s sister, Karen Kuzma, revealed in Investigation Discovery’s Evil Lives Here that the first thing she noticed about Gacy’s house was the smell.

“There was a smell as you walked in the house and through the house,” she said. “It just had this old, musty smell. The house wasn’t built on a slab, [there] was dirt underneath it, and if you don’t cover that, it smells.”

Kuzma added that their mother didn’t notice the odor at all, but that Gacy said it was “coming from the earth underneath” the house, which she recalled was only about three feet deep.

She said that later on, when Gacy was in Cook County Jail, he told her, “I should have cemented the crawl space. I don’t know why I didn’t cement the crawl space.” Later, the smell would be part of what made authorities suspect him of murdering local honors student Robert Piest, 15, who worked at a pharmacy that Gacy visited the day he went missing.

Former Des Plaines officer Mike Albrecht recalled to NBC Chicago that when police were assigned to surveil Gacy after Piest’s disappearance, the part-time clown would try to pal around with officers and invite them into his house. When one of Albrecht’s partners, Bob Schultz, was in the bathroom of Gacy’s home on Dec. 20, 1978, the furnace came on, bringing with it the smell of dead bodies from underneath the house.

“That odor from the heat, from the crawl space,” Albrecht recalled. “Bob said right away, ‘It smelled like a morgue!’ ”

Where did John Wayne Gacy bury his victims?

Gacy was arrested on Dec. 21, 1978, and Albrecht took the killer’s first statements.

“He went into detail on what he had done to Rob Piest,” Albrecht recalled to NBC Chicago. “And Rob Piest and four others were thrown into the Des Plaines River because his crawl space was too crowded. He said, ‘Give me a piece of paper and I’ll draw a diagram for you.’ It’s amazing how exact that diagram was!”

Gacy told investigators that he buried 26 of his victims under the crawl space of his house, one in a trench next to his driveway, one under his garage and one under an addition he’d made to the home, according to the Chicago Tribune.

When he ran out of room in the crawl space, Gacy began disposing of his victims’ bodies off the I-55 bridge into the Des Plaines River. CBS News reported that the bodies were wrapped in plastic and covered in lime.

What happened to John Wayne Gacy’s house after he went to prison?

Gacy’s house was demolished, and the property was razed in April 1979.

The Chicago Tribune reported that the empty lot where Gacy’s house once stood became a tourist attraction for true crime fans and ghost hunters in the 1980s.

A new ranch-style home with three bedrooms and two bathrooms was built on the lot in 1986, according to Realtor.com, and the property has a different street number than it had when Gacy lived there.

Today, a neighbor told the Chicago Tribune, it still attracts people from out of town who want a glimpse at where Gacy’s horrific murders took place.

“If you’ve got two guys in a car, or an out-of-state plate,” they said, “it’s probably Gacy.”

How much is John Wayne Gacy’s property worth today?

Records indicate that the former Gacy property was sold in 2004 for $300,000. In July 2019, it was listed for sale at $489,000. After several price changes and re-listings, the home sold in March 2021 for $395,000.

Real estate appraiser Orell Anderson told Realtor.com that the price cuts were likely necessary because buyers “have to have an incentive [to live] in a place where a horrific event occurred.”

“When these houses come up for sale, some people buy the place thinking if they tear it down and change the address a little bit and do some cosmetic fixes, the stigma will go away,” Anderson explained. “The stigma runs with the land, not the house.”