Dr. Jeffrey Smalldon

I didn't need to tell them that.

What I was interested in mainly is making a connection with them.

It's something I often had occasion to think about throughout my career, but I don't know what it is.

I just didn't seem to grasp irony.

One particularly dramatic example of that was Gacy talked with me for hours on end about how he couldn't possibly have killed all of these boys and young men who he was convicted of killing, 26 of whom were found in the crawl space under his suburban home.

He could go on for hours and hours about all kinds of different people had keys to that house.

The cops assumed it was like a normal residence, but it wasn't.

There were people in, people coming out, and he could go on forever like that.

But he insisted that the cops really had the wrong guy.

But he saw no irony in posturing as an expert about serial murder.

He would dress these national FBI conferences.

They would invite him to be a guest through some sort of technology.

And he would do it.

And I would say, John, what makes you think you have anything special to contribute to law enforcement studying the mind of the serial killer when you insist that you're not one?

And he would just pause for a minute and say, well, I don't know.

I just assume that I've got something to say that is worth their listening to.

Yeah.

I don't know if Gacy's infamy same in Australia as it is in the United States.

And even if it was, yeah, I talk with a lot of like college age students and Gacy is at most kind of a footnote in their minds where for people of my generation, you know, he was one of the truly monstrous, he and Bundy and Manson.

But basically, in the 1970s, Gacy had his own business in a suburb outside Chicago, not far from O'Hare Airport.