How to Catch a Mass Murderer : Miniseries about John Wayne Gacy is told from the Perspective of his Unrelenting Captor

John Wayne Gacy was a well-respected member of the Chicago community who owned and operated his own construction company. But he had a heinous secret life.

He would lure young boys, often his own employees, to his house, force them to perform sexual acts and then murder them. He would often sleep with the dead body of some of his victims for one to two days before disposing of it.

On Dec. 22, 1978, Gacy was arrested and later charged with the murders of 33 teen-age boys. Twenty-seven corpses were found buried in the crawl space under his house. Six others had been disposed of in a nearby river.

Gacy has been held on Death Row at the Menard Penitentiary in Joliet, Ill., since his 1980 conviction.

The four-hour miniseries “To Catch a Killer,” a huge hit when it aired in Canada in January, dramatizes the investigation into one of America’s most sordid serial murder cases--at least until Jeffrey Dahmer came along.

Brian Dennehy stars as Gacy. Canadian actor Michael Riley plays Joseph Kozenczak, chief of detectives in the Des Plaines Police Department who supervised the investigation that led to Gacy’s arrest and conviction.

Kozenczak, who recently wrote a book with Karen Henrikson about Gacy, “A Passing Acquaintance” (Carlton Press), was a production consultant on “To Catch a Killer.”

Now a private investigator who tracks missing people, Kozenczak talked recently about his headline-making case.

Kozenczak described Gacy as a sexual psychopath.

“It is human nature that on a daily basis you would have normal sexual feelings,” he said. In Gacy’s case, however, those feelings “reverted to an uncontrollable urge to go out and commit this act--tricking individuals to coming back to the house with him and eventually killing them. Killing them is his sexual act.”

Besides being a successful businessman, Gacy was active in the community’s Jaycees and was a precinct captain for the Democratic Party.

“The Polish population in Chicago is the largest outside of Poland and he organized Polish Day parades,” Kozenczak said. At one of these parades, Gacy had his photo taken with then-First Lady Rosalynn Carter, he said. “If you look at his lapel he had a Secret Service clearance badge, which would imply that somebody did not do their job finding out about his background.”

Because of Gacy’s solid reputation, the Des Plaines community was rocked by his arrest. Even Kozenczak, who had been appointed chief of detectives three months earlier, had no inkling Gacy was a mass murderer.

Yet he arrested Gacy after just 10 days of investigation. In most serial murder cases, Kozenczak said, investigators find bodies but have no suspect. “This case was in essence reversed. We did have a missing boy and we didn’t know he was dead,” he said.

It began when the detective began looking for a 15-year-old boy, Rob Piest, who had disappeared on Dec. 11. Piest, who attended the same school as Kozenczak’s son, was an honor student from a good family. Kozenczak sensed the boy wasn’t a runaway.

Gacy, who had two previous arrests for aggravated assault, became the prime suspect when Kozenczak learned Piest left the drugstore where he worked part-time and went outside to meet with Gacy about a higher-paying construction job. Piest never returned.

Kozenczak put Gacy under 24-hour surveillance. “Back at headquarters, we were coordinating a massive process of background investigations,” he said.

Those investigations included interviews with co-workers, family members, students and former employees. “They were really the basis for the puzzle fitting together.”

Another piece of the puzzle was the evidence Kozenczak found when he first searched Gacy’s house. The evidence, Kozenczak said, initially was “not very important to us, like driver licenses (of young men). But when we started laying this material out ... by using the date of birth and the name, we would call the Chicago Police Department and say, ‘Do you have anything on this kid?’ Lo and behold they would say, ‘That kid has been missing for two years.’ When we started to get police reports (on the kids, we saw something in the) little box that says ‘former employer.’ In that box we started to pick out PDM Contractors, which was Gacy’s company.”

“To Catch a Killer,” Kozenczak said, is not a story about John Wayne Gacy per se. “It is a story about police work. One of the fortunate aspects is that the screenwriter Jud Kinberg and executive producer Jinny Schrenkinger were extremely concerned that they didn’t want it to be a rip-off, a violent story.”

Kinberg worked very closely with Kozenczak on the script, spending two weeks “listening to him outlining the story. It was marvelous. It was scary. I kept in close contact with him (during the production).”

He never, however, did any research on Gacy. “My purpose was telling the story through Joe’s point of view. I wanted Kozenczak’s Gacy. To me that was important.”

Kinberg said his main objective was to have the script reflect Kozenczak’s humanity. “This is a man for whom the missing boy became a human being instead of a number,” Kinberg said. “There are good cops.”

The Gacy case made Kozenczak famous and forever changed his life. “I never sought publicity for myself, but in this instance (was) forced into that role,” he said. “Instead of just sitting in the back of the room listening to people talk, I ended up in front of the room giving presentations, insights into the case and investigative techniques.”

“To Catch a Killer” airs Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. on KTLA and Monday and Tuesday at 5 p.m. and again Wednesday and Thursday at 9:30 p.m. on WGN.