Along a 500-mile section of highway between Prince George and Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada, at least forty-three young women have disappeared since 1969. This section of road is now called the Highway of Tears, and a website has been launched in the victims honor by Prince George businessperson Tony Romeyn, who was moved by the stories of women who have gone missing along Highway 16, and wanted to help the families of the victims.
http://www.highwayoftears.ca/website%20Launched.htm
On the site, there is a map of Highway 16 that shows the general area where nineteen victims were found or is said to have disappeared. Four of the nineteen girls are listed as missing, while the bodies of the other fifteen have been found and the cases considered homicides. Ann Bascu, who went missing in 1983, is the only one who went missing outside of B.C., in Hinton, Alta.
The RCMP, or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, have examined the similarities among the murders and disappearances and have ascertained that eighteen of the victims share positive links.
The Highway of Tears Symposium was held in March 2006 by several Prince George-area aboriginal groups. The outcome was the Highway of Tears Symposium Recommendation Report, published June 2006. It states:
John Wayne Gacy
The Killer Clown
Victims (33)
Background
John Wayne Gacy was born on March 17, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois, to John and Marion Gacy. He died May 10, 1994 by lethal injection, at the age of fifty-two.
Gacy’s childhood was an abusive one. His father was an alcoholic who beat his wife and children on a regular basis and he referred to the younger Gacy as a stupid little sissy and a mama’s boy. When Gacy was nine years old he was molested by a family friend. At eleven, he developed a blood clot in his head after being hit in the head by a swing and began to have blackouts. His father believed that his son was faking the blackouts; however, Gacy was eventually treated to dissolve the clot.
At twenty years old, John Gacy left home and headed to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he worked for three months at a mortuary before quitting and returning to Chicago. In Chicago, he enrolled in the Northwestern Business College and got hired by the Nunn-Bush Shoe Company in Springfield, Illinois, as a salesperson. It was there that he met fellow employee, Marlynn Myers. Two years later, in September of 1964, he and Marlynn were wed.
After completing his apprenticeship, Gacy was promoted to manager of his department. He became active in local Springfield organizations, joined the Jaycees, and rose to vice-president of the Springfield chapter by 1965.
Sexual Deviant
Gacy’s father-in-law offered him a position managing three Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa. By this time, Gacy had a family: two children, a son named Michael, and a daughter, Christine. Not long after moving to Iowa, Gacy had his first known homosexual experience with a colleague of the Waterloo Jaycees, which he had joined after moving there. Gacy became involved in pornography, drugs, and prostitution on a regular basis, and in 1967 he molested a teenage male employee at one of his restaurants.
Gacy opened a private club in his basement which catered to his employees. He would often encourage his patrons to drink and then make sexual advances towards them. Gacy once permitted a teen to have sex with his wife in order to blackmail the teen into having oral sex with him. However, his little club came to a grinding halt when in March of 1968, two teens – aged fifteen and sixteen – accused Gacy of sexual assault. Gacy was arrested and ordered by the judge to undergo a psychiatric evaluation at the Psychiatric Hospital of the State University of Iowa. Over a seventeen-day period, two doctors concluded that Gacy was mentally competent to stand trial, but that he had an antisocial personality and would likely repeat his sexual behavior.
On December 3, 1968, John Wayne Gacy was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to ten years at the Anamosa State Penitentiary in Iowa. That day, his wife filed for a divorce, petitioning for all the matrimonial property and alimony payments. The Court ruled in her favor, and in September, 1969, the divorce was finalized. Gacy never saw his ex-wife or two children ever again.
Gacy was a model prisoner. While in prison, he completed sixteen high school courses, obtained his diploma, helped to secure an increase in the prisoner’s daily pay, and supervised several in-prison projects. He was released on parole with a twelve-month probation period on June 18, 1970. He promptly left Iowa and moved home to live with his mother in Chicago the next day.
Gacy, with assistance from his mother, bought a house in Chicago, and it wasn’t long before he met Carole Hoff, who he married on July 1, 1972. By this time, however, Gacy had already begun his killing spree. Just eighteen months out of prison, Gacy murdered his first victim.
Murder Spree
Timothy McCoy, a boy fifteen years old, was traveling from Michigan to Omaha on January 2, 1972, when Gacy picked him up at Chicago’s Greyhound Bus Terminal. Gacy brought the boy back to his house, reassuring the boy that he’d return him to the bus station the next morning. Timothy ended up being stabbed to death and buried in a crawl space which was then covered in cement.
Three years later, one of Gacy’s employees, John Butkovitch, seventeen years old, disappeared in July. The day before, John had threatened Gacy as Gacy owed him two weeks back pay. According to Gacy, he lured John to his home and then strangled him to death and buried him under the cement floor in the garage. It is interesting to note that John’s parents called the police more than one hundred times over a three year period, urging them to investigate Gacy to no avail.
In March of 1976, Gacy’s wife left him. As he suddenly had the house to himself, this gave Gacy the opportunity to kill more often, and he didn’t waste any time. Between April and October of 1976, Gacy killed a minimum of eight youths between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, seven of whom he buried in his crawl space, and the other beneath his dining room floor. In December of 1976, Gregory Godzik, another employee of Gacy, also went missing. In the time that he worked for Gacy, Gregory had told his family that Gacy had put him to work
