CBA Record July-August 2024

as a clown prior to incarceration and in prison, painted clowns and other artwork that he sold.) Conti handled some of his final death row appeals. Conti does an excellent job of showing how manipulative and controlling Gacy could be, even while incarcerated. She also shows how nonchalant he seemed to be about his impending fate of death by lethal injection. Conti writes, “If I had met him at a party or on the bus, I prob ably would have thought he was funny and gregarious, but also braggy, a little too full of himself, and a bull[shitter]. No different than many narcissistic know-it alls who run for political office.” Conti suggests what others have stated: that Gacy had to have had help in some of the murders and burials of the victims, given the crawl space, the work that sev eral others did in digging in the space, and the statements of the few survivors of Gacy’s depravity. Conti also reiterates the real possibility that Gacy was responsible for more murders than he was charged with or confessed to. One possible expla nation that Conti offers (also noted by others) is that some of the victims were filmed in snuff films for a national net work in these years before the internet. Prior to this case, Conti was a civil liti gator. Gacy’s was her first and only death penalty case. One reason she was willing to represent Gacy was her strong views, from a young age, against the death penalty. Just before Gacy was executed, Conti had him tape a phone message for Adams ki’s birthday. A chilling last joke that Gacy was part of — a grisly clown until the end. At the end of the book, Conti relays a story that shows that knowledge slips away over time. A few years ago, on the first day of class at DePaul University Law School, Conti told the class that she had represented Gacy in the last set of his death row appeals. One student asked, “Professor Conti, who is John Wayne Gacy?” Thankfully, Conti has written this excellent book about him, and his mur ders, and we learn much about him as well as about one of the great legal talents in Chicago, Karen Conti.

SUMMARY JUDGMENTS

REVIEWS, REVIEWS, REVIEWS!

A t dinner time on December 21, 1978, local news stations were live at a house whose owner, John Wayne Gacy, had been arrested after a 15-year-old boy, Robert Piest, disap peared. Gacy would confess to the killing of more than 30 young men, dating back to 1972 in Chicago. He showed the police his crawl space and mapped out where bodies could be found. Gacy was tried and convicted of 33 counts of murder and sentenced to be exe cuted. The insanity defense proffered by his defense counsel was rejected, despite one of Gacy’s attorney’s stating, “The insanity defense has been looked [upon] as an escape, a defense of last resort. The defense of insanity is valid, and it is the only defense that we could use here, because that is where the truth lies ... because if [Gacy] is normal, then our con cept of normality is totally distorted.” In October 1993, Gacy was still on death row, awaiting execution. A young attorney, Karen Conti, was driving with her law and life partner, Greg Adamski, Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy Defending America’s Most Evil Serial Killer on Death Row By Karen Conti (Black Lyon Publishing, 2024) Reviewed by Daniel A. Cotter

when the radio reported that the date for execution had been set. They spoke about the remote chance that Gacy would be executed, Adamski stating, “They’ll never execute Gacy. They haven’t killed people in Illinois in ages.” Two days later, Adamski and Conti received a call that would lead to their representing the “most hated man in America.” In Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy, Conti provides additional insights into the heinous man who is one of the most notorious serial killers in our nation’s his tory. The call was connected to Gacy look ing for a “First Amendment lawyer, “to address matters that were not connected to the killings or his pending execution.” Conti had just argued a case before the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of the Harold Washington Party. The matters Gacy wanted to address were a statute in Illinois providing that incar cerated people with means had to pay their way for confinement, and compen sation for his paintings. (Gacy had dressed

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